So how close is this technology? I mean, it's

already around the corner.

You just saw it.

I mean, we've been having conversations about this, and a lot of the early BCI, just like Nita was describing it was, people would try to say something, and the physical act of trying to say something, even if you're paralyzed, produces motor signatures that allow you to move an arm or... to create the sounds of speech.

But already we're going up one level in the cognitive stack and detecting the words that you are thinking.

I can tell you that BCI companies will continue to go up that stack because the number of people who can get a communications prosthesis increases as you move up the stack.

There are people who have stroke and the area of the brain that we're recording from right now might be damaged.

later you're speaking it you're talking about picking up thought processes before you've ever articulated them

[laughs]

And, uh, so, uh, uh, and, uh, but we're really in a zone now where it's, it's really moved beyond James Talarico having a chance to win.

James has a real chance to win.

Nothing's assured.

These, these are gonna be close races.

Um, but also Greg Abbott, the, our governor, he also is sweating his race.

Uh, Gina Hinojosa, who is our candidate, and if people haven't paid attention to her, please do, she's running dollar for dollar the best campaign in Texas, and the question is whether she'll have enough dollars.

Yes.

Where do you see, I suppose, BCI more broadly, but obviously, specifically, Paratromic's going next on your go-to-market?

So, in the clinical progression, we see that Right now, we're building a speech prosthesis that's meant for people who are in a wheelchair and have lost speech in specific ways related to motor conditions.

But there are a lot of people who have lost speech that maybe aren't in a wheelchair or perhaps someone who's suffered a stroke and hasn't recovered their ability to speak yet.

Even just restoring speech could be hundreds of thousands of people in the US and can be a very large market.

As we start to expand out the same kind of decoding algorithms we're using for speech can also be used to control robotic arm, control lower limb prosthetics.

So those are where we see as the nearest term applications.

But then we've also seen a lot of really exciting work coming out of clinical trials where people with brain implants in epilepsy monitoring have been asked to report how they're feeling.

Just again, talk about your thinking about investor type at different stages of your journey.

That's brilliant

... that, uh, that we really take a step back in our w- uh, there is all kinds of encouragement about James Talarico.

He is a fresh face.

As you said, he is a moral man who knows his convictions and sticks with them, but he's also a pretty tough guy.

And so he is taking this fight to Ken Paxton and to Republicans in a way that I don't think that they expected.

And, uh, and, and the overall political environment in the country and in Texas matters right now.

Uh, I have always said that, look, for Democrats, a statewide race in Texas is a knife fight uphill.

Yeah.

but I'm just curious, like, when you're at night just thinking about the future, where are we in a half-decade with BCIs?

We're gonna have a lot of trials right in what are called early feasibility studies, which means that people in all different, um, application areas in mental illness, um, degrees of paralysis, will have next generation devices, which at that point will be even better than what you're seeing right now coming out of Paradromics and Neuralink.

Um, it's likely to be Paradromics and Neuralink five years from now that are leading because we're the two companies that are building wireless high channel count, what are called intracortical systems, and those are the most scalable systems.

Um, five years from now, you'll see these people will be using BCIs to control exoskeletons, robotic prosthetics.

You'll be reading out cognitive states, um, associated with, uh, psychiatric conditions, reading out, uh, mood states associated with mood disorders.

To some extent, those things exist already in the clinic, but we'll have much better hardware.

You'll have in-market device- or the first generation of devices for communication and computer control, so you'll see people who are paralyzed and have lost the ability to communicate getting devices to speak, getting devices to control a computer cursor, computer, uh, keyboard.

Yeah