The World’s First Smart Contact Lens with Mike Wiemer, VP of Engineering and CTO at Mojo Vision

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Mike, VP of Engineering and CTO at Mojo Vision. And we discuss how they've built the world's first smart contact lens, why the key to any startup isn't having solutions but instead identifying a problem, and what the edges of technology tell us about where humans are headed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:36) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. The way that this all came together is I have a research team and they look for cool, interesting technology. And they said this guy is making AR contact lenses, and it's not just hype. They actually already exist. And I was like, let's talk with them. So tell me about that.

(Mike at 00:01:03) Yeah, it is a little bonkers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:07) Yeah. So how did you do it?

(Mike at 00:01:09) Man, there's like 50 layers to that question.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) This is a talk show, man. We've got time.

(Mike at 00:01:14) We can talk. Yeah, I mean, there's the technical how—you know, what's in it? How does it work? There's the story of figuring out how to make it work. And there's probably a story about like, how do you find all the right people and put a team together to go and do something like this? Because you need a lot of different disciplines. You need a lot of different types of personality too. I mean, you need people who are just super creative and you need executors, and they have to work together. So there's a lot in there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:54) What type of disciplines did you need to pull from to do AR contact lenses?

(Mike at 00:01:58) Yeah. So we have optometrists on staff who understand the human eye and contact lenses and how you fit. We have material scientists making materials. We have optics people. We make our own micro LED micro displays. So these are semiconductor optoelectronic device engineers. We do our own chip design, so we need ASIC engineers—digital, analog, mixed signal, RF. We've built our own radio in the contact lens, so radio engineering. There's a lot of math in that. Firmware, software, user experience, app design. I mean, what am I missing? Battery engineers, motion tracking algorithms. Sensors. You need all of these things and more. Electromagnetics, antennas. So yeah, there's a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:52) What's in the actual—there's the lens that actually goes into your eye, like a contact lens, and then some other device that it's interacting with, correct?

(Mike at 00:02:59) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:00) What's the technology in the actual lens? What am I putting into my eye?

(Mike at 00:03:05) That's right. So we can't take a whole mobile phone, let's say, and shrink it down into a contact lens. So we have to divide up some of that functionality. Some functionality is in the contact lens and some functionality lives in the accessory device. The accessory device has more or less as much compute as you could want, and it has all of the interfaces to the cellular network, Wi-Fi, and so on. Those kinds of things are really hard to shrink down small enough to get into the contact lens. But the contact lens itself has micro batteries to power the system along with the power management IC. So we've got energy in the lens. It has a micro display which emits light through a tiny little micro optic. So the micro optic captures the light from the display and focuses it onto the retina. Those are another couple of components that consist of what we call the projection system. We have motion sensors in the eye like an accelerometer, gyro, magnetometer that capture the motion of the eye, which is a really important part of stabilizing the images that you see in the real world. So we have motion sensors in the lens. We have a sensor hub which connects to all of these different devices. And then we have a high-speed radio which communicates the data into and out of the lens to the accessory device and from the accessory device. All of that is in there and it implements all these functions. So at this point, we can make real wireless AR contact lenses. We did publish some pictures of Drew, our CEO, wearing our latest version of that system—the system I just described to you. I think we put those out in June or July, which was pretty exciting. And the system does work. It's still kind of in that bumpy bring-up phase where we're still improving it. It hasn't hit steady state yet. But the system does work. It's quite amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:12) Dude, that is so neat. And so how long do these batteries last?

(Mike at 00:05:16) So for first product, our target is two hours of what we call continuous use. But if you think about how people use these digital systems—all of our digital systems—your phone screen is not on continuously. It's on and off and on and off. Your watch is not on continuously. It's on and off, on and off. So if you were to add up all the on time throughout the day, our system would give you two hours of on time duty cycle throughout the day. And we think that's a great starting point for this kind of product. You know, our vision here is not—in the first product or even the second product—it's not about painting the world with AR content all of the time. It's about giving you the right information at the right time in an eyes-up, hands-free, no-voice way. So when it's time to turn left, you see it. You don't need to do anything. Real-time translation is another really, really great one. So travel to somewhere and you're in a foreign land and you don't speak the language. How come you can't have subtitles? Do you need subtitles on 100% of the time? Probably not. That might actually be annoying. But when you want them, you want them. So it's about the right information at the right time and not about painting the world with content all of the time. I think that view for our system—that view is one that does come eventually down the path, really merging the digital and the real together. Our starting point, our belief, is that simple at the right time is actually super powerful. Like, I was just talking with one of your teammates just before we started chatting. We were kind of talking about working out in the morning, getting up early. And I just can't wait to take this thing out on a run and just be able to see my heart rate and distance and speed and not have to fumble or trip with any other device. So yeah, right information at the right time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:17) Now, absent this project, do you typically wear contact lenses?

(Mike at 00:07:20) No, I don't. I'm very fortunate to still have good vision. I've had good vision my entire life. But this is actually an interesting point, which is that right now people who buy contact lenses do it for one reason—to correct their vision. There's really no other, at least mainstream, there's really no other benefit that contact lenses provide other than vision correction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:47) Wait, I got these blue eyes from—so like mainstream, right?

(Mike at 00:07:51) So like there's a few other, there's some edge cases. But really that's why people buy contact lenses from them. So what this kind of technology and this kind of product does is it brings people to the contact lens market who wouldn't have gone and done contact lenses. Maybe you're 20 years old and you don't need contact lenses and you have good vision. Well, this is still a product that you would be probably very interested in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:18) Can your technology correct the vision or is it just the traditional?

(Mike at 00:08:23) It's a contact lens. I mean, anyone who needs vision correction, it corrects your vision. I'm just pointing out that—

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:30) I'll ask it differently. So I don't have contact lenses or glasses or anything like that, but my wife does. So I get nearby what I call near-field experience. So every once in a while she has to go back—I'm not sure the cadence, but every once in a while she has to go back and get her prescription adjusted or rechecked. My question is, can the lenses—can I have a virtual meeting with my doctor, see that my vision needs to change from A to B, and then he sends me some patch download or whatever and the contact lens knows that?

(Mike at 00:09:03) So we have been kind of working on variable focus optic lenses where the lens changes focus as you wear it. You know, that's something that is entirely possible to do. You can likely imagine if you can put electronics and sensors and power systems and data in and out into a contact lens form factor, there's a lot of things you can do. It doesn't have to be just AR. There are many products. So I think as we earn the right to continue, the products that we can make with this really greenfield area are many and very exciting. So what you're describing there is something that wouldn't be supported in the AR contact lens, at least in the first generation. But variable focus optics is something that we see on the roadmap.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:47) Nice. You could do a sponsorship or a partnership with Philips Hue and then have them change the color of their eyes. That could be version 67.

(Mike at 00:09:58) We have already built lenses that have outward-facing LEDs in them that blink and stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:04) Really?

(Mike at 00:10:05) Yeah. Not for the purpose of changing anybody's eye color or any cosmetic reason, just for pure engineering and development reasons. But yeah, there have been people in real life with contact lenses in their eyes that are going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:21) Yeah. Oh, I'm sure you could do so much. My dad, growing up, my dad had this watch and he would point it at the screen and the screen would flash these bars and that's how he would program it. There wasn't a wire. And you could use those lights shining outward as a way to interact with other physical objects.

(Mike at 00:10:38) Yeah. Yeah. There's so many really interesting ideas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:43) How do you keep the focus? Like, obviously my job is to come in here and ask a bunch of questions, figure out where the limits are. But there are literally an infinite amount of things you can do. How do you focus on the one thing that'll get your project to generate revenue? Sort of like, you know, Elon Musk is doing the neural interfaces, but he focuses on the paraplegic people because that's where the money is today. And then ultimately there's this longer-term vision. Where's the money today?

(Mike at 00:11:12) I think the money today is in what we just described.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:14) Okay.

(Mike at 00:11:14) I would point out that Elon is playing a slightly different game than most people in that he can self-fund any project he wants as long as he wants. You know, I admire and like the story of going after people with—paraplegics or other people with damage that can be helped. And I have not done the market analysis on this, so I might just be wrong. I'm pointing out the abstract case here that usually for these kinds of problems, there's not a huge market. So like, the number of people in the United States or in the world who have these issues, who have access to the cash that it might take to pay Neuralink for these solutions—it's not just how many people have damage, it's like how many people actually can pay for this and find a way to pay Neuralink to make their business go. A lot of times when you look at these on-ramp opportunities, they are less about the financial side and they're more about proving the solution out within a population that's hungry for any kind of improvement. And so I think whether or not that's a big market for Neuralink from a dollars perspective, I have no idea. But I just want to point out that their path can be to go and prove this out with this population. And Elon has the optionality to fund it even if that doesn't make money because he knows that on the other side of that, with that proof under their belt, the opportunity starts to widen into people with other kinds of impairments or diseases and then eventually, potentially, to people who are healthy. I mean, we certainly have a strategy of helping people with vision impairments. This has been something that's been important to us right from the very beginning. There's a lot you can do with a display in the eye that opens up a lot of possibilities. And so that's something that we've been working on from the beginning and continue to work on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:23) Yeah. Yeah. No, I just—as an entrepreneur, part entrepreneur, part technology nerd—and I used to get really, really excited about these technologies, and then I learned to curb my enthusiasm to the technologies that align with a business model that exists today. And whenever I'm seeing these interesting new technologies, I'm like, okay, where's the money coming from? So do you think that there will be more money for your product from people who have not worn contact lenses versus people who already worn contact lenses, and will put the constraint of the first two years?

(Mike at 00:13:58) No. I think people who are already familiar with contact lenses in the early phase are more likely to convert to Mojo Vision customers. So some experience with contact lenses is going to be helpful. But I think over the long run, if you look at just populations, there are more people today who do not use contact lenses than there are people who do by, you know, at least a factor of two. Kind of one-third, two-thirds, or maybe one to five, you know, somewhere in this ratio. So there are a lot of people in the world who don't use contact lenses. And if even 20% of them convert, it's an astronomical number of people. So I think in, you know, thinking about what the opportunity is for smart contact lenses, one has to consider not just what the contact lens industry can teach us today, which is really, as I said, centered on people who need vision correction, but how that market can change with the introduction of this kind of new technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:04) Can, just for me, can you move it to glasses so I don't have to put something in my eye?

(Mike at 00:15:08) You know, we get asked that question quite a lot. And it turns out that the problems with glasses and the problems with contact lenses, they're just really not the same. Like, the idea that a contact lens is harder to do than glasses, I actually don't really believe anymore. I think contact lenses are very likely easier than glasses. Just kind of let that soak in for a minute. Glasses are hard. You know, we as humans have spent many billions of dollars pursuing glasses. And today, I mean, you can look out there and see what there is today. They're incredible. It's truly—it's really cool. But it isn't that thing that we all have in our heads as like the most awesome AR thing that we all want. It hasn't quite crossed that threshold yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:00) Well, it had that expectation. That kind of hurt it too, right? Because when you imagine that you're going to be able to put these glasses on and it's going to be this other world. When you do the contact lenses, the first time I saw it, for people that couldn't see it, it's like maybe green lines, Matrix-y type stuff, I guess, that it just was augmented. So it wasn't filling up your whole field of view. It was just an area—like an arrow to go left or a review from a restaurant or something that you're walking up to.

(Mike at 00:16:27) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:27) So you didn't have that sort of expectation in the marketplace of it being this high fidelity, 3D immersive experience that you can't distinguish from reality.

(Mike at 00:16:36) Yeah, that's right. And within the AR category, I think there's two ends of the spectrum, right? There is that immersive—immersive is maybe not the right word because with AR, you still want the real world, right? You still want it there, so immersive is not quite the right word—but it's something in that direction. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there's very simple graphics, notifications, information, key information at the right time, right? So even within the glasses community, there are these two ends of the spectrum. And even with people pouring a lot of money into both ends of the spectrum, we still haven't had that mass consumer hit yet. I do think it's coming, and when it does happen, the opportunity is absolutely immense.

(Mike at 00:17:18) But just to kind of bring it back to contact lenses, it turns out that the problems you need to solve for a contact lens—a lot of them are different problems than you have to solve for glasses. And so the solution in the contact lens space does not port over to glasses, and a lot of the solutions in the glasses space do not port over to the contact lens. So I think that the technology path for these two things is very similar and has a lot of synergy, but they're not the same. If you can make great glasses, it doesn't mean anything about your ability to make a contact lens. And if you can make a great contact lens, it doesn't really mean anything about your ability to make glasses. There are unique problems in both.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:02) I completely easily understand that and see that, right? I'm curious to understand how you charge them. Is it like a near—you have the iPhones now, you can magnetically charge them. How do you charge these things?

(Mike at 00:18:16) Yeah, it's that same principle. Our view is to have a little charger. Well, I mean, we have something like this in the lab right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:26) Much like an AirPod.

(Mike at 00:18:27) Well, this is an old phone. But in the lab, our systems are for engineers, right? So they don't look as nice and polished as this. But it's the same kind of concept that a stand—you take your contact lenses, you put them into a standard contact lens case, and that case has the wireless charging built into it. So when you take the contact lenses out and you put them in their storage, they're charging in that storage. You can take that thing and put it in your pocket if you'd like to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:56) And you would wear all day like a normal contact lens, and it would just activate as needed?

(Mike at 00:19:02) That's right. That's exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:04) The interesting things about your product specifically is there's so much intangible communication. From watching the videos on your home page, it shows you a lot. It's just I haven't seen anything like it before. And to be honest, I am lacking some words here, but it's just fascinating. And when it is up, how do you make it so that it doesn't clutter vision? Like, let's say that it comes up and all of a sudden I get hit by a car because there was a bubble over the car or something.

(Mike at 00:19:35) Yeah. I mean, the bottom line is you can't put content in front of you and also not pay attention to it. You just can't. I mean, I'm looking at you. I'm not looking at something else, right? My attention has a limit, as all human attention span does. So this topic of, you know, how do you give people content and not have them walk into the middle of the street, if you will—I don't think it's new, and I don't think AR or our company are the only ones who have to think about this. People walk around right now with their cell phones in their hands looking down. I mean, if you get in any major urban area or even not urban area, right, but like, you know, I was in New York the other day and it's like nobody's looking at anything. Everybody's face is down on their phone as they're walking along, right? So our devices are already causing us to divert our attention, and we have adjusted to that. And I think that as augmented reality solutions come along that are really useful, that people are really using out in the wild, people are going to have to adjust their habits knowing that they only really do have one place they can put their attention. I do think that augmented reality has an opportunity to at least move the ball in the right direction. Looking down at your phone—the down part is not necessarily a good thing. At least if your eyes are up and your hands are free of any object, I believe you have kind of more of a chance of being aware of your surroundings than if your eyes are down and you have something in your hand. So, you know, this topic of distraction is something that—anyway, it's not unique to contact lenses. It's a whole thing with all of our devices. And we believe that if we can get your eyes up and kind of back into the world as much as possible, that this is actually a step in the right direction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:35) When can I buy one?

(Mike at 00:21:37) I'm not going to give you a release date here, but we're still a few years away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:41) Okay, cool. So it'll be a couple years before these things are out to consumers being purchased regularly?

(Mike at 00:21:50) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:51) Cool. How did you even get into this business?

(Mike at 00:21:55) I've asked myself that question at various times. You know, I think my story in a few sentences is I very luckily—and I mean that truthfully, with luck—got into Stanford as an undergrad and always wanted to be an engineer and was in the double E program. And one of my buddies said, "I'm going to take quals this year and do a PhD," and I hadn't really considered it. Anyway, the competition streak in me came out, and I was like, "Well, if you're going to do it, I'm going to take quals." So basically, the reason I stayed at Stanford and got a PhD is because somebody else kind of challenged me. But I'm glad I did it. I learned a lot through that PhD experience and wound up starting a solar company in 2007 with some friends and other people. And an interesting part of that story is we had never built a solar cell before. You know, we were optoelectronics engineers, so solar cells kind of made sense, but man, were we naive about the difficulty. We thought, "Oh, you know, it's a photodetector. How hard could it be?" It's really hard. But within three years, we set a record for the highest efficiency solar cell that any human had ever made. We're actually on the chart twice. There is a chart that keeps track of these things. So we're on the chart twice at Solar Junction. And if I think about that experience, you know, going from really first job out of school and all the things that you have to learn doing a product in a company that you'd never done before, right, I think that experience taught me that it's okay to not know. And that—and then reflecting on entrepreneurs that I know and respect who've done multiple companies, there are those who kind of stay in a category, and that's great, who can do it multiple times within a category. But there are also those who don't do it in a category, who kind of jump around. You know, they have different interests. And I think the key is—the key to any startup is not having an invention and a solution, but in fact, just defining a really good problem to solve and that the solutions kind of come second, right? And so if you look at the contact lens, when I met my cofounders and, you know, we kind of all looked at each other and said, "Well, we have a starting point. We have a little bit of information about how one would do it, but it isn't a solution. We don't have all the information." But we thought, "Gosh, if we could make contact lenses, smart contact lenses, like, that would matter, right?" And so we thought, "Well, that sounds like a good problem to solve. So let's use the startup ecosystem and the engine here in Silicon Valley, the funding engine and the human and engineering engines, to just run the game, right?" So the game is you get a little bit of seed money, you hire some people, you start to pull down risk on various problems and build a scaffold. And then, you know, you do a Series A and you get more money and you get more people and you get more capability and you build something physical and you show real tangible progress and so on. I think for the contact lens, you know, no, I didn't know anything about contact lenses before this company. But I guess I had some—I don't know if it was a good sense or not—but some sense that there's a method to solving problems that you haven't run across before, and that if we apply that method here, that it might work out. And I think, you know, so far, we've been right about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:25) Yeah. Well, you're in good company here. I'm a fan of jumping around.

(Mike at 00:25:29) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:29) And I did that with software, getting to work in vastly different industries, and ultimately, where that led is to this. So now I get to talk to different people about different technology three, five times a week. And so I sort of got myself—I was software development, consulting, building teams, all of that. And then I realized rather than spending a year or two really deep in one problem just to learn that technology and be in that ecosystem, I can just hop ecosystems on a weekly basis and then it just worked out, you know.

(Mike at 00:25:58) I actually think it's a new thing for humans. I think our tools like podcasts and the plethora of audiobooks and great podcasts and YouTube videos—all this stuff, it's actually giving people more of the tools they need to learn a broader set of skills and be more exposed to a broader set of things. There's—if I split the world into two categories for just a moment, there's really deep learning about something, right? So you pick your topic and you just figure out if you can know everything, right, as much as you possibly can on this topic, and that can be really valuable. But then there's another value here that comes in more of a systems engineering thinking, where you are exposing yourself to as many different ideas and disciplines as possible and seeing if the combination of building blocks can actually give something new. So I gave a talk once upon a time. I have this theory that if you look at all of human invention, all the different technologies and information and things that we know how to do today, right, these are all actually building blocks, and they can be combined in many different ways, right? And probably the answers to many of our difficult questions that face humanity that have some kind of a technology-based solution or an innovation-based solution—probably the answers are already within our grasp. But the combination set, how do you combine the latest in CRISPR technology with deep learning and some kind of quantum computing thing? Like, nobody knows how you combine those things because the people who do quantum computing don't understand CRISPR, and the people who do CRISPR don't understand deep learning and whatever it might be, right? Like, the building blocks we have today, the potential to combine them in really powerful ways, that set is way beyond our ability to explore because it's hard and there's too many combinations and you have to have this kind of cross-disciplinary thinking. So one of the things that I'm excited about in what I see happening today is there are more people who are able to think in this cross-disciplinary way. And I believe it's because there are more tools and more avenues for them to be exposed to different ideas. And podcasts, frankly, are one of the ways I use to get exposed to new ideas. Man, I can just ramble on about this forever. But if you think about humans and how we evolved, we evolved to communicate this way, you know, looking at each other in the eye and verbally and with our body language communicating to each other. And it's this kind of group think that evolves out of verbal communication. Like, this is really what we've evolved to do. Text written down does not evoke or trigger in our brains quite the same connection, right, to ideas as this kind of format does. And so the ability to have a bunch of really interesting people on the Internet talking in this way with each other and to have people listen in, I think it plays into the way human brains work more than maybe the written word does. You know, on the other hand, I love audiobooks, and I love audiobooks that are read by their authors in particular. So I think that's also moving the needle in the right way. But systems level thinking and being exposed to a lot of different things is an important part of human progress.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:22) Well, if you look at the amount of interactions we have compared to educational material or hearing a lecture, that would be the 20% in the 80-20. 80% of the way that we're interacting is listening to conversations between people, whether it's at our home, in our social life. So that's the dominating force. So in hindsight, it makes sense that the podcast long-form conversation concept would take off because there was a huge demand and very little supply.

(Mike at 00:29:52) That's right, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:53) If you go to education, the lectures, it's a one-sided conversation.

(Mike at 00:29:58) Yeah. It's a one-to-many information. One-to-many information is very impersonal and non-dynamic and just not how we were evolved to consume.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:07) Have you asked yourself the question, "What are the humans building?" In the sense that you stand back, you stand on Mars, you look down on Earth, you see all of the humans building all of these little things, and everything leads to something that then is another building block that stacks in that whole explanation you gave. What's the end result that they're building towards that they don't realize?

(Mike at 00:30:32) That they don't realize.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:34) Or realize. I mean, I think we don't realize it. I think everybody goes out and tries to bring value and tries to solve problems. And then when you look back on the stack, it's always very obvious. And it's—yeah. So what's—where are we going to be when we look back and be like, "Oh, that was the main purpose of the contact lenses and everything," or "That was the main purpose of artificial intelligence as a whole," you know?

(Mike at 00:30:56) I mean, I think in some ways, this kind of question is frankly unknowable. You know, how many times have you heard somebody say nobody could have predicted Uber when the—when Apple launched iPhone, right? This is the problem with all these building blocks and the infinite set of possibilities that come from combining them. It's almost infinite, right? The human brain cannot traverse all those forks in the road. And so we make up stories to make sense of the world after the fact. We are good at that. So I think, you know, in a lot of ways, these things are unknowable. I personally am a pretty optimistic guy. We have some major challenges, you know, for humanity in front of us. Like, no joke, major challenges. But part of my optimism for the idea that we can somehow find a way to solve this is that if you, again, look back at all of human history, we've probably always been on the cusp of defeat, you know, like, really. You know, if you look back a few years, it's major world wars, right, and genocides and all kinds of horrible things we've done to each other. If you look back further than that, it's plagues. If you look back further than that, it's bands of people, you know, killing each other in the first cities and all of it, right? If you look back further than that, it's lions and tigers and other plagues and, you know, who knows? There's always been something, right?

(Mike at 00:32:22) There's good evidence from what I understand in the DNA record that there was some kind of winnowing event where everything kind of went down to just a few people, and somehow we managed to thread the needle on that thing. And here we are today. So the idea that humans have ever had a safe period, I think it might be an artifact of the stability of the last fifty years or so, this perspective that stability is a thing. Like, maybe it's not. But, hey, we've managed to string together some decades of kind of a continuing overall boats rising kind of situation.

(Mike at 00:33:01) And it's not that there aren't fantastic examples of destruction and bad things happening over the last fifty years. There are plenty of those. Like, plenty. But there is a way of looking at the last fifty years and thinking that we are having a more intelligent conversation today with each other about inclusion. And I don't just mean that in the social context, but just generally, just inclusion and acceptance of each other all over the world.

(Mike at 00:33:30) I think we have more of that narrative going today than we have at any time in the past. And part of the reason we have that is because airplanes can put you anywhere, and the Internet can let you communicate with everybody. And who knows around the world the different geographies that might listen to this podcast. Right? So our technology has let us come together a little more and feel a little more human and a little less like others.

(Mike at 00:33:56) And if there's any grand direction I hope that we're solving for, it's that whatever comes next to drive growth and economies and production of stuff for humans to consume and live by, I hope that we'll look back and say, yeah, these things actually brought us closer together. There will be missteps. You know, we can certainly have a conversation about whether social media, you know, is that a plus or a minus for bringing us together? You can make a case either way. So I don't, I'm not saying I have all the answers to the technology is uniformly good. I'm not saying that. But I would like to hope that the tools we're building and building upon overall are making us feel more connected, not less.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:45) Yeah. No solutions aren't without their problems. Right? None are perfect. It's just social media.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:51) I think we are better off with it in the sense that as the technology advances, our ability to kill each other more efficiently does, but also does the communication. Now I can sit here and have a real time conversation with someone in China, Russia, UK, wherever. So, you know, we fear what we don't know. And by opening up this massive amount of communication, now we can see that, oh, look. They're just people like us. And you can be told that all day long. But as a human, it doesn't click the same.

(Mike at 00:35:20) Yeah. When you have a friend from wherever it might be, all of a sudden, it's real.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:25) Yeah. No. That's great. I have a weird recurring thought about the answer to the question, what are the humans building? I think that you can look at some of the drivers of what drives the humans at their core.

(Mike at 00:35:38) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:39) Things like, you know, dopamine will drive you for actions. And, like, if I had to make a guess, if somebody said, hey, come give us the theory of what's gonna happen with technology and the advancements. My current best guess is that all the technology leads to a system that allows permanence because none of us really want to die. Like, we want to continue on. Right? So some sort of system or technology for infinite permanence. And then we can do whatever we want there. And then ultimately, we get sick of it because we can have whatever we want and nothing's challenging and whatnot. And then we just hit the reset button, explode everything, and start back as caveman.

(Mike at 00:36:14) It could be. I think you hit on something really important there, which is this question of whether or not anything that you would call human can exist without the opportunity for destruction and without finiteness to the lifespan. So there's an idea, you know, in the category of sentient AI that if there's no pressure on the AI to die, basically, that maybe it won't ever really live. That there's a key part of the struggle that pushes things forward and causes sentient beings to take action, which is the knowledge that you won't be here forever. So I don't know. But it's an interesting thought whether, how important is that ingredient?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:58) Yeah. But that's how we could lose our humanity by going into some sort of digital world. I honestly don't think we're that far off too. I mean, first of all, the funny thing is when I've had this conversation before, I started doing research. We don't know what consciousness is.

(Mike at 00:37:14) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:14) And I think that's, like, fascinating, or at least it's highly debated on a really wide scale to the point where, like, if you ask general practitioners, like, an anesthesiologist, they're like, you're conscious and you're not conscious. We understand the two states. You know?

(Mike at 00:37:27) I think there's some kind of, I almost hesitate to use the word objective reality because we can debate that all we want. But let's just go with it for a moment. There's something that is measurable in what you would try to call the real world, and then there is human experience. And these two things don't have to have anything to do with each other. So how you experience the world doesn't mean that's the way the world is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:54) Right.

(Mike at 00:37:55) Right? So if consciousness is this question of really related to our experience, you know, what does chocolate taste like? How does, what is happiness? Right? What is joy? These kind of, these are human, these are words we use to describe an experience. And it could be that those things don't have some kind of objective truth on their own. They just are our experience and how we're wired and how we are. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:27) They're objectively, so they're objectively subjective.

(Mike at 00:38:30) Something like that. Yeah. Something like that. And so, yeah, it could be that part of the reason it's really hard to answer this question is because it can only be answered within the context of the human experience. Like, you can't put it into the context of, again, trouble with this word, but the real world. Right? It is only true within the context of human experience and other humans and that, you know, fish don't experience things the same way that we do. You know, if you are born with an appendage missing or, you know, without your hearing or something different than the way I was born. Right? Your human experience may actually be somewhat different than mine and that there's kind of truth of experience within you yourself, but maybe not objective experience truth that's measurable with the scientific method. Right? It just could be that there's a split there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:29) Yeah. It's anyone who's done any sort of craftsmanship understands the concepts of certain tools are good for certain things.

(Mike at 00:39:36) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:36) Right? And to understand our geology, there's a great set of tools for that and to find objectivity within that. Right? Because it's outside of us. And you've opened my mind up to a new way of thinking or at least some new words to use when thinking about the human experience being separate from objective truth. That's gonna marinate for a while.

(Mike at 00:40:03) Yeah. I mean, it could be that you can explain it within the objective reality. Again, I don't like that word, but I'm going with it for now. Explain it within that. You know, if you could, for example, model the entire human brain and all of its electro potential and chemical states and, like, you really knew everything, you could be like, yeah. If I wiggle this neuron over here, these things happen in the brain and the person says, I feel happy. Okay. I can, quote, explain it. Right? But what is the feeling of happiness? Like, what is it? Maybe only humans can understand what that means and only can understand within the realm of how it feels, if you will, that there isn't a fundamental to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:48) I mean, that just might be the byproduct of happiness and not happiness itself. Like, happiness might be, for some people, in the series of events leading up to the dopamine hit, the thing that you're gonna mess with in the brain to have them say I'm happy. Right? So I am ill equipped to handle, like, deeper psychological discussions. I need to read more. I would say I'm an armchair person, right? So my brain thinks about these things without me prompting it to. And so when those happen, I kind of follow the rabbit hole and see where it goes and try to flush ideas out, but by no means am I really great at that.

(Mike at 00:41:25) Yeah. I love thinking about these things too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:28) Yeah. Well, keep thinking about these things because you're bringing some amazing inventions into the world. Was there a call to action or something we wanted people to specifically do in relation to Mojo? Do you have a newsletter?

(Mike at 00:41:40) We do have a newsletter. Yeah. You can go to our website and sign up and get the latest about us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:48) And what's your website?

(Mike at 00:41:49) Mojo.vision. It doesn't even need a .com. Just mojo.vision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:55) Thank you, man. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Mike at 00:41:57) Did we? Yeah. Or did we do it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:59) We did it.

(Mike at 00:42:00) Alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:01) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.