It is time to talk about robotic body parts.

Connor Glass, this week’s guest, has a company called Phantom Neuro, and it makes a human machine interface. By this, we mean a computing device that gets implanted in your body and lets you control a robotic limb with your mind.

The first people using this technology are amputees. If, for example, you’ve lost your arm, you can get outfitted with a robotic prosthetic coupled with Phantom’s implant and then make your prosthetic move by thinking about what you’d like to do with it.

Phantom’s technology competes in places with implants from the likes of Neuralink and Synchron. The big difference is that nothing needs to be implanted in the patient’s brain. Phantom’s implant goes near the site of the amputation and links the robotic prosthetic with motor neurons to convey signals back and forth from the brain. It’s a simpler, faster surgery.

Where this technology is heading in the future is another story. Glass can see a day when humans have elective amputations to become, well, cyborgs.

We get into this weird and possibly wonderful future on the episode, along with Glass’s backstory and much more detail on how Phantom’s implant works.

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