Becoming Cyborgs w/ Liviu Babitz

Jan 25

EPISODE #33

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Cyborg Nest’s Liviu Babitz shares his insights into the latest methods for becoming a cyborg, the process behind designing new senses, and how biohacking will change the way we think about human limitations.

Liviu Babitz is co-founder and CEO of Cyborg Nest, the world’s first company to sell intelligently designed senses. He believes more is happening around us than we can actually perceive, so he decided to start trying to grasp some of it. As our lives become increasingly afflicted by artificial intelligence – creating smarter phones, cars, and homes – he decided to make people smarter instead.

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Transcript

Luke Robert Mason: You're listening to the FUTURES Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.

On this episode I speak to the founder of Cyborg Nest, Liviu Babitz.

"It's not about technology. It's not about cyborgs. It's all about curiosity, and it's all about our desire to understand." - Liviu Babitz, excerpt from interview.

Liviu shared his insights into the latest methods for becoming a cyborg, the process behind designing new senses, and how biohacking changes the way we think about human limitations.

You can view a full video version of this version at FUTURES podcast dot net.

Luke Robert Mason: Now, Cyborg Nest is a company whose aim is to radically alter our senses by designing new organs, redesigning our sensory modalities, and allowing us each to individually navigate the world in vastly differentiated ways. It's also one of the first companies to create commercial devices that enable people to become cyborgs. So, Liviu, what is Cyborg Nest, and how does this organisation hope to transform humanity?

Liviu Babitz: So as you said, Cyborg Nest's aim is to enable people to have more senses. The whole idea started when a coin dropped, when we realised that basically, if you think about it, everything that we ever felt, thought or created started from a sensory input.

To put it in another way, we are taught all our lives that our brain is the most important and sophisticated part that we have, but if you think about it, our brain without our senses is exactly like having the most sophisticated computer in existence, but put in a corner of the room - not connected to electricity or connected to the internet. There would be absolutely no input or output. Again, if I take away all your senses one by one, all you're left with is all the memories, thoughts and things that you captured before that. You have absolutely no ability to gather any kind of new input. No more sounds, no more colours, no more touching, no more nothing. The only information that your brain will get is from your internal organs, which we mostly don't have any access to, except pain or itching, or stuff like that.

Then we said, "Okay, so if we have more senses, can we as humans start thinking, creating, feeling, and solving problems from places that we never did before?" That was a big a-ha moment. When that happened, we said, "Well, we'll just have to go for it."

Mason: That's one of the fascinating things about Cyborg Nest. You're using the preexisting senses and preexisting organs to put new information into the brain. One of the first ways you did that was with a product called the North Sense. What was the North Sense - what is the North Sense - and what does it actually do?

Babitz: Yeah, so after that first coin dropped - the one that I was talking about - the next thing we said is, "Okay, but what will be a sense that will be relevant for people? What can we create?" I'm not a hardware or software engineer. Technology is not the aim of my life. I'm a user of technology and throughout my life experience from my previous work and what I do now, what I care about and what we care about at Cyborg Nest is impact. Then we said, "Okay, what sense will actually have an impact on humanity?" we started looking around us. We saw that if you look in the last 100 years, everything that has to do with navigation, orientation and proximity became such an important pillar of our lives, yet we don't have any sense for that. We are basically completely lost without our devices that can help us do whatever we need to do.

If you look historically, if you were born 200 years ago near Marseille in France, in a village, you would go to Marseille once in your lifetime and that would have been it, right? Just as we spoke about before we started this interview, today we travel so much. We move so much. Information and data is flying. Everything is moving and we're like, "But where am I? Where is all that happening?" So we said, "Okay, we need a sense of orientation."

The idea of the North Sense was very simple. It had one simple feature. It was connected to your chest, and every time you face the magnetic field of the planet - which we call North, basically - you get a little notification.

At that stage, the obvious question that people have is, "Okay, but dude, it's like 2021. I have a compass on my phone. Why wouldn't I use the compass on my phone for that? We don't need to do all that." There is a small but radical difference between the two. One is a tool and the other is a sense. The difference between a tool and a sense is as simple as the permanency of it. Neither one of us is going to take his eyes off when we finish this conversation. You're not going to take your ears off when you're done with a song. They're always on, and because they're always on, that's how we create what we call our perception of reality. That's how we understand the world that we live in. we don't choose which sounds to hear and which to not hear, or when to hear them and when to not. We don't choose when to see and when to not, or when to be touched or not. It's just always on.

A compass is something that you need to make a deliberate decision - a cognitive decision. I need to use a compass. You take it out of your pocket, you use it and then you put it back. A sense - the North Sense - it was always there. You're always sensing that thing. Suddenly, having a permanent understanding of your orientation on the planet gets you to think about things that you never thought before. Hey, so the direction that I'm facing now, and the direction to the entrance to the direction of the school for my son, and the way I was going into my office when I was allowed to go into the office, and my next meeting - all of that connects into little maps in your brain. Before that, you didn't think about it.

If you think about it in a different way, you would have never thought, "Which colour should my car be?" if you didn't have eyes. It wouldn't have been any kind of issue and it wouldn't have mattered. Now that you do have eyes, you do think about it. That was the North Sense. We started with something that was as simple as that because we wanted to see what the impact was of that one little input, and how that worked.

Mason: It reminds me very much of the way in which birds sense North when they migrate. It feels like some of the things that you develop at Cyborg Nest are heavily influenced by the animal kingdom. Do you think human beings once upon a time maybe could intuit where Due North was, and perhaps we've lost that ability because we've maybe outsourced so much of that knowledge to our technology?

Babitz: Yeah, so there are a lot of theories about it. None of it, as far as I know, has been really proven in any way. There are theories that say that we might have some leftovers of it in our eyes, nose, and whatever. There are different things, and we might have had this sense in the past, but we've lost it. But the way nature was created and the place that we took it from there onwards are very different in a fundamental way. Senses in nature are there for survival. A bird needs to know how to migrate so it survives the winter, because otherwise it'll die. It'll fly into the next storm. For us, because we were not migrating, it was probably not that important for us to have this sense of orientation. If we did have it, then we've lost it because it was not that important.

Since then, we have moved away as a species, as humans. We moved away from that survival point. Today, you don't use your eyes to see if a herd of buffalos is coming to destroy your house. You don't use your nose to make sure that your house is not on fire. You don't use your sense of touch to see that you're not freezing. You use your eyes to watch a movie. You use your nose to enjoy a meal that you're eating. We stepped away from that survival place.

This is where Cyborg Nest is coming in. Yes, we are taking inspiration from nature, and nature is our kingdom and our mother, let's call it. But there are differences between the species in the way that we perceive and use our senses. We didn't create the North Sense or a sense of orientation because otherwise we're going to die. We created that because we need it. With the way that we've designed life in the 21st century onwards, it's something that will be needed for us as a species.

Mason: North Sense was essentially this small device that you had pierced onto your chest. What it allowed you to do was sense North from this vibration. For you personally, how did having something pierced onto your skin that vibrated every time you faced North change the way you thought about the limitations of your own body?

Babitz: It's really amazing, you know. It was actually a really interesting conversation. When we started Cyborg Nest and before I had the North Sense, we started doing pre-orders for the device. People asked us, "How am I going to feel? What's going to be the difference?" I was like, "Um, I don't know. I have no idea." I've never had another sense. It's not like, "Ah, trust Liviu. I've had 20 new senses before that and I know how that stuff works. I'm going to tell you." We were very frank and very honest about it. It wasn't a place of shame, it was a place of exploration. It was a place of us together, with the community, going forward and creating together, and exploring together. That unknown was an unknown that was true for all of us.

Today, after having the North Sense - I've had it on myself for two years - at some stage I had to take it off and today I have the Sentero that we are already testing so I have my sense back. In the period in between where I didn't have the sense, I did not die, right? It's not like, "Oh no, I'm dead." I'm sorry for everyone that is colourblind, but if you're not colourblind, suddenly you wake up in the morning and everything that used to be orange is not there. You're like, "I can live with that, but why isn't it there? Why isn't my brain getting that information?" You're used to constantly, permanently getting that information and suddenly it's not there. You're like, "I want that. I need that back in my life."

Mason: It feels like some of this technology works with the process of neuroplasticity. We've had Doctor David Eagleman on the podcast talking exactly about how that process works. Do you feel like something like the North Sense is a device - or in the way in which you've described it there - does it now feel more like an organ?

Babitz: It definitely feels like an organ. The whole design and the whole feeling, and the way that we look at what we do is to create new organs for people. You mentioned the piercing and the invasiveness as well. In the beginning, that was also part of the creation. It was very clear throughout the journey that there were two very distinct experiences with the North Sense. One is the cognitive one which is everything that I told you up until now.

Then there was a physical one, which was the piercing. That was uncomfortable, and that was unsuccessful. For now, we've decided to drop that. We are not a medical company looking to create implants. That's not our aim. I don't have any fetish for implants and that's not my interest in life. My interest is to really create new organs for people. The day will come and technology will be there for us to be able to really create those senses.

My Dad intuitively said a very smart sentence that I won't forget. He said, "The moment I can go to Boots or to a pharmacy and buy myself a pharmacy, go home and implant it myself, that's the day I'm going to get an implant. As long as it has to do with body piercers, doctors, blood, healing, whatever - I'm not into that." I think that is probably the common feeling that people will have about this stuff. There is no point in pushing into that direction too much. What matters is really to focus on the connectivity between the technology and the human brain. That's what we focus on, now.

Mason: Has that feedback from your early adopters informed the creation of Sentero? This device is wearable. It's not something that has to necessarily be pierced onto the body. I just wonder how that feedback from those early adopters has helped to inform the way in which you've thought about developing these new organs?

Babitz: It's exactly as I mentioned. In the beginning, people are asking me or I was asking myself, "How is that going to feel? What is the feeling going to be?" then you have it and in the beginning you feel it all the time. There are different stages of the process that the brain goes through when it adopts this new sense. Then at some stage, you're like, "Okay, now I've figured out that this direction is exactly the direction of my son's school, but can I actually feel my son?" then you're like, "Oh, I can sense people." During all this travelling, I started using the North Sense for part of my navigation throughout cities that I don't know. It could obviously not get me to a certain, exact address, but it could help me understand general directions. If I knew that where I need to go is North West, I could obviously go into that direction. Then I said, "Wait, we can actually feel where people go."

If you remember from the first question where I said that everything that we created, thought or felt started from a sensory input - that starts to happen. You get the sensory input that starts to suddenly trigger your brain. Then we were like: Okay, it can help blind people. It can help people with dementia. It can be amazing in gaming. We could build an app for pictures where when you look at pictures, it connects you to the direction where they were taken. Suddenly all these thoughts that we and the community had made the Sentero happen - and will continue making everything happen going forward.

Mason: What you're doing is commonly known as 'biohacking' The wonderful thing about biohacking is that community. They're so key to the development process of these devices because they're very open about giving that sort of feedback. Have some of these applications - both of the North Sense and soon to be Sentero - have they surprised you? Have they informed you? Have you found some really exciting ways that people are leveraging their new senses?

Babitz: Absolutely. It's a matter of personality, you know. Our senses and everything that we have taps into our personality, or our personality taps into senses. It's probably a dual way of going. For example, I have a microphone at home because my son is a musician. I'm not a musician. I love music and all that, but my ears aren't as important for me as they are for my son. For a graphic designer, his eyes are the main thing in his life or her life. We all use our senses in different ways and in different things. We all use our eyes not to get run over by a car when we cross the road. There is common stuff that brings us back to why nature gave us the senses, but beyond the survival place, we all use it in different places. I don't watch TV, my wife does watch TV. It's a choice.

Then also the ideas that people have come from their own personalities. Today we have plans with so many things to do in the future with the Sentero and exactly with different companies, or organisations, or individuals who come and say, "Hey, I want to do it for that." and "I want to use it for this." It's really exciting because every day a new idea comes. People come with new ideas, and it's all happening together.

I have a funny story about biohacking. Do you want me to tell you?

Mason: Please tell me.

Babitz: About two or three years ago, after the North Sense was released to the market, there was an absolute boom in the media about Cyborg Nest. That boom was followed by us being invited to speak at endless conferences. Then at some stage, it got to a place where I completely lost connection with where I am, where I'm going and what kind of talk it is. Just like a machine. Getting on a plane, getting somewhere, doing the talk, going home.

One day, I got to Finland. The conference was at the Biohacking Center. As far as I was concerned back then, biohacking was about technology and humans, and all that. Then I get there. I look at the list of speakers and I see that bloody hell, there is no one speaking here about technology except me. What the hell are they talking about? What is biohacking to them? It was an absolute life changer for me - on a personal level but also on an understanding level.

When I realised that, I suddenly sat in the room and I listened to all of the talks like the people who have come to listen to the talks. I deeply understood the world of biohacking and what that means, and how you can basically take control of your body and your mind from so many places. Again, on a personal level, today I'm a biohacker - not only because I'm the dude who runs the company that creates new senses for humans - but I'm a huge practitioner of the Wim Hof Method. Just behind me here, there are like 15 bottles of supplements that I take every day. I do sports and I do meditation every day. It completely changed my life. I think it all comes as a package - that we will all be part of it, one day.

Mason: Do you think that eventually, we're all going to have to become biohackers? Do you think the way in which we mainstream this process of biohacking is because we're going to realise the best way to live is to design our own morphology and to design the ways in which we want to navigate the world, and to design the ways in which we want to enhance our health?

Babitz: Absolutely. It's all rooted in our curiosity. It's the curiosity and what you can do with that curiosity, right? If you're a super curious person and you have a stick in your hand, you can do amazing stuff with that stick but there is only a certain amount of stuff that you can do with one stick, right? If you're a curious person, and you have a stick, a ball, a rope and a chair, suddenly you're like, "Holy moly, maybe I can actually build something out of this. Something that I can jump with, or a fitness thing, or whatever."

That's what happened to us as humans. Thousands of years ago, we had very little stuff to work with. We continue developing, and developing, and developing. Today we've got to a place where because of the internet and the amount of knowledge we have, and the amount of stuff we have developed - we can really go into those new or different places.

Every generation likes to think that they are the craziest and the nastiest and whatever. We think that about ourselves. I'm sure that my son's generation will take it a step further. What I'm doing will be like, "Ah, so your Dad was the one that did that thing on your chest. That's so old." It's going to happen, and that's fine. It's part of the process. Not only is the short answer yes, the biggest answer is that we can't even think about how much further than that people will take it - and people will take it far.

Mason: Why do you feel so passionately that it's important to design these new senses? Some people may look at what Cyborg Nest are doing and think: What's the point? My body has evolved to deal with the environment that I live in. Why do I need an extra sense, or a new sense, or an enhanced sense?

Babitz: There are a few ways of looking at it. First of all, we go back to the core of our existence and the difference between us and most of the species. It's hard to say all of them, because it's really hard to understand what's happening in most of the animal's brains. One thing certainly is the level of curiosity that we have. It's not something that we can stop. If you think about it, if we didn't have eyes we would have never thought that those lights are planets. We wouldn't have ever thought: Hey, should we go there? Can we go there?

I always speak about people who went to space. Is there a reason to go to space? No. Were we meant to fly? No. Were we meant to leave our atmosphere? Absolutely not. More than that, the atmosphere is built in a way that you'll bloody burn if you try to go through it. It even tells you, "No, no, no. Don't do that, because you're going to die." Still, 50 or 60 years ago there were a bunch of people who sat in their metal tube with gallons of fuel under it, and said, "Light that shit up! We're going." They went, and they had no fucking clue about how that thing was going to end, or what was going to happen. That's the essence of our existence. We can't stop that. It's not about technology. It's not about cyborgs. It's all about curiosity and it's all about our desire to understand, and our desire to think, and our desire to create, and our desire to be. That is why we do need all that - though 'need' is a very harsh word.

Mason: The entire history of science could be reduced to two pieces of technology that have changed the way in which we use our senses. The telescope and the microscope. They fundamentally transformed what the eyes could do. At Cyborg Nest, you go one step further. You say that you believe in technology that empowers us to design our evolution. Hasn't technology always guided our evolution? Haven't we always coevolved with our tools and machines?

Babitz: Absolutely, and I'm happy that you said that. Usually, the way of looking at stuff that I hear most of the time is: why do we need to merge with technology? I'm like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This whole merging with technology is not a question. It's a fact." All the questions about privacy and all these big topics that everybody speaks about today are so relevant and super important. I'm also super aware of it because I have a little kid that I need to protect.

Our relationship with technology started thousands of years ago. If you look, there are many philosophers or historians who look at stuff. Firstly there was humanity. Then there was technology. Then we merged, and because of that we survived. When I say, "merged with technology", it's not the idea of computers in the 70s. It's the stick with the fire, or the wheel that we invented. Those were the first stages of technology. We know today that there were different types of human-like species that evolved parallel to us. The reason we survived is because we adopted technology and they didn't.

It's not about us merging with technology now. Technology was somewhere there and we were here, and then there was the PC and then the laptop, and then the smartphone, and then Liviu comes and says, "Hey, why don't you put it on yourself?" and people are like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We need to speak about it." It's not that that we need to speak about. It's about what we do with your data, that we need to speak about it. It's how we treat you. We don't call people in our company 'customers'. You're not my customer. You're part of a community or something that we've built together. It's these kinds of things that need to be spoken about.

Funnily enough, there's this whole thing happening now with Facebook where everyone is leaving WhatsApp and moving to other groups. Suddenly I was like: How can a company like Facebook for example always pushes us to share more about everything, but if you think about it, we've seen Mark Zuckerberg's son less than we've seen Kim Jong-un's son? He keeps him so protected - or daughter - I don't even remember, because we've never seen him or her. That's the type of thing that will not happen in Cyborg Nest. I will not ask you to have a North Sense pierced in your chest whilst I sit aside and say, "That's fun. That's cool." We were the first to go and do that. We are part of it. Those are the changes that are happening. It's not about the technology itself.

Mason: That's what I love about your work and the work of Cyborg Nest. What you're trying to do is fundamentally redefine this idea of cyborg. When we think of cyborg, we think of The Terminator and we think of these mid-90s visions of having to plug into computers and upload our mind into machines, and merge with machines like the Borg in Star Trek.

What you're doing is much more informed by, oddly enough, two artists. The work of Neil Harbisson and the work of Moon Ribas - who I know were key to the early stages of this Cyborg Nest thinking and Cyborg Nest development. What's wonderful about Neil and Moon is that they created their own organs. In Neil's case, he has this antenna which allows him to hear colour. It's not quite that. What it's doing is it's transforming light waves into sound waves and then vibrating his skull and creating this entirely new sensory experience. So much so, that he now talks about dreaming in sonochromatic dreams. It's become so much part of him that if I went up to Neil and I tried to touch him on the eyeborg on the antenna, he would recoil as if I came up to you and tried to touch you on your nose.

These individuals became profoundly embodied with the devices that they created, in the way in which Andy Clark describes in 'Natural Born Cyborgs' - the idea of profound embodiment. It feels like what you're trying to do is less about connecting with hyperthreading processes of modern connectivity and more about reconnecting with the animal kingdom with nature and most important, with ourselves.

Babitz: Absolutely. It's exactly again as we spoke about before this conversation. I absolutely know nothing about tech on that level. I'm not a tech fan. It's not my thing, and you can ask people in my team. I'm an absolute idiot in those fields. Really, the idea is to try to push into how we can create a positive impact. How can we create a world where we enjoy and we experience, and we have a richer life experience? I don't care about a new chip that comes to the market and can run twice faster than the previous one. I know nothing about it. The users and people out there should not care about that.

It's all about really connecting to nature. It's not by accident that it's happening exactly at times where we understand what we are doing to the planet by the actions that we are doing, and the importance that our planet has for us as a species and for our existence. Think about it this way. We would have never understood the disaster that global warming is causing if we didn't see the glaciers in Iceland melting. Suddenly, you get a picture of a piece of ice that was here and five years after it's here. Holy shit, what happened here? Where is that? Where did that go? Our senses not only help us to enjoy, but they also help us to understand where we live, what is happening.

That's why companies like Cyborg Nest exist. It's not about the technology - that's not the aim and that's not the passion - the passion is humans. Again, I'm a Dad. The last thing that I wish is to wake up in the morning and to see my beautiful son as a robot. That's not the aim, and I don't think that will happen. It's science fiction, and then things that people write. It's often serving a few things. Firstly, to open up people's ideas about stuff, but also to warn us about things that could actually lead to something.

It doesn't mean that if we create cyborgs we are going towards The Terminator. It means that we've learned from The Terminator not to go into that direction, exactly. We're trying to do something that is exactly the opposite, right?

Mason: As a biohacker, when you see something like Elon Musk's Neuralink, do you get excited or do you get slightly cynical about those sorts of projects?

Babitz: First of all, every person that tries to push boundaries, I'm very excited and very supportive of. Specifically, about Elon Musk, I think there are some things that the guy has said in the last few years that ethically we completely do not align on - about women, about some stuff that he put there on Twitter when he didn't think what he was writing.

One time that I felt very uncomfortable with was the last time that they did their live stream about the thing with the piggy. It was nice to see it. It wasn't such a huge technological advancement, but I was still proud of him for doing that. The place where I completely lost him was after the demonstration when he started promising blind people that he's going to make them see or when he started promising people that can't walk that he's going to make them walk. I would never do that. I would say, "I don't know where we're going. We're exploring and let's explore together, and together we'll find how we use that in the best way." The moment he said those sentences, I felt myself suddenly in the place of someone in a wheelchair, listening to that guy and saying, "I might walk!" The reality is that that dude is probably not going to walk - not in the next few years, that's for sure.

Those are the places where I think: Yes, you need to throw the hoop very far and to aim to get there. They are going to Mars. That's so cool and so nice, but I would not go and touch places that are so painful for some people. To say, "I'm going to solve that for you", until you know that you're going to solve that.

Mason: What's so wonderfully egalitarian about the biohacking community is that they actually just use themselves as the laboratories - as you've used yourself as a laboratory. What have you found with some of those scientific experiments that you've performed on yourself?

Babitz: I think that's the only way to go, you know. I have such an eclectic life experience but one of the other things that I did in my life was to be an Officer in the army. You have a responsibility for people's lives, you can't sit in your armchair and say, "Go there, do that." You need to be the one that says, "Follow me." and not, "I'll follow you, after you go." I'm always going to be the first. I will expect my team to be the first people to do whatever we offer other people to do, and to know what's happening. Yes, we will throw the hoop far and try to aim very far, but there are ethical limits that we will not cross, like promising someone that can't walk that he's going to walk, or promising someone that can't see that he's going to see. We're not even close to that.

A self example is such an important thing in life. It's exactly what I said about Mark. If you own that huge company - one of the biggest companies - it's about sharing. I don't think it's a bad thing, the sharing part. Why don't you share yourself? Where are you bro? The world wants to see you. You can't sit in your armchair and ask us to share but to protect yourself behind every wall possible, just because you're Mark Zuckerberg. Those are the places where I think people are not going to eat that kind of shit anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything specific against Facebook, I'm just using specific examples of how things should happen. At the time, Facebook was amazing with the things that they did in the beginning. I think that with everything that's happened, the next generation will do it slightly better. This is where we come and we say okay, we've seen Apple, we've seen Google, we've seen Facebook and we've seen Amazon. We've seen those, they're all amazing, and we all use them, but there are places to improve. We can improve. One of the most important places to improve stuff is the ethical part of it.

Mason: That's another thing that I just love Cyborg Nest. You're not attaching these things to people so that you can extract data to then sell that data to martyrs. You're giving people the power to create senses for themselves, and change the way in which they experience and navigate the environment. If we have a multitude of individuals using either Cyborg Nest devices or devices of their own creation to change the way in which they interface with the world, do you think we're going to start ending up with a society, or will we have a multitude of differentiated humans with a multitude of differentiated senses? If that's the case, how will we be able to communicate effectively between each other - if one person has an antenna and another person has a vibration?

Babitz: Isn't that problem the exciting part? It might get to that place, but isn't that the exciting place where we will need to continue to reinvent ourselves and develop ourselves? If you look at the history of communication, for example, we started from drawing things on caves. After that, we said, "If I want to leave my girlfriend a note, until I draw the whole note on the cave, it takes a look of time. Maybe I'll just write a few letters and I'll tell her that when you see these signs, it means that I love you." Then we started writing, and then the guy said, "Maybe I'll write her a poem, and then I'll write her a book." Then suddenly we had people like Dostoevsky that wrote books that are that thick. From that moment onwards, because life has changed again, we started kind of going backwards. We started from going from Dostoevsky then towards articles, and then it was emails, and then it was texts. Today if you send someone a text - "Why are you sending me a text? Send me an emoji, bro." We are back, basically, to the place of writing on the caves. Instead of doing the drawing on the cave, you do it on the phone and it means the same thing.

We continue moving and evolving. I think situations like you're talking about might happen, but isn't that interesting? Isn't that fun? Where would that lead us? How will we communicate? It's fascinating.

Mason: Well, it was Neil Harbisson who first alerted me to this possibility with some of his artwork. He has this antenna that allows him to hear colour and he creates these incredible sonochromatic art pieces. To me, it's someone who is not wearing or is implanted with an eyeborg. All I see is these incredibly beautiful, colourful canvases. For Neil, he's hearing these beautiful, incredibly sonic squares. For him, his experience of the artwork is completely different.

Babitz: Yeah, but it's exactly those places which are so fascinating and so interesting. Holy moly, I can understand stuff in different ways. It's not just that. Firstly, curiosity. You see a closed door. For us as humans, the first intention is, "I want to open that door because I want to know what's happening there." You gather the courage and you create the key, or you get the key or whatever. You open the door and you expose the door, and you get there. That's the first excitement. That's a place where we are talking about the drawings with Neil Harbisson.

The main question is not excitement of the finding - it's what we're going to do with that, and how that is going to impact our life. The moment we understood that everything in the world has patterns, and everything is basically a big mathematical equation, it wasn't that that changed our life. It's what we did with that that changed our life. It's those places that slowly, slowly we carve into the stone and we get to another place, and to another place, and to another place. Luckily, it's infinite, so it's going to be fun forever.

Mason: What's interesting, again, about the sorts of devices that you create is that it's going to be fun forever, but for it to be fun requires patience. These devices require a little bit of adaptation. As soon as Neil put on the eyeborg, it wasn't a case of him suddenly having this new sense. He had to wear it for almost 10 years before he started to get these sonochromatic dreams. It feels like duration is the key to the adaption of this new technology. It's not like getting a new iPhone. It's not something you're going to switch on and then suddenly you've got this brand new sense.

Babitz: It's those twists in life. I grew up exactly when that notion of plug and play was invented.

Mason: It's more like plug and wait. It's plug and wait.

Babitz: Exactly - but I remember like 10 or 15 years ago, they used to actually write on devices if there were plug in play or not. If it wasn't a plug and play, you wouldn't have bought that. I don't want that shit, because it's not plug and play, right? You would have thought that from that moment onwards, it's just going to get more plug and play. Then suddenly, it's going to a place where people like Neil Harbisson or ourselves come and say, "Right, actually, it's exactly the opposite." As you say, it's plug and wait. It's twists in the journey, and it's stuff that we can't really predict. It's part of the fun, and it's part of the process. It's part of the creation. To be honest, a bit of patience will not do bad to any of us these days.

Mason: People get very excited about this idea. I can become a cyborg. I can become this science fictional vision that I have in my head. As a CEO of a company that creates cyborgs, how do you manage those sorts of expectations?

Babitz: It's just being honest with everything as much as you can, and also being nice. I think that's so important. I'm sorry if there was any case, but I don't think there was ever a case of anyone writing us an email where we didn't reply. Or anyone asking us a question that we didn't reply to - even if we say, "We don't know." Saying "I don't know" is so important sometimes, and just being nice.

I think what some people forget is that maybe most of your life you're a CEO of a company, but there is that moment where you go to the corner shop and you want to buy something. Then suddenly, you are the client. If the guy behind the counter is a dick and is not nice to you, you're like, "You're a dick. You're not nice to me." Why should I be a dick to people? We always need to be humble enough and to just be nice, be honest. Just be nice to people.

Mason: In many ways, I see Cyborg Nest as the pioneers of commercially available cyborg devices, but by paving that way, what you've actually enabled is a whole bunch of individuals to come into this space and create insideables, injectables, embeddables, wearables. What do you think is the future trajectory of biohacking devices and the sorts of companies that want to create biohacking devices?

Babitz: I hope it's ethical. Let's start with what I hope. Beyond what I hope, everything that we have created as humans has pluses and minuses. There was never that thing that was amazing and did just good to everybody. There are always going to be ups and downs. There are going to be failures. There are going to be major successes. There's going to be a journey, and the journey is made out of all the pieces that are part of any journey.

It's very hard to look and say, "That's how it's going to be 20 years from now" - especially when you look historically, the moment the wheel was invented until the moment the car was invented was thousands of years. From the moment the car was invented until the plane was invented was dozens of years. To make a rocket, it was like another 10 years. Everything is getting shorter. People ask me what's going to happen in five years. What did people that were in a job interview five years ago say when they were asked where they were going to be in 2020? Did they say, "I'm not going to come to work."

Mason: Sitting at home in front of their laptop, waiting for a global pandemic to pass.

Babitz: Exactly. "I'm going to sit and home and now work for myself for most of the time. I'm going to be from my bedroom. I'm going to go for a walk with my kid because he's not going to go to school." We can't know. Things are moving so fast. I think as medication says, focus on the present and be in the present. Be present and be here. Plan for the future. Make sure that the steps that you're building and everything has a plan, but first of all, live in the present and be where you are. Make the most out of it. I think that's probably the most we can do.

Mason: It's interesting to hear you mention meditation as a form of biohacking. I just wondered, what has your spiritual practice informed in terms of the way in which you want to take the future of something like Cyborg Nest?

Babitz: Do I need to tell you my life routine every day? I wake up in the morning and then I drink a glass of water. I do between 20 to 30 minutes of breathing exercises - the Wim Hof method - and then from there I jump outside into an ice bath that I have waiting for me, getting cold the whole night. After that, I have my breakfast with a kid, and take a lot of supplements. It's just a part of who we are. It's all going to combine together. It's not one going without the other.

I'm trying to explain for example to other people about the benefits of what this or that can do to you. People still look at it as that horrible world of alternative medicine or alternative therapy. It's not fucking alternative. That's what it is. It's science, and it works. We are just not used to it. It slowly, slowly gets in. We are very close to the moment when you'll go to the Doctor and the prescription you'll get is for 30 minutes every day. That works. If you want to cure your stress, it's not pills that are going to fuck up your brain. It's meditating, but meditating every day - like you take your pill every day, you do the meditation every day. That is going to work. It's all going to go to that place. It's all going to combine together and it's all one unit that we're going to be a part of.

Mason: In that case, if there's anybody listening to this podcast right now who has heard about Cyborg Nest who are excited about becoming a cyborg, or are a wannabe biohacker, what advice would you have for them?

Babitz: First of all, get in touch. Drop us a line. Be a part. Let's do it together. It's about a community. It's not about a person or a group of people. Not for nothing, the company is called Cyborg Nest and not Cyborgs Forever, or whatever. We really see that as a nest, right? We see it as a place where people come and they feel comfortable. The idea of a nest is that you're safe, comfortable, and loved. You're part of something that everybody does for the good and the bad. Just come, get in touch, and accept that if you don't want to get in touch with Cyborg Nest which is absolutely fine as well, don't be afraid. Just go and be responsible and don't do stupid stuff. Push those limits as much as you can, without disturbing others. You're going to get there. Don't give up.

Mason: I love that the emphasis is on the nest rather than on the cyborg.

Babitz: So many times, we've thought of changing the name of the company. But every time we get the place where we say, "Okay we're going to change it." after two days, we're like, "Nah, no point in changing that."

Mason: What's next for you guys? What's next for the cyborg nest? I know you have the new Sentero device which is about to ship.

Babitz: Sentero is coming out now which we're so excited about and we look forward to it. We hope it's going to be cool. Basically, I can't say, but there is a lot of stuff that needs to happen in the next year or even in the next very few short months. Depending on the situation in the world and the financial situation and all of that, we hope that we can make it all happen. We have an amazing team. We have some world names that are going to join us very soon. It's going to be exciting to work together with them. The future is a dream, so let's make it happen.

Mason: I'll certainly be looking closely at what Cyborg Nest brings out in the near future. Liviu Babitz, I just want to say thank you for being on the FUTURES podcast.

Babitz: Thank you for inviting me. It's been a real pleasure.

Mason: Thank you to Liviu for sharing his thoughts on how we might all soon become cyborgs. You can visit more by visiting his website, cyborg nest dot net.

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