Uncovering China's Secret War for Athlete Brainwaves (PTFO Vault)

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. I believe in training the brain, but you gotta be careful who you do it with. Right after this ad. I'm trying to figure out if you can make the thing light up on your head. There's some button that can make it light up, though. I don't know if I charged it. Oh, wait. The lighting will play. Oh, f***. There it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, boom. Now we're talking. I do want to begin by acknowledging what people on YouTube are seeing, but listeners may not discern, which is that I am wearing a very weird electronic headband. Also, I'm sitting across from returning PTFL correspondent Sam Koppelman, the publisher of Hunter Brook Media, who was last seen helping us investigate billionaire Phoenix Suns owner and mortgage king Matt Ishbia. We tried to warn the Phoenix Suns fans. I feel like we did a pretty good job warning everybody of the dystopian future that was also to come for the Phoenix Suns and the NBA. 100%. It was like, if you like how Matt Ishbia is running his mortgage company, you're going to love how he's going to run your favorite basketball team. I wish we could just spend another hour talking about mortgages and the Phoenix Suns. But there is another dystopian future I need to acknowledge. It's the one that was promised to us by comic books, by sci-fi movies that we both, that all of us sort of inhaled growing up because now, Sam, we got robots. We have humans just actively falling in love with artificial intelligence. And we also have a sporting event that happened just last month in August that was effectively ignored by my very serious colleagues in sports media here in America, despite the fact that it looked like this. This is not your average sports tournament. At what is billed as the first ever World Humanoid Robot Games, the athletes come in all shapes, sizes and structure to compete in events ranging from running to kickboxing to soccer. For three days, human handlers from 16 countries are putting machines through the motions to show the potential of embodied AI as well as its limitations. It isn't about winning or losing, but it's a way to trial the robots in agility, endurance, and battery life. I mean, those robots were like throwing punches and like slowly kicking soccer balls like toddlers. A hundred percent. I mean, to be clear, the humanoid robot games looked kind of ridiculous. But what's important to understand is that what you saw broadcast in that tournament was just the early days, the Model T equivalent of these robots. I mean, I hope so, because for the record, the first ever World Humanoid Robot Games, which was allegedly not about winning or losing as that kind culture warrior of a broadcaster, apparently. Participation trophies for all of the human. Orange slice, robot orange slices for all the robots. That whole event was dominated, actually, by one company, by this Chinese robotics company named Unitree, because all those robots that didn't look like they know ball got apparently blown out by the Michael Phelps of robots. They won 11 medals, they set multiple records, which apparently are a thing we're tracking down. And this gets to the part of the story that we spent six months investigating at Hunterbrook, which is that China is working on pairing this humanoid robotics technology with something called brain-computer interfaces. Yes. BCI. And so the Cold War had the nuclear arms race. The 60s had the race to the moon. Today, China and the US are locked in a battle over who can master the human brain itself. And I think that big. Big headline does need a little more explanation because I get that, like, it's robots and AI everywhere, but the brain, how do they want to master and win the brain? You've probably seen Elon Musk with the Neuralink where it can help paraplegics walk. There's all sorts of good, positive use cases for this technology. Inspirational, like, I think of that story earlier this year where they enabled a quadriplegic from Arizona to control a computer using his brainwaves and he could play chess. He could browse the internet. He could play video games. He could tweet. I think it just became intuitive for me to start imagining the cursor moving. Basically, it was like using the force on a cursor. The thing is, China's prioritizing what it calls cognitive warfare, which is that this technology, as it develops, is going to be able to do things like read your brain, see if you're responding positively or negatively to something you see in the world, catch you if you're lying or disloyal. They're going to hack the human brain, is what you're saying. They're going to hack the human brain. That's the idea. So, this whole technology, which, you know, China's been using for a long time. whole technology, which, you know, China has made a priority, the endgame here, insofar as you can see it, just top line would be what? The endgame would be to be able to understand people's thoughts when they think them without having to wait for those people to share those thoughts in public. Which feels useful to a government like China's or ours, frankly. Absolutely. And then there's one other thing that the government seems excited about using brain control interface technology for, and it's pairing this technology with the humanoid robots. The ones we just saw. Correct. To create what the Chinese Communist Party has called super soldiers. The super soldier, to me, I grew up, Sam, knowing that Captain America was the original super soldier, right? But when I think of the American side of the space race, I do think of Neuralink. I do think of Elon. In America, you've heard of, but they're not the only major player. Just like China, the U.S. government is investing heavily in brain computer interface technology. It's a technological and a military imperative. There's companies like Synchron that's partnered with Apple. And then just last month in August, there was this Bloomberg story about how there's a big American BCI company that was founded at Harvard in 2015 and is now, quote, aiming to compete with Elon Musk's Neuralink. And so this American company, I want to say that the name of it, it just feels optimized in the same way that Netflix has that show about NFL quarterbacks that they just called Quarterback. Correct. Yes. Neuralink's American-born rival startup is named BrainCo. Which is perfect. According to Bloomberg, BrainCo is in talks to secure roughly $100 million in pre-IPO financing at a valuation of more than $1.3 billion. In part because of the weird electronic headband that you're wearing right now. This headband, which is called the Focus Com and is in fact available for the low, low price of $279.99 online, is studded, as you were alluding to, with these electrodes that have been reading my brainwaves while podcasting here through my skin, as a commercial helpfully explains. It's time to change your mind. Now there's a wearable that can help train your brain for a better focus and a calmer mind. Introducing Focus Com. Focus Com uses EEG technology to detect and analyze the activity in your brain while proprietary algorithms translate those signals into your Focus Com score. In the app, you'll practice raising your Focus Com score and keeping it high while staying alert and focused. You'll see your progress week by week as your brain gets stronger, more consistently relaxed. At work. Yeah, I just feel very consistently relaxed right now with you in studio. Okay, well, I'm sorry, because the next thing is probably going to ruin that moment of zen. The reason I reached out to you to collaborate on this investigation is that there's something that BrainCo doesn't want anyone in America to know. Because yes, the story of BrainCo is that it was founded out of Harvard by a Harvard PhD slash professor who taught a course on brain computer interface technology. And it even had the dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education as an advisor. Yes. But according to documents that Hunterbrook Media has obtained, BrainCo itself has been funded for almost a decade by entities linked directly to the Chinese Communist Party. Yes. And in recent years, BrainCo has largely shut down its U.S. operation, moved to China, where it's now going public at that $1.3 billion valuation. And it has quietly become one of the most important companies in the world to the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party. Which would seem to have an important bit of context, given everything that we just said at the top of the show. Correct. An American company with years of research from Harvard and MIT scientists is now on China's team in the next space race. And as much as people listening might be thinking, what are these two assholes going on about? Why are they the only two people who care about this thing? On some level, I should point out here that in April of 2025, three prominent U.S. senators happened to publish a letter with the goal, of warning America about what they called the rapid development and commercialization of brain computer interface technologies. The senators wrote, quote, "The risks posed by the exploitation of sensitive neural data are not hypothetical. The Department of Commerce has determined that Chinese companies are using biotechnology to support military end uses, including, quote, purported brain control weaponry." End quote. Brain control weaponry. Yeah. Chill cat. casual stuff. Normal sports podcast material. And yes, according to the Chinese government's own website, quote, the country seeks to achieve key technological breakthroughs in the industry by 2027. Which also brings us back around to, yes, those now increasingly terrifying humanoid athlete robots that were running around and punching stuff. But also a question that I think is worth asking, which is, what is the source of the neural data that everybody is warning about that the government of China is apparently quite interested in? Pablo, this might be the most insane part of the story. What we are reporting today, a portion of that neural data has been secretly harvested from the unwitting brains of some of the greatest athletes in the world. Which is. Which is why, clearly, I decided to join you in investigating this story. And also why I think it's probably time for me to take this headband off. Probably a good idea. Yeah, just a little bit safer if it's just on the table over there. So, Sam, I want to establish that this headband that I was just wearing, called the Focus Com, is not just like a random thing. It is actually incredibly popular in the world of sports because it enables athletes to track their brainwaves for performance reasons, right? You can see when you're calm, when you're stressed, you can get in the zone, is what the whole advertising around this is. The thing. The thing about the power users of this quietly Chinese government-backed device that I think people need to know here is that these aren't just like any athletes. We're talking about Italy's famously focused Yannick Sinner, who trains with the Focus Com. We're talking about the former number one women's tennis player in the world, Iga Swiatek, who is using it every day. The number one alpine skier of all time, American gold medalist Michaela Schifrin, who uses it, as also a bunch of English Premier League soccer players do. The Focus Com website also says it's currently used by, quote, over 20 NCAA teams, including the University of Kentucky, in addition to, quote, professional and Olympic organizations across every major sport. U.S. weightlifting is a partner. USA bobsled. Skeleton is a partner. Yes, you can actually see some of these logos. The USA weightlifting logo is on the box of the headband that I took off. And if anybody is wondering. Why, at this point, all these athletes believe in this connection between brain-computer interface technology and actual athletic results, I do think it's worth hearing from somebody whose Zoom background happens to provide an answer to that question. You see, I got a Lombardi trophy. Not the real one, but it looks just like it. I guess that's me right there in a Bucs uniform. Someone sent me that. I thought that was cool. Action figure. And then I got some of the helmets from the teams I played for. The Giants, the Patriots, San Francisco 49ers, my last team. And all the tags are from Super Bowls I played in from my locker. So, Sam, this is longtime NFL defensive back Logan Ryan, a guy who played 11 seasons in the NFL, won two Super Bowls, as you see those replica trophies indicate, with the Patriots. But what's funny to me is that after Logan Ryan left the Pats, he wound up on the Tennessee Titans. And he is the answer to the question of who's the guy who intercepted the last pass that Tom Brady would ever throw at a Patriots uniform. And after that, by the way, Logan Ryan became a Tampa Bay Buck. And yet another piece of memorabilia happened to enter his possession. I picked off Aaron Rodgers when I was on the Bucs, and that completed my run of picking off Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and Aaron Rodgers. So I finished my quest of picking off all the goats of my era. So that's what the Bucs season was for. He has like a wall in his home with like the heads of the greatest quarterbacks. Yes, everybody he has slain. And I was just thinking that you interviewed Logan Ryan because it was another way to rub something into Bill Belichick. Yes, I'm surrounding the Belichick of journalistic ways. But speaking of this question of like, okay, the invasiveness around these characters, I should point out that Logan Ryan says he did all this stuff because of this device that read his brain. And he trusted it so much, actually, that he signed up to personally endorse the Focuscom and even appeared in a commercial for it in 2022. Well, how I got introduced to it to start is I would use yoga as part of my recovery. And one of the yoga instructors that I was working with was also talking about breath work. So I started doing breath work with her. Then she introduced me to a device that you put on your head and it's an app you play on your phone and you would play a race car game. And the more that you were in the right breathing and the right mental space, the faster your car would go. And the harder you tried, the slower it would go. And it made me realize that we can't just will everything to happen. So when I perform on the field, I could better off getting a flow state because any athlete, you know the story when they're in the zone or it's the ninth inning, Michael Jordan and LeBron, their pulse is like this and everyone else is going crazy. They keep themselves in a calm flow state. So when the two minute happened or the last drive against Tom Brady is happening, I'm not freaking out like some players, like most are. What was the name of the company that you partnered with? I think they changed. I think they changed names. I got a, I don't want to misquote it. Let me, let me get back to you on it. The bigger company's name is BrainCo. Okay. So this is probably where we should properly introduce BrainCo and its founder, Han Bi-Cheng. Yes. Cause I was long gone at Harvard when BrainCo was being founded by that guy in 2015, but you were actually on campus, I believe. I was, I was, I think we might've been in slightly different crowds, but I was there when he was He was studying neuroscience and he founded BrainCo a year before Elon Musk even started Neuralink. Right. And by 2017, Han Bi-Cheng was being honored by MIT Technology Review as one of their top innovators under 35. And the headline for MIT Technology Review read, quote, an inventor that brings brain machine interface out of science fiction into reality, end quote. Okay. So Elon and Neuralink were focused on brain implants, where you've got to drill a hole into someone's head. Into your skull. To make it work. Han Bi-Cheng set up an office in sunny Somerville, Massachusetts. Where I used to get drunk in college. A hundred percent. And he built a gentler, more consumer-friendly device that you just wear on top of your head. And he also created a robot prosthetic hand operated with that same handband technology that would go on to be named one of Time Magazine's 100 Best Innovations of 2019. And as the host of one of Time Magazine's 100 Best Podcasts of All Time, I can tell you that I too trust the gentle touch of this robotic hand. Absolutely. And you are not alone. Plenty of academics got on board with BrainCo as well. As I mentioned, BrainCo's advisor was the dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, who went on to become the president of the University of Virginia. According to an interview with Bi-Cheng in Chinese media, he said, quote, most of our core teams are from Harvard University and the MIT Brain Science Center. Very legit places. And a Harvard grad named Max Nuland is who became the president of BrainCo USA. He was working as a research scientist at the company when BrainCo reportedly announced its seed funding round of $5 million in 2016. Which is a very American success story. A hundred percent. Except that Hunterbrook had a reporter in Taiwan dig into the corporate records on who actually invested millions of dollars into BrainCo. And what we found was that BrainCo has been repeatedly financed by Chinese state-owned enterprises, including an entity inside China Electronics Corporation, which is a conglomerate that the U.S. Defense Department has sanctioned. And so how was the Chinese government hiding their investment then? Well, actually, by 2024, we found that the Chinese government was just straight up investing tens of millions of dollars directly into BrainCo. And I think this would help explain why the biggest initial market, the biggest user base, was not hyper-competitive pro-athletes, but something I think that is arguably even more competitive. That's right. It was the Chinese education system, as this 2019 report from the Wall Street Journal explains. For this fifth-grade class, the day begins with putting on a brain wave-sensing gadget. The device is made in China and has three electrodes, two behind the ears and one on the forehead. These sensors pick up electrical signals sent by neurons in the brain. The neural data is then sent in real time to the teacher's computer. So while students are solving math problems, a teacher can quickly find out who's paying attention and who's not. I just got to say that that video, classrooms of kids wearing the headband that Logan Ryan and and I apparently both share in common. It's f***ing crazy looking. It's absolutely insane. There was a ton of backlash, even in China. Parents were like, I do not want the Chinese Communist Party collecting data on how well my kids are paying attention in class. It actually got some coverage here in the United States too. And then between like 2020 and 2023, there was this weird era in BrainCo's history where they kind of like stopped sending out press releases. They weren't doing as many interviews. They began to lurk in the shadows a little bit. The block got hot, even in China. Even in China, people were like, what the hell is this s***? Yeah, which raises questions about how the American wing of the business was handling this. Badly. We actually spoke to a former high-level BrainCo exec who told me that almost the entire team in Somerville was laid off by like 2024 in the first couple months. Almost nobody was coming into the office. We actually had a reporter go visit BrainCo's offices three different times. We never saw more than two people. That guy, Max Newlin, who was the president of BrainCo in the United States, he resigned. And he was the same guy who was always hyping BrainCo up. Okay, so the president of the company in America is gone. And meanwhile, the question that I think is really important to ask at this point in the story is what access does the Chinese government have to what, what was harvested from the brains of all of these Chinese schoolchildren in all of these classrooms? Such an important question. And here is where we've got to make clear that in China, it's not like optional to share information and data with the government. They actually have a national intelligence law that requires Chinese companies to cooperate with intelligence services when requested. This, you may remember, is why TikTok was almost banned in the United States. Yes. But the thing is like, whereas TikTok knows your preferences for which dances, and cooking recipes, and memes you want to watch, BrainCo has data on your actual brainwaves. Which sounds extraordinarily valuable to said government to the point where, yeah, how do they handle the fact that it's a flop? Right. So during this period of time when BrainCo was laying low in the U.S., waiting for the school controversy to pass, the Chinese government's interest in BrainCo's data doesn't seem ever to have wavered. In fact, BrainCo is now being listed as one of the six little dragons. The six dragons is what people now call a cluster of elite startups here. China's rising stars in gaming, robotics, AI, and neurotech, all working around the clock to beat Silicon Valley at its own game. These are the six tech firms in the city of Hangzhou that receive special government support, favorable loans, and integration into China's broader technology ecosystem. The most prominent being DeepSeek, that little-known startup that upended the AI world in January with its low-cost chatbot. And there are more. Unitary Robotics is seen here as having the potential to do for China's robotics sector what DeepSeek did in AI. They make humanoid and quadruped robots like G1EDU that can dance to its own beat and pack a decent punch if that's what you want your humanoid to do. This is the same gold medal-winning technology from the world humanoid robot games that we started with. Yes, that is robot Michael Phelps. And that company, Unitary, you're probably not surprised to learn at this point, is actually officially partnered with BrainCo, which we know in part because on Unitary's own website, the company outlines how its robots can be equipped with BrainCo's dexterous hand, the one from Time magazine, which is now being showcased at robotics conventions where the robots can be equipped and they're not being used to help quadriplegics walk or tweet. They're being mounted onto full humanoid robots capable of neural control. Which is, to just spell it out, the ability for people to control with their brains a robot army of the future. Correct. And of course, the other reason we know about BrainCo's partnership with Unitary is that Hunterbrook Media looked under the hood of Unitary's source code and we found that they actually have an integration with BrainCo's prosthetics right in their code base. And by the way, while you were sniffing around the code base of this robotics company, what the U.S. government was doing, what the U.S. House of Representatives in particular was doing in May of this year was send a letter of their own warning about Unitary and their, quote, well-documented ties to the Chinese military and the CCP. Which is probably a good time to mention that BrainCo's offices in Hangzhou, not to be confused with the Somerville offices, they're right next to Unitary's. And that office has hosted visits to them from the Chinese premier, the CCP's number two guy after President Xi, as well as their minister of science and technology. We've also seen photos and videos of BrainCo's CEO, Han Bi-chang, being visited by the chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Which is? A Beijing-installed figure known for crushing democratic protest. And what we're seeing here just in this video is another bit of tape. It's a guy who lost both hands using two of those BrainCo robotic arms to draw calligraphy, to shake hands. Another guy is playing the piano, Sam, to speak to the dexterousness of the robot arm. This is, from a pure, like, science perspective, objectively incredible. It's f***ing sick. It's an unbelievable invention. And it makes complete sense why China and the United States care so much about this technology. So, if you're wondering here, as Sam and I were, how this entire company just got swiped out from under the noses of BrainCo's U.S. leadership team, we tried tracking down James Ryan, the former Harvard dean and subsequently the president of the University of Virginia, to ask him this very question. And in an interview with Hunter Brook Media, James Ryan confirmed that he had been an advisor to BrainCo and he joined BrainCo because he knew Max Nuland, the since-resigned BrainCo president, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. But in 2023, Ryan said, this is after the Chinese school children scandal we mentioned, and around that time when BrainCo went dark and stopped sending out press releases, he officially stepped down from his advisory role at BrainCo, citing his sparse experience helping out the company. Now, when asked directly about BrainCo's links to the Chinese government, James Ryan told us that he didn't know anything about that. And when told that BrainCo had plans to IPO, Ryan said that he would divest from the company entirely. Quote, "I am disturbed and saddened to hear this and very disappointed, obviously." End quote. In fact, as a U.S. college administrator, Ryan told us that he had been briefed on attempts by the Chinese government to steal intellectual property from American universities. He said he even spoke to Max Nuland about that. And what Nuland told him, plainly, according to Ryan, quote, "We are not connected to the Chinese government." End quote. Now, what Ryan tells us is this, quote, "I truly hope Max didn't know." Max Nuland did not respond to repeated requests for comment. And that raised the question, that raised an even bigger unsolved question for us and the American government about how exactly BrainCo pivoted and why its business is currently booming in China. Well, a big part of it is, of course, the data that they're collecting, which brings us back to BrainCo's roster of some of the world's greatest athletes. Yes, one of whom I believe we left, in the middle of our Zoom call. And yeah, I should probably tell American BrainCo spokesman and two-time Super Bowl-winning defensive back, Logan Ryan, some things that I have learned after the break. In order to understand how BrainCo's role in the world of sports is, in order to understand how BrainCo's role in the world of sports is, pivoted from classrooms full of tiny Chinese schoolchildren with Focuscom headsets, we had to call somebody who was not Chinese and not American, and I believe may well be the most Italian person that I've ever met. If you want to make a good carbonara, you need to have on the table all the ingredients. If you don't have all the ingredients, okay, the carbonara will not be perfect. So an atlet, a top atlet, is like the ingredient on the table before to be cooked, okay? Totally. Yeah, I just, I love him. I love this man, despite everything that we're about to get into with him, honestly. He's amazing, especially because carbonara only has like five ingredients, and so it's clear he takes each of them very seriously. Yeah. Yes, the spice level is important. You need kick in your carbonara, and don't let the egg get scrambled. Pro tip. My name is Riccardo Cecchini. I am a medical doctor specialized in sport medicine. I live in Italy. In this moment, I am in my facility, Formula Medicine facility, which is in Tuscany, in Viareggio, a little town on the beach. Very nice place for summertime. So I would recommend to join me as soon as you can because here now, the weather is perfect. I'm basically ready to go move. I know. I feel like I can expense that. Into his house. Yeah, no, 100%. We can expense the trip to Tuscany, to a beach town I didn't know was even possible in the Italian countryside. But that is, of course, Dr. Riccardo Ceccarelli, who, beyond being a volunteer ambassador for the Board of Tourism in Tuscany, is the CEO and founder of a company called Formula Medicine. And Formula Medicine has been supporting F1 drivers in mental and physical training for more than 15 years. Yes, their logo, it's on the boxes of these devices that are on the table. You may recall, Sam, how Logan Ryan earlier was talking about how he was playing that Focus Com game on his phone where you calm down and the virtual race car goes faster. Dr. Ceccarelli, it turns out, has been basically using the BrainCo Focus Com to study the exact same thing for years. Except with actual human race car drivers. Who happen to be the best in the world. And so our innovation was to link BrainCo and a heart rate recorder. Directly implemented inside our tests. So it's not for meditation, for relaxing, but it's just like the heart rate recorder on the treadmill to see how much you activate your brain, your frontal lobe, which is the frontal lobe is the decision maker. But it's the problem of the tennis player before and during a match. The problem is how to control. But how to control not when you are relaxed in a closed room with a silent and they do meditation. The problem is how can I control when I am on the match point, on the tiebreaker. So that is the point. So we train people in and out of the comfort zone. And the tennis thing is also in his comfort zone, personally. Because Dr. Ceccarelli, when I talked to him in July, had actually just gotten back from training the brain of one of his non-F1 clients who was at Wimbledon. No! No! Unbelievable! Winning the tournament because, yeah, you might recall how Yannick Sinner won one of the most impressive matches in the recent history of tennis. Yannick, he had to learn how to cook. This is what we did at the beginning when he was 19, 20, 21. Because he's a very clever guy, he understood. And now he's able to do a good carbonara. And that's it. Yannick Sinner takes his piece of Wimbledon history. What a wonderful match. Notably, Yannick Sinner, closest thing to a robotic tennis player we've seen. The greatest living advertisement for focus and calm. He is like a human humanoid. Yes. But the thing is that, obviously, Dr. Ceccarelli came to BrainCo when Yannick Sinner was just 19. He's been partnered with this company for a very long time. His name is literally on the box. Yes. He is also on the website. When you go, as we did, to order this thing for $279.99, you see the testimony from this guy. He's testifying to the greatness of the focus calm specifically. And he is not shy about how long and how intimate this partnership is. I have to say many thanks to BrainCo because, when we met them, we select different kind of device. And then we saw that this was, for us, the best and more reliable. And so we. Okay, so we knew that he was a BrainCo partner. What we didn't know was which athletes have actually been using the focus calm and giving BrainCo data. But it sounds like the doctor essentially told you everything. Yeah, it was sort of like just hearing him name a bunch of people in his phone that he had also. Studied the brains of. We had here in this gym many, many famous, famous athletes. Michela Schifri, Federica Brignone, that won the last world championship on the ski. Paltrinieri, which has been one of the best swimmers in Italy, but also winning gold medal. Fencer winning gold medal in the Olympic Games. We are already working with. Two football players in Manchester City. But there is like this other missing part of this, which is, okay, here's this Rolodex of athletes that you've been studying, working with, who've entrusted their careers, their minds to you. And they are very thankful because it seems to have, in their view, really worked. But in terms of like where the data goes, right? This is a technology story as well. How that data is secured, whether it's encrypted, is it stored on a hard drive, is it stored on a cloud somewhere? It all made me think of how the CCP, had announced, as previously mentioned, that there were going to be some key technological breakthroughs in the industry by 2027. And I wanted to know, how do you assure privacy? And how do you work on stuff like making sure that it stays protected? All the brainwave data. That is a very important question. And I think that was one of our, I don't say problem, but you know, That is a very important question. And I think that was one of our, I don't say problem, but you know, when you start the research, like we did many years ago, it was a different age. But more, this system is getting out of our limited number of persons. We discovered that it was important to have a very important privacy protection. So we did, obviously, when BrainCo gave us, as the company, decay, these kind of things, everything has to be protected and private. But now we have a legal team that is working together with our technicians to develop a system that they are encrypted, that they are protected. That's insane. Okay, so a couple things on that. So there's that. So one, sounds like the privacy protections, he says, are very important to implement. They don't exist yet, even though he's been working with BrainCo since 2019. Yeah. And Pablo, we bought BrainCo devices, and we looked at their privacy policy, and it's not great, Bob. And so I just got to jump in here to point out that we, of course, reached out for official comment from BrainCo. But not before finding out that BrainCo and the Focus Commons data privacy policy is kind of like untangling a nest. A nest of Christmas lights. Seemingly by design. For instance, if you go to the BrainCo website, its privacy policy is littered with references to data collection. It reads, in part, quote, We collect data from any given person using our devices and applications, including people under the age of 18. End quote. And included in the breakdown of data types collected, EEG raw data is listed as provided and managed. But when reached at long last for official comment, what BrainCo told PTOFO and Hunterbrook Media on September 4th, 2025, is this, quote, We don't share user data with anyone. EEG data received from the BrainCo headband is transmitted to the Focus Commons application. All EEG data remains in the Focus Commons application within the user's smart device and is purged from the application at the conclusion of each use. All accusations about data collection and sharing are false. End quote. And in fact, when you now visit the privacy policy page for Focus Commons specifically, it mirrors this exact language that we got. It says that, quote, Neither EEG nor IMU raw data is transmitted to BrainCo servers. End quote. But it is also worth noting here that the privacy policy page says it was updated to version 2.0 on September 7th, 2025, which is three days after they issued their response, And also that, according to the Internet Archive, which saves earlier cached versions of webpages, that specific language did not exist in version 1.0 of the policy earlier this year. But maybe even more revealing is the fact that Sam and the reporting team at Hunterbrook Media looked under the hood of the BrainCo open source code on GitHub. And what they found is that BrainCo was letting third-party developers access the code. And they let those third-party developers access brain data of users wearing the Focus headbands. This is, quote, user brainwave data, attention data, et cetera. And they let those third-party developers access it, quote, every half second, which is a far cry from its claimed local-only storage policy. All of which brings us back to sports and athletes' brains. So, this is where we end up. This is where I do think it's just worth us grounding this in reality because as much as this is very i mean truly just like a parody on some level of itself this is what the big data era of sports is like we are the children of moneyball sam and so brain co is not a story about the future this is the story of right now this is a story of who gets access to your increasingly personal biometric data which a guy like logan ryan incidentally is otherwise already pretty aware of as athletes we wear a lot of wearables we wear a whoop and we wear a thing to show how fast we run and there's a lot of times where you know the team would say it's optional but everyone has to kind of wear it and i would say well if i'm 33 and you realize i'm not running as fast every practice you how how are you using that data right is that gonna lead to my release there is one last thing that sort of unites all of this and this is where i'm like i just wonder if you were ever told or learned anything about this before this interview because the last bit of information which we found really interesting and kind of crazy is that if you get into some of the open-ended data and you're like oh my god i'm not running as fast as i used to i'm not running as fast as i used to open-ended data and you're like oh my god i'm not running as fast as i used to code apparently this is the github open source code of brain co what they're doing is that they're collecting the brain data of users every half a second and in china companies are obligated to send the data they collect to the government and and the last last thing to just close the circle is that brain co has chinese investment from the ccp they're funded by chinese entities sanctioned by the u.s government with direct ties to the military and i'm like did logan know any of this when he decided to like i'm gonna try and use this to improve my football career yeah no absolutely not you know i had no idea about that i mean this is i used them a lot in like 2020 you know i can't say robots and ai wasn't coming but you know and i just feel obliged sam to point out that i do believe logan ryan i i truly believe that he did not know anything about this when he signed up to be a spokesperson no brain code does not make this right and so when logan and by the way i proceed to tell him about so much of what we just talked about in this episode um you know about brain co founder han bi chang about robot humanoid super soldiers the letter from the u.s senators private neural data all that on and on um it it just built towards this question that i now have to admit is pretty predictable is that something you wish you had known yeah absolutely you know and the way it was presented to me obviously is not that way so i'm not going to be able to say that i'm not going to be able to say that i'm not you you try to accept to be to get better in your field and you you're you're willing to do what it takes legally obviously to get better at your craft and i believe in training the brain uh but you got to be careful who you do it with you got to make sure you you're you do your research and you're vetted and um like i said nobody on my team could even have thought this is a possibility but this is the world we live in nowadays with all this type of ai and technology that who knows what the information is going to be and i'm not going to be able to say that we're putting in what that could be used for and obviously we need a right to to protect ourselves from that so i don't know how personalized it is to me i don't know if they're able to track my thoughts or something with that but that that's all pretty alarming to me and um definitely need to look into that he is calm still in all of his assessments of this works i mean well but except for after the zoom interview because um and i want to be just fair to everybody involved i think it's worth me pointing this out on their behalf logan ryan and his understandably panicked pr person who was not on the zoom call uh but heard about the zoom call from her client uh they reached out to us here at pablo tory finds out to reiterate how just unbelievably freaked out logan uh was once he sort of realized what this all implied yeah totally understandable yeah and i wanted to help him look into that i want to help figure out okay how real are these concerns because as per the tiktok example we all are giving our data to some foreign government in the cloud on some level it feels like but is this data actually going to the chinese government and are they going to act upon that is a question that i had for our old friend in tuscany the best athletes that you've trained whether it's yannick sinner charlotte claire michaela schifrin manchester city i mean just an incredible roster do you think it's possible that that china would use those brainwaves to train their athletes that they might get better athletes because of their association with branco yes absolutely yes absolutely yes we are still in um in uh in contact with them now because they did also a device which is more wearable and that's we can use in different experiment with the aviation with the military because obviously the device has to be wearable and comfortable so is a is a synergy is a pro is a project that is uh running since many years and uh and obviously branco was really really uh supporting us sam i don't think that's gonna make logan ryan feel consistently relaxed i do not think it will because it sounds like the doctor just confirmed not only that the chinese government might be using these brainwaves but they might be using them for military purposes and so this is where i should note that military purposes can mean a lot of things there is a difference between focus com eeg data for instance training human soldiers to perform better in combat scenarios and using brainwave data to control the robotic limbs of super soldiers but at the same time honestly in the hands of a foreign adversary both not great meanwhile in their response to our detailed questions branco said we have no collaboration of any kind with any military in any country to the best of our knowledge our technology is not being used for any military purposes we have implemented stringent compliance measures that explicitly require our customers not to use or transfer our technology for prohibited end uses or to prohibited end users including military applications end quote branco also added somewhat amazingly quote to emphasize we develop and provide dexterous hands for humanoid robots with no affiliation with whatsoever to the military our technology is exclusively applied in the fields of embodied intelligence and dexterous manipulation end quote and yet that's not even the most bizarre exchange that sam and i experienced while we were trying to get an actual interview with brainco's founder han bi chang for this story because that exchange that bizarre exchange occurred over text message and this one was from a burner number according to the open source intelligence analysts on our team and pablo if you would indulge me i would just like to read these texts out loud would you be the gray text and i'll be the green probably best that way um okay 8 50 p.m hello this brainco very smart company hello three exclamation points my response 10 21 a.m tried calling you always happy to talk brainco but seems you called me from a burner try me whenever you 'd like to talk brainco but seems you called me from a burner try me whenever you want to 129 p.m i brain co i respond immediately totally who are you got impatient five minutes later is this dr han 4 39 p.m yes dr han and then like i'm on an episode of catfish how can i confirm that you're really dr han you ask me if i am dr han i say yes thumbs up emoji Gangnam style Peace sign emoji Ha ha ha Can we video chat? We should talk 6.56pm Yes, it is 7am in China Chinese flag emoji Eye free at my lunch Deal 1am my time 1pm yours What email should I send a Zoom invite to? 9.08pm Unsubscribe I have to admit it kind of hurt my feelings I mean that's a great burn just at the end of a long text message exchange just being like unsubscribe Horrifying This is, by the way, like worrisome in a different way because the whole question underlying that text exchange is a simple one Are you being scammed? And now the question I think we should ask as we get close to the end of this episode is Is this headband really what this very smart company says it is? Is this thing also a scam? Look, at this point in my life, Sam I've done enough investigative journalism and just buying of stuff that I tend to see promises from unicorn tech founders through the lens of is this a scam? And we haven't episode in which we've established that this technology is backed by the Chinese Communist Party, which is competing in a brain race with America and all this other stuff. And so it's fair to wonder whether all of this is also on some level just propaganda. Good question. So the first thing to note on this front is that I hired a Harvard Crimson reporter to fact check Dr. Han Bi-Chang's brain co-origin story. Which is a brilliant move to just outsource it to a younger, hungrier person. 100%. And what we found out is that first, Dr. Han Bi-Chang is a doctor in the sense that Julius Irving is a doctor, which is to say not actually a doctor. According to the Harvard registrar, he never finished his PhD. Which is worrisome. Second, BrainCo was indeed founded out of the Harvard Innovation Lab. But when we spoke to the iLab, they told us that they tell every company not to use the iLab's branding on any of their products. And that's why we're memorabilia. BrainCo has it basically everywhere. Yeah. And third, Han Bi-Chang likes to claim that he taught at Harvard, specifically a course on brain computer interface technology. He actually once told an interviewer that he recruited students to the class by telling them it could teach couples to read each other's minds. But the reality, according to an email we were sent by the course's actual professor, is that Dr. Han was a teaching assistant for like one semester. And he swears that the course was never branded as a way to help you read your boyfriend's mind. Right. And so this question, though, this now through line of, is this false advertising? It takes us to a question that I don't think has ever been asked before in human history. But was Logan Ryan, longtime NFL defensive back, and President Xi Jinping, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, both misled by BrainCo founder Han Bi-Chang? So look, there are smart people who disagree on this. We spoke to one former technical leader at BrainCo and a few experts on neuroscience. And some of them think that headbands like the ones BrainCo sells don't do much. They collect a lot of information, but it's hard to parse. They compare it to standing outside of a stadium and trying to hear individual conversations. You can hear cheers, but it's not like you can understand what everyone's saying. Right. And this is sort of like the trade-off. Neuralink, Elon, they're drilling holes into skulls and implanting stuff, BrainCo is sitting at the top of my brow on my skin and is therefore ostensibly less precise. That's correct. But we also took our findings to Nita Farahani, a professor at Duke of Law and Philosophy. An actual professor. Who literally wrote the book on BCI. Professor Farahani was appointed by President Obama to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She has a particular expertise in cognitive warfare. And she warned me that China technologically, has come a very long way when it comes to mining the brain through headbands like the FocusCom. It's probably useful to look at the broader context of a lot of information that's come out about China's investments in brain-computer interface more recently. Which then makes you think, okay, well, why is China investing so significantly into brain-computer interface devices? Clearly, it has some military component to it, some dual-use component to it. So I asked her, where does BrainCo come into all this? And what she said is that maybe BrainCo is a way for China to, quote, collect citizen and athlete data by greenwashing a company claiming it's a Harvard and MIT institution to intentionally hide from the consumer what data has been collected, where it's going, and who's behind it. And maybe BrainCo is part of the pathway either to distribute it internationally and be able to collect biometrics from individuals in other places, and or to be able to develop brain interface technology that is using these devices to be able to share commands, for example, within the military, or to be able to communicate with a device in an incredibly secure and very difficult-to-intercept manner. And this reminds me of the conversation with Logan Ryan, where he had to jog his memory to remember what company he was the spokesman for, actually. Because BrainCo, if we go back to the box on the table, is not on the Focus.com box anywhere. It's not even on the Focus.com website. And by the way, like Dr. Ceccarelli's name, also, I just realized this, happens to be misspelled. Missing a couple of letters there and Ceccarelli. But at this point, I basically digress. An article in Nature Communications recently came out of a bunch of Chinese-based researchers who were at one of the state universities that has. significant investment from China in it as well. And it proposes an incredibly secure mechanism of trying to safeguard what goes from brain signals to a device. And they were doing it based on a wearable device. And the level of security that they were developing is far beyond what you would need for financial transactions, even far beyond what's applied, for example, to classified documents. Yeah, I mean, the whole thing with BrainCo is it's always a question of whether this is actually this incredible company that is instrumental to the Chinese Communist Party, or whether they're a bunch of incompetent students who weren't even really doctors, who can't even spell the doctor's name right on their box. And so I asked Professor Farahani, is all of this technology BS? Are those neuroscientists right, who say that it's kind of like trying to listen to individual conversations standing outside of a stadium? And what she told me was that it's not just a technology, it's a technology that's been around for a long time. And what she told me is that initially the data might have seemed kind of worthless. It was always going to be way noisier than the kind of data you get from a device like Neuralink that goes directly inside of your head. But she says that because of the rise of AI, some of the data that BrainCo collects may increasingly become discernible. All of the noise can become signal. And that's because of AI from companies like DeepSeek, which we should remember is another one that's been around for a long time. One of China's little dragons located right next to BrainCo and Unitree. We should plan a trip. Yeah. And in Professor Farahani's mind, BrainCo probably isn't duping China. Because no matter how well it works, she says, it's going to still be a useful tool for an authoritarian regime. So let's take that world where it collects nothing. It's already incredibly oppressive, right? Then you go to the other extreme of like, let's assume a science fiction scenario where like literally everything you're thinking could be decoded. And to be clear, it cannot be from a wearable headset like this. And it's hard to imagine that it ever would be. But there's enough that could be collected where you can do things to prime people in settings like that with information that you can then extract from their brain signals. You know, show them communist imaging. See how they respond to it. Figure out if, you know, their reaction is starting to be, you know, likely to be, you know, a little bit more likely to be the same. Demonstrating by rising up because their anger levels are starting to increase. So as a tool of oppression against already oppressed minorities, it doesn't surprise me. This seems like the, you know, most powerful kind of oppression that you could do and not have to physically harm somebody. And by the way, it is worth noting. Remember those images of BrainCo being used in kind of walked away from it? Well, BrainCo didn't actually stop doing that. Our reporter found a Chinese government contract from 2023. And it showed that the CCP had tapped BrainCo to supply its headbands, not just to any school, but to a special education school in a region called Ningxiahui. Ningxia, for listeners who haven't heard of this place, has surveillance cameras above mosque doors. Religious lessons for children are banned. Worshippers have to swipe government issued cards to enter their places of prayer. Their movements are logged. Their identities are confirmed by facial recognition. And BrainCo, it seems, is part of that surveillance toolkit. Which is to say that, you know, this isn't actually like the whoop wearable device that lots of people have now or the aura ring or anything else. It's something more disturbing. For an athlete, I think it's easy to think that the government has issued a card that says, especially an elite athlete, you hear a lot in any privacy context, somebody saying, well, I don't really care about my privacy because I personally am insulated from the harms of it. And first of all, that's not true for the individual. But second, we also have to start to think about the group effects. Like, what does it do to sports? What does it do to competitive sports? And, you know, more societally focused implications. What if your data is taken and used to discriminate against somebody else, which is how it happens? And so this idea of like, well, it's not going to harm me. And even if my data is used to harm other people, not my problem. I think I'd say it is your problem. It's all of our problem if we become complicit in a system that means that we give up data willingly, knowing that it could be used to harm other people. The use cases and the misuse cases will just become more problematic. But to be very clear about the use case that we started with, which is, you know, athletes and robots, it does seem like the professor here, does not dismiss that out of hand. For the skeptics out there. I think it is very likely that the CCP is using brain data to try to better understand how our athletes perform, to better train for future soldiers, to become part of an overall program that they've been developing around cognitive warfare. Which means that BrainCo might actually be training, you know, like Chinese artificial intelligence with Yannick Sinner's brainwaves. And if you're wondering here whether Yannick Sinner, until very recently, the number one tennis player in the world, responded to our request for comment, the answer to that is no. Same applies to his fellow former number one, Iga Sviantek, as well as all-time number one, Alpine skier Michaela Schifrin, who also trains with Dr. Ceccarelli. But I did get to ask one more question of the NFL player who picked off Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady. What's it going to be like when the Chinese military has an army of Logan Ryans? If they have a Logan Ryan robot come out, they're going to be making some quick decisions, smart decisions out there, I'll tell you that. And so they'll be tough to beat, man. I was pretty sound in my mind back there in a football perspective. So they'll be safe and sound in the middle of the field and figure out how to, we just don't, don't put no Tom Brady's out. Logan Ryan got the best one one time. And I just want to put a pin in that taunt from Logan Ryan for just one more second here, because it does bring us to the end of an episode that connects to a number of topics that we've been recently investigating on this show. From Harvard, to sports washing, to insane athlete endorsement deals, to billion dollar startups. But this particular story is about something so big because this story is about how our most personal and sensitive and valuable data is being compromised so often. And we don't even know it because the norms have already been set and sold by a foreign adversary with our cooperation to enable it. But the thing I found out today at the end, after all of this, after all the super soldiers and neural surveillance and China using American technology against America in a global brain race is I think just a recipe for trash talk of the future. Yeah. You know, the robot that stole my brainwaves is going to kick the ass of the robot that stole your brainwaves. It's a weird time, Pablo. Just a bit of futuristic spice at the end of a very meaty episode. Ending with a real kick. Just like a good carbonara, a wise man might say. This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time. I'll talk to you next time.