Neuroscientist and Backyard Brains co-founder Greg Gage joins host Dave Haviland on the SPARK.grow Podcast to discuss how his company makes neuroscience accessible through DIY brain-machine interface kits for students. Gage shares how Backyard Brains evolved from a grad-school side project into an NIH-funded educational tech business, his upcoming Tech Talk demo at a2Tech360, and his new book exploring how the mind builds models of consciousness—linking neuroscience, AI, and creativity in education.
SPARK.grow is hosted by Dave Haviland of Phimation Strategy Group.
Read the transcript:
Dave Haviland: Welcome. This is Dave Haviland with another edition of the SPARK.grow Podcast. Today I’m going to be talking to Greg Gage of Backyard Brains. And just before we get started, of course, a shout-out to Ann Arbor SPARK for sponsoring this podcast.
I do strategy and growth consulting for a range of companies in Ann Arbor and beyond, and I’m looking forward to an interesting conversation with Greg here today. Greg, you’re going to be speaking at this year’s a2Tech360 [Tech Talk].
Greg Gage: Correct.
Dave: What are you going to be speaking about?
Greg: So I have a company that I co-founded with my lab mate when I was in neuroscience grad school here at University of Michigan.
And we develop the equipment we use in the lab, which is to record from brains, and we make low-fi versions of these high-tech products. And so we make educational grade for right around fifth grade through high school, through universities and grad schools that allow you to record from neurons inside the brain and learn a bit about how the brain works, record from the output of the brain, which is like your muscles, your EMGs, your EEGs, your EKGs, that’s your heart, and then into the computational side of things.
And so the talk I’ll give on Friday will be about a brain machine interface kit. So this is in an area called neural engineering where you take the output of the brain, which is through the musculature. So our brains can only communicate in one way, and that’s to move muscles, either to your mouth or to your arms and legs.
And so we have a little kit that works with Microbit, a technology that’s used widely in classrooms. They partnered with BBC who created it in the UK, and then it’s a way to teach kids how to program. And so there’s block code, you can switch over to Python or to JavaScript and make little projects come to life with this little microcontroller.
And so what we made is an attachment that allows you to snap that microcontroller into a little holder and that holder can then record from your brain, from your heart, or from your muscles. And then you use that to make cool projects. And so yeah, we’re making a brain machine interface that teaches kids how to make neural prosthetics. So we have a hand that’s made out of basically balsa wood and string and paper that shows you how the actual hand works, where the muscles are.
And I think we’re going to do a live demo of five or six different projects. We have, we call it the Spiker Man. So it’s like a web flinger that you record from the backside of your arms. If you bend your arm down, we can shoot a web out. So using these little web flingers, these little string. Yeah. And that’s, that’s going to be on the cover of Make Magazine I think next month. We just got a contract with those guys. It’s kind fun. So yeah, so that’s what we’re going to be doing the talk about, which is funny. Completely. I mean it is a product that we sell, but it’s like the plans for that were completely different. And now we we’re turned it into a Kickstarter campaign. Now we’re just selling it.
Dave: That’s really neat. Tell us a little bit more about the business.
Greg: Yeah, so it’s kind of an accidental company. I was planning on being a professor. I was in industry for a while. I was an electrical engineer. I did PCB design, that type of stuff, and kind of got bored with it. And I wanted to go back into academia. I wanted to go where nerds got credit and respected. I felt in the company that I was at, they didn’t have the two-track system. And so I kept being pushed into management. I’m not a good manager, so I wanted to go into a field there. I felt like, all right, where can you be a nerd and excel? And I thought academia could be it. So that’s where I was. And I was there for a number of years, I think it was like seven years by the end.
But then with my lab mate, we made a bunch of, well first of all, we made these satirical posters at these scientific conferences that were getting more and more of a buzz each year. And then one year we decided to, it was right around the time of the hundred dollar laptop, if you remember this. It was right around the beginning of the maker movement of 200, 2008. There was a hundred-dollar laptop. We tried to make a hundred-dollar spike, which is the equipment that we use to record from neurons, which a lab would pay $50,000. Our lab paid $50,000 for that, because there are not many people buying those equipment. So the amps are not that expensive, which just there’s not demand.
Dave: Did you give it to a hundred?
Greg: Yeah, we had a poster and we presented it as a cure for the zombie apocalypse because it’s like if your loved ones got stricken by a zombie virus and they started eating brains and walking different, that must be the brain that’s controlling that. So you have the cure, would have to be from neurological perspective. And so the joke was that all the vendors have turned into zombies and that you can only break into Radio Shack at night. This is back when Radio Shack was around. So the kit was made out of Radio Shack amps and we had had a cockroach leg that we were actually the cricket leg at the time. We were recording the neurons from it. And you could hear it on the speaker so that you can put into a computer, you can actually do neuroscience experiments with it. So yeah, it was kind of like a hipster thing, just to kind of show off what we can do with the engineering chops for it.
But then the journal nature was there. We were doing steer posts before this one. So we had a big crowd there waiting to see what we were going to do that year. And then the Journal of Nature was there and they happened to be walking by seeing this crowd, what’s going on. So they went and listened into this presentation of these crazy guys talking about the zombie apocalypse and this stuff. And I think that people could slowly get what we were trying to do. If you just kind of had a poster for a low-cost bio amplifier for educator. No one cared about that. We could do it this way. So they stopped by. We got in Nature, we were on the Nature podcast. And then it’s funny, I was doing research in the basal ganglia, this striatum, and you probably know about these, but this is where dopamine plays a role when you get positive rewards and you can hijack those systems with drugs.
So I’m getting these emails now after this podcast about, Hey man, it’s really cool, I’d like to buy one of those amps, keep up the good work and all that stuff. And at the same time, I’m publishing and really fancy neuron and all these fancy journals. And not once I’m like, Hey man, Greg, I love what you’re doing with the fast inner neuron, keep up the good work. But the stupid side project just kept coming in, get three or four emails a day and you wonder maybe this little joke project could be something bigger.
So we decided we went to the Dare to Dream program at the University of Michigan. Then we went into the entrepreneurship center and got some training on that. My co-founder graduated and did a Kaufman Entrepreneurship fellowship. And then, yeah, so we started to create the company when I was in grad school, bootstrapped it a hundred percent, sold kits, used that money to buy more parts and just kept selling those. And then we eventually got a grant, a grant from the NIH to, it’s called Small Business Innovative Research Program, the SBIRs. And so we got one of those and we haven’t looked back. It’s been over almost 16 years now. So it’s been a while. And so yeah, we use that money to hire people. We have an office in downtown, a bit like this, but on State Street. And now we have a large crew of about 10 people and we manufacture stuff and we ship it around the world.
Dave: You sound like a natural marketer.
Greg:
Yeah, no, it’s funny enough, I’m…
Dave: Intuitive market.
Greg: Yeah, intuitive. Maybe. It is funny. People have said about our speaking style is very, it is more of a storytelling, but I always tell people, given talks at TED, and we’ve had these coaches that would come in and train you how to speak at TED. And when I got up there gave mine, you’re good. And it sounds different than other people. And I always tell people I spent a lot of time in front of fifth grade classrooms. And the cool thing about fifth graders is that they’re kind of smart enough, but they haven’t learned the social skills yet to not look bored and just to be completely moody in front of you. And so you kind of have to sharpen your chops. So you can tell me you get an instant feedback, what’s boring and you’ve got to switch it up.
Dave: You know who else is like that? The karaoke crowd, 10 o’clock on Saturday.
Greg: Exactly. I know it works. So that’s interesting. Yeah. But we can get, so we’ve been funded by the NIH for years. So we take the money, so we sell our products and then we take the money from the NIH to develop new products. We’re always in a process of making something new. And so we were going to do that with this, we call it the Spiker bit, Micro bit is the computer. And the spiker bit allows you to record spikes from a human fitted in there. So the plan of that all along was to write an NIH grant for that. So that looks like that’s going to be going away. And so what we decided to do is to do a Kickstarter campaign for it, which we launched this summer, and now we’re now releasing it as a product this month. So that’s what I’m maybe giving the talk about.
Dave: Is there structure wrapped around your innovation? Do you have an innovation process so to speak?
Greg: Yeah, I mean the issue with us is that we have more ideas than people or sense. So I mean, fortunately or unfortunately, I like to think it’s fortunately, but right now I think it’s unfortunate. It’s that we tend to hire the people that are almost exactly like me. And so we have a bunch of idea people, but not a lot of people that can actually do the, you said earlier about marketing. Marketing is important material. It can be done. It’s like the thing with a ADHD, right? It’s like you give a person a book on time management. Yeah, and I need to read that. It know it’s important to do that, but you just never do it with marketing. And I know it’s important. I know exactly what needs to be done. It is really hard to, even if I get someone to do it, to focus, come back to them and focus on them to do that. So that’s the challenge that I have. The creative process is quite simple. We have, I feel like with this grant funding that we’ve had, we’ve had the intellectual freedom to basically play with things that work. And so that’s the creative process. It’s about having time, right? About having time to find out which of these, and we’ve had a bunch of fails that optogenetics, this is the being able to control neurons with light. We tried that twice and we couldn’t get that at the fifth grade level.
Dave: Was it a technical fail or was it a process fail?
Greg: It was a biological fail. Yeah, probably if we had a better operations person, we could have done it. So the issue with that, we need to have fruit flies eating the food at the right time just before it was in the classroom. And that became a nightmare to manage. eah, we’d have to send them to the teachers. So anyways, that we’ve had some technical on that more, we missed the mark of where we think. So I know my co-founder made a really cool kick that allows you to record a neuron for using kind of turn the century technologies. And we couldn’t find, it’s a really cool concept. Everyone likes that idea, but first of all, the raw components are really cheap. There wasn’t enough interest there. So anyway, for the most part, I think what we do is we try to find, so we kind of comb through the literature. So a lot of the stuff we do is the recording of neurons is almost a hundred years old. So the Sir Lord Adrian did this. And so there’s nothing really new in what we do in terms of the electrophysiology, but most people don’t know about it. So you can read the literature. And so we have the tools to do that. And what we kind of develop now are just a bunch of experiments. We run fellowship programs. We need kids to try to recreate experiments or make new ones or ask questions of our, sometimes we rip from the headlines and find a cutting-edge paper and try to make DIY versions of that one.
Dave: What if we say that your day could be divided up between doing the technical stuff or whatever it is, the managing, and the leading, what’s the mix of not day-to-day maybe, but just month to month?
Greg: I can tell you. So we have a monthly meeting and that’s the leading, and like I said, I’m probably the worst CEO that is out there. I’ve tried to talk to other CEOs to come in, but they all tell me that they don’t want to come in because it’s like it would ruin the culture. I keep hearing that over and over again. But I don’t care. Sometimes it’s just not good. I’m not good at it, I feel like our stuff is so innovative and so cool. It should be everywhere. It should be in every school and all that stuff. It takes a different mindset to do that. So if you know any operations people that could help with that. So we have a maker space in our office on State Street, and so we bring on students. I’m an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan, and so I have undergraduate research opportunity program op students that are coming in. And so we treat them grad students and we give them a project and they work on those. And so I spend about half my time doing that stuff.
Dave: Managing them?
Greg: Just working with them. In research, there are different types of PIs. This is the primary investigators. There’s ones that have large labs and four postdocs and 10 graduate students and then like 30 undergrads, and then they get very little time with the PI. And so then there’s the Andy Schwartz’s and there’s a few other that just have a small group and they kind of like, Andy Schwartz is doing the surgery and is hands on, and I’m more of a hands-on kind. I like to be close to the data because if I’m going to speak about it, I want to be able to make sure mean it’s kind the mixture. So we have a number of students that we have about five right now, but I want to be there for each of ’em. So I like to do that.
So I’m writing a book. So my co-founder and I wrote a book in 2023, I think it was called How the Brain Works, and it was an MIT press and with Penguin Random House publishers. It was everywhere. It was a force. But it was kind of a disappointing book because at the very end with the title, How the Brain Works, you’d think it was about what people normally care about. How does this thing work that I can move and see? And really what it was about was every technique you could use in neuroscience to be able to record and understand how the brain works. So it’s like, how do neurons work? How do groups of neurons control systems? How do sensory systems work? But I think when people look at that, they’re not really caring about EEGs and these slight changes of they want to know how the brain works.
Dave: They want to know the outcomes or the results.
Greg: Yeah. And so that’s been bugging me for a while. And so last summer, we ran a program that tried to answer a little bit more of those. And so we’re getting into the psychology side of how does the brain build models of consciousness? Sounds foo foo, but there’s some scientific theories that you can test. And so we replicated a lot of those experiments. And so now we’re writing on a new book that I’m you in February, same MIT Press, and it’s going to be about how the mind works and how does the brain build up models of our body. And so it turns out that we can easily manipulate your body to make you think that your body is not what it is. I can make you think that your nose is growing out, you multiple arms, your arms are going through the floor. So all this…
Dave: Just through what’s happening in the brain
Greg: Right. Just by giving us all information at the end of the day, and you can manipulate the information and it makes it so real for you. That rubber hand illusion is a great one. Why do people get freaked out? Because they think that rubber hand is theirs. That only works if you give it some information or you have to rub the hand while you’re rubbing the fake hand. So getting information to the brain that’s incorrect can really manipulate the perception of yourself.
Dave: Seems very relevant in an AI world.
Greg: Yeah. So there’s the guy. So in the idea of your body being an informational model is quite old. It was like 1911, these papers came out, this theory, but it was expanded upon in 2000, a hundred years later, by a guy at Princeton named Graziano who added this arrow of attention. So you have a little stick coming out of your, you have a model of your body and a model of a stick coming out with what you’re tending to. And so that particular model is really important for neuroscience. If you really what you think about what the mind is doing, what the brain is doing is trying to predict the world so that you can best make predictions. The best predictor of what is going to happen next is if you can model what another person you imagine you are, in AI terms, you’re a reinforcement learning engine, an agent inside of this computational world, you’re building models, but now you have to make a model of another agent who might have been modeling you. So you’re modeling another agent modeling you, and then they’re probably modeling back, this recursive loop.
And so this particular theory that this neuroscientist came up with is really taking off, but not in neuroscience. It’s being taken off in AI. And so the people who are studying the literature and running in that direction are the people that are doing this ‘attention is all you need.’ That’s what these transform models do. And what this theory states is that the consciousness is your model of your own attention and you run that model of attention on other people. And so I am hoping that by writing this book now and presenting it to neuroscientists that we can get more people, even though Grazziano is a great neuroscientist, he doesn’t really do, he’s doing his work, but it is not quite making the penetration. It does almost every neuro that no one knows about this stuff. And so we’re trying to make a call to arms for neuroscientists. Because once you understand that you can measure this stuff, literally you can measure, it sounds weird, but we have I modeling your attention as an arrow coming out of your eyes and that arrow has a force to it. And we can measure that force. It’s about 0.01 newtons, about the weight of a birthday candle on your hand. So you feel that someone is staring at you, potentially. I mean we can measure that there is a force there. We also measure that there’s a flow to it, like a laser beam coming out of your eyes. And so this sounds like it’s crazy, but it’s not. I mean we use very scientific methods, we could measure it and it’s completely not by chance, we can know that this stuff is real.
Dave: So are you saying that our consciousness is really a model at play?
Greg: Yeah, I mean think about it. You only have access to yourself, but you can imagine other people. And it turns out we call these mirror neurons in neuroscience. You ever heard of this term? I’ve heard of that. So what a mirror neuron is, if there’s a great paper from like 2006 where you have people watching The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, complete strangers in an FMRI machine, and when you see someone grabbing a hat or cocking a gun with their hands, all these random strangers synchronize in their hand reach of their cortex. Why is that? They’re running a model of them. In order to understand somebody else, you run a model of yourself on them. And so, not just the physical body and the hand region is pretty large, which is why that gets picked up better. It is one of the, if you look at the homunculus, there’s a big hand region. You need something that’s big to be able to see an FMRI’s, dirty signal, but turns out that’s everything. So even fear, if I am watching someone get scared, the same neurons in my brain would fire. If I’m watching someone, I’m not scared, but I’m watching someone get scared. So you can epic the theory of mind that came out with autism research kind of reflects this stuff. So yeah, at the end of the day it’s just a model. I mean if you look at the brain, the brain is sending spikes. The number of spikes per second is how we think the information is encoded. And what does that, if you look at the cortex, the cortex is like the large pepperoni pizza and it’s about the thickness of an orange peel. But if you slice it anywhere and you look at the sides, the architecture is almost identical everywhere.
And so whatever the brain is doing, whatever the cortex is doing is doing the same thing everywhere. But the question has always been, what is the cortex doing? The answer is building models. It’s building models of the world, building models of yourself and running those models on each other and on yourself. So that’s what we think it is and we can do experiments that show that to be true.
So yeah, this is how do you make money off this thing? So we’re going to write a book, we have a bunch of experiments that we’re doing and we’re turning into a curriculum and we’re going to figure that out once it comes.
Dave: I mean that’s a whole thread that I’d love to spend an hour on, but if I try to bring it back to leadership management, all that stuff, does any of that impact or influence how you consciously lead the business or how you think about the business?
Greg: No, this stuff is there. I’ve already confessed that I don’t think I’m the best leader. I lead by example, which I think is good. I mean, what I’ve noticed with our team is that we have extremely dedicated people that will give everything to get things to be absolutely perfect. That’s coming from a leading by example. So I spent lots of times in there and doing that.
The idea of attention is extremely important. It works in psychology for, I mean that’s what the model comes from, it works within businesses and even businesses should have attention. So this model, it works at every level. So groups of cells become a human, groups of humans become a business. And so the business entity models its own attention and looking at what other companies can be doing to it. So there’s ways that you use it there. And we do think about that much differently now than we did in the past.
Dave: Wow. So you have the monthly meeting, is that with everyone? Do you have anything else from a management process?
Greg: Yeah. So here’s the strategy that we’re working on with right now. So I’ve realized that my weakness is that if I’m not interested in it on some level that gets my intellectual curiosity peaked, I tend to fade out. And so the plan right now, so I do meet mostly with our technical teams. We hire good people that can run by themselves. So we have our production, I feel comfortable with, our software development I feel comfortable with. And the teams I meet with are doing hardware designs or experimental designs. So that’s the management. So the idea of these parts that are weak, we’re trying to figure out ways to make them more interesting. So we’re doing sort of agentic developments or using the tools that we have about these attention schemas and running them into agents that have access to Google ads and stuff like that, and the meta ad managers. And so trying to come up with ways to take the stuff that I like and move it into the stuff that we need to do is the experiment we’re running right now, so I can let you know in about a month how it’s going. So we’re in the middle of learning how to use the tools first to be able to do that as a result of that.
Dave: Is your business model changing?
Greg: Our model’s changing right now because of the lack of government support grants. We were kind of an innovation center making ourselves open source for schools.
So now about 40% of our income comes from federal grants. More recently about half. We got a lot of large grants, and so now all those grants have gone away, and so we have to figure out how to double our income using what we have right now. So it’s been a rough challenge and we’re trying to figure it out. And so we’re switching instead of writing grants, we’re doing Kickstarters. We have another Kickstarter campaign coming out in November that’s going to be a robot that you’ve program, not with code, but by dragging neurons and connecting neurons up and they spike. If they make the wheels turn and you move in front of the camera, it spikes. And by connecting neurons together, inhibitory, excitatory, you can produce behaviors, right? It’s super cool. It’s like there’s something that’s been around for about 50 years in the ivory towers of academia, but there are no robots out there, so we’re being the first ones to do that. So that was an SBIR grant that we turned into a product. And so yeah, we’re going to continue to switch it up to try to market our stuff better.
Marketing up to now has been earned media like these TED talks or being on TV shows or Netflix and then getting bumps of sales and not sustaining them after that. So it was never a big problem for us. We could always figure it out. But now, I used say, I at least like soft money. I like a little bit of uncertainty. I kind of like uncertainty. And these times are even for me with AI on the rise and I’m an AI guy and this stuff makes me uncertain and yeah, I don’t like it. It’s so much change happening at the same time.
Dave: I think everyone, especially at the leadership level can identify with that. How are you navigating your team through that change?
Greg: I made a decision about a year and a half ago, but we can’t hire anyone because I feel pressure. I have a feeling that a lot of these jobs become automated and I don’t want to bring somebody on if in a year or two it’s going to be different. So we kind have changed our model internally and I’ve been training our teams how to use these tools so we can try to have everyone kind of growing together. That’s the approach.
And I think you read about it, we’re in this stale economy right now where no one’s hiring. I think most managers at this point right now, and some are on the other side, they’re letting a lot of people go. It’s probably a little bit too early for that, but yeah, but I could see it. I don’t believe in the AI bubble. I do believe that these things happen in chunks. So I think we’re going to continue to grow. I think we have the secret. It is just figuring out how to work it.
Dave: When you say we, do you mean the company or do you mean the society?
Greg: Society, society, yeah. Just the way I think the way that AI has been handled is kind of cool with this open source stuff, being able to share even with China, that’s shocking. China’s sharing. We’ve done a lot of cool research about how they were able to do things so cheap. So what I said, I meant the global community of AI, people that are sharing these ideas. That’s the cool thing about human societies. You can’t land a man on a moon with a person. It needs to be a group of people and the percolation of ideas is global. Now I suspect we’re going to get past these things.
Dave: I have a few more questions that are a bit all over the place, so I might switch a bit here, but I want to ask ’em all.
How do decisions get made at your company?
Greg: We have a discussion about it. So one of the things we like to do, we have kind of a debate structure, and I can get overridden often and even if I’m doing something bad, we have a yo dog policy, which is if my co-founder doesn’t like the way I’m doing things, it’s a yo dog, the way that you handle that meeting, stuff like that. So one of the nice things about being a scientist is that you’re open to criticism and you actively seek them out.
One of the reasons why I like the SBIR is that people will tell you how much you suck, and it’s hard. It’s hard when you go through life to get people to take that seriously and tell you. It’s like once you get high up in a company that people want to tell you everything’s good, but it’s hard to find people who tell you what sucks. And so try to create an open environment where people can tell you that you suck. That’s where companies fail. They have blind spots, they think they’re much better than they really are, and they make these failures. So that’s the way we do that. We do that in an open way through our lab meetings and through our other meetings as well. But yeah.
Dave: Well, that segues nicely into the next one, which is tell me about how you handle conflict. That’s either how you handle conflict or as a company you handle conflict.
Greg: So we try to be very objective about things. If there is a conflict, we try to bring it back to, if one way you can go to logic or you go to the screening, if this thing was true a hundred percent of the time, what would be the outcomes? And then you say, well, if the other one’s true, what percent? What would be the outcome? Then you look for things that you can measure. We’ve done surveys, we had debates about what do people want in classrooms and also grant reviewers will give you crap all the time. Teachers don’t have time for that stuff. We think they do, but they think they don’t. So what do we do? We do SurveyMonkey and we collect data and we write a little short paper on that, publish it and then we could have the debates about it. So yeah, we’re almost to a fault objective trying about even subjective things. We try to make it objective by running surveys.
Dave: Yeah. How do you deal with underperformers?
Greg: Yeah, it’s tough. I think most people are bad at this. In the beginning, the biggest mistake we had is not letting go of people on time. So we kind of have these abilities to give people contracts to get out of it or we try to train. We’ve done a number of things. We had one that we had it on, Hey, it is not really working out, that type of stuff. And I was ready to let the person go and then they told me, Hey listen, I’m not cut out for this job but I have this promotion. I think it’s always good. You always want to give people the ability to grow the company, but the person said, no, man, I suck at this job. I was much better doing what I did before. Can you just move me back to my old job? I didn’t even think about that. That’s brilliant. So no, it is one of the issues that I have is that I tend to think that people want what I think I’m on the spectrum. And so you have a hard time running models of other people. Everyone wants just move on and keep going ahead, but that’s not the case.
Dave: How do you work on your own evolution as a leader?
Greg: I have coaches. Yeah, I mean it’s funny that the thing I just mentioned is something that came out of coaching. So it’s quite clear to everybody in the room except for me and especially with my crew, because they’re all, I’m pretty sure we’re all on the spectrum, right? Because I can tell my guy only wears blue, right? Focus on the robot. So it’s hard to get critical feedback on that, on your blindsided to this, right? So in the TED Fellows, I would get these amazing coaches and they would tell me about the missing conversation. Greg, in your head, you’re telling you all this stuff, but do you ever tell it to that person? They know to change. So it’s very simple communication at the end of the day. So I seek out professional coaching on that type of stuff. I’m in the Edward Lowe Foundation program. They have a lot of cool tools for that.
Dave: Nice. And do you have a written down mission, vision, value stuff?
Greg: We do. Yeah, we do and we go back and we change them every once in a while to upgrade it. So now our mission is more on the computational side of things. I think that’s where it’s quite clear if anyone is following AI is that these things are becoming more and more human-like, right? And these are branching into, it is clear that all of the latest models have theory of mind. So they’re not conscious yet and I suspect they will be at some point. I think we have the tools to make them, so we just have to figure out how to train them in those ways. So I see the field changing. So when we first started out, it was just about spikes. Then we moved into and we use invertebrate animals. Then we switched to missions to be more human-based.
And then we got into the human machine interface areas and now we’re in this completely computational side of things. So doing experiments on more on psychology, but coming back to models that you can show how the brain works.
So yeah, so we’ve got our fourth vision statement of where the company’s going and our mission has been pretty much the same to democratize neuroscience from these is these special universities and making them available with the Bernie Sanders of neuroscience.
Dave: That’s great. Alright, my concluding questions. What are you most worried about for the next year and the next decade? What are you most excited about?
Greg: The next? I think the same, right? Yeah. I think if you set up sort of a draconian novel about what society could look like, this is exactly how you’d start it off getting to the point where you could have a GI and during a time of major government shutdowns, like we’re closing programs for the unemployed poor at the same time that we’re ramping up on technologies that could make more unemployed. So I suspect it’s going to be a bumpy ride for the next few years, for the next decade ahead. I think we’ll get to a GI in the next decade. What does that mean? It’s hard to predict, right? It could mean there’s these doomers and boomers, right? So I am not convinced either side yet. You can’t know. You have to let these have to be both at this point, right? Yeah. You kind of have to let them, that’s what computation is. It’s about letting the computations compete.
So it could be one of the low-hanging fruits is infinite supply of energy. That’d be great. That would help the planet. So if you get these fusion machines all working and that’d be great. So the question is what do you do with these? People were talking about it in 2016, about universal basic income, the talk went away when it is coming to be more important, everyone’s off people.
It could be the biggest thing that happens. And I suspect even if it goes horribly bad, what will come out of that? I mean, if you look at the end of the agriculture, if you go back to Ann Arbor, you looked about a hundred years ago, 80% of the jobs are agriculture and then now it’s not. You get less than 8%, right? So it’s like, I’m sure during that transition it was really rough, but afterwards it came. All right. So maybe I think we’re going to be that generation that lives through that transition and I’m not sure it’s that great for those people, but I think it moves better for the future.
Dave: And I think talent and leadership matter in those times. How it matters, what our particular situations are. We’ll see. But if you zero it into the next year for your company, what are you most excited about?
Greg: I would say we have a very cool, it’s a book, but it’s an idea. And if these experiments pan out, we’re doing a bunch of new experiments, sort of get at how do emotions have a play in consciousness and we have a mechanistic approach to that. And if it turns out to be true, that could be huge for us and for the field in general, ology and everything else. So I’m excited. We have a book deadline in February and then we’re just going crazy on that one right now. We’re doing so many experiments. We have so many cool experiments that we have in the tank already that we’re getting to write up. So I’m looking forward to that. I think that will be, every once in a while during these tough times, you get these little sparks of light and innovation and things that make you happy. And I suspect this will be one of those.
Dave: Nice. If people want to learn more about you and your situation or the company?
Greg: Yeah, we’re Backyard Brains. You can find us online, backyardbrains.com. And if you’re ever in downtown Ann Arbor, and if you want to stop by, we’re on South State Street and you can go pop up around the top floor right next to See Eyewear. So we have a lab there. We’re doing demos and experiments. We can probably use some subjects.
Dave: And if you want to hear more on the technical side, you can look for your talk at the a2Tech360 Tech Talk on Friday, October 3rd.
Greg, thank you so much. Covered a lot of great ground. Appreciate your authenticity and the glance into what your experience is like.
