8 The Sunday Times February 13, 2022
BUSINESS
California tech tycoon is developing a Fitbit for the mind
The $50m hat
that can read
your brain
I chose
Shackleton’s
voyage over
a small farm
function to severely-disabled people.
Longer term? He reckons we will merge
with machines and “secure the future of
humanity relative to AI”. The very large
hurdle in Musk’s way, of course, is that no
one wants brain surgery.
Johnson’s goal is to make mind meas-
urement mainstream, which is why after
exploring brain implants he alighted on
the non-invasive approach. And for him,
it is personal.
Johnson suffered chronic depression
for a decade. His father struggled with
addiction, his stepfather is in the late sta-
ges of cognitive decline. “Having some-
thing that would give further insight into
what we could do to improve our mental
state is really compelling to me,” he said.
Johnson, 44, grew up Mormon in Utah,
did a two-year mission for the church in
Ecuador and started launching business-
es after uni. He is a serious person who
seems acutely aware of the challenge that
he, as a non-scientist, has undertaken,
but is unbending in his mission, and like
many other tech entrepreneurs, unironic
in his conviction that his invention could
change the world. This ultimate goal is to
translate the vague workings of our
minds into universally understood mark-
ers, hard data upon which, “the architec-
ture of society, from school, to our self-
improvement, to our relationships to
politics and economics” will be rebuilt.
When he sold Braintree, Johnson was
in his mid-30s, a father of three and sud-
denly, wildly wealthy. At a crossroads,
Jthe avid reader of biographies drew
inspiration from Sir Ernest Shackleton,
the Antarctic explorer. Johnson keeps
two tattered, original volumes of Shackle-
ton’s journals from his voyage on the ill-
fated Endurance in his office bookcase.
“It was either go on a Shackleton-like voy-
age, or go to the mountains and have a
small farm. Right in the middle just didn’t
make sense to me.”
He chose the former. He hired 100 peo-
ple, all on his own dime. They filed morethan 200 patents on everything from pro-
prietary lasers to chips and sensors as
they sought to miniaturise a room-sized
medical device into a consumer weara-
ble. Last year, the company raised
$53 million — its first outside funding — to
scale up production and keep shrinking
the device. Johnson said: “It’s been one of
the most difficult companies in the world
I can imagine to build.”
At Kernel’s warehouse-style headquar-
ters in Culver City, California, they strap
to my head the result of all that toil, and
have me play a simple video game that
involves shooting orbs as they appear on
a computer screen. While I click away,
the Kernel Flow is blasting my grey mat-
ter with pulses of photons and interpret-
ing how they bounce back. The patterns
change based on blood that flows to the
most active parts of the brain. The result
is a real-time, 3D video of the nooks and
crannies lighting up as I play.
Today the company has several dozen
prototypes out in the wild, mostly with
researchers looking at everything from
meditation to concussions. Commercial
partners include Cybin, a psychedelics
company, and Aim Lab, which trains pro-
fessional gamers and designed the simple
shooting game I tried.
Kernel has come a long way, but has
much, much further to go. The pulsing
brain images it generates are no doubt
data-rich, and to a non-expert, arresting.
But turning that data into insights or
actions will take some doing. Katherine
Purdue, Kernel’s head of neuroscience,
went through my brain data from the
experiment. She showed me how my left
motor precortex lit up, which is typical
when using right hand to click a mouse.
The back of my brain was also glowing, as
this is where visual and motion process-
ing takes place.
The question, however, is: so what?
What value judgments or actions can one
take based on a glowing brain?
“If you’re in academia, if you have a
pretty map like this, you are done,” Pur-
due said. “But when it comes to thinking
of a commercial application, you need to
be thinking about, how are people going
to use this? How are people going to find
this valuable? We’re not yet at the point
where it’s a consumer-level app that’s
ready for you in your house. Instead, we
are gathering data about how these pat-
terns of brain activity are linked to these
other things that are actionable.”
Johnson is undeterred by the haziness
of Flow’s future. He harks back to Shack-
leton. “I admire endeavours that, in their
time and place, look at the horizon of
human opportunity, of the thing that
could be attempted, and they choose to
do that thing, despite the odds.”
Shackleton died on his last Antarctic
voyage. “He never made it,” said John-
son. “It’s not a story about success. It’s a
story about what one does on the jour-
ney, after identifying that point on the
horizon.”Outlandish though it may sound, John-
son reckons that Kernel is about to cata-
lyse the creation of a new tech platform,
based on neural measurement, that will
seed a universe of products the same way
that, say, Apple created the app economy
when it invented the iPhone.
“We want to reduce the complexity to a
‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’. Is this
good for my brain? Is this bad for my
brain?” Johnson said. “If we are success-
ful, it would alter how we understand our-
selves and each other, it would change the
ecosystem of Earth and our collective
future. I think it would be that big.”
Imagine if an educational video game
carried a “brain safe” badge after being
tested with Kernel’s tech. Perhaps Nike
could use it to optimise training for top
athletes. Or you could see what that
nightcap, or an hour on Instagram, is
doing to your grey matter in real time.
Johnson is not alone in his enthusiasm
for decoding the brain. A mini-industry
has emerged in recent years around
brain-computer interfaces. The best
known is Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which is
building a brain surgery robot to drill a
hole in the skull and sew in thousands of
polymer threads connected to a chip.
The goal in the near-term is to restoreSEASON FOUR OF
DANNY IN THE VALLEYKERNEL’S BRYAN JOHNSON:
‘MEASURING THE MIND AND
RE-ENGINEERING
SOCIETY’
THESUNDAYTIMES.CO.UK/DANNYINTHEVALLEYTHE MIND AND
RING
Bryan Johnson
holds the Kernel
Flow his firm is
developing
before it carried
out an exercise in
reading the mind
of Danny Fortsonn
d
nTHOMAS ALLEMAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMESA
lab technician turns a knob
near the back of my neck,
tightening onto my skull a
helmet packed with enough
lasers to make a Storm
Trooper jealous. “How’s that
feel?” he says.
Honestly, kind of strange.
Atop my cranium is the
Kernel Flow, a bulky array of
modules that is about to bombard my
brain with photons. The strange-looking
device took five years and more than
$50 million of the personal cash of tech
tycoon Bryan Johnson to develop.
Think of it as an MRI machine — those
coffin-like monstrosities you see in medi-
cal dramas where patients lay perfectly
still while it images their insides — shrunk
down to a helmet that provides a live
video of what is happening in your brain
by analysing blood flow and oxygenation.
Johnson made his fortune when he
sold his payments start-up, Braintree, for
$800 million to PayPal in 2013. Online
payments make life easier. But Kernel?
He reckons that it could, quite literally,
change the world. “This really is about
the future of being human,” Johnson said.
Stay with him, here. Johnson’s argu-
ment is that the brain is one of the last few
things “in the known universe” that can-
not be measured routinely. He envisions
Kernel as a consumer device, a kind of
Fitbit for the mind, that will change that.
There is precedent. He points to
genome mapping, which went from bil-
lions of dollars a time to a couple of hun-
dred, or building-sized mainframe com-
puters shrinking to a smartphone. He
plans to start selling Kernel’s Flow device
at “smartphone prices” by 2024 and that
it will soon become ubiquitous.DANNY FORTSON
TECH TALK
all working, living and
entertaining ourselves in
virtual worlds.
The Facebook founder has
gone all-in on the idea. He is
convinced it will lure back
young people, who are
leaving Facebook in droves
for TikTok.
Teenage Facebook users
have fallen by 13 per cent
since 2019, according to
internal documents, and
were projected to drop by
another 45 per cent by next
year. TikTok is now the
world’s most downloaded
app. Zuckerberg, 37, has
called the video app, “one of
the most effective
competitors that we have
ever faced”.
In another era, he would
simply acquire his way out of
such a jam. In this case,
TikTok is too big, owned by
an unwilling seller in China’s
Bytedance, and Facebook is
being sued on antitrust
grounds by the Federal Trade
Commission. He is going to
have to innovate his way back
to relevance. Hence spending
at least $10 billion on Reality
Labs, the arm charged with
making the metaverse reality.
Like the ad system
overhaul, this is an epic swing
that will take years to pay off.
But stranger things have
happened. After all, Philip
Morris International, a slim
version of the conglomerate it
was then, is worth
$160 billion, three times its
value when the Marlboro
man fell off his horse. And the
company says it has a new
mission: to deliver “a smoke-
free future” via smokeless
tobacco products.
Next to the world’s largest
tobacco company pledging to
stop selling fags, Zuckerberg’s
lark of building a new, virtual
world looks almost
pedestrian.As critics unite against its ‘addictive’
sites, Facebook becomes Big Tobacco
would go down “in the annals
of business history”. He
added: “MBAs will study this
decision for the next century.’’
We’ll come back to that.
Fast forward to this month to
what we’ll call “Facebook
Thursday”. At its annual
results call, the social media
giant revealed a stunning
drop in daily users — the first
in its 18-year history —
slowing sales and falling
profits.
Wall Street freaked out.
Shares in Meta Platforms,
Facebook’s parent company,
plunged 26 per cent,
vaporising an astonishing
$232 billion of the company’s
market cap. They closed
Friday at $231.51, valuing
Meta at $630 billion.
Why the sudden reversal of
fortune? Familiar factors:fading dominance, fierce new
competitors, governments
angry at its addictive
products and a looming
regulatory crackdown.
Meta’s results seemed to
halt a stunning run that took
Facebook from student
website to $1 trillion empire
in less than two decades. Josh
Brown of Ritholtz Wealth
Management summed up
investors’ sudden loss of
faith: “I don’t think Facebook
stock can recover for a very
long time.”
If Philip Morris is a guide,
the outlook may not be so
dire. Philip Morris shares
regained that lost ground in
less than two years. The
Marlboro price cut started a
price war that sapped rivals’
balance sheets while Philip
Morris, the industry’s 800lb
gorilla, used its vast resources
to tap new markets such as
Russia and other countries
that emerged from the Soviet
Union. Its lost market share
was regained. And nearly 30
years on, its perch atop the
industry is secure as ever.
Does Zuck have a similar
path to redemption?
He has two giant hurdles to
clear. One was thrown in
front of him by Apple chief
Tim Cook. Apple’s recent
privacy changes have robbed
Facebook of an estimated
$10 billion in annual sales —
about 8 per cent of its
$117 billion revenue — and
forced Zuckerberg to remake
his advertising machine for a
world in which the largest
phone maker will no longer
allow it to collect the data it
needs to target ads. This is a
mammoth project that will
not be measured in months,
even years.
The same goes for the
metaverse, Zuckerberg’s
vision for the next iteration of
the web, in which he sees usMark Zuckerberg could learn
something from the Marlboro
Man. On April 2, 1993, Philip
Morris shocked the market
when it announced a 40 cent
cut to a $2 pack of Marlboro
cigarettes, the biggest
tobacco brand in the world.
The move was a reaction to
a litany of threats that were
all converging at once: fading
dominance, fierce new
competitors, governments
angry at its addictive
products and a looming
regulatory crackdown.
Wall Street freaked out.
Investors lopped 26 per cent,
and $12 billion, off of its
market value. The day came to
be known as “Marlboro
Friday;” the biggest one-day
value loss for any company.
Roger Enrico, then a Pepsi
executive, said the moveAPPOINTMENTS