Connor Glass – Merging with Machines to Steward the Flame (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 6)

This is Daniel Fagelli. You're tuned in to The Trajectory. We're speaking about neurotechnology in this episode of Stewarding the Flame, but we're not talking about interfacing with the brain. Safe to say, this is my first interview, not just on The Trajectory, but in the history of my many, many interviews of covering neurotech without talking about brain-computer interface in any regard. Our guest this week is Connor Glass. He's the founder of Phantom Neuro. They work on integrating... sensors into the neural tissue within people's limbs to recover function. Connor got his MD back in 2019, spent a handful of years at Johns Hopkins as a postdoctoral researcher focusing on neuroengineering and now is raised a good deal of money and doing some exciting things with Phantom Neuro here in Austin, Texas. This is our sixth episode of Stewarding the Flame, where we focus on how to encourage the thrival of the greater process of life, which bubbled up from a single cell up to the rich biosphere we have now and could hypothetically reach even more. Experience, power, access to nature, and value. Connor brings a very cosmic view to this conversation. When our discussion initially started, I was kind of feeling him out, and he went straight line down sort of the necessity of change in a way that I think is pretty profound. And he brings his sort of knowledge of the way the brain and the neural system sort of works to bear in this particular episode in a way that I think is interesting. So as usual, I'm going to save my comments for the very end of this episode. I certainly have a few of them. But without further ado, this is Conor Glass here on The Trajectory. So Connor, welcome to

the show. So Connor, welcome to the show. Dan, thanks for having me.

Absolutely, glad to be able to have you here. There's a lot to get into from kind of the neuro and BCI vantage points, but I'm gonna start high level as we have for everybody here in the Stewarding the Flame series. And ask about sort of how you think about defining life in the living process. You are working very closely with a self-repairing, self-creating biological system with human beings. And of course, we share that with the rest of the living world. How do you like to define life in kind of a simple sense?

Yeah, I mean, it's a complicated, simple question in a way, actually. Yeah. In my mind, life is something that's able to, I guess, react to its environment and evolve and change over time as an entity. So that could be a plant, you know. reacting to its environment and able to shift its kind of gaze towards the sun all the way up to us being able to react to our environment and other people within our community and all of that. And so I think it's an ability to react and change the environment in order to optimize your existence, right? So a plant focuses itself towards the sun properly so they can grow more effectively. We orient ourselves with our community and our environment so that we can, I guess, move towards whatever human efforts we're trying to further. So in my mind, that's really in its most simplistic form what life is. Now, I think that humans are very different compared to plants, and