53. Brain-Computer Interface, Music as Medicine, and the Last Frontier of Privacy
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Your Brain Is the Last Private Place. For Now.
What if the most private place you have — not your phone, not your diary, but your own mind — started to become readable? Not in some distant sci-fi future. Now.
That is the uncomfortable and fascinating question at the center of this episode. Mizter Rad sits down with Dr. Jörn Rickert, a German neuroscientist and entrepreneur who has spent his career quite literally inside the human brain. He co-founded CoreTec, a company that builds brain-computer interface implants that read brain activity and respond to it in real time. In 2026, CoreTec performed the first human implantation of its Brain Interchange system in Seattle, helping a stroke patient recover movement in his arm.
Then Jörn did something unexpected. He stepped away from the implant world and started something completely different: Neudio, a company that uses music — personalized to your brain waves in real time — to change your mental state. No surgery. No electrodes. Just neuroscience and sound.
Brain-Computer Interface Technology: What Is the Brain Actually Doing?
Before we can talk about brain-computer interface technology, we need to understand what the brain actually is. Jörn puts it simply:
"The brain is simply the computational engine that makes from all what we see, from all our perception — vision, hearing, feeling — then we have experiences, and all this is processed in real time to make decisions, which in the end result in movements from your body and your voice. So it is essentially an input-output machine that controls all our behavior."
When that machine breaks — through stroke, injury, depression, addiction, chronic pain, or age-related diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's — the consequences are profound. And that is where neurotechnology steps in. According to Jörn, the field has two main applications. The first is therapeutic: using brain stimulation to treat neurological diseases, retrain damaged neural circuits, and bring the brain back to a healthy state. The second is enhancement: using brain-computer interface technology to augment cognitive abilities in healthy individuals. We are firmly in the first phase right now. The second is coming.
From Brain Implants to Music: Two Very Different Solutions
CoreTec's Brain Interchange is a precision platform. It is implanted inside the skull and creates a long-term, stable communication channel between the brain and external devices. It reads brain activity, decodes movement and speech intention, and can stimulate specific areas with precise electrical signals — all in real time. Jörn explains what makes this approach unique:
"The brain is so tiny in its structures, tiny currents. And your head, your skin, the bone, the muscles that are there, they all isolate the brain and protect it from reading its thoughts or doing precise stimulation. So that's why we said, if we want to deliver precision therapies, then you need an implant."
The key concept behind CoreTec's approach is something called closed-loop stimulation. Jörn breaks it down:
"Closed loop essentially means that you listen to the effect of what you're doing to the brain. You listen to the brain and then you stimulate on demand, and you can react to your own stimulation and you can time stimulation to the activity of the brain."
This real-time feedback loop allows the system to induce lasting changes in the brain's state — not just suppress symptoms, but potentially reprogram the brain itself. The journey from CoreTec to Neudio began when Jörn's friend and collaborator, Professor Andrew Jackson from the UK, made a surprising discovery: that music, timed precisely to your brain waves, can produce effects similar to electrical brain stimulation.
"He found out he can double his brain waves or half his brain waves just by listening to music that had been timed to his brain. I was like, okay, that's really cool. That's finally a neurotechnology that is pleasant and effortless and it allows a targeted stimulation."
How Neudio Turns Your Favorite Music Into a Brain-Computer Interface
The difference between regular music and Neudio's approach is personalization. As Jörn explains, all music has an effect on the brain — but until now, everyone hears the same MP3. Neudio reads your brain waves through external sensors (headbands, earphones, or patches that are already commercially available), and modulates elements of the music you are already listening to — in real time — so that specific sounds hit your brain at precisely the right moment in the wave cycle. This pushes your brain waves up or down, toward concentration, relaxation, or pain relief.
The company currently has a prototype plugin for Spotify. If you are a jazz listener, for example, the rhythmic elements of the drums would be subtly altered to synchronize with your personal brain activity. You would still be listening to your own music. It would just be working harder for you. This is not passive listening. This is a non-invasive brain-computer interface built around sound.
Brain Data, Privacy, and the Real Question Nobody Is Asking
One of the most provocative moments in this conversation comes when Mizter Rad asks about privacy. If brain implants are reading electrical signals from our thoughts, who owns that data? Jörn's answer is surprising — and a little unsettling:
"What kind of person you are, your inner thoughts and feelings — okay, maybe not what you just thought, but is it so relevant what you thought? You're defined by your actions, your impressions. And that is read by cameras, health gadgets, your behavior on the internet. They can already know who you are. You can add very little by brain reading right now."
In other words, the last bastion of privacy is not as protected as we think — and the threat is not coming from brain implants. It is already here, through our phones, our faces, and our browsing habits. This connects to a broader theme the show has explored before. In the episode with James Glattfelder on consciousness and information theory, Glattfelder argued that our models of reality shape the world we build. If the data flowing through our digital behavior is already a more accurate portrait of who we are than any brain scan, then the real frontier of privacy is not neural — it is behavioral.
The Intersection of Psychedelics, Music, and Brain-Computer Interface Therapy
The conversation takes a personal turn when Mizter Rad shares his own experience at a ceremonial session in Colombia, where a live drummer played music that seemed to physically amplify the effects of the medicine. Jörn confirms the science behind the experience:
"Combining this — you know, with music that already has an effect — but now you give the music an additional effect, like an additional targeted modulation of brain activity. That is definitely where we are going."
This connects to an episode the show has explored from a different angle. In the conversation with Carina Cunha, founder of Satori Health, Mizter Rad looked at the therapeutic use of psychedelics for mental health. What Jörn adds is the next layer: what happens when you pair a brain-rewiring substance with music that is actively tuned to your brain waves in real time? The clinical possibilities are significant. Neudio is already preparing collaborations in this space.
The Business Reality: Who Pays for Brain Technology?
Building at the frontier of neuroscience is not just scientifically hard. It is commercially brutal. Jörn is candid about this:
"If you have a therapeutic device, insurance pays when it's effective. But brain implants require training surgeons, maintenance, calibration. It's not like a pharmaceutical where you pay one billion and you have a nice pill everybody can just take."
The regulatory burden on implants is growing — increasingly comparable to pharmaceuticals — but without the same economics on the other side. Market penetration is slow. Surgeons need training. Patients are cautious. Non-invasive neurotechnology, like Neudio, currently sits in a far lighter regulatory environment. And that gap is, for now, an opportunity.
What the Next 50 Years Will Look Like for the Human Brain
When Mizter Rad asks Jörn to look ahead across five decades, the answer is layered. On the brain specifically: first, a brain reset — the ability to bring a damaged or diseased brain back to a baseline healthy state using stimulation or psychedelic-assisted therapy. Then, a permanent reprogramming: not just treating symptoms but actually changing the underlying network for the long term. Then, augmentation: extra senses, enhanced cognition, augmented communication — the ability to share not just words but mental images directly. But Jörn's deeper worry is not about the brain. It is about society:
"We don't need office jobs anymore. We don't need manufacturing jobs anymore because we have robotics and AI to do this. So how are societies going to be organized? Will we have a new form of socialism so that the benefits are distributed among the society? Or will we end up in a society where most people are poor, offering their manual labor in competition to robots?"
This connects directly to what Gizem Gumuskaya explored on this show about anthrobots and synthetic biology — the question is not only what the body becomes, but who benefits when biology and technology merge. And to what Elio Challita discussed about insect-inspired micro-robotics: the smallest machines, whether biological or engineered, may carry the largest social implications.
The Last Private Place
Mizter Rad closes the episode with something worth sitting with: "Today reminded me that the most interesting frontier is not the body. It is the mind. It's not intelligence, not memory, but something harder to define. The raw, the unfiltered, the private experience of being you. And that is worth protecting."
The brain-computer interface is not just a medical device. It is the beginning of a conversation about what we are willing to share, what we are willing to become, and what we will insist on keeping for ourselves.
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This article is based on the Mizter Rad Show episode #53 featuring Jörn Rickert and was polished by AI.
Listen to the full conversation with Jörn on the Mizter Rad Show.
Stay curious. Question everything. And maybe, just maybe — the most private place you have is still yours..
Mizter Rad
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Mizter Rad (00:12.364)
Hello, beautiful humans. Let me ask you something. Right now, at this very right moment, where is the most private place you have? Is it your house? Is it your phone? Your diary, maybe? No, I think it's your brain, your thoughts, the things you almost said, but you didn't say, the feelings you never acted on, the doubts you had before you made a decision. All of that has lived until now entirely inside your skull.
invisible. It's only for you. But that is starting to change. Every year we get better at reading the brain, at recording it, at responding to it, at, and this is the part that should make you think, influencing the brain. My guest today has spent his career at the frontier of this topic. He's a neuroscientist and an entrepreneur from Germany. He co-founded CoreTech, a company that builds devices that go inside the human skull.
listen to what the brain is doing and respond to it in real time. In July 2025, Cortec performed the first human implantation of the brain interchange system at the hospital in Seattle to help a stroke patient recover movement in his arm. This is not science fiction. This is actually happening right now. But then, and this is what makes my guest today different, he stepped back
from the implant world and started something completely different, a company called Neudio, which uses music to change your brain state. No surgery, nothing inside of your skull, no electrodes, sound and neuroscience working together. So today we're talking to him about the brain, how it breaks, how we can fix it, who owns the data the brain produces, and what happens when music stops being
Jörn Rickert (01:46.989)
music to change your brain state. No surgery, nothing inside of your skull.
Jörn Rickert (02:03.796)
You
Mizter Rad (02:09.164)
just music and becomes medicine. Dr. John Rickert, how are you?
Jörn Rickert (02:16.789)
Hello Mario, thanks for the invitation. I'm fine. I'm looking forward to talking with you about these fascinating topics.
Mizter Rad (02:26.54)
That's fantastic. Look, Jordan, before I welcome you to the show, let's see what Mara, the news from the future reporter, has to say about what is happening in about 50 years from now.
Mizter Rad (04:24.728)
Thank you, Mara. Today have the man who helped build the technology you just described. Jordan, let's go. We get there.
Jörn Rickert (04:33.037)
Great, okay, thanks. Yeah, that was a nice report or not so nice report from the future. And my first thought when hearing it has been, that's not 50 years away. That's probably more 15. I might predict. Yeah.
Mizter Rad (04:44.183)
Yes.
Mizter Rad (04:55.701)
wow.
Mizter Rad (04:59.296)
Okay, that's good to know. And I would love to jump on that as we go in the conversation. But to begin with, just to have a clear table, a clear slate, I want to start from zero, Jordan. want you to imagine that my grandmother is listening right now, and she's never heard of brain-computer interface, of course. And so in the simplest way possible.
What is the brain actually doing in our heads that can go wrong? How can it get damaged? And what are you building to fix it?
Jörn Rickert (05:40.248)
Well, yeah, mean, the brain is simply the computational engine that makes from all what we see, from all our perception, you know, we have vision, we hear, we feel, then we have experiences and all this is processed in real time to make decisions, which in the end result in movements.
from your body and your voice. So it is essentially an input-output machine that controls all our behavior.
Mizter Rad (06:28.737)
And how can it get damaged? How can that brain get damaged? And how do you think or how are you solving that damage in a way?
Jörn Rickert (06:36.991)
Yeah, mean, are damages just okay, there can be physical damage, like you have an accident, you know, you receive you have a stroke and parts of your brain just get damaged. And then depending on the severity, you lose function. But then I think nowadays, as we are living in relatively safe societies, you can
largely prevent damages from accidents. However, there are other forms of damages that occur from things not totally understood. So it can be wrong behavior, could be part of your genetics, bad experiences you made, and then your brain gets into depression.
anxiety, addiction. So these things happen also pain, mean, could be a result of course from damage, but could also result from bad behavior. I mean, the biggest problem we probably have as humans is that we are sitting still mostly while we have been made to walk. And sitting obviously produces back pain. that's actually the largest
market today for neurotechnology. These are the stimulators implanted in your back to relieve pain.
And so there are these, what we call more network diseases when your brain is working, but it's producing undesired effects like sadness, pain, addictive behavior, schizophrenia, know, psychosis, you know, all these neurological diseases that
Jörn Rickert (08:44.043)
make what today we call mental health crisis.
And of course, are then age related diseases that are part of this, like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, which are affecting more and more people in our aging society. And that is the issue with the brain today. And neurotechnology, which is my field now,
essentially has two applications. So one application is to treat these kind of neurological diseases. So that is okay we stimulate the brain, we retrain the brain to alleviate the symptoms or bring the brain back to a healthy state. So that is application one. So the other application
is okay, well, if you're healthy, right? If you don't have a disease, then what can you achieve by changing or stimulating your brain or reading your thoughts? So you can use neurotechnology to augment or enhance your cognitive abilities. So this, course,
at an earlier stage, when it comes to efficient implants, know, today, people are in plant healthy people are implanting implants, for example, to to be more beautiful. So there it's it's pretty normal. So the question is, in the future, will people implant their brains to become more intelligent or more
Jörn Rickert (10:47.337)
you know, concentrated in these things. And then of course, there's technology that doesn't require implantation, and it's much easier to apply. a lot of these things we are using today, like you might consider glasses, you know, a brain aid because it helps your eyes see better. You might consider music as it is today, not the music that I'm developing, a way to
Mizter Rad (10:49.569)
Hmm.
Mizter Rad (11:06.891)
Right.
Jörn Rickert (11:17.637)
improve your mood or enhance your well-being already by the way it stimulates your brain. So there's a lot of gray area of what already today is used to improve or change your brain activity.
Mizter Rad (11:38.23)
Okay, so tell me something you you among other things, because you're very entrepreneurial individual as far as I can read from your profile and background. But there are two main companies or two main ventures that you're pushing. One that is called Cortec, and I'm going to put in very simple words is the the solution or technology that goes inside of your skull in your brain. It's invasive, let's say.
Jörn Rickert (12:03.938)
Yeah.
Mizter Rad (12:06.763)
And then Neudio, which is the newer venture that works from the outside through music. And I feel like those two things are related, but they're quite different at the same time. Very different, very big jump. So help me understand why do some people need a surgeon and a drill to open up and put something inside? how does the other side works that basically work with music outside of your head?
Jörn Rickert (12:18.677)
Yeah, they are on different edges, right? So, yeah.
Jörn Rickert (12:29.897)
Yeah, yeah.
Jörn Rickert (12:34.347)
Yeah.
Mizter Rad (12:36.811)
So tell me more about those two companies and why those two things work differently.
Jörn Rickert (12:36.875)
Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, great. So, you know, I come from neuroscience, and I've been working in interdisciplinary teams about 10 years at university. when I started Quartek, so the discussion has been, okay, do we really need an implant, you know, to realize what we want to do?
to build a brain computer interface. And it is clear that if you want to have precise information or precise treatments, then you need an implant. The brain is so...
you say, tiny, has tiny structures, tiny currents. And your head, your skin, the bone, the muscles that are there, they all isolate the brain and protect it from, you know, reading its thoughts or doing precise stimulation. So that's why we said, okay, if we want to deliver precision therapies,
which we think is best to effectively treat patients or also to precisely read thoughts if you wish to go into that direction, then you need an implant. So we started out with Cortec.
Mizter Rad (14:10.679)
Mm-hmm.
Jörn Rickert (14:19.297)
when after more than 10 years building the company a good friend of mine, Professor Andrew Jackson from the UK, told me that he found out how to apply recent neuroscientific principles to his old hobby, music, with the effect that
he can stimulate his brain in a similar way electrical stimulation works but from just listening to music I got super excited because know implants are a great technology with you can achieve great things with implants
But from a business perspective, they are pretty awful. They're heavily regulated. And even if you get an implant approved or into clinical trials, then making this implant really help many people. It requires training surgeons. It requires maintenance, calibration.
It's very complex stuff. It's not like a pharmaceutical where in the end you pay one billion, but then you have a nice pill everybody can just take. No, you have this hugely complex implant. so having something that works non-invasively and then even with a pleasant stimulus like music,
to me was extremely attractive. And so I got into that and started building non-invasive brain stimulation together with Andy Jackson.
Mizter Rad (16:31.063)
So tell me precisely the solution that Cortec is building or has built for inside the brain, what does it fix in the brain or in the nervous system? And the solution for outside the brain, which is Neudio, what does it fix from outside, from the outside of the head, say, with music?
Jörn Rickert (16:41.197)
Yeah.
Jörn Rickert (16:48.438)
Mm-hmm.
Jörn Rickert (16:52.182)
Yeah.
Jörn Rickert (16:55.533)
So the CoreTech, Core Innovation, what we call brain interchange, this is essentially a platform that allows long-term stable communication of the brain and external devices. So in the essence, it's a tool that you can use. You put it in between your brain
and modern information technology. So then you can read brain activity, you or AI can interpret it, can find out biomarkers, can find out for example things like movement intention or speech intention.
And then it can analyze this in real time and can talk back to the brain, stimulating it when it's actually needed and where it's needed, allowing them to deliver precision therapy, allowing closed loop reprogramming or changing of the brain's network so that hopefully people
who are in a bad state like depression today can then be moved for a longer time to a healthy normal state. Yeah, sorry, that was a technical term. So closed loop essentially means that you listen to the effect of what you're doing to the brain. So you listen to the brain and then you stimulate
Mizter Rad (18:31.787)
When you say closed loop, sorry to jump in there, but when you say closed loop, what do you mean with that?
Jörn Rickert (18:49.191)
on demand and you can react to your own stimulation and you can time stimulation to the activity of the brain. So from neuroscience, yeah real time right, so we know that so the brain works on the order of milliseconds and the cycles in the brain work on the order of tens of milliseconds.
Mizter Rad (19:03.509)
real time.
Jörn Rickert (19:16.715)
So if you can analyze brain activity within tens of milliseconds and then stimulate back, can stimulate depending on the brain state that is currently occurring. And this allows you to essentially reprogram the brain. You can change and induce long lasting changes to the state of the brain. So that is what is behind closed loop stimulation. So this means a kind of lasting
reprogramming of the brain, which of course is in its infancy. From any male experiments, we know lot of basic science how this works. But of course, we have to apply it to humans and human specific diseases and learn how to do it in an optimal way.
treat humans, so this requires clinical trials.
Mizter Rad (20:18.743)
Okay, so let's say I go to the surgeon, they open my head and they put a little device inside of it. Now the doctor and myself can look at the brain activity, can check for speech intention, movement intention, and sort of with this closed loop mechanisms that you talk about in real time, react to the brain and reprogram the brain as we go.
kind of. So that's more or less how it works. And then they close my, my head is now closed and I'm walking around with the device. Is that already happening out there or what is the current?
Jörn Rickert (20:49.25)
Mm-hmm.
Jörn Rickert (21:01.025)
Well, it's increasingly happening. mean, Cortex so far implanted the first two patients. And in these patients, this is treatment. So this is not about reading thoughts to control devices. So this is the second study that will start this year in Europe. But in the first patients, this is treatment. So this is closed-loop stimulation.
Mizter Rad (21:14.199)
Mm-hmm.
Jörn Rickert (21:29.261)
to do stroke rehabilitation. so there are different applications. Now, if you do movement intention decoding or speech intention decoding as Neuralink is doing, what you can then do with the
other part of the device, like the writing to the brain. So you read from the brain. So you read brain states, thoughts, and then you can write back to the brain. So if you have a thought reading device or device to control a computer, what you can then do by writing back is you can induce some perception. You can bring a feeling to your prosthetic.
a sense of touch or you can probably improve training.
Mizter Rad (22:29.001)
Is this all electrical signals or what is this?
Jörn Rickert (22:31.743)
Yeah, this is all. the really thing that amazes me is that the brain communicates by tiny electrical signals, highly parallel processing, millisecond time scale. And all our modern technology also works by tiny electrical signals. So it somehow seems kind of naturally to bring these two together to communicate.
Mizter Rad (22:47.607)
Mm-hmm.
Mizter Rad (23:00.235)
Mm. Mm.
Jörn Rickert (23:01.949)
Of course, the barrier is high. The biology is totally different from our silicon circuits. But that's exactly what we're working on. So to interface and interconnect our electrical communication of the nervous system with the electrical communication of our modern IT devices.
Mizter Rad (23:28.225)
So, okay, so I have that device inside of my head. Now it's sending electrical signals to read the speech intention, let's say. So what does that mean precisely? Does that mean that someone outside of my brain in a computer will read or be able to decode what I'm about to think and that I haven't set with words yet? Is that more or less what it is?
Jörn Rickert (23:39.17)
Yeah.
Jörn Rickert (23:57.556)
That is more difficult as if you really try to speak. So we know from neuroscience that intended movements or intended speech or just thoughts produce much weaker signals than the actual execution. But still that works. It just works.
not as good as if you really try to do something or actually do it.
Mizter Rad (24:32.343)
But are these weaker signals? Sorry, is the weaker signals because we're not able to go so deep and read them or because why are they weak? I mean, why do we think they're weaker?
Jörn Rickert (24:45.687)
Well, it's just the fact that the signals are weaker if you just think about it as opposed to the actual execution. So, and we always have to think when we talk about the brain computer interfaces today, we talk about reading from the cortex, right? I mean, if you look at our brain, right, the brain is big, right? It's totally inside the head. It goes then.
into your body, controlling your muscles. And on the surface, what in humans is pretty big is what we call cortex, or the neocortex. So this is a surface structure. And that is just one of many parts of the brain. And obviously, the other parts of the brain have a use too, right?
the ideal brain-computer interface would read from all parts of the brain, from every location, every neuron possible. And then we get the full picture. But this is really not where we are. So even like the Neuralink device, you have it records currently from 1,000 neurons. 1,000 neurons in certain locations of the surface of the brain.
So can imagine you only get a kind of glimpse of what is going on with regard to thoughts. of course, for example, if I want to decode a movement or a movement intention or even language, if you go to the actual output of the brain,
This is motor neurons. So in the end, have specific neurons that move your tongue, your mouth, that move your muscles. If you would be able to read from these output neurons, even if you intend a movement, then you get a weak activation, you would be able to get a very precise readout. So this is essentially the thing with the brain.
Jörn Rickert (27:03.563)
We understand perfectly the output. How do we drive our muscles? We understand perfectly the input. Like how do we transform the light that comes through our eyes into neural signals and certain first order shapes. But when it comes to the processing of how do we make decisions, how do we come from the sensory input to the motor output?
all the things that the brain is computing all the time with all the different parts. The understanding is close to zero, it's not really understood. It's still a kind of riddle. All we do is we extract some signals that we get, the more the better, and then we correlate them and we train them so that we can get some estimation out there.
What happens then if you establish a permanent connection between your brain and an actor like a mouse cursor or a robotic arm and you realize, okay, now there is a connection with this brain activity, I can move something, then your brain learns. in the end,
We might not need to understand how to read thoughts. We just let the brain learn to control the computer, to talk directly to this machine. that this is something that you have to take into account. So you record from a very limited area of the brain. You never get the full picture.
Mizter Rad (28:40.491)
Hmm.
Jörn Rickert (29:01.407)
And then if you do a permanent connection to some output, the brain adapts, it changes, right? ideally it learns and becomes better at its tasks.
Mizter Rad (29:15.895)
Well, that's fascinating for sure. The fact that we know very little, but at the same time we already know that it's fantastic machine, the brain itself. Very hard to understand.
Jörn Rickert (29:29.035)
Yeah, it's pretty comparable to the big AI models, right? So where you have a billion or I think even close to a trillion parameter models, so huge vectors. And I mean, this is also what the brain is doing, right? You have 90 billion neurons with thousands of interconnections so that you have
trillions, a model that contains trillions of parameters that process at any time your stimulus. So it's kind of comparable to what is going on there. It's just very efficient.
Mizter Rad (30:14.367)
Okay, so neurotech, you started with neurotech inside the brain, and it's used mainly for precision therapies. But then you took another route and you jumped into Neudio, which works outside the brain with music. Tell me more about that. And how is that being used right now? What is the main difference? And if that cannot go because you were mentioning that the brain has is encapsulated or protected with this layer that doesn't
Jörn Rickert (30:42.871)
Mmm, yeah.
Mizter Rad (30:43.913)
Let us read very well this micro signals that happen inside the brain. So why are we working with devices from outside the brain? What do we know about that?
Jörn Rickert (30:56.033)
Yeah, so this reading from the outside, stimulating from the outside, scratches only the surface, right? So the question is, what can we do with it? So you can't deliver precision therapy, you cannot read precise thoughts, you can maybe read whether somebody
wants to move or whether he wants to move left or right or so but not much more. However, you can read brain waves. So the brain has waves of certain frequencies coordinating your cognition and orchestrating your processing. And we know from science that if you change these brain waves
you can increase them or you decrease them then you can change things like concentration, relaxation, your focus, you can improve learning and memory so these kind of processes you can influence and
The newest trend is exactly also here, closed loop stimulation. So if you read a brain wave and then you stimulate it, meaning you kind of push it when it is actually the wave is currently rising, right? Then you kick it and you make it rise higher. And when the brain is currently
the wave is falling, it's descending and you stimulate it while descending then you decrease it further. And this has been found out with electrical stimulation, optogenetics and all these invasive methods. Andy Jackson, my friend, found out, well, you can do this with music if you time the effect of the music that arrives in your brain.
Jörn Rickert (33:13.911)
to the tide or the status of your brain wave, then you can increase and decrease your brain waves. And this is exactly what the CAR-TEC implant is doing in its first clinical trial. It is reading the brain waves in the stroke patients damaged brain area, trying to stimulate at the right timing of the wave to improve stroke rehabilitation.
And now imagine how I felt when Andy showed me in his video after I've been building Cortex for 15 years. Well, you know, I found out I can do this with music and he showed me that he can double his brain waves or half his brain waves just by listening to music that had been timed to his brain, right? I was like, okay, that's like...
really cool. That's finally a neurotechnology that is pleasant and it's effortless and it allows a targeted stimulation so you can increase or decrease different waves of the brain. So that could be a product that many people can actually benefit from.
Mizter Rad (34:39.251)
So, but is there a still a difference in terms of the reach of the technology when it's inside as opposed to when it's outside? Like, is it more still more effective anyway if it's inside? Because you were saying before that the brain is protected with these layers that don't let us, yeah.
Jörn Rickert (34:57.137)
Yeah, yeah, mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. mean, so the trick here is so that you take the effect music has on the brain, but you time it. So for example, we play a piano tone such that when the effect of the piano tone arrives in your brain, it hits your brain wave at the right moment in time.
There are not many things you can do non-invasively, but brain waves you can record from the surface of the brain. And you can then tune and time the music to affect the brain. If you do this invasively, you can reach more specific and deeper brain areas. And then you can regulate the strength of the stimulation by adjusting your electrical current.
So this allows a stronger and more precisely targeted stimulation than we achieve with Neudio. course, I would always say if you need a strong effect, maybe you need an effect at a deeper location in the brain, then you need an implant. There is focused ultrasound that
achieve something and then there are some methods who allow stimulation roughly from the outside in different areas of the brain but still they have limitations. But Neudio is good for stimulating these rhythms of the brain and influencing them and this allows cognitive enhancement and relief of
some relief of mental illness, we think, very easily for everybody.
Mizter Rad (37:02.647)
Okay, so let me see if I understand something, because I understand that Neudio is built on the idea that music can, like you said, modulate your brain, your brainwaves. But if I think about it, music has always sort of done that. It has made us cry, fall in love, go to war. So I'm trying to understand what's new here. it that?
Jörn Rickert (37:22.529)
Yeah.
Mizter Rad (37:28.779)
the ability of sort of jumping in the right wave that you have decoded sort of with music.
Jörn Rickert (37:33.579)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the difference here is that so far the music has an effect, we know this, but so far the music has been the same for all of us. So we all listen to the same MP3, you know, it's exactly the same music you and I listen to, whereas Neudio reads from your brain, we read the brain waves and the brain waves we can read
from the surface of the brain non-invasively. We don't develop hardware. So there are headbands, there are earphones, and there are more and more companies bringing out brain reading hardware, patches. It's essentially headbands, glasses, or earphones that contain brain sensors. And we don't want to compete with Apple working on brain sensors.
Mizter Rad (38:10.059)
Okay.
Jörn Rickert (38:31.519)
phones. We concentrate on taking these signals and then modulating music in real time. So currently we have a kind of prototype plug-in for Spotify so that then can take songs from Spotify and modulates parts of these songs based on your brain activity
and then makes these songs personalized to your brain activity in real time. Meaning that certain tones and volume effects are timed to your brain activity. And by this, we can achieve a targeted non-invasive stimulation, which before has been done by implanting an electrode to the brain or
delivering electrical stimulation, but it has never been done with music.
Mizter Rad (39:37.688)
So, okay, so if I have one of these patches that I put to read my brain waves and I go to Spotify and I find that plugin, that playlist, basically you're telling me that I will be able to listen to a curated playlist of sound bites based on that playlist of Spotify that will sort of be...
personalized to my brain waves in that specific moment in time.
Jörn Rickert (40:09.205)
Yeah, mean, so in the end, will be able to have you listen to your favorite music. Tell me one of your favorite types of music.
Mizter Rad (40:27.019)
Whatever. OK, I like jazz, actually, instrumental jazz.
Jörn Rickert (40:31.721)
Okay, so jazz has lot of instruments and probably the most effective would then be if the drums and the elements from the drumming like this tingles, that they'll be slightly altered in their rhythm to hit your brain at the right spot, right?
Mizter Rad (40:46.903)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jörn Rickert (41:01.971)
we would do a real-time alteration of your song and modulate elements in it so that they have a rhythm that is tuned to your brain. You can go to our webpage, there are a couple of sample songs that we produced. There's also a first version of an existing famous song that we have nudeoed, if you wish.
But there are also tons of creatives, like there are so many musicians out there that are excited at the opportunity to produce actually this new kind of music, which for the first time is a personalized music.
Mizter Rad (41:46.199)
Mm.
Mizter Rad (41:53.944)
That's what I wanted to ask you actually, talking about musicians, what does that mean for the future musicians? Will they be composing songs like they're doing now or will they start composing mental states, happiness states? Or is the musician of the future basically more like a mental health guru or still an artist?
Jörn Rickert (42:05.634)
Mm-hmm.
Jörn Rickert (42:13.581)
No, think the idea is that our app and so the neuroscience is in the application of the music. So they create their music such that elements can be modulated and
how they are modulated is then decided by the user. So the user says, I want to be more relaxed, or I want to relieve my pain, or I want to improve my focus and attention. And then chooses the music that he likes. And this music is compatible with this real-time modification. And then the algorithms and the neuroscience that sits inside the app
decides which elements do I modulate how such that the user gets the desired brain modulation. And then the music sounds slightly different, but it's pretty subtle depending on the configuration you choose and whether you listen to it or I listen to it.
Mizter Rad (43:33.335)
Your proprietary solution is the software that does that transformation, let's OK, I see. OK, so you were talking about drums before, and it reminded me of something that happened to me, let's say. And this is more like on a personal note, because I also understand that we also talked about this in the show, that there is a conversation going around psychedelics, psilocybin, ketamine.
Jörn Rickert (43:37.739)
Yeah, exactly.
Jörn Rickert (44:02.529)
yeah, mm.
Mizter Rad (44:03.544)
being used in therapeutic settings and in Berlin, in Germany, there's a lot of clinics as you may know, where you go into a control state and they, you know, give you a bunch of MDMA to like boost your X or Y emotion, happiness, let's say. And there's a lot of music in those sessions and it's not random, it is intentional. I remember I was in one of the sessions in Colombia, it was more like a
Jörn Rickert (44:07.346)
yeah.
Jörn Rickert (44:21.943)
Mm-hmm.
Mizter Rad (44:31.991)
guided by a cha man and there was a drummer in the middle of the session and I almost wanted to like eat the music. It felt so nice. It was very intense and beautiful. Have you looked at what happened at the intersection between psychedelic music and brain waves together? have you maybe tried it yourself actually?
Jörn Rickert (44:32.215)
Mm-hmm.
Jörn Rickert (44:56.653)
Have you tried this yourself? Maybe I tried Neudio and I have limited experience with psychedelics. mean, when I was in Mexico, they have these traditional medicine mushrooms that you can just buy in form of very tasty chocolate. So I did some micro dosing and it feels pleasant, but I...
I probably didn't take enough to experience hallucinations. But I think, I mean, this is very promising therapeutic approach as you know, this is a kind of medicine that helps rewiring the brain. That's what the science says. And of course, combining this, you know, with music,
Mizter Rad (45:30.965)
have the full full experience.
Jörn Rickert (45:55.864)
that already has an effect, right? I mean, that is what we know. But now you give the music an additional effect, like an additional targeted modulation of brain activity. I mean, that is definitely what we are going to. And we are preparing these kind of collaborations. However, currently we are a step before as we
need to bring out a working app for the iPhone that then allows these trials to be done easily, for which we are in the process of raising some funds and working on this with our own time and money so far. But that's exactly, I think, where the future is also in the combination of therapies. You have behavioral therapy. You have neurostimulation.
And of course then there is also pharmaceuticals, maybe not the classic pharmaceuticals that just suppress symptoms as also neurotechnology today is often suppressing symptoms, right? It's not treating or curing the brain, which is the big hope of closed loop neurostimulation. That you can not only, you know, suppress symptoms of a disease, but that you bring the brain back to a
Mizter Rad (47:15.607)
Mm.
Jörn Rickert (47:23.639)
healthy state.
Mizter Rad (47:25.367)
You mentioned money and I want to talk about money in business because I find it fascinating that you're building these companies in a sector that might be one of the most expensive regulated things that human beings can attempt to build right now. Also because it has this ethical area that is very delicate for some people.
Jörn Rickert (47:44.097)
Yeah.
Jörn Rickert (47:47.818)
Yeah.
Mizter Rad (47:54.07)
Walk me through the business reality of both Cortech and Neudio. Who actually pays for this? Who is the client here? Who is the one paying?
Jörn Rickert (47:58.773)
Yeah, yeah.
Jörn Rickert (48:09.751)
Well, yeah, I mean, in the end, if you have a therapeutic device, you know, insurance pays when it's effective. So we have devices like deep brain stimulation for Parkinson or cochlear implants for hearing that are paid by insurance. Still, with regard to deep brain stimulation, there is
probably below 10%, maybe even just 5 % of people who could benefit actually decide or receive one of these devices. the market penetration is pretty low. And yeah, that is likely because what I said at the beginning that this is not a pill, but it's a complicated technology where you need to train
you know, surgeons and technicians. And of course, it could be scary, you know, to have, you know, well, you have an implant in the brain, something is put in the brain. But this is something where I would be a bit more relaxed. And my personal experience that I made here that was decisive for this was watching brain surgeries, right? And for example, if you have epilepsy,
The best treatment that really helps you get rid of your epilepsy is taking out parts of your brain that produce this epilepsy. And if you see what's happening there, they might take out a patch of several centimeters, like five times six centimeters, like big chunks of your brain. And then...
If you look at the patient and the person afterwards, there is no change. You don't realize it. that means that the brain is maybe partially overrated. And of course, this is because you have like we have two eyes, we have two sides of the brain. and so you have to be careful to remove only things from one side. If you take out the same parts of the brain on both sides, you get a problem, right? But you have this kind of redundancy.
Jörn Rickert (50:29.163)
there and yeah I think the regulation is an upcoming or already a problem when it comes to implants the development to get such a device approved is it's not yet as expensive as pharmaceuticals but it's getting close to.
And then there are now additional regulations and discussions about privacy of your thoughts and all these things, which actually hamper innovation. Because if you have a pharma product approved, maybe you paid a billion, but then you have a pill, you just need people to get a pill or maybe a shot. As opposed to having a brain implant approved means, okay, now you have to train surgeons, technicians.
That means that the growth in the market is the market penetration rate is much slower as opposed to a successful pill that may be immediately prescribed to hundreds of thousands of patients. That will not happen to neural implants, right? So meaning that it's not really fair to probably have the same regular level of scrutiny applied to neurotech, you know, because
The risk from a faulty product is much lower as opposed to a faulty pill, you know, because of this much slower market penetration. So there will be fewer patients affected by a faulty product than could be from a faulty pill. But what you achieve with this regulation is that you reduce and you innovation and patients are not receiving innovative treatments or much less than they could.
Mizter Rad (52:17.431)
Mm.
Jörn Rickert (52:19.177)
In the early 80s, when the first neural implants were developed, like the cochlear implants, they were built in the university lab without quality management and everything and brought into the first patients. And then they very slowly started penetrating and growing. But that is not possible today anymore. So you need a ton of money to get it approved. But then what you get is, if you made it all the way, still a slower...
market entry and penetration. So that is of course different for non-invasive neurotech unless it maybe is additionally regulated which currently it's not yet and right now it's not yet regulated and I would also caution that like in the introduction from the 50 years in the future they were saying they were able to
Mizter Rad (53:02.219)
But right now it is not regulated.
Jörn Rickert (53:16.257)
you know, read emotions and behavioral patterns or something from the brain activity. I would say this is already happening today because in the end, the brain produces output. The output is your action. It's your behavior. And if someone reads the data from your internet browsing or maybe with a camera, your facial expression and emotions,
Mizter Rad (53:22.003)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jörn Rickert (53:46.05)
he gets a much higher accuracy of your emotional state and what kind of person you are than with the very best brain reading technologies available today. Definitely, 100 % sure. I'll bet on that. this is a kind of, it's close to discriminating neurotech and writing on, this is the last bastion of privacy. And I would say, no, these...
What kind of person you are, your inner thoughts and feeling, okay, maybe not what you just thought, but is it so relevant what you thought? mean, you're defined by your actions, your impressions, and that is read by cameras, health gadgets, you know.
your behavior in the internet, they know already, you can already know who you are. so and I think this is actually much more critical, you know, as it's out there and allows very, very detailed profiling of personalities. You can add little by brain reading right now.
Mizter Rad (54:35.287)
Mmm.
Mizter Rad (54:38.75)
Great.
Mizter Rad (54:56.791)
Hmm, I understand. So if I'm an entrepreneur or an investor right now, listening to this conversation, but I'm also building or investing in companies that will last for the next five decades within this industry or this sector of neuro neuroscience, neurotech. Where is the real opportunity? I like, I I don't want the obvious stuff. I the things people are not looking at yet.
Jörn Rickert (55:22.131)
Mmm. Yeah.
Mizter Rad (55:26.451)
that you say, wow, this is going to be needed. This is going to be, or this is already a problem, and it will be a bigger problem. We need to solve that.
Jörn Rickert (55:26.999)
Yeah.
Jörn Rickert (55:34.465)
Yeah, think it's on the non-invasive side, it's personalized biofeedback as Neudio is doing. So this is a way of personalized biofeedback intended to modulate your brain. And I have another project that is bit simpler even, intended on modulating, training your behavior.
So this is one big area where you use a real time biosignal decoding, which can be a camera reading your facial expression or your body movement or heart rate or brain signals. And then it's evaluated in real time and used to provide feedback to train you or modulate.
you into a certain way that you as a user can decide to optimize your behavior. So the difference to what we have today is you have these biosensors and readings, and they are evaluated. But then you read in the morning, this was my sleep, or you read, was how many steps I took. The trick is that to change behavior or to train your brain,
you need to provide feedback within the physiological learning time frame. And this is short, like within 50, 100, 200 milliseconds, then you get the best effects on training and learning. And I think this is one big area where I envision and I have some projects that I'm happy to talk to investors about. One is Neudio. The other is when it comes to
brain implants and you're talking about really effective things that work reliable, know, it's, you know, modulating the brain. I think here the perspective is that you can not only treat symptoms, but you, as I said, you do a reprogramming of the brain to actually cure diseases.
Jörn Rickert (57:58.222)
This is something that will become possible with devices like the core tech brain interchange. But then, from an investment perspective, we would still have the problem, that's an implant. It's difficult really to scale. People are scared of an implant. But then what we're probably not thinking about today is that
If you have such an implant that can read and write from the brain treating your symptoms or helping you to control a robotic arm if you're a paralyzed person, what you can then also do, you can have this implant to modulate your brain to give you additional benefits. well, you use it to treat your disease or to control your wheelchair.
But you can also use it to give you a sixth sense, a vision from the rear. You can use it to boost your cognition. You can use it to improve your performance, your concentration. That's the same implant, right? But it has a dual use because you can control it from the outside and you can apply different kind of stimulation patterns. And what will happen then is that
People will not say, is a scary brain implant. Everybody sees he has a brain implant. Poor person, he has a disease. Suddenly brain implants will become sexy. It's more like, shit. he has this brain implant. that's cool. he can improve his cognition and he can learn better. He has a sixth sense.
Mizter Rad (59:40.023)
It's a superhuman.
Jörn Rickert (59:52.552)
this kind of stuff. when you manage to make implants sexy, then you might get it like the breast implants are selling quite well and nobody is scared. Breast is also very delicate organ putting stuff in there. suddenly people actually want implants and then things get rolling and it becomes the big billion trillion dollar market.
Mizter Rad (59:54.102)
Yeah.
Mizter Rad (01:00:08.437)
Mmm. Right.
Mizter Rad (01:00:21.601)
Mmm.
Jörn Rickert (01:00:21.611)
Depending of course how governments react and how this might be regulated or not. But from the investment perspective, you you want to be the first mover and not wait until government has regulated something and then others already have the products.
Mizter Rad (01:00:41.495)
Interesting, you mentioned sixth sense. I wanted to touch on that also. I want to switch gears here a bit and I want to go somewhere a bit strange or unusual with you. We talk a lot about brainwaves as data signals that we can measure and record, but humans we've always had experiences or we experience that science.
There's stuff that science cannot fully explain, like the sixth sense that you mentioned or the intuition that we sometimes we call that feeling that you get into a room before anything happens and you feel like you're in the wrong place, that the energy is bad. Like you said, some people call it sixth sense, some other people, you know, when they hear all of a sudden from someone that they've been thinking about, they call it synchronicity.
Jörn Rickert (01:01:13.996)
Mm-hmm.
Mizter Rad (01:01:36.023)
spirituality. We associate these things with the mystic a lot of times, but I wonder if brainwaves are real and measurable things that we can the signals that we can measure. Is it completely crazy to think that some of what we call intuition might actually be a form of communication between brains that we simply don't?
have the instruments to detect yet.
Jörn Rickert (01:02:08.493)
I guess so. There have been studies on synchronicity of brains between subjects and it has been demonstrated absolutely clearly that if you synchronize the brains of two subjects they like each other more.
You know, in animal experiments where you synchronize the brains pretty hard, they liked each other very much.
Mizter Rad (01:02:42.039)
Okay, so that makes me that makes me that makes me actually think now like because we talked a lot about how music can, you know, modulate your brain. But then I'm also thinking how about food? How about smells? How about, for example, in the future, designing perfumes that can that can modulate your partner's brain in certain ways so that she gets
Jörn Rickert (01:03:00.181)
Mm-hmm.
Jörn Rickert (01:03:10.815)
Hmm
Mizter Rad (01:03:11.793)
you know, more attracted to yourself. don't know all this. Do you see that also maybe as a possibility of an extension of this idea, let's say?
Jörn Rickert (01:03:18.475)
Yeah, mean, I think the biology is definitely the big frontier, know, creating, modulating biology, you know, both genetically or, you know, more subtly, like designing a perfume that is, you know, targeting you. think that
probably is even possible today. think the science on that is probably not to... There is a lot of things that have already been shown. So yeah, think that is certainly possible to design smells targeting the genetics of a subject.
Mizter Rad (01:04:14.856)
Mmm. Yeah.
Jörn Rickert (01:04:16.007)
then augmenting presence. But I mean, music is just one sensory or auditory modality. So you can do similar things with visual stimuli, with tactile stimuli, olfactory stimuli. olfaction is probably the strongest sense of all. There is nothing that produces as strong emotions, memories,
than olfaction. It's also the oldest sense by evolution of all these.
Mizter Rad (01:04:47.703)
Mm.
Mizter Rad (01:04:53.845)
Yeah, very interesting. Jordan, I have a question that I like to bounce with my guests, and that is, in the next five decades, from your perspective as a as brain expert, what as an entrepreneur as well, someone that builds actually not just stocks, what do you think we'll have figured out by the next 50 years? And what do you think will
Jörn Rickert (01:05:02.38)
Yeah.
Mizter Rad (01:05:21.847)
still be a complete mystery. How will that picture of the world look like from your perspective?
Jörn Rickert (01:05:29.229)
Hmm. I mean, okay, there is of course the specific niche of my professional expertise when it comes to neurotechnology and what will happen to the brain. I think in a nutshell, so first we'll be able relatively soon to do a brain reset so that you can actually bring the...
brain to a normal, more healthy state by stimulation, psychedelic mushroom therapies. But then eventually, the bad state might return because it's related to your behavior or genetics. And then we'll learn how to actually reprogram the brain in the next step so that people have really a longer lasting or permanent healthy state or
and then maybe even turn this to augmentation and really use this to improve task related performance, have additional sensors and we'll from the brain computer interface perspective
you know, okay, we'll have paralyzed patients, know, control devices, but, you know, maybe we'll also be able to cure paralysis and they don't need it, right? I mean, there's a lot of, you know, people working on pharmaceuticals that treat the reasons for the paralysis. But then if it comes to healthy subjects, we might be able to use brain computer interfaces for augmented communication. I mean, one limitation is
Well, we can talk to each other. And if I could talk faster, that might not really help because you lose me probably, right? And if we would just talk with two implants, I don't know. I would think that this, we don't know how this would actually work to bring my information in your brain. That's not really, but we can use it to augment communication by
Jörn Rickert (01:07:45.492)
having my visual ideas be read from my brain. if I want to show you what I have in mind, like my house looks like, like my idea looks like, this is what is a limiting factor of communication. We can speak in words, but we think also in images. And this could be a nice tool.
to augment communication. So improving your brain when it's needed. So for certain tasks, you will be able to get brain improvement, augmented communication, and of course, treatment of mental diseases. So that is there. But I think that compared to what is happening when it comes to AI and robotics,
These are the things that fundamentally impact our society from the huge productivity increase. I mean, the big question here is really, what will happen to work life? How our society is going to be organized? And this is very real. It'll not take 50 years to get there. So the big question is, if we
you know, have all this progress finally implemented? So we don't need office jobs anymore. We don't need manufacturing jobs anymore because we have robotics and AI to do this. So how are societies going to be organized? Will we have a new form of socialism so that the benefits are distributed among the society?
Or will we end up in a society where most people are poor, they are offering their manual labor and competition to robots, offering cheap massages, craftsmen, simple repairs, always in competition to robots. I think these are questions probably much closer than 50 years.
Jörn Rickert (01:10:09.289)
start working on right now. so the speed of innovation is accelerating and will accelerate more with AI. And can we as humanity manage this to the benefit? Can we escape wars? we, you know, do we manage to organize us somehow globally? You know, obviously, we, we, we, it's clear we live in one world.
where effects, climate change is the perfect example. It affects everyone on earth. And if we don't manage to cooperate on a nation's level somehow, then we have big issues. And these are the things that trouble me much more because they are more imminent than what might come from brain implants in the future. So yeah.
Mizter Rad (01:11:06.517)
Right. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. I see what you mean. There seem to be much more tangible issues or topics to discuss. Definitely, especially nowadays in the last months for sure. Joran, I want to thank you so much. Genuinely appreciate your time, the time you shared with us and all your experience and knowledge. Is there something else you want to share to close
this conversation with my audience, people that are listening out there. How can they find you? How can they support you? If you're looking for investors or people to come into one of your projects, how can they reach you?
Jörn Rickert (01:11:53.9)
Yeah, I mean, on record. I'm on LinkedIn. That's if you Google me, I'll working on a homepage that hopefully comes up. And yeah, so I'm easy to find and I'm very open and I'm talking to some investors today, but I'm happy to advise in Neurotech space and
happy to get investors on board for CoreTech, Neudio, and other even simpler ideas. Thank you, Mario, for hosting me. And I wish you all the best with this great podcast. And I'm happy to come back any time.
Mizter Rad (01:12:42.615)
Thank you, Jordan. Beautiful people. We talk a lot on this show about the future of the body, transhumanism, living longer, longevity, about becoming more connected to technology. But I think today reminded me that the most interesting frontier is not the body. It is the mind. It's not intelligence, not memory, but something harder to define. The raw, the unfiltered, the private experience of being you.
and you yourself. And that is worth protecting. Until next time, beautiful humans, stay curious, question everything, and maybe just maybe.
Jörn Rickert (01:13:17.834)
Yeah.
Jörn Rickert (01:13:32.27)
Great to be with you Mario. Yeah, that's fine.