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The World is Moving Fast. Futureproof Yourself Weekly.
Your front-row seat to the Future of Business, Tech, Life, and Human Potential.
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Kimberly Bates is a world-renowned futurist and executive brand leader. For over 20 years, she has advised some of the world’s most valuable global companies and iconic brands, from Fortune 100s to fast-moving startups, helping them anticipate change and shape the direction of their industries, customers, and culture. Her work has driven future-ready brand and business transformations, breakthrough products and services, and entirely new business models and revenue streams.
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with all these other devices that we're talking about, and truly most wearables today, we
think of them as read devices.
So literally devices that just tell you what happened, but they don't do anything beyond
that.
Where Elemind differs, and we hope that this is the future of not just sleep, but the
future of wearables and any kind of health tool, is that devices will no longer become
data reporting machines, but read and write devices.
Devices that tell you not just what's wrong with your sleep or what happened last night,
but devices that also fix your sleep in real time.
So how do you do that?
Welcome to the FutureCaster Podcast where we give you a front row seat into the future of
business, life, and human potential.
I'm sitting down with Meredith Perry, inventor, deep tech entrepreneur, and co-founder and
CEO of Elemind, a neurotech company pioneering non-invasive brainwave modulation to
optimize our sleep, focus, and recovery.
Known for her breakthrough work in wireless electricity, Meredith now stands at the
forefront of a bold new vision, sleep
as an on-demand brainwave state.
We explore how AI, wearable neurotechnology, and real-time brain monitoring are
transforming the way we fall asleep, stay asleep, and reach deeper, more restorative
states on command.
Could we one day turn on sleep like flipping a switch?
Will neurotech compress or restructure sleep as we know it?
Hi Meredith, It's been a long time.
Hey, Kim, thank you so much for having me.
So great to be here to see you again.
Many years ago we met at a summit series get together in New York we ended up having lunch
and it was one of the most mind blowing conversations I'd ever have.
And then I think it was a few years later, I see Fortune magazine and you're on the cover
the next Elon Musk.
yep, that tracks that makes sense to me.
you are one of the smartest people I've ever met and you're always building science based
companies.
So from that time that I met you and you started a wireless electricity company, now
you're moving into neurotech, neuroscience and sleep innovation.
Take us through that journey.
I've always been interested in technology at the edge of uh what people think is possible,
I started thinking about the brain, you know, the next frontier.
We, we know everything about what's going on inside of our cars, inside of our
refrigerators, but we have literally no idea of what's going on inside of our bodies.
And to me, that felt crazy.
You know, we can replace all of our other systems, but
When the brain goes wrong, it's really a massive mystery.
And so not only did I want to learn more about the brain how it works, but I really wanted
to understand how we could fix it in a way that was hyper-personalized to the individual
in a way that did not come with compromise, like a drug where you have to suffer side
effects.
So I started looking into all these different methods of intervening with the brain
through different types of neurostimulation, and we can get into what that means.
But long story short, I partnered with Dr.
Ed Boyden, who's one of the lead neuroscience professors at MIT, and together we've
brought a new kind of, new kind of,
technology for human performance, if you will, to life through brain stimulation.
the journey's been a wild one.
When you're on the edge of what's possible, things are difficult, things are hard, you
bump into every possible obstacle, but it's rewarding when you get it right.
you've been an entrepreneur your whole life.
what is that journey like?
And what are some of the lessons you learned along the way?
What is that journey like?
m A lot of it is absolutely hellish.
there was like an Elon Musk quote like seven years ago about something like being an
entrepreneur is like eating glass or something like that.
That definitely resonates with me.
the lessons that you learn, especially when building new technology, I've always built
totally new things that haven't existed before.
But what surprised me about that is what's harder than building technology is managing
people.
So what that tells me is that no matter what company you're building, if you're working
with people with different personalities and um different missions and different styles,
the hardest thing is going to be getting everybody to operate at the same speed on the
same, you know, with the same tone.
without conflict.
So um what I've learned throughout the years is the people that you work with is the most
important thing that you can choose.
If a technology doesn't work, that's sort of binary, but you can choose your path with the
people that you work with and that can dramatically impact the success or failure of your
company.
with this company, I work with very nice people.
and it's made all of the difference.
Do you get enough sleep every night and what made you really interested in sleep?
Great question.
So while we're in the sleep tech space, we didn't start this company to be a sleep
technology.
Sleep is actually what we call like our Tesla roadster.
It is the first of what will be many categories of um new neuromodulation apps, if you
will.
And I'll explain what that means.
But yes, I get great sleep.
I sleep eight hours a night.
wake up excited and ready to start the day uh in large part due to Elemind but I did not
have a problem falling asleep previously.
What I do struggle with from time to time, about three times a month or so, I will wake up
and have difficulty getting back to sleep.
And when that happens, I tap this button on my LLMine headband and it restarts the
stimulation and I fall back to sleep.
sleep plays an enormous role And it's a force multiplier for any part of your life that
you're trying to improve.
The opposite is true too.
If you have poor sleep, you're going to have worse outcomes in almost every category that
you're trying to improve at, whether it's your health, your mental health, uh your ability
to play well in a sport the next day, you name it.
So uh it's sort of a fundamental uh pillar of health and wellness that's kind of been
lost.
throughout the years or just really not paid attention to.
uh With the advent of new sleep tracking tools for consumers, I think more people are
paying attention to sleep, which is really great.
most people think of sleep as a passive nightly ritual that we do.
how do think that perception is going to change as all of this new technologies coming
into the space?
I think as new technology can intervene with your sleep and actually help improve
different parts of your night, people will start to understand through their own
subjective experience how much these different parts of the night actually matter.
Because you might feel better the next day, for example, if we lengthen the amount of time
that you spent in deep sleep.
That's just one example.
Matthew Walker's been just a big influence on my sleep hygiene and sleep health.
I've seen the health benefits of going to bed consistently at the same time every night.
It's just a game changer.
And I just feel healthier and my skin is clearer, everything works better.
And my mind is much clearer the next day.
I'm more focused.
let's talk about your technology.
how does Elemind use it to influence brain waves,
I can give everyone like a 10 second lesson in neuroscience and I promise it won't be
terrible.
The brain is an electrochemical organ and we can measure brain activity on the outside of
the brain using something called an EEG.
So in the same way that you might get an EKG for the heart.
and you see a bunch of waves come out on the EKG and you can get a sense of how the heart
is performing, you can do the same thing with the brain.
And there are different brainwave frequencies that we can measure with EEG that tell us
what's going on with the brain, uh roughly.
So typically, the higher the frequency of your brainwaves that we can measure, the more
alert and awake you are, and the slower your brainwaves, the sleepier you are.
And there's actually different frequencies that
uh that are associated with different sleep states, for example.
So if you're in REM or you're in deep sleep or light sleep, you will see very
characteristic frequency bands that we can measure on the outside of the head that are
associated with those different states, which is how, if you go into a sleep lab, they can
actually tell you by looking at your brain what stage of sleep you're in.
So that's your mini lesson just on how the brain works and how we can measure it.
What we found out is that if we can measure those brainwave frequencies in real time,
and interrupt the high frequency brain waves that are associated with wakefulness, which
we call alpha, if we can interrupt them at a very specific moment in time, we can
effectively cancel out the waves that are associated with being awake.
And when we do that, people fall asleep much faster.
So we think about this like noise cancellation, but for the brain.
let's take everyone through the four stages of sleep, but there's actually five because we
go from one to into deep sleep and then we go back to two again and then into REM.
So there's roughly four stages of um grouped into non-REM and REM.
and you cycle through them repeatedly across the night em every 90 minutes or so.
So you first start out in N1, which is light sleep or the transition from wakefulness to
sleep.
It's the lightest stage of sleep.
A lot of times people, if you wake them up in N1, they might not even realize that they
were sleeping.
It lasts a few minutes.
The brain activity slows, the muscles relax, it's easy to wake up, and it's your
transition.
N2.
um is what we call light sleep.
So this is the largest percentage of your total sleep.
um Heart rate and body temperature drops.
The role of light sleep is it's effectively stabilizing sleep and supporting learning and
memory consolidation.
And then you go into deep sleep, which is called N3 or slow wave sleep.
And it's the deepest and most restorative stage of sleep.
It's dominated by really slow waves.
That's why it's called slow wave sleep, called Delta waves.
it's hard to wake somebody up from this.
So if you tap on somebody's shoulder, you'll wake them up during light sleep, it's gonna
be harder to wake them up during deep sleep.
Physical repair happens during this stage.
There's growth hormones that are released, there's immune support.
This is like the most restorative stage of sleep.
And then there's REM, which people are familiar with while they're dreaming.
It's called rapid eye movement sleep.
It actually looks very similar from an EEG standpoint to being awake.
um but brain activity becomes more awake-like.
There's very vivid dreaming that occurs during this.
Your muscles are actually temporarily paralyzed during REM, and this is important for
emotional regulation, learning, and memory.
And so you cycle through these phases about 90 minutes, through all four of those things,
every single 90 minutes throughout the course of sleep.
And deep sleep tends to occur towards the...
first part of the night and not the second.
So if you're looking at what's called a hypnogram or like a sleep report from one of your
wearables, you'll see maybe a lot of deep in the beginning of the night, but not at the
end.
There's just so much technology out there, but you're one of the first, I think you and
Somnee are one of the first technologies that actually perform more like a sleep lab and
really actually measure real brainwaves.
Could you explain how
that is different from some of the other technology out there that kind of makes a
guesstimate of sleep.
there's a lot of sleep trackers and in my mind they're actually guessing how you're
sleeping that's not as accurate as Elemind.
Yes.
So if you were to go into like a clinical grade sleep lab and um
and get the gold standard measurement of sleep, they would put all these electrodes all
over your head, plus a whole bunch of other sensors.
It'd be the worst night of sleep of your entire life, but you'd get a pretty good um and
pretty accurate measurement of what happened over the course of the night.
What they're using is something called EEG, which is the same thing that we're using.
um And they're measuring the brain directly, which is the most direct measurement of
sleep.
If you are using anything else other than EEG, whether that's something on your wrist or
something on your finger um or something on some other part of your body that's not the
brain, you're using indirect measurements of sleep to try to infer what stage of sleep
you're in.
So if you're looking at heart rate or body movement to try to say, what stage of sleep do
we think that we're in?
It's an indirect measurement.
It's a proxy.
And it's naturally going to be far less accurate than the most direct measurement, which
is the brain, which is what we're using.
if I think about a really good sleep tech stack, Elemind could be that truth of really
tracking very accurately your stages of sleep and your quality of sleep.
And then you could use other bio trackers to see how before and after, once you start
getting really good sleep, how your physical performance and human performance has
improved over time.
Totally, totally.
And we're working on some partnerships with some of these other trackers.
So this is not a ding on any of these people.
We think it's wonderful that they uh brought the importance to sleep to the world through
making it so accessible.
It's so easy to put on a ring.
It's so easy to put on a watch or something around your wrist.
And people aren't wearing Elemind during the day.
but they are wearing those devices during the day.
And so you're right, they can see the impact of better sleep on their daily um readings
through heart rate, body movement, whatever else they're measuring.
how is AI being used differently than traditional sleep tracking?
with all these other devices that we're talking about, and truly most wearables today, we
think of them as read devices.
So literally devices that just tell you what happened, but they don't do anything beyond
that.
Where Elemind differs, and we hope that this is the future of not just sleep, but the
future of wearables and any kind of uh health tool, is that devices will no longer become
data reporting machines, but read and write devices.
Devices that tell you not just what's wrong with your sleep or what happened last night,
but devices that also fix your sleep in real time.
So how do you do that?
Especially as everybody is different and brain, the brain, the body is unpredictable and
it's variable.
So if you're doing something that's unpredictable and variable, you need to be able to
catch it on
on the fly and adjust in real time how you stimulate somebody.
And you have to be able to see the outcome of that.
Like, hey, is the therapy that I just gave this person actually working or not?
And you should be able to see that by looking at the brain.
And if it's not, you should be able to adjust.
And when I say you, I mean, the machine should be able to adjust itself to learn which
stimulation, which type of, know, whatever the machine is doing.
to drive your brain to an optimal state.
we use AI to do a number of different things.
uh We use AI in combination with our unique algorithm, which determines when to stimulate.
So we track the brain with EEG and AI, which allows us to know in real time, what
frequency we should be targeting of the brain, what stage of sleep somebody is in.
and then uh and when we should be sending a sound pulse relative to the person's brain.
So when you're using Elemind to try to fall asleep faster and fall back to sleep faster,
it's not pressing play on, you know, like a like a track that is the same for everybody.
We are measuring your brain from microsecond to microsecond and making on the fly
adjustments to the stimulation to get you to sleep faster.
And then
what we're going to be introducing over time uh is something called the AI Sleep Tailor,
which will actually learn your habits over time.
We'll learn, hey, on the days that Kim maybe has a drink or goes for a run or was stressed
out, her brain looks like this.
And on the days that her brain looks like this, we've now learned over stimulating her for
45 nights that this
specific type of stimulation will drive her brain to the most optimal state of sleep the
best.
And where AI is so beautiful in this situation is that it allows us to make all these
different changes and learn what works best for the individual on a given day
I think that you can use technology to still encourage natural state of sleep.
I do believe there's a future where we can turn our sleep on and off when we need it and
maybe rethink when we sleep and how we sleep.
So maybe-
sleep becomes more programmable in the future uh based on goals.
I might have, need better memory, consolidation, I want muscle recovery, or maybe I have
PTSD and I really need to work on that and start emotional processing.
So I envision a future where we can program our sleep and control it more.
What do you think about
Completely agree.
And control is a really important word.
And that's what we're also trying to bring to the world with Elemind We call it sleep on
demand so that you can take a nap in the middle of the day if you want to.
Grab your headband and go to sleep.
We uh do these funny kind of uh tactics on the street of New York City uh where
Like we went around and put people to sleep in Washington Square Park, on the High Line,
on subways.
We were outside of the uh Giants game last weekend in the middle of a blizzard while
people were tailgating.
It was like 10.30 AM and they were drinking.
And we said, you want to take a nap?
And on demand, we were able to put people to sleep.
And the whole concept here is to show you that you have better control over your own
brain.
And if you can fall asleep during a tailgate with uh the assistance of sleep on demand, uh
you can truly have better control over your brain and when you go to sleep.
So how can this technology be applied to optimizing waking states, like flow states,
creativity, accelerated learning?
Are you thinking about any of those things?
Yes.
um But I want to be careful here because there's a lot of ideas that we have that we
haven't proven clinically yet.
And that's important.
um So we can't make any claims around things that we haven't actually studied.
But we've got a lot of ideas on how we might be able to improve things like focus
your ability to learn and things like that.
One thing that we have shown clinically is the ability to improve motor memory formation.
What is motor memory?
If you're trying to learn how to do a physical task, whether that's like play the piano or
swing a golf club, and we play specific tones while you are learning that task.
and then you go to sleep with Elemind on your head and we play those same tones during a
very specific time of your deep sleep, you will actually learn how to do that physical
activity better overnight.
So that's one example of how we can improve your wake state or your performance during
wake.
But in terms of the things that we're thinking about, yes, we wanna improve your focus.
We wanna get you into flow states.
Yes, we want to make it so that you won't be stressed out during the day or when you are
stressed, we can lower that stress.
We also have ideas around um on improving retention of sound that you're listening to,
whether it's listening to a podcast uh or watching a video or something like that.
You can learn the information that you're hearing better.
um through our neurostimulation as well.
So a lot of really cool things coming down the pipe.
is there a future where children can benefit from this?
Or ethically, is that just a place where you're just going to stay away from that?
I would love to include children um in our studies.
One of the beautiful things about our technology is that we just use sound.
It's very lightweight.
Listening to sound um is one of the safest things that you could possibly do, especially
for the incredible amount of benefit that you get from it.
um It's actually one of the weakest ways to stimulate the brain.
but if you can get it to work in your favor, it's one of the best because there's like no
side effects whatsoever.
Unlike a drug or unlike something like electrical stimulation, which might be a little
scary to people, sound is really easy.
So we have tested clinically on people over the age of 18.
Our LMI device for sleep can be used by
anyone over the age of 13.
And that is really only because it's not because it shouldn't be used on somebody under
13, but there are data laws around collecting data of people under the age of 13.
let's focus now on the next 10 to 20 years.
So beyond sleep, what is your company?
trying to achieve.
Love that question.
a uh couple things.
Beyond sleep, over the last six years through clinical research, both internally and with
third party research institutes, we've shown clinically that Elemind can not just help
people fall asleep faster and fall back to sleep faster, but also suppress tremor for
people with what's called essential tremor.
uh
We can enhance the effects of anesthesia for people undergoing anesthesia.
uh We can improve motor memory formation as we talked about a little bit earlier, which
means you can learn how to do a physical task better.
And now we're working on uh improving memory for people with Alzheimer's.
But beyond those discrete issues that we're trying to address with neuro stimulation, the
grand vision here, the grand lofty vision is to uh
make Elemind like a secondary autonomic nervous system for people.
What does that mean?
We want to live in a world where we have something that is continuously monitoring us,
watching over with us, looking after us, if you will, that can continuously be looking at
the brain and catching when things look different, because differences uh indicate that
something has maybe gone awry.
um And then intervening in real time with some sort of stimulation,
that will address the issue that the technology has found or drive your brain from a
suboptimal to a more optimal state without the person even needing to raise their hand,
press a button or touch an app to say, I want this.
So truly a proactive system that helps guide the into optimal human performance.
That's the grand vision.
So you foresee almost like a brain app store in the future?
Yeah, like kind of like an app store for the brain.
I think that's where we're starting, where you can sort of pick and choose from a menu.
But then over time, um you know, maybe when you set up your Elemind the first time, you'll
say, hey, these are the things that I want you to address.
Because maybe not everybody wants a better focus or, you you might not want to be super
alert while you're maybe getting a massage or something like that.
So maybe you turn that one off.
so that we don't watch out for that when you're trying to chill out.
But you should be able to have a very easy life if something is continuously working on
how do we bring Kim into the optimal state for what she's doing uh always.
As our homes become more on beyond the future and they start sensing the people living in
real time, they can adapt to our needs and understand our biometrics better They're
anticipatory.
What do you see as your role in that future?
So it's funny you mentioned this.
We actually filed a patent on something like this like three years ago, and it actually
doesn't require uh crazy new technology.
instead of you needing to adjust your thermostat, or you needing to turn off your lights,
or you needing to turn off your TV, or uh maybe make yourself a smoothie, your body and
your biological uh transitions should be able to...
uh
communicate that before your brain does.
What I mean by that is if you tell us that your optimal body temperature is like, I don't
know, 97.5 and we detect that it goes up or down, uh that change that can be detected can
then be transmitted to your Nest thermostat, for example, and the room temperature can go
up or down to keep you at your desired body temp.
That's one example.
But the other thing is that if we detect, if we know when you want to go to sleep, we can
automatically adjust the lights in your home or drop some shades.
Or if we've detected that you've fallen asleep, that should immediately turn off your TV
or music or whatever it is going on.
And so these changes can easily be communicated outwards to other electronic devices that
have communication systems like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
if they're able to communicate.
So the challenge today actually isn't whether or not this can be done.
This is actually a fairly easy thing to accomplish, but the companies all have to
cooperate to truly make a smart home and smart body compatible system.
Do you think we're going to have smart pajamas in the future that can actually monitor our
vitals, but also maybe cool us off or heat us up so that we don't have to rely on all
those smart beds that we have right now?
That also is something that is relatively easy.
The challenge there is um in making those smart pajamas comfortable and making them
washable, um in making them um inexpensive enough that people would want to buy multiple
sets, especially if they have to wash them.
And I think that the number one thing that people would really want is temperature control
uh of their pajamas as opposed to their mattress topper or something like that so they
could travel with it as well.
dream states are really important for our mental health and mental healing.
And there are companies out there today like REMSpace who have, I think it was like a year
ago, they had people inside of their dreams actually messaging each other and
communicating.
And there's this whole new industry of lucid dreaming.
do you think that we're going to be able to program our dreams in the future?
where we actually can help input stories and narratives that help us heal or reframe our
nightmares so that we feel better when we wake up.
I don't really know what the consequences of messing with that would be, but it would be a
really interesting study to do.
uh I would be very excited about decoding somebody's dreams.
people are working on, translating EEG to text.
I know that there's been some fMRI studies on trying to,
look at the images that people see in their brains while they're dreaming, which is really
cool.
Being able to play that back to someone could be really interesting.
I know there's a bunch of lucid dreaming companies that want you to insert yourself into
the dream to try to change the narrative.
uh That's interesting.
I think there are definitely many ways that we can intercept our dreams.
The issue with that is going to be on making it comfortable enough that people actually
want
to use it.
Sleep is a very, very finicky uh time of your life.
You want to be very comfortable.
You want to be unencumbered.
And so if you're offering someone a new piece of technology to do something for them,
better make a very measurable impact on their life or they will not use it.
Do you see a future where you might be able to help people um see a video of their dreams
when they wake up?
I think if we can use some technology that is working on decoding EEG into thoughts, then
in theory, could um potentially record your dreams for you, at least in text.
but you could easily, even just using the AI that we have today, convert that text into a
video that you could like play back, uh which would be a very fun experience to have like
a video journal of your dreams, even a written journal of your dreams over time and track
what your thoughts are over the course of the night.
I think everyone would love to wake up, especially the people that don't remember their
dreams to wake up and be like, what the hell happened last night?
What do you want your legacy to be, in the world?
Because you're always pushing the envelope in every industry you touch.
I do know that while I'm alive, I want to make a difference.
in, my life, I want to discover things, um, that haven't been discovered, whether that's
aliens on another planet
or new ways to solve problems and truly make a positive impact on people's life.
don't want to be making photo sharing apps.
want to be like, want to be truly pushing the limit and trying to understand what's
possible, both the humans and the world around us and trying to understand what the hell
this thing that we call life is
Meredith.
You are as brilliant today as you were when I met you many years ago, and I'm really
appreciative for you coming on the show today.
Thanks for having me, Kim.
I hope we do this again sometime.
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