Episode #40: Three Breakthroughs: Brain-Computer Interfaces, Advanced Neural Networks, and Ozempic Trade Update

Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ

• Where is the transcript for this webinar?

  Samantha Herrick:
  Today we’re trying to crack open the secrets in our little brain—our cerebellum. Let’s see where it brings us.

  Mike Collins:
  If you do not listen to Steve Jobs and Sam Altman and Elon Musk, you are going to be missing out.

  Michael Peri:
  What is deep tech today becomes shallow tech tomorrow, and we actually grow more and more into it. This is no longer just about where you’re going for the cheap, scratch-the-itch junk food type thing. I mean, it truly is what’s going into your body and playing a much bigger role.

  Samantha Herrick:
  All right. Hello everyone. Welcome back to this episode of The Tech Optimist Three Breakthroughs. We’ve got a cool episode for you today. Of course, we’re joined by the legend himself, Mike Collins, Founder and CEO here at Alumni Ventures.

  We also have a new guest for Three Breakthroughs for the next few episodes—Mike will be joined by Michael Peri, a partner here at Alumni Ventures. But again, we also call him Mike, so this will be interesting.

  And of course, myself, Sam Herrick, will be your guide and editor for this episode.

  In a world captivated by criticism, it’s easy to overlook the groundbreaking technologies shaping our future. Let’s shine a light on innovators who are propelling us forward. As the most active venture capital firm in the US, we have an exceptional view of tech’s real-world impact. Join us as we explore, celebrate, and contribute to the stories of those creating tomorrow. Welcome to The Tech Optimist.

  As a reminder, The Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized advice and it is not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

  Mike Collins:
  Hi, welcome to Alumni Ventures and our Tech Optimist podcast. This is our Three Breakthroughs segment where we talk about things that are on our mind, caught our attention, and that we’re thinking about—things that could potentially be big news in the areas of innovation, technology, or science.

  I’ve got a new co-pilot this week. Mike Peri has been volunteering to do this for the next month or so, letting Matt Caspari, who has been doing it, get back to his day job. Mike, welcome to the show.

  Michael Peri:
  Thanks, Mike. Happy to be here. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve enjoyed listening to prior episodes, so hopefully I’ll have some cool groundbreaking stuff we can chat about for the next few weeks.

  Mike Collins:
  Mike, you work in our Chicago office with a couple of our good Midwestern funds.

  Michael Peri:
  That I do. Chicago born and raised. My parents came over from Italy, found a nice spot here in Chicago, and I’ve been here ever since. It’s nice. UChicago grad, as you can see behind me. My wife went to Northwestern, so we plopped down in Lincoln Park as we were coming down for grad school.

  Over a decade later—plus two kids—here we are. We’re still here enjoying it and hopefully we’ll make the city work for the long term, but we’ll see. There’s a constant debate of whether you stay in the city or move to the suburbs.

  Mike Collins:
  Yeah, I mean, huge Chicago fan, obviously. For me, it’s definitely one of the top cities in the country.

  Michael Peri:
  Maybe May through September this week.

  Mike Collins:
  Yes, definitely. The walk to the office in February can be a little rough, but I live in New Hampshire, so I haven’t figured that out yet either. Great people, cool architecture, food, sports, the lake—what else could you want? Great city. Congratulations on that.

  Michael Peri:
  Yeah, thanks. Actually, my wife and I, with our kids, were planning to come out more towards the East Coast this week. We have friends near the Providence, Rhode Island–Westport, Massachusetts area, but it looks like Hurricane Debbie might be throwing a wrench into that one. So, rain check—pun intended. We’ll have to come back out another time.

  Mike Collins:
  I’m also in the camp of thinking through it. I’m a big advocate generally of cities when you’re young, suburbs with kids, and then get back to the city when they leave the nest.

  Michael Peri:
  There you go. Exactly.

  Mike Collins:
  All right, number one—I’ve got a little different take on a breakthrough. I’m going to push the Lex Fridman interview this week with Neuralink themed. It starts off with, I don’t know, 90 minutes with Elon Musk. Lex does amazing interviews. This one is, I don’t know, something like seven or eight hours.

  Michael Peri:
  Oh, my God. It’s a marathon.

  Mike Collins:
  Buckle-in type of thing. I took a long bike ride this weekend and I listened to 2X. I had to slow down part of it. I mean, those guys deal at pretty high bandwidth. By the way, I was on an e-bike on a rail trail, so don’t give me too much credit, but I thought it was fascinating.

  Again, I think it is really important—if you’re at all interested in technology, innovation, and investing—you need to listen to people like Elon, whether you love him or hate him. Like a lot of the people who move society forward, they’re jagged and they’re, like all of us, flawed.

  I think if you do not listen to Steve Jobs, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Zuck, and others, you are going to be missing out. Do yourself a favor and listen to this interview.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Ask and you shall receive. This is one of the first times, coming through the narrative of this episode and trying to dissect any missing pieces of the show, where Mike and I have had the same breakthrough for the week.

  I, too, a few days ago was scrolling through YouTube and had this episode from Lex Fridman come up. I’ve listened to it already and it is a really awesome episode.

  Again, however you feel about Elon, some of the things he says are always fascinating. Lex does a fantastic job on his podcast of really being a third-party, unbiased interviewer. His podcast is… some of the stuff they talk about is very fascinating, very innovative.

  Some examples of guests he’s had on his podcast are Jordan Jonas, Andrew Huberman, Sean Carroll, Mark Zuckerberg, Annie Jacobson, Matthew Cox, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg again, Matthew McConaughey, Bert Kreischer (the comedian), David Pakman, Simone Gertz—the list just goes on and on.

  If you want to hear the rest of that episode, go over to his YouTube channel or on Spotify. It’s just the Lex Fridman Podcast. I’m going to bring you that snippet right here from that episode so you don’t have to go anywhere. Here’s a snippet from that and then we will just keep rocking with the rest of the show.

  Lex Fridman:
  You think there’ll be emergent leaps of capability as you scale the number of electrodes? Do you think there’ll be an actual number where just the human experience will be altered?
  Yes.

  Lex Fridman:
  What do you think that number might be—whether electrodes or BPS? We of course don’t know for sure, but is this 10,000, 100,000?

  Yeah, certainly if you’re anywhere at 10,000-plus per second, that’s vastly faster than any human can communicate right now. If you think of what is the average per second of a human, it is less than one per second over the course of a day because there are 86,400 seconds in a day and you don’t communicate 86,400 tokens in a day.

  Therefore, your bits per second is less than one averaged over 24 hours. It’s quite slow. And now even if you’re communicating very quickly and you’re talking to somebody who understands what you’re saying—because in order to communicate you have to, at least to some degree, model the mind state of the person to whom you’re speaking—then take the concept you’re trying to convey, compress that into a small number of syllables, speak them, and hope that the other person decompresses them into a conceptual structure that is as close to what you have in your mind as possible.

  Lex Fridman:
  Yeah, there’s a lot of signal loss there in that process.
  Very lossy compression and decompression. A lot of what your neurons are doing is distilling the concepts down to a small number of syllables that I’m speaking—or keystrokes, whatever the case may be. That’s a lot of what your brain computation is doing.

  Now, there is an argument that that’s actually a healthy or helpful thing to do because as you try to compress complex concepts, you’re perhaps forced to distill what is most essential in those concepts as opposed to just all the fluff.

  In the process of compression, you distill things down to what matters the most because you can only say a few things. That is perhaps helpful. I think we will probably get… If our data rate increases, it’s highly probable it will become far more verbose. Just like your computer—when computers had… My first computer had 8K of RAM, so you really thought about every byte. Now you’ve got computers with many gigabytes around. If you want to do an iPhone app that just says “Hello World,” it’s probably, I don’t know, several megabytes minimum, a bunch of fluff.

  Nonetheless, we still prefer to have the computer with more memory and more compute. The long-term aspiration of Neuralink is to improve AI–human symbiosis by increasing the bandwidth of the communication. Even in the most benign scenario of AI, you have to consider that the AI is simply going to get bored waiting for you to spit out a few words. If the AI can communicate at terabits per second and you’re communicating at bits per second, it’s like towing a tree.
  You’ve talked about the threats, the safety concerns of AI. Let’s look at long-term visions. Do you think Neuralink is, in your view, the best current approach we have for AI safety?
  It’s an idea that may help with AI safety, certainly. I wouldn’t want to claim it’s some panacea or it’s a sure thing, but many years ago I was thinking, “Well, what would inhibit alignment of human collective, human will with artificial intelligence?” And the low data rate of humans, especially our slow output rate, would necessarily—just because the communication is so slow—diminish the link between humans and computers. The more you are a tree, the less you know what the tree is. Let’s say you look at this plant or whatever, and “Hey, I’d really like to make that plant happy,” but it’s not saying a lot.

  
  The more we increase the data rate that humans can intake and output, then that means the higher the chance we have in a world full of AGIs.

  
  Yeah, we could better align collective human will with AI if the output rate especially was dramatically increased. I think there’s potential to increase the output rate by, I don’t know, three, maybe six, maybe more orders of magnitude. It’s better than the current situation.

  
  That output rate would be by increasing the number of electrodes, number of channels, and also maybe implanting multiple Neuralinks.

  Matt Caspari:
  Hey everyone, just taking a quick break so I can tell you about the Deep Tech Fund from Alumni Ventures. AV is one of the only VC firms focused on making venture capital accessible to individual investors like you. In fact, AV is one of the most active and best performing VCs in the U.S. We co-invest alongside renowned lead investors.

  With our Deep Tech Fund, you’ll have the opportunity to invest in innovative solutions to major technical and scientific challenges, which can have a hugely positive effect on society—companies that have the potential to redefine industries and create a more sustainable future and deliver significant financial returns. If you’re interested, visit us at AV.VC/Funds/DeepTech. Now back to the show.

  Mike Collins:
  Then the whole area of Neuralink is just fascinating. Obviously, I think they’ve had two or three implants already. For those of you that are less familiar with the technology, this is basically dealing with computer probes into the brain. They obviously started, like a lot of companies do, with people that have significant disabilities and limitations, and it’s a miracle what they can provide to people.

  Just breaking down with some of the team there, the impacts on people’s lives that they’re having, the serious technology and engineering going into basically putting this thing in a human brain, their plans for the future—just really… I think it’s hard to come away without huge respect for people who, again, are working on really, really hard problems that seem crazy or way into the future. And Elon’s obviously Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink—big, big problems.

  Michael Peri:
  It’s the ultimate equalizer. You had talked about this where it’s like regardless of your maybe Flavor of the Week stance on a certain policy or political leanings, it’s undeniable what these entrepreneurs are doing to really better society, better science, better breakthroughs. It’s a prime example of it.

  Mike Collins:
  Obviously, everything’s a nail with technology, hammer in my hand. If you step back and you look at how the world has moved over the past thousands of years, the past hundred years, underlying all of it is usually big technology shifts and innovations. Clearly, I think we’re looking at a handful of fronts right now where there’s stuff going on with energy, there’s stuff going on in AI, there’s stuff going on in the life sciences space—an ultimate area of innovation and technology and venture capital for the next 100, 200, 300 years. Space is going to be increasingly part of the story, I think.

  Again, I just encourage people, this is an example of the kind of thing that you’ve got to at least scan and listen to what the people that are driving these changes are saying and thinking and working on, because it’s going to impact your life, the lives of your kids, grandkids, et cetera—your business, your personal life. That’s my pitch.

  Michael Peri:
  No, it’s great. You had mentioned this earlier, the notion of deep tech and a lot of these breakthroughs. We’re in this privileged seat where we can see all of this stuff. I think what’s really fascinating for folks who aren’t as lucky as we are to be engaging with these great entrepreneurs building deep tech is the natural evolution, where what is deep tech today becomes shallow tech tomorrow, and we actually grow more and more into it. Then you just continue to challenge the complacency in terms of what we think is feasible.

  I think this is a prime example of that, and it’s fascinating to see how far we’ve come. I have fewer years overall than you have in the venture space, but even in the decade plus, the amount of innovation that’s happened is truly sci-fi in that way. You don’t think it’s possible, and all of a sudden it is, and it becomes part of your status quo.

  Mike Collins:
  One of our young associates, actually one in the Chicago office, just did an Instagram Reel that I thought was really clever, which is taking… Drew took a bunch of technologies—the automobile and the airplane and all of these things—and he pulled quotes about people, a fair number from The New York Times, basically calling all of it just impractical, stupid, niche-y, just claim chowder. That’s the story of technology. First you’re crazy, and then it’s obvious before you know it.

  Michael Peri:
  Oh, yeah. I think about early in my career, Bill Morris from… At the time, Google was speaking here in Chicago, and he had talked about this notion of exponential growth, just a scientific breakthrough. His example was mapping the human genome where you had two sides of the camp. When we got 1%, you had this vast majority of researchers and scientists saying, “Well, it’s going to take 100 more years to get the rest.” Then you had another side which was like, “Now it’s going to happen really fast.” Sure enough, in a matter of years, fully mapped and we’re off to the races. It just goes to show you how exponential that can really be.

  Mike Collins:
  I think it shows you too, Mike, how poor humans are at under-appreciating things that are geometric in shape. Our brains work fairly intuitively in a linear fashion. Part of being a great investor is just understanding the flaws of human biases and the way our brains work. People like Warren Buffett understand these things. I think they’re well-read, but I think some of it is also intuitive. Basically, you are about human biases. One of the things you are about is not appreciating geometric phenomena. That’s one, for sure.

  Michael Peri:
  Complacency really could be a killer. On the notion of brain science, I actually found a really cool one. And fun fact, Mike, I don’t know if you knew this about me—I graduated in the financial crisis. So right away, your job offer vanishes overnight. I studied behavioral cognitive neuroscience and economics in undergrad, and I was like, “Well, you know what? Maybe the PhD route is for me.” My first job was a research assistant in a neuroscience lab. It helped me learn data science before data science was a cool thing, but it also just piqued my interest in neuroscience in general.

  I read recently, and it was published originally in Nature, a leading scientific journal, but it was picked up on a whole host of different websites and whatnot, which are leading neuroscientists today unlocking the secrets of “your little brain,” your cerebellum. What’s groundbreaking about this is the cerebellum—speaking of complacency—has been originally thought about in terms of the traditional place for coordinating movement. A lot of research has been done there, but it’s also significantly influencing our thoughts and emotions where others have thought different areas of the brain are.

  Like I said, initially published in Nature. It really challenges these long-held beliefs about the cerebellum’s function. When I saw that, I was like, “Okay, here’s an area where you have researchers who are really pushing that complacency and saying, ‘What else do we know about our brain?'” Which—too long, didn’t read—for our listeners out there: not much. We’re still exploring a lot of it. In my mind, and what they’re seeing in the research is, it really is revolutionary.

  Although the cerebellum, for those who don’t know, only comprises about 10% of the brain’s volume, it contains over half of all of its neurons. I think that in and of itself is really a leading indicator that research is being done there and should continue being done there to understand what else it does. Now, this breakthrough is really understanding the notions of its contributions to cognitive processing, emotional regulation, and it suggests a more integrated role in brain function than previously understood.

  Before we go into some of the potential and why, I just wanted to stop there—did you think that was as cool as I did?

  Mike Collins:
  Yeah, no, super cool. Again, I think there’s some intuition there too that resonates, which is so much of great thinking is often associated with physical activity—that stress management related to exercise being the silver bullet, the motion, rhythmic motion leading to getting in flow, physical flow, mental flow, those kinds of things in a very holistic approach, for sure. Super interesting. I look forward to reading it. I have not read that.

  Michael Peri:
  For me, we sit back and once again, we have this luxury of being able to look at all this innovation. Our team recently sponsored a deal in a microrobotics platform. They essentially take this little device smaller than the size of a grain of rice and can put drug payloads in there, and they go in through the cerebrospinal fluid up into the brain and deliver it. You think of what this research is coming out and how it can help innovations like that, so all of a sudden you have this real new view and revolutionized understanding of both neurological and psychological disorders that can really help new treatments and therapies.

  Michael Peri:
  By recognizing that the cerebellum has a much broader impact and is integrated, you think about the innovative approaches to things that society deals with every day and we know are interconnected—things like anxiety, depression, or rates of childhood autism. It’s really a small step but a big breakthrough in the sense of how we can challenge what we know about certain areas and continue to push that innovation forward. It’s one I always keep on the back burner when I look at breakthrough neuroscience. I thought this was a really cool one.

  Mike Collins:
  No, no. Listen, humans are biological computers with our own tech stack, and actually, again, Elon and Lex talk a little bit about this in the first part—which is you’re going to have silicon computers, silicon AIs, robotics over here, and then you have these big bags of salt water with a biological brain. The question is how do we work together?

  One of the issues is just bandwidth between our brain and those systems. That’s a real area of research. That’s a real area of potential innovation, I think. You see a 15-year-old walking around with a smartphone, and that is a pretty intimate relationship, frankly. Now it’s a separate device—they’re looking at it through their eyes and things like that—but boy, it’s pretty inseparable. For one, try to take it away.

  Michael Peri:
  As a dad of two young little ones, my wife and I talk about that all the time. The relationship with technology, even from when we were kids to our kids today—we don’t know how to approach it. I think we’ll approach it as it comes, but it’s certainly something top of mind for us.

  Mike Collins:
  Yeah, no. We are already computer-enhanced biological computers, and I think we’re just going to see more and more of that.

  Michael Peri:
  Yeah.

  Samantha Herrick:
  I really love that Mike P. brought this in as his breakthrough for his first introductory episode. Welcome to the Tech Optimist family, Mike, but what a way to kick off breakthroughs. I love how this paper that he talks about from Nature flips what we know about mental health and physical health on its head because the cerebellum—the little brain—is so unexplored. I did a bit of research into this topic recently, and I’ve got a few things that I want to share.

  Published in Nature’s Mental Health Journal last week, an article was titled Brain Lifestyle and Environmental Pathways, Linking Physical and Mental Health. I’m going to read a bit of the abstract and then go from there:

  “Depression and anxiety are prevalent in people with a chronic physical illness. Increasing evidence suggests that co-occurring physical and mental illness is associated with shared biological pathways. However, little is known about the brain’s role in mediating links between physical and mental health.

  Here, using multimodal brain imaging and organ-specific physiological markers from the UK Biobank, we established prospective associations between the baseline health of seven organs—including cardiovascular, pulmonary, musculoskeletal, immune, renal, hepatic, and metabolic systems—and mental health. We revealed multiple pathways mediated by the brain through which poor organ health may lead to poor mental health. We identify lifestyle and environmental factors including exercise, sedentary behavior, diet, sleep quality, smoking, alcohol intake, education, and socioeconomic status that influence mental health through their selective impact on the physiology of specific organ systems and brain structure.”

  From there, that got me thinking about what all of this means and what can happen after those pathways are discovered. It seems like someone was ahead of us, for sure. I came across a multi-institutional research project led by Todd Braver. This article is from Washington University in St. Louis Arts and Sciences, titled Braver Awarded MURI Grant for Attention Control Strategies Research.

  Braver is a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and the project is a computational cognitive neuroscience framework for attention control traits and states. It’s expected to span about five years with a total budget of $8.8 million. The research team will develop neurocomputational models of both individual differences and state-related fluctuations in attention control due to factors such as motivation, stress, and mind wandering.

  They will test the models using multimodal neuroimaging methods, including functional MRI and EEG. They’ll also develop novel tasks to investigate attention control in both laboratory and real-world complex environments. A major goal of the project will be to harness the modeling and task development efforts to implement and evaluate new training strategies for enhancement of attention control.

  This is quoted from Braver:
  “Such strategies will be useful in enabling individuals to maintain high levels of focus and concentration, even in high-pressure situations such as those faced by military personnel.”

  So this too is diving into the little brain. How much of that is contributing to our attention span? How much of that is contributing to our physical health and mental health? It’s all connected.

  I thought these were really cool. I’m going to throw these articles in the show notes but wanted to share. We’re going to take one more ad break and then hop into Mike’s last breakthrough to round off the episode.

  Alumni Ventures Ad:
  Do you have a venture capital portfolio of cutting-edge startups? Without one, you could be missing out on enormous value creation and a more diversified personal portfolio. Alumni Ventures, ranked a top 20 VC firm by CB Insights, is the leading VC firm for individual investors. Believe in investing in innovation? Visit AV.VC/Foundation to get started.

  Mike Collins:
  All right, the last one I’ve got—I’m going to go to McDonald’s.

  Michael Peri:
  Okay. Here we go.

  Mike Collins:
  McDonald’s had their earnings, which were pretty poor. I’m being generous, I think.

  Michael Peri:
  Not a good week to talk about earnings, right?

  Mike Collins:
  Yes, earnings. I’m going to pick on one company in particular because I think there was a fair amount of misdirection going on. Again, I think everybody that’s been around me knows that one of the profound but less spoken about technology breakthroughs is related to GLP-1 drugs. We’re beginning to… I think if you really read carefully and see the numbers in the earnings reports, I think we’re at the very, very tip of that starting to impact what Scott Galloway called the “fast food industrial complex.”

  I wrote something a while ago called The Ozempic Trade, really about how more and more people are beginning to take these medications. They’re finding beyond weight loss benefits—like inflammation, fatty liver disease, and other un-weight-related health benefits—maybe even some areas that are affecting other organs like the brain and kidneys. There’s just so much that has been an unintended consequence of industrial food production, which has allowed the population to greatly expand. People are not starving.

  Again, like every technology, there’s a negative unintended consequence. With an evolution of scarcity, and all of a sudden you go into a supermarket and there’s a zillion calories—and a lot of them are processed and engineered—we statistically have had an obesity epidemic. There is an entire food system related to cheap, good, tasty calories.

  Michael Peri:
  And cheap calories, too.

  Mike Collins:
  And cheap calories.

  Michael Peri:
  They made it to the point where, and this is what’s funny—I think to your point of there’s something else potentially in the McDonald’s earnings—because it’s almost cheaper to go and buy three meals a day for your family at McDonald’s than go to a grocery store right now.

  Mike Collins:
  Yes, it is.

  Michael Peri:
  Inflation is only playing one part of that. It’s much higher in other aspects. I totally agree. There’s something else that could be happening really from a behavioral economic standpoint.

  Mike Collins:
  I think that’s exactly right. What you’re going to see over time is people recognizing that being healthy and taking a GLP-1 drug is in their self-interest. The consequence is they’re going to eat more fresh, real food and less McDonald’s. That’s a very simple example. Because I’m doing that, I’m not going to become a diabetic, I’m not going to need a stent, and I’m not going to maybe need knee replacement surgery at 50 but at 70.

  I think, again, maybe it’s reading my own book, but I think the call was surprising enough to the negative if you really parse it. Personally, I felt there was a lot of jazz hands around other stuff going on, but I think this is the very tip of the iceberg of what we could see over the next decade—a real shift. As these medications become more widely available, they’ll turn into pill form, become more accessible and affordable, and I think you’re going to see pretty dramatic shifts in parts of the food industry and even alcohol. We’re finding some other behaviors and disorders are helped or regulated by these systems.

  Michael Peri:
  You’re going to see a pull-through. You know this about me, Mike—I’ve done a lot in digital health and healthcare investing over the years. I think you’re starting to see food as medicine as a new category of care. It isn’t just what consumers are looking for as it relates to their overall health, but you’re seeing large health insurers move into, “Okay, how do we think about this from a reimbursement standpoint? How do we think about this embedded in true value-based care?”

  This is no longer just about where you’re going for the cheap, scratch-the-itch junk food type thing. It truly is what’s going into your body and playing a much bigger role. As we unpack GLP-1 and other innovations there, you’re going to see that pull through long-term behaviorally—maybe you down-titrate off of it, but now you’ve built a mindset recognizing food as medicine. Health insurers of the future will think about preventative care as not just surgeries or pharmaceuticals but a combined approach, where we help subsidize great food for individuals, especially diabetics.

  I think we are only stepping into what that paradigm of care looks like and how business models can shift around it.

  Samantha Herrick:
  All right. We’ve talked about GLP-1 drugs on this podcast quite a few times. Mike has graciously shared his experience on a GLP-1 drug, Ozempic. If there are other people out there like me—again, I’ll say it—I’m not a neuroscientist, doctor, or biologist. I don’t necessarily know how GLP-1 actually works within the body.

  I know we did a video a few weeks back with a company called Pendulum, where Colleen Cutcliffe, the CEO, did a nice job explaining what GLP-1 drugs are and how they work. Definitely recommend taking a look if you’re interested. I want to share a quick clip from Andrew Huberman’s podcast, The Huberman Lab, called What is GLP-1 and How Does it Reduce Appetite and Promote Weight Loss?

  Andrew Huberman does an excellent job explaining scientifically and unbiasedly what this drug does biologically. I’m going to play that now because it’s fascinating and helps everyone understand how it’s actually working.

  Andrew Huberman:
  I want to highlight some recent findings in an area totally separate from mental health that I think are really important. This is a paper published in Cell, one of the three Apex journals (Nature, Science, and Cell are considered the “Super Bowl” of publishing).

  This paper, entitled An Inter-organ Neural Circuit for Appetite Suppression, illustrates a principle everyone should know: parallel pathways. These are neural or hormonal pathways that operate independently to accomplish a common goal.

  Glucagon-like Peptide-1 (GLP-1) is a peptide that can dramatically suppress appetite. That’s why these drugs are being explored for diabetes and obesity. They lead to weight loss. Yerba mate tea can mildly promote GLP-1 release, but synthetic drugs provide much stronger effects.

  What’s beautiful is GLP-1 operates through at least two mechanisms:

  1. Gut distension: It acts on neurons in the enteric nervous system, making you feel full without actual food.

  2. Brain signaling: It activates pathways from gut to hypothalamus to trigger satiety.

  This parallel brain-body communication illustrates how biology works—bidirectional and coordinated. That’s why GLP-1 drugs are impressive and potentially transformative for weight loss and obesity treatment.

  Mike Collins:
  Clearly in both these areas—brain science and AI, and the Ozempic trade—we put our money where our mouth is whenever we can. When we see a great entrepreneur and opportunity aligned with these themes, we invest.

  For example, we’re backing a great team with strong academic credentials working on a non-pharmaceutical approach, using a person’s own gut biome to produce more GLP-1 naturally. That’s holistic, empowering to individuals, and disruptive.

  Again, lean into the future. Lean into optimism. Support hardworking, smart people making the world better.

  Michael Peri:
  For sure.

  Mike Collins:
  Excellent. Mike, welcome to the show. I look forward to next week. We’ll do it again.

  Michael Peri:
  Yeah, likewise. Talk to you, Mike.

  Mike Collins:
  Excellent.

  Michael Peri:
  All right, see you.

  Mike Collins:
  Bye.

  Samantha Herrick:
  Thanks again for tuning into the Tech Optimist. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d really appreciate it if you’d give us a rating on whichever podcast app you’re using and remember to subscribe to keep up with each episode. The Tech Optimist welcomes any questions, comments, or segment suggestions, so please email us at [email protected] and be sure to visit our website at AV.VC. As always, keep building.