My name is Tom Roseberry.
In college I rowed on the heavyweight crew while studying Mechanical Engineering. I really wasn’t a great student, scoring a 2.8 GPA and ending up on academic probation for a semester my freshman year. That was mainly because my interest was in rowing and figuring out how at 5’10” I might be able to keep up with my 6’5” Olympian teammates. I began studying the sport, which led me to exercise physiology and I spent more time reading blogs, papers and chat boards (when those were a thing) than studying thermodynamics.
One thing that always fascinated me was how much more effort I could give in racing than I could in training. In racing the pain came easier, and I could take myself right to the edge of consciousness, sometimes briefly passing out at the end of races. In training I would struggle to “go to the well” and everything felt harder and slower. This couldn’t be explained by the cardiovascular, pulmonary or muscular systems I was reading about in that era’s exercise physiology texts. Something was missing.
After college I got a job as an aerospace manufacturing engineer (as most MechE’s do in the PNW). I continued my love of endurance sport by racing triathlons and continued reading about training, racing, nutrition, and general physiology. I spent a LOT of time on Slowtwitch, a triathlon website and chat board, even at work.
Eventually I came across a theory which, at the time was revolutionary, although now seems obvious - the Central Governor Theory. This theory states that the brain is ultimately in control of physical output, and that it uses a combination of inputs (physiological state, external context, etc) to decide how much output it will allow. Therefore your maximal physical output at any given time has a “governor” given a number of different variables. This makes sense - we can’t run ourselves to death (without something going wrong) and people cheering us gives us a “boost”. Again, this seems obvious, but at the time the dogma was that your plumbing (cardio, pulmonary, musculature) dictated maximal physical output in endurance activities.
The Central Governor Theory was posited by a somewhat controversial exercise physiologist named Timothy Noakes. He wrote what is probably one of the most comprehensive books on the physiology of running, Lore of Running. At 922 pages in text book form, it’s extensive.
One of the coolest things about Slowtwitch back then was that scientists like Noakes and other prominent exercise physiologists would frequent the board and get into arguments with each other. I would learn more from those threads than reading 20 scientific papers. Not just in facts about physiology, but also how to think critically and challenge ideas from multiple angles. My favorite debates were between Noakes and Andrew Coggan, the (debatable) inventor of Functional Threshold Power and Training Stress Score. You could literally watch a scientific field evolve in real time during these debates.
I was a pretty terrible employee, spending most of my time reading these threads, other papers, and doing my work mostly between 10am and 2pm on Fridays. Despite that I was still rated highly, garnering top raises and projects. This is more a testament to how dysfunctional the aerospace industry is.
I was also very unhappy. I hated spending 8 hours a day sitting at a desk knowing that this was really just a waste of time and there was no reason to actually do great work. In fact it felt actively discouraged. When I worked fast (or really, at a normal pace) the project lead would tell me “ok, let’s slow down and really review this” and then never review. I would eventually just buy the parts and build the thing without clearance or review, and then get back to reading papers and Slowtwitch threads.
One day after a triathlon in Las Vegas (Silverman for you aficionados), I got pretty hammered and spent the entire night talking about the Central Governor Theory. The person I was traveling with finally got fed up and said “why don’t you just go work on that???”. The light bulb went on.
I spent the next few months looking at how I might do that. Being an engineer, what interested me most was not that there was a central governor (at this point the literature was pretty definitive), but what circuit mechanisms resulted in there being a central governor. Therefore I decided to retrain as a neuroscientist, starting from the beginning with biology, chemistry and the general prerequisites for a neuroscience PhD.
I quit my engineering job, enrolled in North Seattle Community College and started coaching triathletes and cyclists as part of Cycle University to pay for it. The coaching afforded me more time for studies and helped refine the questions I was most interested in. The schooling also helped me demonstrate that the 2.8 in undergrad was not representative of what I was capable of. The change was pretty dramatic, but I truly enjoyed feeling like I was taking control of my life, and working full time on what had interested me for almost a decade.
Coaching was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. I watched all my athletes move from finishing middle of the pack to vying for world championship slots. The tri team grew from 6 to 60 members and the indoor cycling program another coach and I had started (InCycle Elite) grew into CycleU’s flagship product. The programs grew because of something very simple that has become harder and harder to cultivate, particularly over the past few years: community. I focused very hard on not just coaching, but also how to get people in the group to feel secure, that they had a place and felt connected to the group.
In my original thinking about the Central Governor, I hadn’t put a lot of thought into community or culture. I knew people cheering helps a person perform better, but I hadn’t thought about how the day-to-day support a strong community and culture of people with similar goals can be a performance enhancer. This seems obvious now and there are many anecdotes of how a high performance group working over time can achieve some of the best athletic performances the world has ever seen. Off the top of my head: Kenyan culture of the 2000’s, the Brownlee brothers and Great Britain in the early 2010’s, Eliud Kipchoge’s training camps and partners, and most recently Norway’s 4 golds at the 2020 olympics. Again, these are just off the top of my head, there are literally hundreds more examples.
After 3 years of prerequisites, coaching and even working in a neuroscience lab at the University of Washington studying birdsong (I know, strange, but bird song changes a lot given social contexts and the circuitry is relatively well defined) I moved to San Francisco to start a PhD at UCSF.
I joined a lab that studies how motivation is turned into movement - mainly in the context of Parkinson’s disease. It was a perfect fit, and I was even able to study how motivation centers in the brain control running output (Roseberry et al., 2016).
During this time I ran a lot as it was the easiest sport to integrate into a busy grad student schedule, did some cycling, and raced a couple swimrun races. I also started drifting away from the initial purpose, feeling somewhat like I had answered many of my initial questions. It was also easy to get “nerd sniped” with all the world class research going on around me. Everything looked interesting and biotechnologies were undergoing a boom.
I became especially interested in restoring movement to people who had lost it as I couldn’t imagine my life without movement. After graduation I joined a brain-machine-interface (BMI) lab in Berkeley looking at how neural implants could be used to control prosthetics and restore movement in paralyzed patients.
After just 7 months I decided I wanted to have a more direct impact helping people and joined Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
Neuralink was as crazy as you might imagine, possibly more so. I learned a ton, and would 100% do it again, but also burned out after a little over a year. I then tried a 3D printing startup with a co-founder of Neuralink (the co-founders other than Elon, Max Hodak, Paul Merolla and DJ Seo have been removed from the wikipedia page, but you can still find them in the original Wait But Why article - interestingly that article originally spurred my interest in BMI). My partner and I had a rocky relationship and when covid hit I was no longer able to travel to his lab in Oregon so we dissolved the partnership. I moved on to a gene therapy startup, in the process making a hard shift to coding - machine learning, computer vision and cloud-based computing. And next moved on to a startup making drugs for dogs to live longer.
Each venture has had a truly noble mission, but I lost the original thread, and in doing so, lost a piece of myself. I’ve learned a lot along the way - from coding to building teams and startups. But after a couple months of reflection, this has all been practice.
It’s time to get back to my roots, what I’m passionate about, what I get up every day and think about, what has always accompanied me on this journey.
It’s time to build.