--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 got to be careful who you do it with. Right after this ad.
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--:-- Pablo Torre: 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Oh, wait. The lighting will play.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Oh, f**k. There it is.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 PTFO correspondent Sam Koppelman, the publisher of Hunterbrook Media, who was last seen helping us investigate billionaire Phoenix Suns owner and mortgage king Matt Ishbia.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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.
--:-- [Audio clip: News broadcast]
News Anchor: 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 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I mean, those robots were like throwing punches and like slowly kicking soccer balls like toddlers.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 100%. 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Yeah, participation trophies for all of the humanoid. 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 now as well. 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yes. BCI.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: And so the Cold War had the nuclear arms race. The 60s had the race to the moon. Today, China and the U.S. are locked in a battle over who can master the human brain itself.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And I think that 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?
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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 the cursor. The thing is, China is 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: They're going to hack the human brain, is what you're saying.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: They're going to hack the human brain. That's the idea. So this whole technology, which China has made a priority, the end game here, insofar as you can see it, just top line would be what?
--:-- Pablo Torre: The end game 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: In America, Neuralink's the name 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And so this company, 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Correct, yes. Neuralink's American-born rival startup is named BrainCo.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Which is perfect.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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 FocusCalm, and is in fact available for the low, low price of $279.99 online, is studded, as you were alluded to, with these electrodes that have been reading my brainwaves while podcasting here through my skin, as a commercial helpfully explains.
--:-- [Audio clip: BrainCo commercial]
Narrator: 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 Calm. Focus Calm uses EEG technology to detect and analyze the activity in your brain while proprietary algorithms translate those signals into your focus column score. In the app, you'll practice raising your focus column 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yeah, I just feel very consistently relaxed right now with you in studio.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Brain-control weaponry.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yeah. Chill, 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Probably a good idea. Just a little bit safer if it's just on the table over there.
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--:-- Pablo Torre: So Sam, I want to establish that this headband that I was just wearing called the FocusCalm 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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 Jannik Sinner, who trains with the FocusCalm. 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 Mikaela Shiffrin, who uses it, as well as a bunch of English Premier League soccer players do. The FocusCalm website also says it's currently used by over 20 NCAA teams including the University of Kentucky, in addition to quote, professional and Olympic organizations across every major sport. USA Weightlifting is a partner. USA Bobsled Skeleton is a partner.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 that it's worth hearing from somebody whose Zoom background happens to provide an answer to that question.
--:-- [Audio clip: Logan Ryan]
Logan Ryan: You see, I got a Lombardi trophy. Not the real one, but looks just like it. I guess that's me right there in a Bucs uniform. Someone sent me that. I thought that was cool, an action figure. And 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 in a Patriots uniform.
--:-- [Audio clip: Sports broadcast]
Broadcaster: I mean, we'll never see this run again, Jim. Brady's pass, it's intercepted, and returned for a touchdown by Logan Ryan, the former Patriots.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And after that, by the way, Logan Ryan became a Tampa Bay Buccaneer, and yet another piece of memorabilia happened to enter his possession.
--:-- [Audio clip: Logan Ryan]
Logan Ryan: 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 Buc season was for.
--:-- Pablo Torre: He has like a wall in his home with like the heads of the greatest quarterbacks.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Yes, everybody he has slain.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And I was just thinking that you interviewed Logan Ryan because it was another way to rub something into Bill Belichick.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Yes. I'm surrounding the Belichick empire in all sorts 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 FocusCalm and even appeared in a commercial for it in 2022.
--:-- [Audio clip: Logan Ryan]
Logan Ryan: 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 performed 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: What was the name of the company that you partnered with?
--:-- [Audio clip: Logan Ryan]
Logan Ryan: Oh, I think they changed names. I don't want to misquote it. Let me get back to you on it.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Please. The bigger company's name is BrainCo.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Okay, so this is probably where we should properly introduce BrainCo and its founder, Han Bi Chang.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Yes, because I was long gone at Harvard when BrainCo was being founded by that guy in 2015. But you were actually on campus, I believe.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I was. I was. I think we might have been in slightly different crowds. But I was there when he was there. He was studying neuroscience. And he founded BrainCo a year before Elon Musk even started Neuralink.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Right. And by 2017, Han Bi Chang 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 Chang set up an office in sunny Somerville, Massachusetts.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Where I used to get drunk in college.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 100%. 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 headband 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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 Chang 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 Newlin 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Which is a very American success story.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And so how was the Chinese government hiding their investment then?
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: That's right. It was the Chinese education system. As this 2019 report from The Wall Street Journal explains.
--:-- [Audio clip: Wall Street Journal report]
Reporter: For this fifth grade class, the day begins with putting on a brainwave 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I just got to say that that video, classrooms of kids wearing the headband that Logan Ryan and I apparently both share in common, it's f***ing crazy looking.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yes. It actually got some coverage here in the United States too.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: The block got hot, even in China.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Even in China, people were like, what the hell is this?
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yeah, which raises questions about how the American wing of the business was handling this.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 of the story is what access does the Chinese government have to what was harvested from the brains of all of these Chinese school children in all of these classrooms?
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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?
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- [Audio clip: News broadcast]
News Anchor: 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. Unitree 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: This is the same gold medal winning technology from the world humanoid robot games that we started with.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yes, that is robot Michael Phelps.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: And that company, Unitree, you're probably not surprised to learn at this point, is actually officially partnered with BrainCo, which we know in part because on Unitree'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 they're not being used to help quadriplegics walk or tweet. They're being mounted onto full humanoid robots capable of neural control.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Which is to just spell it out, the ability for people to control with their brains a robot army of the future.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Correct. And of course, the other reason we know about BrainCo's partnership with Unitree is that Hunterbrook Media looked under the hood of Unitree's source code, and we found that they actually have an integration with BrainCo's prosthetics right in their code base.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 Unitree and their, quote, well-documented ties to the Chinese military and the CCP.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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 Unitree's. And that office has hosted visits 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 CEO Han Bi Chang being visited by the chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Which is?
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 Hunterbrook Media, James Ryan confirmed that he had been an advisor to BrainCo, and he joined BrainCo because he knew Max Newland, the since-resigned BrainCo president, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. But in 2023, Ryan said — this is after the Chinese schoolchildren 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 Newland about that. And what Newland told him, plainly, according to Ryan: quote, "We are not connected to the Chinese government," end quote.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Now, what Ryan tells us is this, quote, "I truly hope Max didn't know." Max Newland did not respond to repeated requests for comment. And 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.
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--:-- Pablo Torre: In order to understand how BrainCo pivoted from classrooms full of tiny Chinese school children with FocusCalm 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.
--:-- Riccardo Ceccarelli: 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 athlete, a top athlete, is like the ingredient on the table before to be cooked. Okay?
--:-- Pablo Torre: Totally. 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Yes, the spice level is important. You need a kick in your carbonara and don't let the egg get scrambled. Pro tip.
--:-- Riccardo Ceccarelli: My name is Riccardo Ceccarelli. 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I'm basically ready to go move.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: I know. I feel like I can expense that. Into his house.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 FocusCalm game on his phone where you calm down and the virtual race car goes faster. Dr. Ceccarelli, turns out, has been basically using the BrainCo FocusCalm to study the exact same thing for years. Except with actual human race car drivers. Who happen to be the best in the world.
--:-- Riccardo Ceccarelli: And so our innovation was to link BrainCo and a heart rate recorder directly implemented inside our test. 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 out of the comfort zone.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Oh! Unbelievable! Winning the tournament because, yeah, you might recall how Jannik Sinner won one of the most impressive matches in the recent history of tennis.
--:-- Riccardo Ceccarelli: Jannik, 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. That's it.
--:-- Broadcaster: [Archival clip] Jannik Sinner takes his piece. 6-4. 6-4. 6-4. 6-4. What a wonderful match.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Notably, Jannik 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yes. But the thing is that, obviously, Dr. Ceccarelli came to BrainCo when Jannik Sinner was just 19 years old. He's been partnered with this company for a very long time. His name is literally on the box.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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 FocusCalm specifically. And he is not shy about how long and how intimate this partnership is.
--:-- Riccardo Ceccarelli: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Okay, so we knew that he was a BrainCo partner. What we didn't know was which athletes have actually been using the FocusCalm and giving BrainCo data. But it sounds like the doctor essentially told you everything?
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Riccardo Ceccarelli: We had here in this gym many, many famous athletes. Mikaela Shiffrin, Federica Brignone, that won the last world championship on the ski. Paolo Trinieri, which has been one of the best swimmers in Italy, but also winning gold medal, a fencer winning gold medal in the Olympic Games. We are already working with two football players in Manchester City.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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?
--:-- Riccardo Ceccarelli: That is a very important question. And I think that was one of our, I don't say problem, but 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 SDK, this kind of thing, 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 to enter in our...
--:-- Pablo Torre: I mean, 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Yeah. And Pablo, we bought BrainCo devices and we looked at their privacy policy. And it's not great, Bob.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 FocusCalm's data privacy policy is kind of like untangling 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: But when reached at long last for official comment, what BrainCo told PTFO and Hunterbrook Media on September 4th, 2025, is this: "We don't share user data with anyone. EEG data received from the BrainCo headband is transmitted to the FocusCalm application. All EEG data remains in the FocusCalm 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 FocusCalm 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 to us. 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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 is letting third-party developers access brain data of users wearing the Focus headbands. This is, quote, "user brainwave data, attention data, etc." 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: All of which brings us back to sports and athletes' brains. So 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 BrainCo 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.
--:-- Logan Ryan: 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 will 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, how are you using that data? Is that going to lead to my release?
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 source code, apparently, and this is the GitHub open source code of BrainCo, 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 the last thing to just close the circle is that BrainCo 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?
--:-- Logan Ryan: Yeah, no, absolutely not. You know, I had no idea about that. I mean, I used them a lot in like 2020. You know, I can't say robots and AI wasn't coming, but, you know.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And I just feel obliged, Sam, to point out that I do believe Logan Ryan, I truly believe that he did not know anything about this when he signed up to be a spokesperson.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: No, BrainCo does not make this obvious.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Right, right. And so when Logan, and by the way, I proceeded to tell him about so much of what we just talked about in this episode, you know, about BrainCo founder Han B. Chang, about robot humanoid super soldiers, the letter from the U.S. senators, private neural data, all that, on and on. It just built towards this question that I now have to admit is pretty predictable. Is that something you wish you had known?
--:-- Logan Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. And the way it was presented to me, obviously, is not that way. So you try to accept to get better in your field, and you're willing to do what it takes legally, obviously, to get better at your craft. And I believe in training the brain. But you got to be careful who you do it with. You got to make sure you do your research and you're vetted. And 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 the information that we're putting in, what that could be used for. And obviously, we need a right 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's all pretty alarming to me. And definitely need to look into that.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: He is calm still in all of his assessments of this. That s*** worked.
--:-- Pablo Torre: I mean, well, but except for after the Zoom interview, because, 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, but heard about the Zoom call from her client. They reached out to us here at Pablo Torre Finds Out to reiterate how just unbelievably freaked out Logan was once he sort of realized what this all implied.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Yeah, totally understandable.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Yeah, and I wanted to help him look into that. I wanted 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: The best athletes that you've trained, whether it's Jannik Sinner, Charlotte Clare, Mikaela Shiffrin, Manchester City, just an incredible roster. Do you think it's possible that China would use those brainwaves to train their athletes, that they might get better athletes because of their association with BrainCo?
--:-- Riccardo Ceccarelli: Yes, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. Yes. We are still in contact with them now because they did also a device which is more wearable and that we can use in different experiments with aviation, with the military, because obviously the device has to be wearable and comfortable. So it's a synergy, it's a project that is running since many years. And obviously, BrainCo was really, really supporting us.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Sam, I don't think that's going to make Logan Ryan feel consistently relaxed.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 FocusCalm EEG data, for instance, training human soldiers to perform veteran 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Meanwhile, in their response to our detailed questions, BrainCo said, quote, "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." BrainCo also added, somewhat amazingly, to emphasize, "We develop and provide dexterous hands for humanoid robots with no affiliation whatsoever to the military. Our technology is exclusively applied in the fields of embodied intelligence and dexterous manipulation." End quote.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 B. Chang, for this story. Because that exchange, that bizarre exchange, occurred over text message. 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Would you be the gray text and I'll be the green?
--:-- Pablo Torre: It's probably best that way. Okay.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 8:50 p.m. "Hello. This BrainCo. Very smart company. Hello!!!"
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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."
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 1:29 p.m. "I BrainCo. I respond immediately, totally. Who are you?"
--:-- Pablo Torre: Got impatient five minutes later. "Is this Dr. Han?"
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 4:39 p.m. "Yes, Dr. Han."
--:-- Pablo Torre: And then, like I'm on an episode of Catfish, "How can I confirm that you're really Dr. Han?"
--:-- Sam Koppelman: "You ask me if I am Dr. Han. I say yes. 👍 Gangnam style. ✌️ Ha ha ha."
--:-- Pablo Torre: "Can we video chat? We should talk."
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 6:56 p.m. "Yes, it is 7 a.m. in China. 🇨🇳 I free at my lunch. Deal. 1 a.m. my time, 1 p.m. yours. What email should I send a Zoom invite to?"
--:-- Pablo Torre: 9:08 p.m. "Unsubscribe."
--:-- Sam Koppelman: I have to admit it kind of hurt my feelings.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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?
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 have an 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: Good question. So the first thing to note on this front is that I hired a Harvard Crimson reporter to fact check Dr. Han B. Chang's BrainCo origin story.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Which is a brilliant move to just outsource it to a younger, hungrier person.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 100%. And what we found out is that first, Dr. Han B. 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: Which is worrisome.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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 website's memorabilia. BrainCo has it basically everywhere.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: And third, Hanbi 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 Bicheng?
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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 Farhani 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 FocusCalm.
--:-- Nita Farahani: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And this reminds me of the conversation with Logan Ryan, where he had to like 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 FocusCalm box anywhere. It's not even on the FocusCalm 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 in Ceccarelli. But at this point, I basically digress.
--:-- Nita Farahani: 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, you know, 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.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: 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?
--:-- Nita Farahani: 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 of China's little dragons located right next to BrainCo and Unitree.
--:-- Sam Koppelman: We should plan a trip.
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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.
--:-- Nita Farahani: 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 likelihood of 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 most powerful kind of oppression that you could do and not have to physically harm somebody.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And by the way, it is worth noting. Remember those images of BrainCo being used in Chinese schools and how they got all that backlash and kind of walked away from it?
--:-- Pablo Torre: 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 Ningxia Hui.
--:-- 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 this isn't actually like the Whoop wearable device that lots of people have now, or the Oura Ring or anything else. It's something more disturbing. For an athlete, I think it's easy to think, 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."
--:-- First of all, that's not true for the individual. But second, we also have to start to think about the group effects. What does it do to sports? What does it do to competitive sports? And more societally focused implications. What if your data is taken and used to discriminate against somebody else, which is how it happens?
--:-- This idea of, "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 where 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 — 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 Chinese artificial intelligence with Jannik Sinner's brainwaves.
--:-- Yep. And if you're wondering whether Jannik 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 Swiatek, as well as all-time great Alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, 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.
--:-- Pablo Torre: What's it going to be like when the Chinese military has an army of Logan Ryans?
--:-- Logan Ryan: If they have a Logan Ryan robot come out, they're going to be making some quick decisions, some smart decisions out there, I'll tell you that. 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 put no Tom Bradys out. Logan Ryan got the best of him one time.
--:-- Pablo Torre: And I just want to put a pin in that taunt from Logan Ryan for 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, Pop. 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.
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