Transcript

Matt Heine (MH):

Steven, welcome to the show.

Stephen Scheeler (SS):

Good to be here, Matt.

MH:

For those of you that were lucky enough to come up to the Accelerate Summit, Steven was one of our keynote speakers and one of our best speakers on the day, so absolutely thrilled to have you in the studio.

SS:

It's great to be here and thanks for the invite to your summit. It was fantastic.

MH:

Steven. Obviously there was quite a few people that did come to the summit, but there's going to be plenty of listeners that probably haven't come across you before, so it'd be great just to get your backstory because it's really interesting.

SS:

I've been in Australia about 30, 35 years and in spite of my accent, I'm American. I'm from New York. Originally I was born at a good time. When you look at the luck of life, I was born in the sixties and my father served in World War II and I benefited from all the boom in the US economy. I had a very good low cost American education, which isn't true today. Things are a lot more expensive, but then what really set me up well was when the internet started to happen. Once I got into business, the internet was happening in the nineties and I was working in corporate roles in those days. I was head of strategy, head of business development for a couple of big companies here in Australia, and the internet started to happen and nobody knew where that lived within corporate land in those days, those of you old enough to remember what is this e-commerce thing, what is it?

Is the internet thing. I wound up putting my hands around that and just getting a lot of early experience with technology, with the internet, with the e-commerce. Anyway, that sort of led to my whole life in technology and I've been involved in a number of startups over the years, but probably most notably two things. One, I worked for Facebook for many years. I was one of the adults I suppose that was brought in to turn that from a cult into a company, and that was a great experience. I was there for a number of years and I left a few years ago and I thought I was retiring, at least retiring from working as hard as I used to, but of course life had different plans for me and a few years ago I was lucky enough to meet a couple of amazing individuals. We became friends, these guys were neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, data scientists, and we started to build a company called Omniscient, which is sort of the open AI of the human brain. We use AI to decode the brain, so now I'm in the world of data science, AI and neuroscience, so I learn every day from the people I work with. I love it.

MH:

I'd like to come back to, I guess your thoughts on ai. Clearly it's a big focus for you at the moment, but reflecting on your career, something that I'm often quoted on or talk about is this concept of luck and how some people managed to create their own luck or get lucky. Very often it seems stinky about your career and how you've ended up doing what you're doing, that you've had a number of those moments and I'd love to get your thoughts on that.

SS:

I love this concept of luck. I think that luck is also linked to gratitude. That's another theme in how I think about the world With luck, let's look at companies and corporations and startups. I was involved in a company called Facebook, and Facebook succeeded because it was luckier than other social media companies. I think they were smarter in some ways, but also there was luck involved with my own career. I wound up not at Facebook, not because I was necessarily the smartest guy. We had a lot of good people in that company, but that's probably why I succeeded is I was part of a great team and if those people weren't there, I probably wouldn't be sitting here talking to you today. So there's no question. All of our careers are built on the shoulders of others and I think the most successful people in the world, there is a whole team around them and there's been teams around them through the whole career.

So that's definitely been true of me. On a personal level, I just feel like a lucky person. I was born, as I said, a middle of the 20th century. I was one in the middle United States middle class. I got a great education, great healthcare system, hopefully lived in 90 or a hundred and it'll be a healthy life. My grandparents all died in their sixties. I mean, I think we live in obviously the best time in history if you're born in the right part of the world to have an amazing life. But at the same time, I think we have a responsibility. I think I have a responsibility and having been so fortunate to give back, and so that's one of the things I'm really dedicated to for the rest of my life, and hopefully I'll be here a long time, is giving back to the world and making an imprint on the world. That's something better than the world was when I found it.

MH:

When you think back to those days and you said you were being brought in as the adult in the room, I think what you didn't mention was you were the CEO of Facebook for AsiaPac. That's right. So you had a big team, I'm guessing a very young team and a pretty diverse team. What were some of the things that you learned personally going through that experience because it would've been quite difficult to be sort of helicoptered into that environment?

SS:

Yeah, it was an unusual moment. I think a special moment in Silicon Valley history. If you go back, I joined Facebook back around 20 10, 20 11. If you remember back in those days, things were booming, right? This was after the.com crash happened around 2000, 2001, and then a bunch of companies like Google and Facebook kind of rose out of those ashes and then we're growing at just crazy rates. And so when I joined Facebook, it had already been growing substantially, but now it was growing at an even greater rate, and even though it was getting bigger, it was still growing even faster. We actually accelerated growth as the company got bigger, which is really unusual and it's sort of a function of how these network effects work on social media. And when I joined, the average age of Facebook employees was 23 and Mark was about 25, 26.

I was 45, 46. I was much older. I later learned that I was the oldest person that Facebook had ever hired anywhere in the world up to that point in time. I didn't know that at the time. I did a TED talk about that for a topic. So I had to learn a lot about not just doing my job, but doing my job under a lot of scepticism. I mean, even Mark was very vocal in those days about anybody over 30 wasn't worth as the arrogance of youth. He was very critical of people older. And so I was one of these guys in there. I was one of the older guys, and so there was just a lot of scepticism about what I could do as a leader. Nobody cared about my background or my experience or where I'd gone to university. Nobody cared. And so I had to rethink how do I earn credibility with these people that I need to work with every day?

How do I prove my worth and how do I really deliver value, not just prove my worth, but actually deliver value? So I realised that in retrospect, but I went through probably six months of just kind of having to rethink everything I did as a leader and as a manager. And a lot of that I think taught me how to be humble, how to be flexible and how to question everything that I thought was my pattern of success. I had to learn that there was good things in that pattern, but there are things I needed to change.

MH:

And one of the questions that we sort of often discuss with business owners is what is the role of a leader in a business today? What is the role of A CEO? How did you think about that at Facebook and some of the other companies that you're in? You're

SS:

A leader of your business as others probably listening to this. And when I grew up in business back in the eighties, nineties, early two thousands, it was all about the smartest guy in the room. And it was a guy, right? I mean it was very male dominated and it was about you didn't really question the person above you, you just were smarter than everybody else. And then you needed to know the answer to every question for your boss above you. It was very micromanagement oriented. By the time I got to Facebook, things had changed and definitely things are different today. And so I think as a leader you need to change as well. This happened at Facebook. I kind of redefined myself and I was very clear with the people that I was working with, and this is how I would frame it. I said, look, my job is very simple.

My job is to make you successful, period. That's it. And if I'm not making you successful, then I'm not doing my job and you have the right to call me out on that. Now, at the same time, you have a responsibility to make yourself successful. It's a joint responsibility. What I did, I remember the first team offsite I had, I'd been there a couple of weeks, I got my team together, we went and had an office, we did it here in Melbourne, actually at a hotel in Melbourne. I got a big suite and I brought my team in there. I had like 10 people in my team in those days. I was walking on my way to that meeting. I was thinking, how am I going to get credibility with these guys? I knew that a lot of them were sceptical of me. I'd gotten feedback from of their managers about how hard they to manage.

They were just really talented, really ambitious people on Facebook land. And when I got there, I realised I had this idea. I thought, I'm going to put up two pieces of paper on the wall on top of one. I'll say, good boss. And then on top of the other one it'll say, bad boss. And I'll give them all pens and I'll just say, go up there and write what a good boss is on one and what a bad boss is on the other. And they all grabbed their little pens and mark because they went up and started writing and took a few minutes to do that. And then we kind of walked through it. But I took those two pieces of paper. I didn't photograph 'em. I didn't make 'em to a PowerPoint. I didn't throw 'em away. I took them and I put them next to my desk in the office for the next two years.

They stayed there. And so we moved offices and somebody threw them away, but they would sit there. And so I said, thank you very much. You've given me my job description. You want me to be this good boss. So my job is to do all that stuff and not to do those other things. And it created a really nice mechanism for my people to be able to in real time criticise me because literally I would have guys occasionally come up to me and they would point at the bad boss and they'd go, Hey, you're doing this. You're playing politics. Or You didn't keep us informed or you weren't transparent enough, or you made a decision that wasn't really work through the group effectively. And so my job is to make you successful. And then good boss, bad boss, I felt were kind of redefined me as a leader and no leader had ever done that with me. And certainly I had never thought about doing that until I got to that Facebook land. I

 

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MH:

Can imagine that would've been very confronting initially.

SS:

It wasn't. It. I did another thing that was very confronting. So when I got my first performance review at Facebook and every six months, and look, a lot of companies, I'm sure yours as well, you do very rigorous performance review processes. I remember I got it and before I even read it, I took and I posted it to my whole team. I posted it to my whole org. So not just to people who reported me, but everybody in their teams as well in our internal group before I even read it. And I used to do that every six months I would just post my performance review. Now, that was a little frightening, but it was even more frightening for some of my colleagues who didn't want to do that. So I got a little blowback from some other folks in the business that you shouldn't do that because it exposes other guys. And I understood that because not everybody wanted to be that open, but it worked for me. I had this belief that I need to be a very open, transparent leader here. I need to admit when I don't know things I need to learn from others, I need to be very clear about good boss, bad boss. And I really do believe that my job, any leader's job, is to make the people around them successful. That is your job. And I think being clear about that with your people is a real advantage.

MH:

So you mentioned a couple of attributes about Bad Boss and a couple of attributes that you took on personally. What was sort of the top three Good boss items?

SS:

Yeah, good boss. It's pretty obvious, but it's cares about me. I remember that was probably the most important one, cares about me as a person. Secondly was doesn't play politics. Doesn't puts people first and looks after their team, doesn't just look after themselves. So it's related to cares about me. And then I think the third one was really about just how decisions get made. And this was new versus the world. I knew in the nineties, back in the old days, decisions get made, you were just told what it was and you would just march forward. It's different now. And it was different at Facebook, it was much more about we want to be part of the decision. We want to be consulted, at least consulted or informed at different points in time. It was not a command and control culture at all. That created lots of challenges with communication, to be honest with you. When you're a leader, sometimes you just want to decide, tell people, get on with it. But I think to be most effective today, you need to bring people on that journey. So those were the things on the Good Boss list.

MH:

And that's a good point I was discussing with someone with recently where you've got organisations that are almost too collaborative and nothing gets decided. And sometimes you just need someone to make a decision to that command and control and trying to find that right balance can be a struggle.

SS:

The balance is hard to achieve. Even in the current company. I run much smaller now, but there are challenges. We need to move fast, make decisions quickly. We have people all over the world. We're global business. Different people expect to have levels of insight into how decisions are made. And I understand that expectation. I want them to be demanding. I actually say to our people, I want you to be unreasonable in good ways, not in unreasonable, unreasonable ways, but I do want you to be unreasonable because if we're not unreasonable, we're never going to solve the problems we need to solve. We're never going to achieve the great things we think we can achieve. We're never going to change the world in ways we think we can change it unless we are unreasonable. So I can't expect you to turn that off when it's about me making a decision and then turn it on with everything else. I think you have to accept that characteristic gets turned on all the time if that's the kind of business you're trying to build.

MH:

So the world's moving very quickly, technology's moving at a rate of knots, the type of people that you're hiring is probably really important. What were you looking for back then when you were hiring staff? What were the attributes? Cause it's no longer necessarily just about the diploma they have on the wall.

SS:

Again, at Facebook I learned a lot. It was a very thoughtful company about how do you attract the right talent and how do you develop it. There were two characteristics that they looked for and that I looked for ever since in any employee you hire. So the first is the ability to learn and learn quickly. Whether somebody's good at coding or good at this or good at that is secondary to just this person's good at learning fast. And the reason is things change so fast now. The nature of people's roles, the tools they use, the technology, even that, and especially with fast moving companies that are more technology driven, you're going to ask people to do different kinds of roles and move around the company in ways that's really unpredictable. So what you want is not people that are just good at one thing, you want them good at in theory, anything. And so that's where learning, being able to learn quickly is important.

MH:

Can you test for that?

SS:

I think there are ways to attempt to test for it, and we can talk a long time about how you interview people, which is very imprecise. But yeah, there are ways to test for it. Facebook's way to test for it was really just back in those days it was very non-scientific. It was really just tell me about the things you have done in your life. And because we were hiring a lot of 21, 22 year olds, there's only so much they've done. But what we were trying to test was how much flexibility do they have? Ideally you'd want somebody who'd studied anthropology for four years and then they switched to an engineering master's degree or something. It's like, oh wow, very diametrically opposed sort of fields. Yet they were successful in both. Ah, you're probably good at learning. So that would be an example. The second characteristic we used to look for that I still look for today is the ability to make the people around you better.

That's actually always the question I ask a question and everybody I interview, which is why you over anybody else? And the answer I always want to hear is I make other people better and obviously I want them to prove that somehow. But if they can make others around them better and they learn fast, man, you're hired. I really don't even don't care what your CV says. I'll give you a shot. And just think about the multiplier effects of that. So there's probably specific roles where it doesn't matter if you make other people better, I get it. But I think in most roles, people are in teams. And making those teams better is probably the one of the most important attributes you can recruit for.

MH:

One of our core values is courageous. So that ability to stick your head out and make decisions and not necessarily things that are going to kill the company or have a huge financial impact, but try things and fail fast. There's a great story you told about when you really stuck your neck out at Facebook and ultimately whilst you were running a big business sort of locally, you still reported through to head office. Would you be able to share that with us?

SS:

Oh, this is the auction indeed. The auction thing, yeah. When I first joined Facebook, I wanted to make a mark within the business and it was hard. There was so many talented people, and this would be true of other companies at the same net wealth at certain times, Google at a time. There's a time in that world where you join and it's like there's all these amazing people around you. We used to joke at Facebook that you would go through this valley of death as soon as you joined. You were so happy and pumped and this is amazing as companies. Unbelievable. And then you go back and see that person a few months later and they were so depressed because they're like, oh my god, there's so many talented people here. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know if I can measure up.

Everybody goes through that. So I went through that too and how to make an impact. So the part of the business I was responsible for was around the revenue generating side of the business. And then those days, that was mainly, it's still today ad sales, it's selling advertisement, which was something I'd never done before. I got Facebook, to be honest with you. So I needed to build the ad sales business in Asia Pacific and in Australia, in and countries in this part of the world. And of course we always had a target list of advertisers, the biggest advertisers we needed to go after. And one of them in Australia was in those days was, and I'll call 'em out specifically, I think amazing company, Domino's Pizza. We actually didn't have a lot going on in fast food restaurants at all. So McDonald's a big advertiser on Facebook, KFC wasn't there.

They're big advertisers in general, but they weren't big on Facebook and Domino's was not big at all. And so there was always this list of in each market, in each country we're in of the advertisers that had big advertising budgets, but we had a really small share up and we were almost zero for Domino's. And Domino's was on that list. And I remember I had a list of, I guess call them the white whales. These are like, if I can crack these big clients and start to get them spending on Facebook, I'll get notice. So Domino's was one of those and I said, look, I need to get on top of this. So we had a relationship with Dominos that wasn't good. The previous team with Facebook hadn't gone on with them, and Dominos was very close to Google in those days and spent a lot of money on Google.

And Google's a great platform too. And Facebook hates Google, real arch rivals. So my strategy was, well, I need to get close to the CEO EO, who was Don Mays, who's since become a friend, amazing guy, and I need to kind of crack this, get Google out of the way and kind of crack something on Facebook. I was invited to their franchisee conference up in the Gold Coast. So they have a big two, three day big company conference as many companies do. And I managed to meet Don while I was there. I mean, I think I got into an elevator with him and sort of buttonholed him. So we had a chat, but then he took off and a couple of days go by and then the Google team was there hobnobbing with the marketing team from Domino's, and they were very close. Then we were kind of being frozen out and we got to the last night and it was a big black tie dinner.

And as part of that, they had a auction of experiences for this charity that they had. They had internal charity, very important to them. And so they were auctioning off. You could have dinner with a cricketer and you could do this, do that. I was sitting on the table with the team that didn't like me, didn't like Facebook from Domino's. They started to auction off an experience about going to Google for the day. They'd fly somebody to Sydney and then they could tour the Google office in Sydney and be the intern for the day. There was a movie called The Intern, if you might remember. It was like, be the Intern. And I saw them auction this off and I leaned over to the guy, the marketing guy who didn't like me from, I didn't like Facebook from Domino's, and I said, Hey, Facebook would've contributed something.

I didn't know anything about this. And he just looked at me. He goes, well, you can contribute something now. So I said, great. I'd had a few drinks, I was pissed off. We hadn't even had this opportunity. There's Google going. And so I said, great, well forget about flying people to Sydney. Here's the prize. We're going to fly two people business class to California. You'll get a tour of Facebook's head office in Silicon Valley, and you get a meeting with founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He just went, you can do that. That's amazing. I said, sure. And so he went up, he told the auctioneer, the auctioneer said, we've got this thing just from Facebook. It's this meeting with Mark Zuckerberg. It's just a shimmer of excitement. Goes through the room. I can see Don Ma and the directors of Domino's got all excited and then they started to auction it off.

The Google thing went for four grand. The Facebook experience went for $40,000. It was the biggest thing they'd ever auctioned in the history of their auction for this charity. Everybody leapt up, tears in their eyes, Don rushed over and hugged me. It was this beautiful moment. And of course then we all sat down, they went on with the evening and I had a guy, one of my guys from Facebook there, he leans on when he is like, were you allowed to do this? I said, no, I have no permission to do this whatsoever. And anyway, later I called my boss. He said, oh, that was a dumb idea, but don't do anything. So a couple days go by, I wound up in the office, my boss was there, he pulls me aside and he goes, look, this is bad. Everybody knows about this in Silicon Valley because it was all over social media apparently.

And so he's like, Mark's not happy. Cheryl's not happy. This is bad. And I went and sat down and met at my desk and I'm like, oh, what should I do? I asked my boss why. He goes, don't do anything. And of course I didn't do that. I did something. I sat down, I wrote an email to Mark. I just sat down and wrote a message to Mark. I said, I don't want to lose the Google. I'm going to crack dominoes. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I wrote my little story. I sent it off to Mark and I waited, and the next day an email came in. It was from Mark and it just said one sentence, I'd be happy to help. I love that you lived our value of move fast and break things and I'd be happy to help and signed Mark.

And that was it. And then that was the beginning. I wound up going and meeting Mark because we did a pre-chat about the visit, and the person who went over was one of the Domino's directors. He's the guy who bought it. And Mark was great. We actually brought his whole family came Facebook paid for everybody. Mark not only spent like 15 minutes, he spent about an hour with this group and myself and Cheryl joined as well. Mark and Cheryl were super gracious, just lovely to these folks. And that was kind of the moment that I wouldn't say that Mark and I are best friends, but we got to know each other in that strange moments. It's kind of led to me. I never did that exact thing again. But the idea that sometimes you really need to swing for the fences is kind of ingrained in me. And I think if you did that today, you'd be fired. If you went Facebook, you'd tried that today, you'd be gone. But back in those days, we were a little more wild west, and I think I got away with something that today wouldn't happen.

 

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MH:

Great story on so many levels, and I think it just encapsulates so much about what you're talking about from a leadership perspective, but also what you look from employees and being able to stick your neck out and take a risk.

SS:

You don't want to cross the line. There were people at Facebook that crossed the line that I had to let go. I won't go through every detail, but there's something around leaders that you need to be seen to be taking risks that risk you and maybe don't risk the company, but they kind of risk you because I think you gain a lot of respect from individuals. I would say, Hey, this person is not there just trying to pad their own resume. They're really here swinging, playing for the team. And just even doing that earned me a tonne of credit with my team, other things as well that I did, but they could see that I was here really, really swinging for the fences to try to build this company that in a way that if you just sat back, it's not going to happen. You really have to get out there and take risks.

MH:

Speaking of taking risks and swinging for the fences, your new business, you're trying to solve some pretty major big problems that haven't been tackled before and you seem to be winning, what are you up to

SS:

After that? Facebook, I met a couple of guys who became good friends. I won't go deep into them, but one's a neuroscientist, one's a data scientist. We're living in this moment now when AI is so powerful. We all heard about it, open AI and other tools. But in the background even what profoundly what's happening is we're getting computing power now that's so hefty that we can now make sense of the most complex things in the universe, which ultimately aren't language and text. It's actually the human mind. We set off three years ago to build a platform that uses AI to decode the brain. We're sort of the open AI of the human brain, if you want to look for an analogy. And we have been, I think, pretty successful so far. I mean, the brain is the most complex thing in the universe. It's far more complicated than anything else we've ever come across.

And in a way, if we could understand the brain, then you can't understand the brain because we're using our own brains to understand ourselves. So there is a limit to how far we can go, but we're nowhere near that limit today. And so we're starting to build tools now that decode things like mental illness, neurodegeneration, things like emotions and intelligence. We can now build tools for helping doctors diagnose any mental illness in seconds in a way that's impossible for doctors to do today based on just AI and building maps of the human brain. It's an Australian company. We're pretty small. You don't have to be big companies to build amazing technology and AI today about 50 people. But we've now built the platform, the data, the applications we're building on top of it now. And what's really exciting about it is I'm a big believer that things like mental health, it's one of the biggest tragedies of the 21st century. Everything else in the world's getting better, mental illness is getting worse. Just to summarise, the big reason is we don't understand what's going on in people's brains. The tools that our company has built now offer the prospect of eliminating mental illness from the face of the earth in conjunction with other technologies. But I think it's one, it's that important what we're doing. I'm very lucky. The team's amazing. Our investors are amazing, our partners are amazing. And we all through Covid, we built this company and now that Covid is over, we're really hitting our straps.

MH:

It's pretty incredible. I had a quick chat prior that you're actually using a lot of the brain technology or the way that brains are functioning to solve the problems of the brain. Who or how did you come up with that initially?

SS:

One technique of artificial intelligence is neural networks, which mimic how the brain actually works. Now we're obviously using those sort of techniques to understand how the brain works in another way. So it's turning it back on itself. I've got to give credit to my colleagues. Stefan Doyen is our chief technology officer, chief data scientist. He's one of the company. He's a brilliant data scientist who also happens to have a PhD from Cambridge in neuroscience. So it's kind of like unique moments. He actually became a neuroscientist. He got frustrated by that field because he found his patients weren't getting better and he didn't understand what's going on in their heads. He completely left neuroscience behind and one off became a machine learning AI guru. He worked for a lot of big consulting firms, so he was working for banks and insurance companies implementing big AI projects.

But then just before I met him, he met another guy, a neurosurgeon named Mike Sughrue, and Mike is a brilliant neuroscientist neurosurgeon, and they sort of realised that the state of AI had gotten to such a level now that we could understand the brain in a much more powerful way. And the light bulb went on for Stefan saying, Hey, this stuff that used to frustrate me, I think now AI can solve. And so he actually, he quit his job. I quit his job. I quit what I was doing, and we put this company together. So it was really almost like a lemon meets McCartney moment. And I'm Ringo Star, I'm the drummer in the band. My role is really to build the company, but I've got an amazing team that builds our technology.

MH:

Given the audience of this podcast, wealth management, there's a lot of second, third, fourth order effects or impacts of what you are doing. Have you started to think through the positive benefits of whether it's solving mental health, providing better ability to do brain surgery? Where does this all end up?

SS:

To answer your question in two ways. One, the macro level. What is AI going to do to the economy, to competition to different sectors? Massive question. And I think everyone who's investing or putting dollars into different markets needs to understand how is AI going to change the competitive landscape in that part of the world where we're putting dollars for us. Just to take one example is mental health. If you read recent reports, it was a productivity commission report that Australian government did last year. There's been others from the UN and others. They show that the tragedy of mental illness is obviously a human tragedy. One in five people in every country on earth will have a diagnosable mental illness every single year. It's a covid every year. Every single year. That's what mental is, and it's only getting worse. But beyond that, it's the economic impact.

So the different reports, they estimate that between three and 10% of GDP is basically lost because of mental illness. And that's not treatment costs, it's lost productivity. It's people who can't work or aren't effective at working because they're depressed or they're mentally ill. And so solving mental illness has a massive economic impact on, in fact, if you could cut the rate of mental illness in half in the world, it would probably give you the biggest increase in GDP in a hundred years. It would be the biggest economic growth hit that we could have in a century. That's how important solving mental illness is beyond just the human element, there's the huge economic element. Small as our company is new, as our technology is, if it starts to scale, we could see massive economic benefits from the fact that people are just, the brains are healthier and they're more productive.

And that to me is another dividend of what we're doing. Could be the next Mark Zuckerberg, the next Elon Musk, the next Matt Heines out there maybe plagued by mental illness that well, let's turn that off. Let's make that person healthy, and then they can do the amazing things that they're capable of because every advance on this planet comes from human beings. And the more human beings we have doing their best work, the more the planet, more everything will advance and we can then solve all these other problems we've got from climate change to war and peace on the planet.

MH:

Pretty incredible what you are working on. For those that are listening, how can they find out a bit more about your company, but also is there anything that you are reading or listening to at the moment that you would recommend?

SS:

I'll start with the recommend. I found a podcast recently that I find sometimes infuriating, but it is definitely goes deep in certain topics. It's called All In. Yeah, I've been around a couple of years. It's for Silicon Valley VCs, and these guys all have different backstories. I don't agree with everything they say. They're very America, US centric, I've got to say. But I think they're very good at looking deeply in certain topics and really debating them in a way that often doesn't happen in the Twitter sphere or the X sphere, whatever we call it today. And so that's one. And then in terms of finding out more about us, we're called omniscience. Omniscience means all knowing we chose a word that nobody can spell, nobody can pronounce, and nobody knows what it means says our name, which our

MH:

First, I was going to ask you to spell it

SS:

First decision, but if you go to our website, it's o eight t.com. Omni is O, and there's eight letters in the T. So we've actually, it's o eight t.com, and we are leaders in a field called connectomics. You've heard of genomics, which is mapping of the human genome. Connectomics is the mapping of the connection to the human brain, so like the word connect and then omics. And so even if you Google connectomics, you'll come to our website as well. We're the world leaders in this field today. I'm hoping, or I anticipate that connectomics will become a household word within the next 10, 20 years. And that all of us will use technology and AI to maintain the health of our brains, and hopefully our technology will be there to help everybody on Earth make their brains either healthier if they're sick, or make them just work better, even if they're healthy. So that's the vision. So yeah. Oh, at.com and Omniscient is our company.

MH:

Wonderful. I'm sad to say we've run out of time. I could probably ask you another three hours worth of questions, but I really appreciate you taking the time to come and chat. Congratulations on what you've achieved and look forward to seeing where it all goes.

SS:

Thank you, Matt. It's been a pleasure of being here, and have a great day.