The First Robotic Human Arm with Tyler Hayes of Atom Limbs

 
 

Tyler Hayes is an obsessive genius building utopian technology. He is the CEO of Atom Limbs, a visionary startup creating robotic, mind-controlled prosthetic limbs. This artificial arm will be the first capable of a near full range of motion and will restore the basic sense of touch missing from today’s prosthetics. 

Tyler and I chat about how and why he decided to tackle this problem. We talk about the state of the prosthetic limb market today. And towards the end of our conversation, we do some wild speculating on the future possibilities of Atom Limbs.

Here’s what I learned from the episode:

  • There’s no such thing as an artificial arm…yet. Atom Limbs began by looking at existing academic projects that had never been commercialized and assembling the recipe. 

  • How do you get great people on your team? Most great people want to work on the world’s greatest challenges. 

  • The Atom Limb works via a noninvasive cuff of electrodes that sit on the skin. The arm is trained with machine learning. It’s controlled wirelessly.

  • Four main technologies are incorporated into Atom Limbs: (1) breakthrough robotics, (2) noninvasive neural interfaces, (3) AI, (4) wearable tech.

  • Atom Limbs has already started user testing the arm and are rapidly approaching clinical trials. 

  • The Atom Limb can auto-level. So, if someone using the arm is drinking a glass of wine, the arm will keep the glass level. 

  • The market is not as small as most might think. There are a hundred million people in the world who have limb loss. 

  • People with limb loss are underserved by the market today. Many joke about their $200k myoelectric arms back at home in the closet. 

  • There is potential for the creation of artificial spines in the future. This could help people who would otherwise be paraplegic or quadriplegic. 

  • Hook arms today cost around $26,000, and myoelectric arms cost around $195,000. Atom Limbs is aiming to make a state-of-the-art arm for the same or lower cost as a hook arm.

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Episode Transcript:

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, this is broken. You could just see the signs. It was like there's this blinking sign above the industry. It was like, this is broken. This actually needs disruption. Like we all love saying that word in Silicon Valley. This actually needs it.

Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, and welcome. I'm Eric Jorgensen, and I don’t know much, but I have some very smart friends. And if you listen to this podcast, then no matter who, where, or when you are, you do too. Together, we use technology, capitalism, and friendship to create a brighter, more abundant future. Today, I get to hang out, and so do you, with Tyler Hayes, who's the CEO of Atom Limbs. This visionary startup is building robotic, mind-controlled, but non-invasive prosthetic limbs. It'll be the first artificial human arm capable of a near full human range of motion, and it'll restore this basic sense of touch that's missing from every prosthetic today. This team is out here absolutely working miracles, and I'm so excited to share them with you. In this episode, we talk about how Tyler noticed this problem initially and saw how great a solution could really truly be. We talk about how he discovered and assembled the various technologies necessary to truly solve this problem and the current state of the prosthetic limb market. It's a real mess, and we're very excited to have Tyler working on it. We also look into why Atom Limb's has chosen to offer crowdfunding options, and finally, near the end, we speculate wildly, one could say irresponsibly, on the future that gets unlocked by the possibilities of this product. It's really quite incredible. As both a disclosure to you and to show you that I put my money where my mouth is, I will say upfront, our fund, Rolling Fun, has invested in Tyler and his company. I'm honored that over 50 listeners like you now invest alongside us into early stage tech startups like Atom Limb's. If you want to put your money to work alongside us, learn more at rolling.fun, which is linked in the show notes below. Accredited investors can invest through AngelList today. With Rolling Fund, as always, the sooner you invest, the more of our deals you get to participate in. To learn more, please reach out through Twitter or email. Now I invite you to take a deep breath, relax, and enjoy Smart Friends, your favorite podcast, arriving at your ears in three, two, one. 

If we want to start, the right place to start is where the idea came from for Atom Limbs. And I genuinely think it'll be, I think this is interesting because it is in some ways so obvious and in some ways so elusive. That's not a good version of the question, but I want to start with, where did the idea for Atom Limbs come from?

Tyler Hayes: Literally, yeah, we’re at the starting point, let’s start there.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, where did it begin?

Tyler Hayes: It's a confluence of things. In 2019, when we were working on Bebo, we sold that to Amazon and Twitch. And at the time, I was kind of angel investing in some longevity companies. And you know me. I share that. I have that sort of crazy thing where I'm like I want to live forever. I want to be the first human being in another solar system alive, ideally. And I want to give people the ability to live as long as they want, as healthily as they want. It's just been a big deal for me for a long time. And I have been looking at a bunch of prosthetics for that basically. 

Eric Jorgenson: I don't know if it's your first company, but at least a major chapter prior to Bebo was a healthcare focused company, too. 

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, so I guess, what, Atom Limbs is my fourth company technically as a founder, co-founder. And so my second one, yeah, was called Prime. It was like the number one family health records app in the app store. I don't even know if you remember this, but yeah, back in the day, which was a Tuesday, as they say, I myself coded the entire back end for this app to reverse engineer all the patient portals in the country so you could like scrape your medical records from every patient portal. And I started cutting my teeth on the healthcare system back then, like working with payers and providers and pharma and everyone. And it was just crazy because at the time, this was, what, 10, 12 years ago, even back then, it was just so obvious that healthcare was not going to solve a lot of its own problems. So, I was like, okay, well, let's take a tech approach to it. And we definitely did some really great things with that. We ended up shutting the business down. The business model just wasn't really there. But yeah, no, absolutely. And then when we were running Bebo, I'm doing this angel investing. And then I had a friend, her name is Mary, she's actually a Twitch streamer. And I met her through working on Bebo. She's former Army, I believe. She's a former EOD. And so she hugged a bomb when she was active duty and it blew her arms off. And she's incredible, by the way, like just as a human being. She's definitely, she's got the edge of someone you might expect in the army, for sure. She's got that humor, that dark humor. But for the most part, she plays video games on Twitch with her feet. She plays with an Xbox controller with her feet a lot of the time. And other things, too. But I remember just asking her and a few other people, hey, it looks like you have limb loss, but you don't really use prosthetics. Like, why is that? And just straight up, everyone would say the same thing. Like, look, man, you wouldn't know this, but prosthetics are just dog shit. And that's what she's saying. And I was just like, okay, I got to dig in. I got to click on this and know what's so broken about this. And then, oh man, I mean, we've talked about this a little bit behind the scenes. But it was just so crazy when I started finding out, like, what do you mean everyone still uses hooks from 1912? What do you mean they, for the most part, don't even use those hooks? It was just insane. I don't understand why this is happening. And then when we dug into it, we found out why. And it's a lot of things. But yeah. 

Eric Jorgenson: So I think it's interesting that you so clearly started with a problem on this. So you started with prosthetics that seems like they shouldn't because we're surrounded by technological miracles. Like why hasn't somebody invented a better one of these? There's all the structural market reasons or misalignment, principal agent problem reasons why somebody might not have built a great one. But how did you go about that process of kind of being like, oh, no, there's like a really good solution here. Was this like a blind leap? You're like, fuck it. Or did you kind of go through this process of like, let me go find the go on a quest to find all the different individual pieces of a solution?

Tyler Hayes: No, it was super circuitous. It was not an obvious path for sure. I even multiple years into this journey still feel like I'm learning stuff every day about it. But I guess the simple answer would just be, I had looked at a lot of prosthetics. You know when you go on YouTube and you see all those bionics videos or whatever, like, oh, check out this cool Terminator arm or check out whatever other arm that looks like it's like the breakthrough thing, and this person got a brain implant and they're able to control it. It just turns out all of it's like stuck in academia. Like none of that were real products. And then when I finally started looking at the real products, I was like, okay, well, wait a minute. So, there's no such thing as an artificial arm? It's all just like different manufacturers. Like one makes a hand, one makes a wrist, one makes an elbow. A prosthetist, a human prosthetist has to assemble it by hand still. And then the socket that you actually put your residual limb or your stump, whatever you want to call it, in, that is still plaster cast molded by hand by a prosthetist, and they send it to this other facility called Central Fab, and that takes three months to make it, and then you get it back and oh, it's a rigid one-to-one form of your arm, and oh, you gained five pounds, guess we got to do another one now. It's just like, I don't understand, how is this still so backwards. And basically, to get to the solution on it then, it was, okay, well, let's look at all the academic projects. It's let's look at all the products that exist out there. It was definitely a lot of talking to other startups that had tried it and failed at it and what they saw. But I'll just be really straight. I don't think anyone else put the recipe together. And I think that's why we had to step up and do it. Just speaking openly and honestly, if someone else had done this, I probably would have just invested in it. And I'm very happy that we're doing it. This definitely feels like my life's mission in many ways. But it was slowly all that and then one other huge thing, which was I emailed a friend of mine, who is an industrial designer, and I just said, hey, I don't really know a lot about industrial design and mechatronics and stuff like that. And she was like, oh, well, let me connect you with this guy, Doug Satzger. He used to lead a bunch of ID at Apple. Whenever you hear that from someone, I was like, sure, yeah, okay. Former ID lead at Apple, yeah. Awesome. Well, he worked on the Bondi blue of the iMac, like chose that color and stuff. Wow. Okay. Yeah, so Doug and I just talked to them about their ID the whole time. He should fix this, this, and this. We got coffee and we chatted for four hours. I had never met the guy before and we just fell in business love, so to speak. 

Eric Jorgenson: ID equals industrial design in this context, correct? 

Tyler Hayes: Yeah. So the people who are responsible for not just the look but the feel of a product, but also everything from materials to colors to surfaces to part lines to tolerances, that's a lot of work back and forth between ID and mechanical engineers and electrical engineers. Doug just kind of shared the exact same vision, man. And we were just like, okay, well, we feel like two peas in a pod. Let's go get some more peas in this pod. Then he emailed a buddy of his who was also ex-Apple, and then that guy led us to another gentleman named Eric Monsef, who created the core hardware team at Apple, which was like 250 deep engineers. He ran portables at Apple, so MacBook, all that stuff. And then now those two super fine gentlemen are my co-founders, and the rest is history.

Eric Jorgenson: That's incredible. I love that we are seeing the sort of budding of an answer to a question that I feel like people ask each other all the time, which is like, what if Apple built X? What if Apple built Y? Like, what if the talent and discipline and stuff that goes- why can't everything be as incredible as an Apple product? There are so many- I mean, computers and phones are incredibly important. And I realize not everything, not every device has to have that level of polish and finish on it. But this is definitely a market that deserves that kind of craftsmanship and quality.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, I agree. I feel like it's almost the inverse. Yeah, not everything deserves that level of craft and finish, but everything deserves at least a pretty high class level of of good finish and polish to it. But what we always say is just like, wait, we have electric cars, we have reusable rockets, and we literally have generative AI now. Why don't we have artificial limbs? It's just the tech is literally there. Why wouldn't you do it?

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think it's kind of a bizarre question, but I think it's really- I think you are an interesting case. And as you say, you started this hardware company, this incredibly technical business without necessarily having that experience yourself. And so, I kind of want to ask, who did you have to be to this company and how do you- I don't know, like I want to explore and share that because I think it's an important thing to internalize for a lot of people.

Tyler Hayes: Let's do it, yeah. I think it's actually like a really under-discussed topic in Silicon Valley even. It's people kind of not- the willingness to step outside of your own lane to do something that's kind of bigger and more important than yourself. And for me, sure, like academically, 15 years ago, I got a degree in psychology with a minor in neuroscience. And yeah, I kept up with neuroscience since then, but I'm not a neurosurgeon. I'm not a neuroscientist. And yeah, I built cars and stuff growing up around the house, but I'm not a mechanical engineer. I can't sit in CAD and do that stuff. So someone asked me once, you got these really amazing people on your team, how do you get these people on your team? It's just kind of part of this question. And I just told him, I was like, honestly, man, the greatest people in the world, the best talent in the world wants to work on the greatest challenges in the world, and that's how you get them. And I don't think me and Eric and Doug and everyone else on our team would want to work on a photo sharing app right now. I think we want to work on something that's really impactful to people. Everyone, most people on our team have had the opportunity to work on these huge scale products that billions of people use. And that's what we want to do here too. So, for me, I think the key that unlocked it was like, I just got to be willing to step outside myself on this. And the phrase I always use is, I don't know if I've ever shared this with you, but I just take myself to school on it. I'm not going to go to university and learn this stuff, but I can definitely just read a lot of blogs, talk to a lot of people, interview a lot of experts, hire some of the best people. I can't take my hands off the wheel. I can't- what's that phrase where it's like, just hire great people and let them do their thing or something like that? It's like, okay, you still got to provide direction. Coach K didn't just like get the best players, like go play the game, have fun. You still have to help people and guide them and direct them, but it's definitely a lot of, for me, a lot of humble pie a lot of the time. I ask a lot of questions a lot of the time. I don't- it's probably like, my job is probably like 20% giving direction and 80% gathering feedback and advice for the right direction on what to do.

Eric Jorgenson: Did you watch Ted Lasso?

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, totally. We just finished season three, actually. What an amazing ending, by the way.

Eric Jorgenson: Amazing ending, amazing show. I have like related to that a lot. And I hear that a little bit as an analogy here of like you don't have to know- have to be a deep, deep expert in the thing if you can- like there's a meta skill in assembling the team and setting the vision and helping everybody kind of- You do need the right people and you do need them to work together well. But I think there's a lot of talk in the valley about what you need to be, the deep technical expert, or you need to spend your life in that market or whatever. You're a great example of an inspiration of like, no, I just saw a really big problem. And then you did the hard work to go find the people who had the skills, not just some people but the very best maybe in the world to go and tackle this. And when you start with those starting conditions, yeah, the snowball keeps rolling. Of course, more incredible engineers are going to want to work with those guys at their company and get first-hand experience with them. 

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, I feel like what you're talking about here is like, to me, it's like respect. In this case with prosthetics, I have to respect the problem space. I have to respect that I have all my limbs and I’m not someone with limb loss. I have to respect that I'm not an industrial designer or an electrical engineer, and those people know way more than me. And I definitely have to respect the fact that we're stepping into a space that a lot of people have really tried to innovate in. And we're not trying to say that all the innovations that came before us weren't necessary. But I think we're also saying at the same time, like, hey, you kind of got to bring this team together to do this, to your point. Like, you can't- full respect to like Waterloo students and stuff like that that we all love and talk about all the time. Like you couldn't get a team of like 50 Waterloo students and solve this problem in this way. You have to get people who know, with Eric, for example, our CTO, he knows everything from supply chain to logistics to operations, to really his job is more like chief engineer than a CTO. He's in the trenches every day with our engineers and he has the same respect for like we’ve got to find the right way to do this in a high class way, in a sophisticated way. This can't just be baby's first prosthetic sort of thing. It's really got to be- it's not just a breakthrough, it's a statement piece. It's got to say to people like we've got you. Like it has to, seeing an image of it, seeing someone use it has to communicate to potential customers, look, we're doing this in a different way. And part of that is we see you as a whole person which comes from respect. It can't just be the way it is today. I don't even know if you know this, but prosthetics today, as a person with limb loss, you can't buy a prosthetic. Like sure, you can maybe go get a 3D printed one from some of those kind of like trendy startups that are making them for kids, but you can't just go to the companies that make them and buy them. You have to get a prosthetist to buy it for you because that's the way the prosthetists and those companies have set it up. There's no such thing as a relationship. You as a person with limb loss don't have a relationship with the person that made or the company that made your hand and your elbow. You have a relationship with the prosthetist that makes it. So, one of our first things we said was like, well, okay, frankly, that's BS, like that's insane. I bought my car with an app, I bought my phone with an app, I buy my groceries with an app. I mean, I go to the grocery store. I'm not that- I go outside. Anyway, you know what I'm getting at, right? It's just, it comes back to respect.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I think I remember where I was the first time I saw an image of the Atom Limb. And I think you guys have done, exactly to your point of the respect and the scale that you were going after and the quality bar that you set, from even the very beginnings of this company when it was nothing, just showing how high your bar for success was and what you expected that product to be. And if you haven't, like I pull it up on my phone sometimes, I show it to people like at a party or whatever. It's like, look at this company. Like when they're just kind of like, sometimes people pull your string on what cool shit's going on like if they know that you pay attention to what's happening in the future. And I'm just like, I pull it up. There’s no better visual representation. Go to atomlimbs.com and just look at the renderings and the graphics there, and it shows just how cool this thing could be. It truly like-

Tyler Hayes: And it should be. There's no reason it shouldn't be. I don't know why they can't look like that today.

Eric Jorgenson: And if you're making- what could be more worthy of respect? Like you're making something that's about to become a part of a person's body.

Tyler Hayes: It’s the ultimate wearable, as we say.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Like how much higher of a calling to craft and quality could you possibly expect?

Tyler Hayes: Okay, well, first of all, I think I got to send you your referral code for every time you show this image to someone. We'll set up that loyalty program in the background.

Eric Jorgenson: Perfect. I've had people ask me like, can they attach third arms, fourth? Like, do I need to be limbless in order to partake in this incredible product?

Tyler Hayes: No. I mean, that's the thing too. It's like, I remember one of the first conversations you and I ever had about some of this stuff was actually about the tele-operation of it, the remotely controlled operation. So, yeah, a person with limb loss can wear it, but if you don't know how the product works, basically the way it works is you put on this cuff of electrodes around your stump, it's not invasive, they just sit on your skin, and then you train it with machine learning, and then the arm just moves. It's attached to your body over that, and you wear it. It attaches to a shirt that you wear that we designed. And that's it. But the implication of that is that you can control it wirelessly because it's already wireless. So what that means is like I can send you the cuff, Eric, and you could control the arm here in our lab right now. We should have done that, by the way. Why didn’t I do that?

Eric Jorgenson: I could just be like poking you in the side of the head. 

Tyler Hayes: Eric needs my attention. Sorry, I'll be right back.

Eric Jorgenson: Stop tickling me or I'll put you across the room. That's fantastic. So, I think it's an underrated piece of what you're building or an underrated aspect of it is, which gets back to kind of the starting conditions of the company, is how many different technologies you needed to assemble in order to actually deliver this product. It's not one innovation. You said you had to sort of like search out all these different academic research and previous startups. And I don't know, I would love a little more detail on that process. Like, is it a giant checklist? Was it just like pile it all on the table and figuring it all out? How do you actually go about it? Because I think this skill is so underrated of like identify a big problem, be mad that someone hasn't invented a better version of it, then go look at all of the various pieces and technologies that exist already that you would just need to assemble into a product to deliver to market. Like these opportunities are everywhere. So, I think we can't be too detailed about going through that process and showing people kind of what you learn and abstracting it a little bit.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, because it's a lot, to your point. I think, what are all the just, high level summary real quick, what are all the different technologies that we've had to integrate and incorporate to do this? I mean, one, breakthrough robotics, first. Two, neural interfaces, non-invasive neural interfaces. Three, just AI in general. I mean, in this case, machine learning, a lot of dynamic machine learning, things like dimensional scaling, stuff like that. Four, wearables. You have to wear this thing. People wear these really uncomfortable harnesses today. We can't do that. We're not going to put a strap on your body that tugs on your armpit all day. That's painful. Five, everything from the clinical side. So, how does this thing get reimbursed? How do you bill for it? What stakeholders do you have to work with to do that? And then you just kind of do a laundry list after that of like, well, we have to- it’s a medical device technically, so it has to get cleared by the FDA. Prosthetics, prosthetic arms are predominantly class one devices today. So, it's not like a super high burden, but you’ve still got to do it. So, like, what did I know before I came into this? Let's see, I've made some really cool software apps that a lot of people use. I definitely appreciated scale because like I discussed back in the day, I mean, I think I left right after we crossed like a billion users or something like that and 10 million websites. It was pretty huge. I definitely understood that and how to grow things, and that's why we have a wait list today. Actually, I don't even know if you know this, by the way, but the waitlist just crossed over 11,000 people. 

Eric Jorgenson: Holy shit. It's huge. 

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, it's something like 200, just over 200 million in forecast revenue. Which gets back to your point of like, okay, so when you integrate all this stuff, and when we integrate all this stuff, getting into the details now, so with the robotics, one of the first things we said was like, okay, we want this thing to have every degree of freedom. You need control of the elbow, the wrist, and all three degrees of freedom. So rotation, adduction, abduction, flexion, extension, and then fingers. And that was like the big thing no one had done before. I mean, there's many things they hadn't done before, but one of the biggest was certainly individual finger control. We said we wanted to do that. I'm like, okay, well, how do you do this? Because if you want to, for example, just bend your fingers over at the joint that connects to your hand and that's it, okay, sure, you could do that with a prosthetic hand today. You could do that with a robotic hand. What if you want to get like a book grip though? What if you want to get kind of a combination of things to happen with using the different phalanges of your fingers? So you're like, okay, that means we can't put actuators in the forearm that just tug strings on the fingers like everyone else does basically, or in the palm. We have to actually put motor actuators in the fingers. And by the way, we're trying to make this thing for 25th percentile adult female size and up. So, imagine like a five foot two woman or man. I should just say five foot two person. And that's a smaller hand. And so how small do these motor actuators have to be? And we went out and we talked to everyone we knew, Japan, China, Mexico, Germany, everywhere, who makes these motor actuators, all the companies we know. No one had made a small enough motor actuator with all the things we would need, like built in encodings, we could talk to it, and a really high gear reduction ratio. So, we just designed it because they were even telling us, like, hey, if you guys make this, maybe we'll want to buy it from you too, like on the side. It's like, oh, okay, well, maybe there's a second business opportunity here. Put that to the side for a second. Let's just focus. But so even on just that one thing alone, that was probably months of back and forth with dozens of people to try to figure it out. And looking back in hindsight, of course, now, we've gotten all this preclinical data, people have tested the arm, we're nearing a production intent design and all that. So, it seems like, oh, it was really easy, but no one knew those pieces before we did that. And you could say the same thing about the wearable and the neural interface. The neural interface, I think, is probably the second greatest challenge, and I think the wearable is the third greatest challenge. The wearable being the shirt and the socket, we had to do everything. We've looked at everything from 3D printing or additive manufacturing to all the materials you can put on someone's body. So, you have to understand, okay, everything from like it has to wick sweat away. It has to be breathable. It has to be light. The whole thing has to be light. And I know you know this, we've talked about this, the whole arm is only a few pounds, which even on that front, okay, so then you double click on weight, and then maybe I'll shut the hell up for a second. But so, you look at the weight of this thing, and we look at all these amazing arms that are being concepted in academia for this stuff that receive all this like government funding and stuff. These arms are like 10 pounds, 15 pounds. The average adult human's arm is 5% of your body weight. So, if you're 100 pounds, each of your arms is about 5 pounds. If you're 200 pounds, each arm is about 10 pounds. But there is a big difference between weight and perceived weight. If I took a five pound weight and hung it on your shoulder, you're going to lean. You're going to get musculoskeletal issues if I do that. So, we’ve got to find a way to preload a bunch of that weight. And that's why we went so deep on saying, okay, everyone else is making these harnesses. Just throw it away. Like there's no way you can keep using those. No one wears their prosthetics because these things are so uncomfortable. And so, but what if, we asked ourselves, what if we use the whole surface area of the torso? Wait a minute, that's a crazy concept no one's ever done before. But well, actually, yeah, you could just put some semi-rigid materials into a shirt and keep it kind of stationary on someone's body and then attach the socket to that, apply some preload to it, kind of snug it up to someone's stump, and all of a sudden, our arm is I think about four pounds right now, the prototype is, and that four pounds can start to feel like three pounds, two pounds, one pound. You diffuse the load, and it forces across the whole torso, and then you apply a little preload. The first thing we see, we had a guy come in who was literally leaning, like walking in, he was literally leaning. And we were like, oh man, this is going to be a hard one. And he took his prosthetic off, and he kind of leaned back towards center a little bit, but he's still leaning. And then when he put the Atom Touch prototype on, he was still leaning, and literally Doug just looked at him. He's like, yo, dude, you know you can stand up straight with this, right? And he's like, oh, oh, oh. And he stood up straight. He's like, oh my God. He didn't even think, he'd been so indoctrinated into thinking like that's just the way it is. His body was used to it. And he starts walking around the office, and he's got a much more normal gait as he's walking. And yeah, I just think you've got to go as deep as possible on all this stuff to your question. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's an incredible- just hearing you talk through those, there are so many constraints or parameters that you need to think about. When it's in full physical contact with somebody for every waking minute of their life for the most part, like, man, the constraints on that are so hard. Were there times where you like- did you go in knowing all this? Or were you like, some of these walls in the maze that you like bumped off of, you were like, oh shit, that's a new constraint that we hadn't thought about? 

Tyler Hayes: I don't think I knew almost any of this before I came. I feel like definitely, I don't know, I'm a Tyler 2.0 call it or something. You know what I mean? It's just having to learn kind of at least a little bit of everything to be dangerous, everything from mechatronics to machine learning to neural interfacing. And then I think a big part of that, maybe go to the spirit of your question, is like what's all the stuff that we're also not doing right now that we've had to get really sharp on? So, with the neural interface, for example, the cuff, it's not invasive. Okay, is it always going to be non-invasive? I don't know, but survey says probably not because if you want to write data back to the body, then what do you do? You can't send fields into your arm from the outside and into the nerve. You’ve got to actually get in the nerve at that point, and that stuff’s so far away, but that stuff's got to happen, too. So we kind of like have a little bit of line of sight to that kind of stuff. We design it. I like how we design the arm modularly too. So they're like coming out with the above elbow configuration first and then come out with the below elbow and the hand soon after that. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I like your approach to do the hardest one first and then roll downhill after that. I remember you telling me like everybody, every limbless person, sort of no matter how and when they lost it, has still like that ghost feel, the ghost limb or perception of a ghost limb, which is what helps train the AI and train to control the arm. Is there- I hadn't like really viscerally sort of put myself in that position, but if you're using this, is your only feedback loop, as you say, like feed information back to the body, is the feedback loop just mainly visual? Like if they're not watching what the arm is doing, or they just can like trust that the limb is obeying to some extent?

Tyler Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I guess there's maybe, what, two questions in there. One is like how do you control it, and is it only visual feedback? And the other- Well, I guess I'll just talk to that one first. So do you know what proprioception is? Have we ever talked about this? Proprioception is kind of known, and it's like your sixth sense sort of and it's that your body knows where your limbs are even when you're not looking at them, and that's because you get all this feedback from your muscles so your brain knows where your arms and your legs are. So, if you put your hand under a table and you wave it around, you still can kind of feel where it is. So, there is a little bit of proprioception that happens when you wear a prosthetic arm that is sufficiently embodied. So, if you use a hook arm today, you really aren't going to get that because it's just kind of off balance and there's not really a lot of comfort to it. It's not really snugged up to you. But with ours, we hear people saying that sometimes. And one of the things that we actually start seeing is people start gesturing with the arm. Like they'll just be talking. Yeah, subconsciously. 

Eric Jorgenson: That's so cool. That's so wild. 

Tyler Hayes: Honestly, the first time we saw it, we actually like literally stopped the person that was doing it. We're like, hey, just real quick, was that on purpose? Or like, is that like an error in the arm? And they're like, whoa, what do you mean? We're like, well, you're gesturing while you're talking right now. And they were like, oh, my God, what? No, I guess I was doing it naturally. Yeah, it's the craziest thing.

Eric Jorgenson: That's so fascinating, man. How cool. So you're now in the stage where you are getting to sort of bring people in and pilot things. What's the situation as it is today in Atom?

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, let's see. So we've been going just over 24 months full steam. And in those 24 months, basically now, yeah, we're nearing our production intent design and rapidly approaching clinical trials now. But so basically about 12 months ago, we started testing the arm on people, super controlled test environment here at headquarters and stuff, but bringing people in. And so far, fingers crossed, but so far, of all of our I think it's like 35 or 36 test users at this point, all 100% have control of all their joints. And they all have above elbow limb loss, which is considered the hardest level to try to get fine motor control, like with fingers, sort of unprecedented. So yeah, they're moving their elbows, the wrist, the fingers, there's the touch feedback in there, kind of to your previous question about it's not just visually controlled, it's also- I don't think most people would really think about this, but a lot of your motor control of your limbs is touch driven. It's nice when you can pick up a glass without having to look at it, which comes from this thing called pre-programmation where you've done it a thousand times before. Babies, they play with their environment so they can kind of start to predict it. It's prediction and pattern recognition at the end of the day.

Eric Jorgenson: I always thought it was really clever, you have this beautiful image, I don't remember if it's in your deck or on your website, but of a young woman holding, like with a touch limb, holding a wine glass. And it really made me stop and think like how hard mechanically that problem would be, like to know what substance you're picking up, how much pressure to apply. Yeah, it just really got me thinking about it. And also, just like taking for granted, of course, these kind of older, dumber limbs can't, like even if you could hold something, like you're not about to pick up a wine glass with a hook or a dumb sort of high pressure thing. I don't even know what you would call it. But the amount of activities that a smart device unlocks is incredible.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, I think that was maybe kind of like your question a few minutes ago. Maybe the most surprising thing to me was not actually all the features we knew we were going to intentionally unlock. So individual finger control, sophisticated touch feedback with haptics, stuff like that. We knew we were going to do that. But you know how Apple is always like, oh, it's hardware and software, the marriage of hardware and software makes things great. And yeah, it's true. I would agree with that. But you could definitely get a little too navel-gaysy saying stuff like that. But with this, it turned out that when we integrated the hardware and the software together in a whole arm, not just like a hand that has to connect to someone else's wrist, to someone else's elbow, to someone else's controls, we can just do stuff that literally other people can't do. So, like auto leveling. So, like when you're drinking that wine, that's just an image you saw, but if we showed a video of someone doing that, the arm will keep the wine glass level. So, like as you move your elbow and your wrist around, it'll keep the hand parallel with the ground so you don't spill it. Which, we're not taking away control from the users in doing that. They have to activate that mode still, and they know it's happening because there's a video display even on the forearm. So you can always see what the arm is trying to do. 

Eric Jorgenson: Oh, that's awesome. I didn't know that.

Tyler Hayes: Did you not know there was a video display?

Eric Jorgenson: Oh, that's so cool.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, totally. I know, I'm like dropping all sorts of announcements here today, evidently. 

Eric Jorgenson: This is fantastic. Yeah, I mean, I'm always surprised and delighted. I feel like there's so many cool things. This is why we do this because it's always fun.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, how much fun do you have doing this? You get to invest in like dozens of companies that do stuff like this. 

Eric Jorgenson: You can tell how excited I am. I'm like rocking in my seat learning about all these fucking things. This is so cool. Yeah, I think there's just so many exciting things about what you guys are doing and the like implications of it for so many people.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, I mean, I remember I listened to the show that you and Bo and Al did, it was like a week or two ago, where you're talking about Q2 and Q3 investments from last year, which is a great episode, by the way. Man, you guys were firing on all cylinders.

Eric Jorgenson: Featuring Atom Limbs.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, so I like scrub in, listening the second time, and I'm like, okay, did I catch this right? And I was like talking- 

Eric Jorgenson: Just make sure we didn't say anything too stupid about him and his company. It's like, did you reveal any trade secrets, Eric? The answer's not always no.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, no big deal. Just like I'll send you the patents for next time. You can just put the PDF up on screen share.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, thank you, thank you. Anything for content, right?

Tyler Hayes: Oh my God. I don't even remember what I was talking about at this point. I'm sure it was very important, but.

Eric Jorgenson: Other companies from the past.

Tyler Hayes: I don't know, man.

Eric Jorgenson: Being excited about shit, Rolling Fun, doesn't matter.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, I don't know. You guys just do so much cool stuff that I feel like it's probably, it's got to feel like a privilege, man. You get to talk to all these cool companies. Every time I listen, I feel like I hear about someone else doing something just world changing.

Eric Jorgenson: Okay, so we've done a lot of like technical stuff in there. I think I'm curious about the market and distribution side also. You said there's a huge wait list. I'm not at all surprised that there's like a line absolutely out the door because people who need this need it badly. But I imagine this is kind of a complicated go to market as you alluded to. So, I would love to just like talk about the discovery and process around that too.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, funny enough, I remember what I was going to say a second ago that dovetails into that, which is, you had mentioned on that previous episode where you were talking about your Q3 investments, you talked about us a little bit. And I remember you saying it's actually not as small of a market as a lot of people think. It's actually quite a big market. And that was also surprising to me when I really got into it. I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. There's a hundred million people in the world who have limb loss. In the US, there's 4 million. That's crazy. And now it makes sense when you think about the fact that a lot of people lose like toes and fingers and stuff. So that's where a lot of it comes from. So anyway, the market and the waitlist and all that. Yeah. It was crazy, man, when we first started telling people about this. So, the waitlist is now over 11,000 people. I think I mentioned this to you in the past, but our waitlist got broken at one point because like a thousand people over a couple of months signed up and they said they wanted a leg. And we were like, yeah, well, but we're making an arm, or at least for now, like we'd love to make a leg, but we haven't announced anything, we haven't said anything. And literally people are just like, look, if this arm is as good as you say it is, it looks like it is, from what I'm seeing in these videos and stuff, yeah, make a leg, I want a leg from you guys. It's like, okay, now we've got to create a separate leg waitlist. That's the greatest problem to have in the world – oh no, we have to create another wait list. But with the market, it's a lot- I think the three things that always come to mind for me when I think about this group of people, this community, and I say community on purpose, I use market in like pitches, sure, but it's really a community because, one, it is so many people, it's way more than people think. Like in the US, just arm loss, 350,000 people have lost part or all of their arm, and that's 350,000 people walking around using a hook or nothing at all. And that's just tragically underserved at that point, which is the second thing I was thinking about this market is like I remember in 2019 or was it 2020? Yeah, summer of 2019, two or three months after we sold Bebo to Twitch and I didn't go to Twitch, like the whole team went and I didn't go for any specific reason other than I just wanted to start Atom Limbs. I love Twitch and Amazon and the whole team and everything. But I went to this conference called the Amputee Coalition Conference. Did I ever tell you about this? Okay, so the Amputee Coalition Conference, annual conference, it's like the biggest gathering of industry and community around amputation of limb loss. So you basically get a few thousand people who have limb loss show up and then kind of all the big players and the small players in the space. And I went and I didn't know if I wanted to actually start Atom Limbs yet. I was still thinking of trying to invest in a company. I met some really cool companies at the time, but the joke that I remember everyone saying who had arm loss, none of them had a prosthetic on. Like a few did, but most didn't. And I was like, hey, can I just ask you, like you don't know me, I don't know you, I'm just some dude from Silicon Valley walking around here, fully respect that I probably have no fucking idea what I'm talking about. But can you tell me why you're not wearing a prosthetic? It just seems like you'd want to wear one. And literally the joke everyone would say is like, oh yeah, I got a great myoelectric arm at home. It's in the closet. Let me go get it. I'll show you. Like they just weren't wearing them because they're so underserved. And I was like, oh my God, they're making a joke out of the fact that they're underserved because that's like Stockholm syndrome at this point. I was just like, this is crazy. And then the third thing is, okay, so there's a ton of people and they're super underserved, and this was like the confluence of these three things was kind of what unlocked the business case for me, and I was like okay maybe we actually need to start a company around this. The two ends of the spectrum of devices you can get today as someone with arm loss are either you get a $26,000 hook – that's the average price for a hook arm, $26,000. 

Eric Jorgenson: Oh my god, for just a glob of plastic. 

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, right. It’s like $10 of plastic and $50 of metal in there. Like, well, I don't know what- Whatever they're smoking, I want it. And then, or on the other end of the spectrum, you could get one of these kind of state of the art, quote unquote, myoelectric arms. What people, when they say bionics, that's usually what they're talking about. The term of art in the industry is myoelectric because it's listening to your muscle signals to control it. The average price is $195,000. You could buy two Tesla Model X Plaids for that these days. You know what I'm saying? For one arm that can only open and close the elbow, rotate the wrists, not the other degrees of freedom of the wrist, and open and close the hand, maybe, maybe if you're lucky, into five fixed grips. Can't control the fingers. So it was like, okay, yeah, this is broken. You could just see the signs. It was like there's this blinking sign above the industry. It was like, this is broken. This actually needs disruption. We all love saying that word in Silicon Valley. This actually needs it. Full respect to everyone in the industry who's done amazing things for so many people who need what they need, but it's just like this stuff should have been done 10 years ago and no one's doing it, so we're just going to step in and do it. 

Eric Jorgenson: And it's such a clear call to an entrepreneur that's like you could absolutely kick everyone in this market's ass. A competitor’s slide doesn't even make sense. What you're pursuing is an unprecedented improvement and the technology exists to do it and that that's the bar that you're setting. I love that kind of approach because if you build what you think you can build, and you're well on the way, you absolutely own the whole market basically instantly. I love that as a bar, as an approach to a market.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, it was kind of like once we started doing it, I felt the same thing. I was like, I never want to do another business that doesn't meet that threshold again. It's like the most addicting thing, like, oh my God, why aren't more people in Silicon Valley doing this kind of stuff? And I honestly think we should. As an industry, as a region of the country, I definitely think more people could probably spend a little bit less time working on a lot of things they're working on right now and more on some really big problems that could make them, by the way, even more money than the stuff they're working on right now. So you could do well by doing good and the inverse. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's a whole herd of contrarians roaming around working on all the same shit at all the same time. 

Tyler Hayes: I'm a contrarian. Whoa, I'm a contrarian too. Wait a minute.

Eric Jorgenson: Let’s hang out together. Okay, so one of the things that I always enjoy about you and appreciate deeply and hope to like amplify one of your traits is just the incredible long-termism of a lot of your thoughts, like both relative to Atom and well beyond. So I mean, you alluded to this earlier, being the first person alive outside the solar system or living to a thousand or whatever. So, I often sort of ask people like, where do you envision your product, your innovation, your company? Like, what is the 50 year scenario? Like where can we get in that amount of time? Which it does really stretch it. 50 years is a long time with compounding technology, but I know you thought about it.

Tyler Hayes: Me? Never. No, obviously not. Yeah. Boy, 50 years. I don't know. But let's just say the future. Just whatever, pick an indiscriminate amount of time more than 10 years from now and less than a million. And that's the same difference at that point. So, I think probably, check me on this if you disagree with this or if you think others do, I think most people for the most part could squint and see that a hundred years or so from now, we're going to have artificial limbs, bodies, types, things. We've got all this other cool stuff. We've all seen enough science fiction. I think people know that kind of thing is probably going to happen. When it's going to happen and who's going to do it I think is the question. So, to me, I think, okay, well, this is not even the first inning, this is the zero inning. This is, we're catching this industry up for this community and market of people who desperately need this catch up. But then it's really everything that comes after that that's the real work, which is, okay, 50 years, I could probably say like 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 50 years from now. 10 years from now, assuming exponential innovation, don't hold me to this, but 10 years from now-

Eric Jorgenson: This is all pencil. We're just here to speculate wildly. If we had a name for this segment, it would be wild, irresponsible speculation, if that makes you feel better about the appropriate caveats applied to this. 

Tyler Hayes: Every time you say it, confetti pops out of the ceiling. Yeah, totally. So 10 years from now, okay, we know, for example, we will be making an artificial arm, series of artificial arms for people as well as legs. Like we've already got line of sight to designing a leg. So, we know we're going to be doing that. Okay, so then what other parts of the body could you easily, relatively easily port these concepts over to, these concepts being like the robotics and the neural interface and all that? Okay, spines. Yeah, absolutely. It is funny, actually, a spine surgeon who found out about us, actually one of the first things he ever did when he started working with us, he emailed me. He's like, hey, you need to make spines. And I was like, I don't know if we should make spines. That's a pretty big deal. And he's like, no, you don't understand. This actually makes a lot of sense because it's something you pose, and it uses the nervous system. And I was like, oh, wow, okay, he might actually be on to something. Now, the level of risk with that is high.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I mean, I imagine for many people, they are coming from a place of only upside or minimal downside. If I'm envisioning it as an internal, like not an external spine support, but I don't know what you're describing, but feel free to correct me.

Tyler Hayes: No, I think literally what I'm describing is an artificial spine, part and all of an artificial spine. Because at the end of the day, I mean, your spine is basically a big nerve that runs in the middle of it, that spiders out into real nerves, baby nerves. 

Eric Jorgenson: It is replacing the nerves or just the structure of the spine and sort of the-

Tyler Hayes: Really all of the above, but I think what he's really getting at and what most spine surgeons have talked to us about is like it's not so much the people who have one tiny little vertebrae or something that gets hurt which is certainly a serious problem, but it's people who have a pretty severe complex trauma who probably need to get their spine replaced and would otherwise be paraplegic or quadriplegic. So yeah. So ten years call it a handful of artificial limbs, and I see other companies out there working on other things like artificial eyes. Now, I don't know if that means they're bionic or if they're just kind of more like something you put on your eye. I think what we're interested in is like taking true replacements. 20 years, I think you should definitely expect to see serious restoration of people who have serious complex impairment either start electively replacing, kind of the most extreme cases, electively replacing. We have, I think, maybe 500 or 1000 people on our waitlist who said that they want to electively replace their limb because it's useless, basically. It's like people who had their arms smashed, but they couldn't get it amputated. They kind of salvaged it, but it's just non-functional. Or things like all the brain implant companies, the brain computer interface companies that are going on right now. Definitely makes sense to put a shunt in and wirelessly send signals from your brain over to the limb because the nerve itself is the problem there. You can't get the signal through the nerve. 50 years from now, 100 years from now, I can't see any reason why you wouldn't effectively be able to replace the major parts of your body at least. That gets into a different question though, which is like, okay, how much do you really need to replace of the body if you wanted a fully artificial body? And to be clear, I'm not talking about like people who just electively replace. I'm talking, again, still people who need to replace probably their whole body for some series of reasons. And do you actually need a respiratory system and a digestive system if you start kind of replacing lots of parts of your body? These things grew over millions of years of evolution, and they're very needed for us in meat based bodies. But I think it's going to look very different than people expect. I would definitely think that the future is going to look a lot weirder than people would think, like in a heartwarming way, but it's definitely going to feel a little weird at first. 

Eric Jorgenson: What's the most fundamental essence? Is it just like keeping the brain alive? Is this like the kind of Futurama heads in tanks? 

Tyler Hayes: I don't think so. I think others might disagree with me. I think, okay, so nervous system, maybe not brain, so your nervous system spiders out over your whole body. So you've got your brain, your brain stem, your spinal cord, all the peripheral nerves that go out to innervate your muscles, sure, I mean, nerves are basically just electrical wires. I mean, they're electrochemical in the way they work, but they're basically just electrical wires. Like all the nerves in your arm are like half the size of my pinky; you can see them with the eye. So, you need to replace that if you didn't. It's not just a brain in a jar, for sure, yeah. Because how else are you going to control your arms and your legs? And all your autonomic nervous system stuff, like how does your heart function if there's no nerves running to it? You have to have electrical signals running to and from it. So, that's pretty deep, deep stuff though that I definitely wouldn't worry about for a long time. I think the next 10 to 20 years are going to be certainly more than exciting enough for a lot of people.

Eric Jorgenson: It's a complex system, the body. We're now still just learning the connections between gut health and brain health. There's a lot of stuff in there that we may lose parts of ourselves without realizing what we're losing as you slowly lose functions.

Tyler Hayes: This is the problem that all the cryo companies have to solve, by the way. Like if you want to get your body cryogenically frozen, do you want your brain frozen or do you want your whole body frozen? Because by the way, they all have both packages, and you can do the brain for cheaper. I don't know that I would do that, but yeah. 

Eric Jorgenson: You wouldn't do just your brain, you would do whole body?

Tyler Hayes: No, I would do full body. That seems insane to me, that you would just choose your head. I get it. Some people have to, or it's to each their own. But yeah, your nervous system is definitely part of who you are because it informs how you interact with the world. So yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: Are you already seeing requests or do you foresee as part of this market, like I don't know if this falls in the class of voluntary, but just like as the body degrades, but the mind stays fine, people instead of replacing a hip, replacing a leg at 70 or 80 or something? Because a lot of the really nasty stuff starts to happen when elderly people fall for the first time or that spiral takes place. And so, if you can sort of get ahead of that to some extent with augmentation of stronger limbs as people start to lose muscle mass, but I don't know enough to know if their nerves are also degrading. Like do they still have enough sort of wherewithal to control well-functioning robotic limbs and sort of extend lifespan that way?

Tyler Hayes: I mean, they're all solvable problems at least. They're all solvable problems. Like if you have a nerve that's impaired, you can potentially put a shunt in and wirelessly send signals. But yeah, I mean, there's, what, a million people in the US every year who get a knee or a hip replaced. Like it's a lot. Didn't Al's dad or something just get his hip replaced? I think. I don't know. Was it your dad? I don't know. Someone's dad, anyway. But yeah, someone in my family just got their knee replaced. And one of the conversations was like, okay, well, how much of the leg are we talking here? Is it literally just the knee? And yeah, I mean, aging and mobility, we have definitely switched as a species now, to your point, as a species, we are no longer in acute condition risk mode. We are in chronic condition risk mode. We've solved so many of the things that would have killed us at age 20, 30, 40, 50. And now we're living 70, 80 years old, which is amazing. Some people live past 100. That's awesome. But now we're basically facing, okay, well, what are the major risks for us? Diabetes, congestive heart failure, mobility, and everyone's body gets worse as they get older. You can't get around that. It's just degradation. And so, I would definitely expect people will start electively replacing more than just a knee and a hip. I mean, what's different about it, other than you're just replacing more or less at the end of the day. I think to us, the risk has to be worth the reward basically or the other way around. In the same way that brain-computer interfaces, like, I think everyone- there's all this snark kind of being thrown around there all the time, like on social media, like, oh, would you really open up your head, like a Neuralink implant or something? Like, well, that's not the question, man. There are millions of people in the world who literally need these right now who have different impairments and disabilities. And then, sure, in 20 years, when we have all the risks and the safety stuff sort of solved, quote unquote, I don't think the FDA is just going to be like, oh, yeah, go nuts. Have fun. That's not going to be optional until it's even safe enough in the US, at least. Now I should be careful.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. People like throw that out forgetting that it is a slow process of like, yeah, the necessary cases and then the early adopters and then the early majority. And then you're like, oh shit, I'm getting left behind by people with Neuralink, let's say, and it's all about context. That decision will become very rational for a lot of people given different contexts. 

Tyler Hayes: I mean, people are doing it today. People are electively replacing limbs today. It's just that they're often being replaced with either, I think there's a hundred people in the world who've gotten an arm transplant, which is pretty crazy. But yeah, that's like tricky. Because now you have to take anti-rejection drugs your whole life because it's like replacing a heart. It's not an organ, it's a limb, but your body doesn't think it's yours. So, you have to take anti-rejection medication for the rest of your life, which is an immunosuppressant. So, you're at risk of- Yeah, so sure, I think that bioengineering and tissue manufacturing will get there at some point too. But even then, I still just think it's going to be a conversation of like, well, why wouldn't you have a synthetic limb at that point then? Like just combine both, combine the best of the material science we have with biologics. You don't have to just do biologics.

Eric Jorgenson: I realize I want to close a loop that we left open earlier. So we talked about the prices of existing solutions today, but I don't know that we actually got to what you think you can deliver this for. And I think that's an important thing, if you're willing to share, that would- 

Tyler Hayes: I know it's like, do we tiptoe around it? Do we- We're happy to talk about that because that's a core part of what we're doing. So, here's the punchline. Okay. So those, the two I said earlier, the hook arms are $26,000 and the myoelectric arms are $195,000 on average in the US. So, what we're doing, our core value proposition to our customers is very simple. It's we are aiming for beyond the state of the art functionality. So greater than those $195,000 arms, as affordable or less than a hook arm, that $26,000 arm. And insurance approves like over 90% today for the hook arms. So we know, and they've also signaled to us, I’ve got to be careful what I say there, but they signaled to us that they're excited about that prop, that value prop because it's like, oh man, you're telling me we can finally give people something that they actually want and we can afford it. Awesome. Our confidence level, maybe that's the thing I'll be a little bit more careful about to the spirit of your question. Yeah, no man, this is on lock. Like 100%. We know we're going to hit that. I won't say what our build materials and stuff are, but yeah, that's definitely, we're going to be offering a very competitive price point. I think after this, the industry will look very different. 

Eric Jorgenson: I mean, that's just incredible engineering that goes into that and work to keep that down and just be disciplined. And I think that’s a credit to you in thinking like an entrepreneur back from a customer and value perspective, not just like an academic of can we do it or somebody who's perhaps a little less aligned of an operator in the healthcare space who asks can we get paid for it. Let's close that whole loop, deliver some fucking value where people are stoked to pay this, and they have something that's a life-changing product experience for them.

Tyler Hayes: That's all it's got to be. Don't make it more complicated. It's like we've talked about this kind of stuff in the past. To me, business is actually very simple. That doesn't mean that it's easy, but it's very simple. Make a product, tell people about it. Make it, and then do marketing. Marketing is just telling people about what you made. It's not that hard. It's not super easy either because you've got to figure out how to do it for your market, and you've got to find the right price point, and you've got to develop partnerships and all that kind of stuff for sure.

Eric Jorgenson: And those are variable too. When you make a product that is as obviously staggeringly better as this is, the story tells itself. And when you're working with a community that I think is as well entwined or well networked as the community that you serve, I think the market is going to take care of itself for the most part.

Tyler Hayes: That's kind of what we're seeing. I mean, the waitlist at this point is just like pure word of mouth now and just watch it grow.

Eric Jorgenson: This is where you get to reap the rewards of all the hard work you did on the engineering side. And I'm so excited to see this actually get out into the world. How do you see the next, I don't know, 6, 12, 18 months playing out? I'm sure you've got a lot to look forward to.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, a little bit. I mean, besides just playing with the toys in the office, that's the best part.

Eric Jorgenson: Strapping on all the arms and running around. 

Tyler Hayes: Oh, man, I haven't even done that. Actually, my barber, I got my haircut recently. He's like, hey, is that arm ready yet? And I was like, what do you mean? Why do you ask? He's like, well, I want it to cut people's hair, man. Like I want to put them on the chairs in here. Like no bullshit. That's actually what he said. I was like, all right, I don't know that you want to do that yet.

Eric Jorgenson: No scissors.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, exactly. The next 6, 12, 18 months are very clear to us. Like I said, we're nearly to our production intent design and rapidly approaching clinical trials. So that's what the next several months look like is landing the production intent design, number one. Number two, going through clinical trials, which is actually a fairly low burden for prosthetics. It's not like drugs where it's like 10,000 people over years. It's like just- it's very low without getting too into it. And you’ve got to do FDA pre-submission and submission there. We know we have to get cleared by the FDA. We absolutely respect that, and we're looking forward to working with them. And then it's going to market. So that's basically the next 12 to 18 months. We've got all the preclinical data gathered. We've got all the videos. We'll be posting a lot more videos now too. So definitely, I think you saw- yeah, that soda can one where he’s pouring the water. Oh man, that was a fun day. 

Eric Jorgenson: It must be so satisfying to watch people have that epiphany and that experience.

Tyler Hayes: We don't even- it is for sure. But before I go into a tangent, honestly, it is emotional, man, every time someone comes in and tests one of these. If it's their first time, they always have the same experience, especially if their family is there. Someone starts crying. Then we start crying. It's just, oh God, this is amazing. And then, second, third, fourth time, every time people come in, like we don't even have to bring the caffeine, man. They walk in like what are we doing today? What are we testing? What do I get to pick up? What do I get to push? What do I get to pull? It's so much fun. And at this point, we actually, we used to script the user tests and say like, oh, we want you to try these different activities. Now we're starting to get to the point where it's like, what do you want to do today? Let's go ham with this thing. Like, what do you want to try? We’ve got all these things around the office. Try playing with them. See what happens. That's actually how the video of the gentleman who poured the water out of the soda can, that's actually how it happened because I think it was literally, we were testing like a Febreze bottle or something. And he was like, pulling the trigger on the Febreze bottle, which again, you can only do when you have individual finger control. And so anyway, he's doing that. And then he's like finishing this Coke Zero. And we're like, looked around like, wait a minute. And he's like, should I pour this out? And then he had finished it. He was like, put water in it, put water in it. And then, the first try, literally the video we posted, I don't think we said this when we posted it, and it went like fairly viral on Instagram. We didn't say, but that was his first try doing that. In 11 years, since he lost his limb, he hadn't poured out anything. Like he hadn't poured a can or whatever because he just couldn't. There's no device that could do that. So hitting it on his first try was crazy.

Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. One of the most mind-blowing things to me is how much innate intuition, I'm sure there's a technical term for it that I don't know, but intuition, talent, skill, like the training feedback loop that people go through to learn how to use this thing that you built them is wild.

Tyler Hayes: That's crazy too because it's literally less than five minutes. And I think that every time I say that to someone, it blows their mind. It's like, do it one time, put it on. You say, all right, Eric, I'm so sorry you lost your arm above your elbow or below your shoulder, but we got you. And it's okay, Eric, with your phantom thumb that you can see that we can't, but you can feel it, flex it and extend it out; with your wrist, rotate it in, rotate it out. And the machine learning system takes these snapshots, five minutes later, you're good to go. I actually- wait, this isn't airing, or you're not publishing this today, right? Okay, so I could tell you something because this will have aired by the time this publishes. So, a couple weeks ago, the BBC came by, like BBC BBC, like the news organization, because they had found out what we're doing and they were really excited about it. And I think it's literally airing today at like 4.30, it's going to air on BBC. There is a 20 minute segment they produced about us for BBC Click. And we had the privilege of working with this really awesome guy named Paul Carter, who is a journalist for BBC. He was born with a limb difference. So, on his arms and on his legs, he didn't keep developing past his elbows and his knees. And I apologize if Paul ever listens to this and I get that slightly wrong, but that's how I best describe it. And Paul, after four hours of filming, kind of looked at us, and he's like, so maybe can I try this thing? Because he came by, he was filming a test user. And we hadn't made a socket for him, so he couldn't use the physical arm, but he used the virtual arm because we have this whole virtual app, where like on your computer, your phone, or a TV, you can just see like a- 

Eric Jorgenson: You put the cuff on and see the rendering of the movements that you're trying to tell it to make.

Tyler Hayes: Exactly. It just looks like a video game environment. And it's just this, it's our concept arm in three-dimensional space with physics and you can move it around just like you would the physical arm. It's one-to-one. I think it was like literally 20 seconds, maybe 30 seconds, he was off and running. We just told him, hey, as much or as little as you want to train. And he trained up the elbow to open and close, the wrist to at least one degree of freedom, and the hand to open and close. He didn't do the individual fingers. And it was like 30 seconds in, he was controlling this stuff. And honestly, the footage of him doing that was very, very humbling. It was like, okay, I think that was the moment a lot of us on the team sort of realized, yeah, I think we all knew we were onto something, but we might really be onto something here. That was pretty special. And I'm really thankful for him coming by and doing that. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think it is so cool. It must be so rewarding to work on something that's so important, like emotionally impactful, like massively life changing to every single one of your customers. I don't know, I've never had the privilege to work on a product that literally brings people to tears when they experience it for the first time. But I think we should all be so lucky. It's a great thing to aspire to. 

Tyler Hayes: I agree. Plus one. I mean, maybe when I was working on online comments back in the day, I had brought people to tears, but in a different direction. 

Eric Jorgenson: Building a marketplace for home services rarely moved people to tears in my experience in a positive direction. 

Tyler Hayes: Is that when we met, by the way? I think you were there however many decades ago that was at this point. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, we were in San Francisco early 2010s.

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, right. It was a special time.

Eric Jorgenson: It was a good time. San Francisco is a special place because it brings our kind of nuts all together in close proximity and we get to all kind of cheer each other on and learn from each other. And it's such a good experience. I hope to achieve some of that virtually with this. Like that's my goal.

Tyler Hayes: I want that goal for you. And obviously, you get to see all this stuff before everyone else does. 

Eric Jorgenson: It's a huge part of the fun. You're going to object to some of these labels, I think, but I'm narrowing in on the right who I'm trying to find and elevate and invest in, these obsessive geniuses building utopian technologies. And I think this is like-

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, I like that. 

Eric Jorgenson: Atom is an incredible example. And I love how you've approached this and everything that you're putting into it. And I can't wait to see the future that unfolds as a result of all this hard work, and I hope it inspires many others to sort of pick up and charge behind you in the same fashion.

Tyler Hayes: That really means a lot, man. Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Yeah, I definitely take that to heart. I really appreciate the words of support there. I don't know about genius. Obsessive, for sure. Definitely obsessive, but mostly just over like Coke Zero. So... 

Eric Jorgenson: How can those of us who believe in the future that you'd like to manifest support you, support Atom, support the vision, or just like follow along and experience the catharsis of moving videos of user testing, the only moving user testing videos that we know of? 

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, we only post our videos to BeReal, the social network BeReal, that now no longer exists. Okay, so no, I appreciate you asking. There's a lot of places people can follow us for a lot of different reasons. And the three I would call out is, one, if you're someone who has limb loss or know someone who has limb loss, the best thing you can do is sign up for the waitlist. It's not like you have to pay any cash for a deposit or anything. We literally just ask for your information, and then we'll get on a call with you if you want and learn more about you and maybe invite you to test the arm here in person at HQ. You can do that at atomlimbs.com, just atomlimbs.com or atomlimbs.com/waitlist.

Eric Jorgenson: ATOM.

Tyler Hayes: ATOM. Thank you.

Eric Jorgenson: Homonyms are the worst. 

Tyler Hayes: If someone would have told me that, if someone could’ve have the decency to tell me that when we started this company, geez. The second is we do actually have an open crowdfunding round, equity crowdfunding round right now at wefundr.com/atomlimbs, like you and me, wefundr.com/atomlimbs. And we're already backed by some of the best VCs in the world, obviously yourself, Bo and Al at Rolling Fun. It's just a joy to work with you guys all the time, but also Moai Capital, J4 Ventures, Trevor Blackwell, the co-founder of Y Combinator, is one of our angel backers. So we try to open these crowd rounds as often as we can because I just think that's part of the story of what we're doing. We're trying to do this in a different way, build a company for everyone. And then the third is certainly, for anyone who works in the media who's excited by what we're doing, I think that there's nothing better they could do than send me an email, just TylerHayes@atomblimbs.com and come by and play with the toys here in Palo Alto. 

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's an incredible story to tell. I can't wait to see more of them get out there, and man, when we see these first things, the first arms hit the market and people start to see them out in the real world, it's going to be a really incredible day. 

Tyler Hayes: I don't know what that first thing has to be, but is it like two people with arms cheersing with a beer? I'm not really sure, like what's that, the first one out there, I don't know. Taking ideas, give me your feedback.

Eric Jorgenson: That should be a question on the waitlist, it's like what's the first thing you'll do?

Tyler Hayes: Totally, yeah, exactly. Well, we'll start asking that and I'll be sure to put your email in that field so that all the feedback goes directly to you.

Eric Jorgenson: I would love it. And then we just send all the perverts straight to the back of the line. We will sort them out right away.

Tyler Hayes: Perverts. What are you talking about? There's no perverts signed up. Oh my God. Yeah, that's a whole other podcast. We'll do that one. That's the Smart Friends After Dark episode. 

Eric Jorgenson: I can't wait to record that one. Record that one and never let anyone else hear it ever. 

Tyler Hayes: Just fall asleep listening to it. 

Eric Jorgenson: Perfect. Tyler, man, I appreciate you dedicating your life and your effort and your hard work to this mission and setting such an amazing example for other founders, for other entrepreneurs, and for spending some time fucking around with me today. It's been a pleasure. 

Tyler Hayes: Yeah, fucking around, fucking up. Sure. Hey, likewise, Eric. I appreciate it. Likewise for everything you're doing. It's a lot of fun. 

Eric Jorgenson: It is a lot of fun. Join us. Join us on the frontier of fuck aroundary and technology. It's never been more fun. It's only going to get crazier. 

Tyler Hayes: See, you're just spitting out great branding right now. Smart Friends Fuck Around should be your in-person event series. 

Eric Jorgenson: Oh yeah, that'll get misinterpreted. 

Tyler Hayes: Okay, withdrawn. Yep. Fair point. Okay, we're going to workshop that one. Thanks for having me. It's great. It's always such a joy talking to you, man. I appreciate it.

Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, you will love some of the most recent ones. Number 34 with Josh Storrs Hall, the author of Where's My Flying Car?, that book we mentioned a few times. I also have one in there two episodes earlier, I think it's 32, with my favorite highlights and notes from that book. That was just a solo cast. More recently, if you liked this, you would probably love Eli Dourado and Ethan Loosbrock on Next-Gen Batteries. That's episode number 66. And Matt Loszak of Aalo Atomics, I believe that's 67 or 68. You can always sign up for the Smart Friends email newsletter at ejorgenson.com. You can invest with me and my partners through Rolling Fun in companies like Atom Limbs. Links to both are in the show notes below. To support the show, please text this episode to a friend or co-worker you think would enjoy it. If you know anyone suffering from limb loss, please send this to them. I imagine it might change their life. Every episode you listen to, every good idea you learn, and every new friend you make brings us one step closer to utopia. So thank you for listening, and I'll see you next time.

TechEric JorgensonTechnology, InvestingComment