Aug 4, 2026 · 47 min · 17 segments
**Afsheen Afshar** has one of the strangest résumés in tech: an MD and a PhD who built brain-machine interfaces that helped paralyzed patients type using only their thoughts, then walked away from…
Afsheen AfsharGuest
Brennan PothetesHost
On One Direction, we can like play video games and control shit with our minds.
Like, what do you think the societal implications are of both those things? Because like on one end, there's a lot of like sovereignty.
And as an entrepreneur and a creator, I'm like, holy crap, like if I could just sit here and take everything in my mind and code the app I want.
But on the flip end, if there's some like overly compliant society that's like before you've even made a decision to put you into a bucket, like that's incredibly scary and dangerous.
One of the things that makes me continuously and more nervous as time goes on is that we have an economics that doesn't include people who have been creating the foundational data to power these models.
You know, not getting into the details, but suffice it to say that we need an economics that actually rewards individuals who are creating valuable pieces of information, otherwise known as our personal data and our small business data and our interaction data to take part of the harnessing of that.
Because as you rightly point out, the incentives for corporations and entities and sovereigns to use that data for their own ends is so outrageously high, it's irresistible.
And they essentially take your data, take your loan data, and then your reward is you get a better loan rate because of that data, right?
On One Direction, we can like play video games and control shit with our minds.
Like, what do you think the societal implications are of both those things? Because like on one end, there's a lot of like sovereignty.
And as an entrepreneur and a creator, I'm like, holy crap, like if I could just sit here and take everything in my mind and code the app I want.
But on the flip end, if there's some like overly compliant society that's like before you've even made a decision to put you into a bucket, like that's incredibly scary and dangerous.
One of the things that makes me continuously and more nervous as time goes on is that we have an economics that doesn't include people who have been creating the foundational data to power these models.
You know, not getting into the details, but suffice it to say that we need an economics that actually rewards individuals who are creating valuable pieces of information, otherwise known as our personal data and our small business data and our interaction data to take part of the harnessing of that.
Because as you rightly point out, the incentives for corporations and entities and sovereigns to use that data for their own ends is so outrageously high, it's irresistible.
And they essentially take your data, take your loan data, and then your reward is you get a better loan rate because of that data, right?
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