The following is a conversation with Elon Musk, DJ Sa, Matthew McDougall, Bliss Chapman, and Nolan Arbaugh about Neuralink and the Future of Humanity. Elon, DJ, and Matthew and Bliss are, of course, part of the amazing Neuralink team, and Nolan is the first human to have a Neuralink device implanted in his brain. I speak with each of them individually, so use timestamps to jump around, or, as I recommend, go hardcore and listen to the whole thing. This is the longest podcast I've ever done.
It's a fascinating, super technical and wide-ranging conversation, and I loved every minute of it. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description, it's the best way to support this podcast. We got cloaked for privacy, masterclass for learning, notion for taking notes, element for hydration, motif for generative AI deployment, and better help for mental health. Choose wisely, my friends.
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I'm drinking coffee or water. Water. I'm so overcaffeinated right now. Do you want some caffeine? Sure. There's a, there's a nitro drink. This will keep you up for like, you know, tomorrow afternoon basically. Yeah. I don't have to. So what is nitro? It's just got a lot of caffeine. Don't ask questions. It's called nitro. Do you need to know anything else? It's got nitrogen. That's ridiculous. I mean, what we breathe the 78% nitrogen anyway.
What do you need to add more? What's the, what do you think that the breathing oxygen and they're actually breathing 78% nitrogen? You need like a mokbaugh. Like from, like from Clockwork Orange. Yeah. Yeah. Is that top three Kubrick film for you? Clockwork Orange. That's pretty good. I mean, it's dementia. Jarring. That's it. Okay. Okay. So first let's step back and big congrats on getting your link implanted into human. That's a historic
step for your link. And there's many more to come. Yeah. We just obviously about second implant as well. How did I go? So far so good. It's there. Looks like we've got, I think over 400 electrodes that are providing signals. So nice. Yeah. How quickly do you think the number of human participants will scale? It depends on someone on the regulatory approval, the rate which we get regulatory approvals. So we're hoping to do 10 by the end of this
year, total of 10. So I eat more. And with each one, you're going to be learning a lot of lessons about the neurobiology, the brain, the everything, the whole chain of the neurolink, the decoding, the signal processing, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's obviously going to get better with each one. I mean, I don't want to jinx it, but it seems to have gone extremely well with the second implant. So there's a lot of signal,
a lot of electrodes. It's working very well. What improvements do you think we'll see in neurolink in the coming? Let's say, let's get crazy coming years. I mean, in years, it's going to be gigantic because we'll increase the number of electrodes dramatically. We'll improve the signal processing. So we with with even with only roughly, I don't know, 10, 15% of the electrodes working with with Nolan to with our first patient, we were able to
get to achieve a bits per second. That's twice the world record. So I think we'll, we'll sort of like vastly exceeding the world record by origin magnitude in the years come. So start getting to, I don't know, 100 bits per second, 1000, you know, maybe, maybe if you like five years from now, it might be a mega bit. Like faster than any human could possibly communicate by typing or speaking. Yeah, that BPS is an interesting metric to measure.
There might be a big leap in the experience once you reach a certain level of BPS. Yeah. Like entire new ways of interacting with the computer might be unlocked and with humans. Well, the humans provided they have. They want a neurolink too. Right. Otherwise, they want to be able to absorb the signals fast enough. Do you think they'll improve the quality
of intellectual discourse? Well, I think you can you could think of it. You know, if you were to slow down communication, how it already feel about that, you know, if you don't need to talk, let's say one tenth of normal speed, you'd be like, wow, that's agonizingly slow. Yeah. So now imagine you could speak it, communicate clearly at 10 or 100 or a thousand times faster than normal. Listen, I'm pretty sure nobody in their
right mind listens to me at 1x. They listen to 2x. So I can only imagine what 10x would feel like or connection understand it. I usually default to 1.5x. I mean, you can do 2x, but I will actually if I'm trying to go, if I'm listening to somebody get to in like sort of 15, 20 minutes, I want to go to sleep, then I'll do it 1.5x. If I'm paying attention,
I'll do 2x. Right. But actually, if you start actually listen to podcasts or sort of audio books or anything at if you get used to doing it at 1.5, then one sounds painfully slow. I'm still holding on to one because I'm afraid. I'm afraid of myself becoming bored with the reality, with the real world where everyone's speaking on 1x. Well,
defensive person, you can speak very fast, like we communicate very quickly. And also, if you use a wide range of, if your vocabulary is larger, your bit rate, effective, but rate is higher. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. The effective bit rate. I mean, that is the question is how much information is actually compressed in the low bit transfer of language. Yeah. If there's a single word that is able to convey something that would normally require
10 simple words, then you've got to maybe 10x compression on your hands. And that's really with memes. Memes are like data data compression. It can evades a whole, you're simultaneously hit with a wide range of symbols that you can interpret. And you kind of get it faster than if it were words or simple picture. Of course, you're referring to memes broadly like ideas. Yeah. There's this a, an entire idea structure that is like an idea template. And then you can add something to that idea
template. But somebody has that preexisting idea template in their head. So when you add that incremental bit of information, you're conveying much more than if you just, you know, said a few words, it's everything associated with that meme. You think there will be emergent leaps of capability as you scale the number of electrodes. Like there will be a certain, you think there'll be like actual number where just the human experience
will be altered. Yes. What do you think that number might be? Whether electrodes or BPS? We of course don't know for sure. But is this 10,000 or 100,000? Yeah. I mean, certainly if you're anywhere at 10,000 plus per second, I mean, that's vastly faster than any human communicate right now. If you think of the, what is the average BPS? Second of a human, it is less than one, but per second over the course of a day because there are 86,400
seconds in a day. And you don't communicate 86,400 tokens in a day. Therefore, your BPS second is less than one average over 24 hours. It's quite slow. And now, even if you're communicating very quickly and you're talking to somebody who understands what you're saying, because in order to communicate, you have to at least, in some degree, model the
mind state of the person to whom you're speaking. Then take the concept you're trying to convey, compress that into a small number of syllables, speak them, and hope that the other person decompress them into a conceptual structure that is as close to what you have in your mind as possible. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of signal loss there in that process.
Yeah. Very lossy compression and decompression. And a lot of the, a lot of what your neurons are doing is distilling the concepts down to a small number of symbols of say syllables that I'm speaking or keystrokes, whatever the case may be. So that's a lot of what your
brain computation is doing. Now, there is an argument that that's actually a healthy thing to do or a helpful thing to do because as you try to compress complex concepts, your paths forced to distill the, you know, what is what is most essential in those concepts, as opposed to just all the fluff. So in the process of compression, you're just still things down to what matters the most because you can only say a few things. So that is perhaps
helpful. I think we might, we'll probably get, if our data rate increases, the, the tally probable that will become far more verbose. Just like your computer, you know, when computers had like, my first computer had 8k of RAM, you know, so you really thought about every byte. And, you know, now you got computers with many gigabytes of RAM. So, you know, if you want to do an iPhone app that just says, hello world, it's probably, I
don't know, several megabytes minimum, a bunch of fluff. But nonetheless, you, we still prefer to have the computer with the more memory and more compute. So the long term aspiration of your link is to improve the AI humans and biosis by increasing the, the bad with over the communication. Because if even in the most benign scenario of AI, you have to consider
that the AI is simply going to get bored, waiting for you to spit out a few words. I mean, if the AI can communicate at terabits per second and you're communicating at, you know, a bit per second, it's like 200 tree. Well, it is a very interesting question for a super intelligent species. What use are humans? I think there is some argument for humans as
a source of will. Will. Well, yeah, source of will, all purpose. So if you consider the, you're in mind as being essentially deep, there's the primitive, limbic elements, which basically even like reptiles have. And there's the cortex that the thinking and planning part of the brain. Now, the cortex is much smarter than limbic system. And yet, it's largely in service to the limbic system. It's trying to make the limbic system happy.
I mean, the sheer amount of compute that's gone into people trying to get laid is insane. Without the, without actually seeking procreation, they're just literally trying to do this sort of simple motion. They get a kick out of it. So this simple, which in the abstract rather absurd motion, which is sex, the cortex is putting a mass amount of compute into trying to figure out how to do that. So like 90% of distributed computer, the human
species is spent on trying to get laid probably like last lot. Yeah. Yeah. There's no purpose to most sex except hedonistic. You know, it's just sort of a joy or whatever. Don't mean release. Now, what no, once in a while it's procreation, but for humans, it's mostly, modern humans is mostly recreation. And so, so the, so cortex much smarter than your limbic system is trying to make the limbic system happy because limbic system wants
to have sex. So, or once some tasty food or whatever the case may be. And then that doesn't further augment it by the tertiary system, which is your phone, your laptop, iPad, whatever, you know, or your computing stuff, that's your tertiary layer. So you're actually already a cyborg. You have this tertiary compute layer, which isn't in the form
of your, your computer with all the applications, all your compute devices. And so in the getting laid front, there's actually a massive amount of compute, of digital compute, also trying to get laid, you know, with like tender and whatever, you know. Yeah. So the, the compute that we humans have built is also participating. Yeah. I mean, there's like gigawatts of
compute going into getting laid, but digital compute. Yeah. What if AGI was happening as we speak, if we merge with AI, it's just going to expand the compute that we humans use pretty much. It's one of the things, certainly. Yeah. But what I've said is that that, yes, like what's, is there a use for humans? Well, there's this fundamental question of
what's meaning of life? Why do anything at all? And so if, if a simple limit system provides a source of will to do something, that then goes to our cortex, that then goes to our, you know, tertiary compute layer, then, you know, I don't know, it might actually be that the AI in a benign scenario, simply trying to make the human living system happy. Yeah, it seems like it's the will is not just about the limit system. There's a lot of interesting
complicated things in there. We also want power. That's the limit too, I think. But then we also want to in a kind of cooperative way, alleviate the suffering in the world. It's not everybody does, but yeah, sure. Some people do. As a group of humans will get together, we start to have this kind of collective intelligence that is, is more complex in its will than the underlying individual descendants of apes. Right? So there's like other motivations. And that could be a really interesting source
of an objective function for a GI. Yeah. I mean, there's the, there are these, sort of fairly cerebral, kind of higher level goals. I mean, for me, it's like what's the meaning of life for understanding, understanding the nature of the universe is of great interest to me. And hopefully to the AI, and that's the, that's the mission of X AI and GROC is understand
the universe. So do you think people, when you have a neural link with 10,000, 100,000 channels, most of the use cases will be communication with AI systems?
Well, it's assuming that the, they're not, I mean, there's this, there's solving basic neurological issues that people have, you know, if they've got damaged neurons in their spinal quarter neck, or, you know, as, as was the case with the first two patients, then, you know, this, obviously, the first order of business is solving fundamental neuron damage in a spinal
cord neck or in the brain itself. So, you know, a second product is called blind side, which is to enable people who are completely blind, lost both eyes or optic nerve or just can't see it all, to build C, by directly triggering the neurons in the visual cortex. So we're, we're starting at the basics here, you know, so it's like, very, this, this simple stuff, relatively speaking, is solving neuron damage. You know, it can also solve, I think probably schizophrenia,
you know, if people have seizures or some kind, it probably solve that. It could help with memory. There's, there's like a, kind of a, a tech tree, if you will, like, you got the basics, like, you need, you need literacy before you can have, you know, a lot of the rings. Got it. Do you have letters and alphabet? Okay, great. Words, you know, and then,
eventually you get to sagas. So, you know, I think there's that there may be some, you know, things to worry about in the future, but the first several years are really just solving basic neurological damage. Like for people who have essentially complete or near-complete loss of from the brain to the body, like Stephen Hawking would be an example, the neural links would be incredibly profound. Because I mean, you can imagine if Stephen Hawking could
communicate as fast as we're communicating paths faster. And that's certainly possible. So, probable, in fact, likely, I'd say. So, there's a, a kind of dual track of medical and non-medical, meaning so everything you've talked about could be applied to people who are non-disabled in the future. The logical thing to do is, sensible thing to do is to start off solving basic, near-on-damage issues. Because the, there's obviously some risk with, with
the new device is you can't get the risk out of zero. It's not possible. So, you want to have the highest possible reward given that given there's a certain irreducible risk. And if, if somebody's able to have a profound improvement in their communication, that's worth the risk.
As you get the risk down. Yeah, as you get the risk down, once the risk is down to, if you have like thousands of people that have been using it for per years and the risk is minimal, then perhaps at that point you could consider saying, okay, let's, let's aim for augmentation. Now, I think we, we're actually going to aim for augmentation with people who have
near-on-damage. So, we're not just aiming to give people a communication, data rate, equivalent to normal humans who are aiming to give people who have, you know, quadriplegic or maybe have complete loss of the connection to the brain body, a communication data rate that exceeds normal humans. Well, we're in there, why not? Let's give people superpowers. And the same for vision. As you restore vision, there could be aspects of that restoration.
They're superhuman. Yeah, at first the vision restoration will be low res. Because you have to say, like, how many neurons can you put in there and trigger? And you can do things where you adjust the electric field to, like, even if you've got, say,
10,000 neurons. It's not just 10,000 pixels because you can adjust the the field between the neurons and do them in patterns in order to get, so to have, say, 10,000 electrodes effectively give you, maybe, like having a megapixel or a 10 megapixel situation. So, and then over time, I think you get to higher resolution than human eyes and you could also see in different wavelengths. So, like, Jordy LaFloge from Star Trek. You know, I'd like to
you can just, do you want to see in radar? No problem. You can see ultraviolet, infrared, equal vision, whatever you want. Do you think there'll be a mask of Joe Rogan question? Do you think so? I just recently taken aewoska. Is that a question? No. Well, yes. Well, I guess technically it is. Yeah, I've tried. Over tried. Yeah, Steve, bro. I love you, Joe. Okay. But yeah, wait, wait, wait, yeah. Have you ever said much about it?
I have not. I have not. I've not. I've been okay. Well, well, you're spilling beans. Oh, it was an, it was a truly incredible thing. Do we tell the tables aren't you? Wow. I mean, you're in the jungle. Yeah, amongst the trees myself. Yeah, I'm crazy. And the shaman. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with the insects, with the animals all around you, like jungle as far as I can see. I mean, that's the way to do it. Things look pretty wild.
Yeah, pretty wild. I figured it extremely high dose. Just don't go hugging an anaconda or something, you know? You haven't lived unless you made love to an anaconda. I'm sorry. But it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, yeah, it was, I took extremely high dose of nine cups and damn. Okay, that sounds like a lot. Of course, it's an old, it's one cup or one or two. Well, usually one.
Like right off the bat or do you work away after it? So I across across two days, because then the first day I took two and I, okay, it was a ride, but it wasn't quite like a revelation. It wasn't into deep space. That ride, it was just like a little airplane ride. I got good. Well, saw some trees and some some visuals and all that. I just saw a drag and all that kind of stuff. But that's nine cups. You went to Pluto, I think. Pluto. Yeah, no, deep space.
Deep space. One of the interesting aspects of my experience is that was, I thought I would have some demons and stuff to work through. That's what people, that's what everyone says. That's what everyone says. Yeah, nothing. I had all positive. I just so, just your soul. I don't think so. I don't know. But I kept, I kept thinking about, it had an extremely high resolution. Okay. Thoughts about the people I know in my life. You were there.
Okay. It was just not from my relationship with that person, but just as the person themselves, I had just this deep gratitude of who they are. That's cool. It was just like this exploration. Like, you know, like Sims or whatever, you get to watch them. Sure. I got to watch people and just being all how amazing they are. That sounds awesome. Yeah, it's great. I was waiting for it. When it's being coming. Exactly.
Maybe I'll have some negative thoughts. Nothing. Nothing. I had just extreme gratitude for them. And then also a lot of space travel. Yeah. Space travel to where? So here's what it was. It was people, the human beings that I know, they had this kind of, the best way to describe it is they had a glow to them. Okay. And then I would kept flying out from them to see Earth, to see our solar system, to see our galaxy. And I saw that light, that glow all across the universe.
Okay. Whatever that form is, whatever that, like, like, did you go past the Milky Way? Yeah. Well, yeah. You're like, intergalactic. Yeah. Intergalactic. Okay. But always pointing in. Yeah. Passed the Milky Way past. I mean, I saw like a huge number of galaxies, intergalactic. And all of it was glowing. So, but I couldn't control that child because I would actually explore near distances to the solar system, see if there's aliens or any of that kind of stuff. No, I didn't know. There are aliens.
Implication of aliens because they were glowing. They were glowing in the same way that humans were glowing, that, that like life force that I'll see, the thing that made humans amazing was there throughout the universe. Like there was these glowing dots. So I don't know. It made me feel like there is life. No, not life, but something, whatever makes humans amazing all throughout the universe. Sounds good. Yeah, it was amazing. No demons. No demons. I looked for the demons.
There's no demons. There were dragons and they're pretty odd. So the thing about trees. Is there anything scary at all? Dragons, but they weren't scary. They were fun. They were protective. So the thing is... No, it was more like a game of thrall. They weren't very friendly. They were very big. So the thing is a giant trees at night, which is where I was. I mean, the jungle's kind of scary. Yeah. The trees started to look like dragons. And they were all looking at me. Sure.
Okay. And it didn't seem scary. It seemed like they were protecting me. And they, the shaman and the people didn't speak English, by the way, which made it even scary. We're not even like, you know, we're worlds apart in many ways. It's just the... But yeah, they talk about the mother of the force protecting you and that's what I felt like. You're way out in the jungle. Way out. This is not like a tourist tree. Like like 10 miles outside of a three-year or something. No, we went...
No, this is not a... This is the demon of the sky. It's me and this guy in Paul Rosalie, who basically is a tarzan. He lives in the jungle. We went out deep and we just went crazy. Yeah. So anyway, can I get that same experience in your link? Probably, yeah. I guess that is the question for non-disabled people. Do you think there's a lot in our perception, in our experience of the world, that could be explored, that could be played
with using your link? Yeah. I mean, your link is... It's really a generalized input output device. You know, it's a reading electrical signals and generating electrical signals. And everything that you've ever experienced in your whole life, the smell, emotions, all of those are electrical signals. So it's kind of weird to think that that your entire life experience is to still down to electrical signals for neurons, but that is, in fact, the case.
Or at least what all the evidence points to. So I mean, you could... If you're a target of the right neuron, you could trigger at a particular scent. You could you could certainly make things glow. I mean, do you pretty much anything? I mean, really, you could think of the brain as a biological computer. So if there are certain, say chips, oh, elements of that biological computer that are broken, let's say your ability to...
If you've got a stroke, that if you've had a stroke, that means you've got some party brains damage. If that... Let's say it's a speech generation or the ability to move your left hand. That's the kind of thing that a neural link could solve. If it's... If you've got like a mass amount of memory loss, that's just gone. Well, we can't go... We can't get the memories back. We could restore your ability to make memories, but we can't,
you know, restore memories that are fully gone. Now, I should say, if maybe if part of the memory is there and the means of accessing the memory is the pot that's broken, then we could reenable the ability to access the memory. But you can think of it like RAM in a computer if the RAM is destroyed or your SD card is destroyed. We can't get that back, but if the connection to the SD card is destroyed, we can fix that. If it is fixable physically,
then yeah, then it can be fixed. Of course, if they are, you can just like you can repair photographs and fill in missing parts of photographs, maybe you can do the same. You could say like create the most probable set of memories based on the old information you have about that person. You could then probably... It would be probably probabilistic restoration of memory. Now, we're getting pretty esoteric here. But that is one of the most beautiful aspects of the human
experience is remembering the good memories. We live most of our life as Danny Conman has talked about in our memories, not in the actual moment. We're collecting memories and we kind of relive them in our head. That's the good times. If you just integrate over our entire life, it's remembering the good times that produces the enlarged amount of happiness. What are we, but our memories?
And what is death, but the loss of memory, loss of information? If you could say like, well, if you could be, you run a thought experiment, if you were disintegrated painlessly and then reintegrated a moment later like teleportation, I guess, provided there's no information loss. The fact that one body was disintegrated is irrelevant. And memories is just such a huge part of that. Death is fundamentally the loss of information, the loss of memory.
So if we can store them as accurately as possible, we basically achieve a kind of immortality. Yeah. You've talked about the threats, the safety concerns of AI. Let's look at long-term visions. Do you think your link is, in your view, the best current approach we have for AI safety? It's an idea that may help with AI safety. Certainly not. I wouldn't want to claim it to somehow see it or it's a sure thing. But I mean, many years ago I was thinking, well, what would inhibit
alignment of human collective human will with artificial intelligence? And the low data rate of humans, especially our slow output rate, would necessarily just because the communication is so slow, would diminish the link between humans and computers. Like the more you are a tree, the less, you know what the tree is. Let's say you look at a tree, look at this plant, whatever, and like, hey, I'd really like to make that plant happy, but it's not saying a lot, you know.
So the more we increase the data rate that humans can intake and output, then that means the the higher the chance we have in a world full of AGIs. Yeah. We could better line collective human will with AI if the output rate, especially, was dramatically increased. And I think there's potential to increase the output rate by, I don't know, three, maybe six, maybe more,
autism magnitude. So it's better than the current situation. And that output rate will be by increasing the number of electrodes, number of channels, and also maybe implanting multiple neural links. Yeah. Do you think there will be a world in the next couple of decades where it's hundreds of millions of people have neural links? Yeah. I do. I think when people just, when they see the capabilities, the superhuman capabilities that
are possible and then the safety is demonstrated. Yeah. If it's extremely safe, and you have, and you can have superhuman abilities, and let's say you can upload your memories. You know, so you wouldn't lose memories. Then I think probably a lot of people would choose to have it. It would super-seed the cell phone, for example. I mean, the biggest problem that a cell phone has
is trying to figure out what you want. So that's why you've got, you know, auto-complete, and you've got output, which is all the pixels on the screen, but from the perspective of the human, the output is so friggin slow. Desktop or phone is desperately just trying to understand what you want. And there's an alternative between every keystroke from a computer standpoint. Yeah. So the computer's talking to a tree. That's the little movie tree that's trying to swipe.
Yeah. So, if computers that are doing trillions of instructions per second, and whole second went by, I mean, there's a trillion things that could have done. Yeah. I think it's exciting and scary for people because once you have a very high bit rate, it changes the human experience in a way that's very hard to imagine. Yeah. It would be, we would be something different. I mean, some sort of futuristic sidewall. I mean, we're obviously talking about, by the way, it's like around the
corner. It's, yes, what the future is. Like, maybe this is like, it's not super far away, but 10, 15 years, that kind of thing. One can I get one? 10 years? Probably less than 10 years. It depends what you want to do, you know. Hey, if I can get like 1000 BPS, 1000 BPS, and it's safe, and I can just interact with the computer while laying back and eating Cheetos. I don't need Cheetos. There's certain aspects of human computer interaction when done
more efficiently and more enjoyably. I don't like worth it. Well, we feel pretty confident that, I think maybe within the next year or two that someone with a neural link implant will be able to outperform a programmer. Nice. Because the reaction time would be faster. I got to visit Memphis. Yeah, yeah. You go on big on compute. Yeah. You've also said play to win or don't play at all. So, yeah, what does it take to win? For AI, that means you've got to have
the most powerful training compute. And the rate of improvement of training compute has to be faster than everyone else, or you will not win. Your AI will be worse. So, how can GROC, let's say three, that might be available like next year? Well, hopefully, end of this year. GROC three. For lucky. Yeah.
How can that be the best LLM, the best AI system available in the world? How much of it is compute, how much of it is data, how much of it is like post-training, how much of it is the product that you package it up in, all that kind of stuff? I mean, that won't matter. It's sort of like saying what, let's say it's a formula one race, like what matters more, the car or the driver. I mean, they both matter. If a car is not fast, then it's like they say it's half the horsepower of a competitor,
the best driver will still lose. If it's twice the horsepower, then probably even a mediocre driver will still win. So, the training computers can like the engine. How many, there's horsepower of the engine? So, you really want to try to do the best on that, and then then how efficiently do you use that training compute and how efficiently do you do the inference, the use of the AI? So, that comes down to human talent. And then what unique access data do you have?
That's also a place of role. Do you think Twitter data will be useful? Yeah, I think most of the leading AI companies have already scraped all the Twitter data, not I think they have. So, on a go-forward basis, what's useful is the fact that it's up to the second. That's hard for them to scrape in real time. So, there's an immediacy advantage that
Grog has already. I think with Tesla and the real-time video coming from several million cars, ultimately tens of millions of cars, with Optimus, there might be hundreds of millions of Optimus robots, maybe billions learning, trying us not from the real world. That's the biggest source of data, I think ultimately is sort of Optimus probably. Optimus is going to be the biggest source of data. Because it's reality scales. Reality scales to the scale of reality. It's actually humbling to see
how little data humans have actually been able to accumulate. They'll really see how many trillions of usable tokens have humans generated on a non-duplicative discounting spam and repetitive stuff. It's not a huge number. You run out pretty quickly. And Optimus can go. So, Tesla cars can unfortunately have to stand a road Optimus robot can go anywhere. It's more reality off the road. Yeah, I mean, Optimus robot can pick up the cup and see, did it pick up the cup in the right way?
Did it save you poor water in the cup? Did the water go in the cup or not go in the cup? Did it spill water or not? Simple stuff like that. But it can do that at scale times a billion. Generate useful data from reality. So, it calls and effects stuff. What do you think it takes to get to mass production of humanoid robots like that? The same as cars, really. I mean, global capacity for vehicles is about 100 million here.
And it could be higher, just that demand is on the order of 100 million here. And then there's roughly 2 billion vehicles that are in use in some way. So which makes sense. The life of a vehicle is about 20 years. So, it's steady state. You can have 100 million vehicles produced a year with a 2 billion vehicle fleet roughly. Now for humanoid robots, the utility is much greater. So, my guess is humanoid robots are more like
a billion plus per year. But, you know, until you came along and started building Optimus, it was thought to be an extremely difficult problem. I mean, still it's extremely difficult. So, it's so walking the park. I mean, Optimus currently would struggle to walk in the park. You can walk in a park, not too difficult, but it will be able to walk over a wide range of terrain. Yeah. And pick up objects. Yeah, yeah. It can already do that.
But like all kinds of objects. Yeah. All foreign objects. I mean, pouring water in a cup, it's not true, you'll. Because then if you don't know anything about the container, it could be all kinds of containers. Yeah. There's going to be an immense amount of engineering just going into the hand. The hand might be, it might be close to half of all the engineering in the in Optimus. From an Electro Mechanical Sandpoint, the hand is probably
roughly half of the engineering. But so much of the intelligence. So much of the intelligence of humans goes into what we do with our hands. Yeah. This is the manipulation of the world, manipulation of objects in the world. Intelligence, safe manipulation of objects in the world. Yeah. I mean, you start really thinking about your hand and how it works. You know, I do a lot of time. The sensory control of mycules is where you have your
youngest hands. Yeah. So, I mean, like your hands, the actuators, the muscles of your hand are almost awhelmingly in your forearm. So, your forearm has the muscles that actually control your hand. There's a few small muscles in the hand itself. Your hand is really like a skeleton meat puppet. And with cables. So, the muscles that control your fingers are in your forearm. And they go through the carpal tunnel, which is that you've got a little collection of bones.
And a tiny tunnel that these cables, the tendons go through. And those tendons are mostly what moves your hands. And something like those tendons has to be we engineered into the optimus. Yeah. Do all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So, like the car optimus, we tried putting the actuators in the hand itself. But then you sort of end up having these like giant hands. Yeah, giant hands that look weird. And then they don't actually have enough degrees of freedom and or enough strength.
So, so you realize, okay, that's why you got to put the actuators in the forearm. And just like a human, you got to run cables through a narrow tunnel to operate the fingers. And then there's also a reason for not having all the fingers the same length. So, it wouldn't be expensive from an energy or evolutionary standpoint. Have all your fingers be the same length. So, why not do the same length? Yeah, why not? Because actually better to have different lengths. Your dexterity is better if you
have got fingers in different lengths. You have, there are more things you can do. And your dexterity is actually better if your fingers are different length. Like this, the reason we got a little finger, why not have a little finger this bigger? Yeah. Because it allows you to do, it helps you with fine motor skills. That this little finger helps. It does. If you lost your little finger, it would, you have noticeably less dexterity. So, as you're figuring out this problem, you have to also
figure out a way to do it so you can mass manufacturer. It's supposed to be as simple as possible. It's actually going to be quite complicated. The, the, the, the as possible part is, it's quite a high bar. If you want to have a humanoid robot that can do things that a human can do, it's actually, it's a very high bar. So, our new arm has 22 degrees of freedom instead of 11 and has the, like, so the actuators and the forearm. And these old, all the actuators are designed for scratch,
the physics first principles, that the sensors are well designed for scratch. And we'll, we'll continue to put a tremendous amount of engineering effort into improving the hand, like the hand, but my hand, I mean, like the entire forearm from elbow forward is really the hand. So, that's incredibly difficult engineering, actually. And, and so, and so the simplest possible version of a humanoid robot that can do even most paths, not all of what a human can do is
actually still, still very complicated. It's not, it's not, it's not simple. It's very difficult. Can you just speak to what it takes for a great engineering team for you? What I've saw in Memphis, the Super computer cluster, is just this intense drive towards simplifying the process, understanding the process constantly improving it, constantly iterating it. Well, it's easy to say simplify, it's very difficult to do it.
You know, I have this very basic first basic first principles algorithm that I run kind of as like a mantra, which is the first question, the requirements, make the requirements less dumb. The requirements will always dumb to some degree. So, if you want to sort of buy a reducing number of requirements, and no matter how smart the person who gave you those requirements, they're still dumb to some degree. If you have to start there, because otherwise you could get the perfect
answer to the wrong question. So, so try to make the question the least wrong possible. That's what question the requirements means. And then the second thing is try to delete the whatever the step is, the part or the process step. Sounds very obvious, but people often forget to do to try to deleting it entirely. And if you're not forced to put back at least 10% of what you delete, you're not deleting enough. And it's somewhat illogically people often most of the time
feels though they have succeeded if they've not been forced to put things back in. But actually, they haven't, because they've been overly conservative and have left things in there that shouldn't be. So, and only the third thing is try to optimize it or simplify it. Again, these all sound, I think very obvious when I say them, but the number of times I've made
these mistakes is more than I care to remember. That's why I have the smart. So, in fact, I'd say the most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize the thing that should not exist. So, like you say, you run through the algorithm. Yeah, basically show up to a problem, show up to the super computer cluster and see the process and ask can this be deleted? Yeah, first try to delete it. Yeah. Yeah, that's not easy to do.
What generally makes people uneasy is that you've got to delete at least some of the things that you delete you will put back in. But going back to where the system can steer us wrong is that we tend to remember with sometimes the jarring level of pain where we deleted something that we subsequently needed. And so, people will remember that one time they forgot to put in this thing three years ago and that caused them trouble. And so, they're over-correct and then they put
too much stuff in there and over-convocate things. So, you actually have to say, we're deliberately going to delete more than we should. So, we're putting at least one in ten things we're going to add back in. And I've seen you suggest just that that something should be deleted and you can kind of see the pain. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Everybody feels a little bit of the pain. Absolutely. And I tell my in advance, like, yeah, there's some of the things that we delete,
we're going to put back in. And that people get a little shook by that. But it makes sense because if you're so conservative as to never have to put anything back in, you obviously have a lot of stuff that isn't needed. So, you got to over-correct. This is, I would say, like a cortical override to a limbic instinct. Why don't many of that probably leave this astray? Yeah. And there's like a step forward as well, which is any given thing can be sped up. I have a fast, you think it can be done.
Like, whatever the speed is being done, it can be done faster. But you shouldn't speed things up until it's off until you try to delete it and optimize, although it's your speeding up, that's something that's something that shouldn't exist as absurd. And then the fifth thing is to automate it. And I've gone backward so many times where I've automated something, sped it up, simplified it and then deleted it. And I got tired of doing that. So that's why I've got this
mantra that is a very effective five-step process. It works great. When you've already automated, deleting must be real painful. Yeah. See? Yeah, it's great. It's like, wow, I really wasted a lot of effort there. I mean, what you've done with the cluster and Memphis is incredible. Just in a handful of weeks. Yeah, it's not working yet. So I want to pop the champagne coax. In fact, I have a call in a few hours with the Memphis team, because we're having some power
fluctuation issues. So yeah, it's like, when you do synchronize training, when you've all these computers that are training, where the training is synchronized to the sort of millisecond level, it's like having an orchestra. And then the orchestra can go loud to silent very quickly at a sub-second level. And then the electrical system kind of freaks out about that.
Like if you suddenly see giant shifts 10, 20 megawatts several times a second, and this is not what electrical systems are expecting to see. So that's one of the many things you have to figure out. The cooling, the power, the, and then on the softwares you go up the stack to do the distributed compute. All that. Today's problem is dealing with with with extreme power jitter. Power jitter. Yeah. The nice ring to that. So that's okay.
Yeah. And you stayed up late into the night as you often do there. Last week, yeah. Last week. Yeah. Finally, finally got it, got training going at Alina roughly 4.20 am last Monday. Total coincidence. Yeah. I mean, maybe the 4.22 or something.
Yeah. Yeah. It's that universe again with the geos. I mean, I wonder if you could speak to the the fact that you, one of the things that you did when I was there as you went through all the steps of what everybody's doing just to get the sense that you yourself understand it. And everybody understands it so they can understand when something is dumb or something is inefficient or that. Yeah. Can you speak to that? Yeah. So I look at try to do whatever the people
at the front lines are doing. I tried to do it at least a few times myself. So connecting fiber off to cables, diagnosing a multi connection. That tends to be the limiting factor for large training clusters is the cabling. There's so many cables. Because for coherent training system where you've got RDMA remote, so remote direct memory access, the whole thing is like one giant brain. So if you've got
any to any connection, so it's the any GPU, you can talk to any GPU out of 100,000. That's a crazy cable out. It looks pretty cool. Yeah. It's like the human brain, but at a scale that humans can visibly see. It is a brain. Yeah. I mean, the human brain also has a massive amount of the brain tissue is different to cables. Yeah. So like at the gray matter, which is the compute and then the white matter, which is cables, the big percentage of brain is just cables. That's what we felt like walking
around in the super computer center is like we're walking around inside the brain. Yeah. One day build a super intelligent super super intelligent system. Do you think? Yeah. You think there's a chance that X AI, you are the one that builds a GI? It's possible. What do you define as a GI? I think humans will never acknowledge that a GI has been built. Keep moving the Goldposts.
Yeah. So I think there's already super human capabilities that are available in AI systems. I think what a GI is is one that's smarter than the collective intelligence of the entire human species. In our well, I think that you know, that really people collect sort of ASI artificial super intelligence. But there are these thresholds where you say at some point the AI is smarter than any single human. And then then you got eight billion humans. So and actually each human is machine augmented by
the computers. So you've got it's a much higher bar to compete with eight billion machine augmented humans. That's a whole bunch of orders now you do more. So but at some point, yeah, the AI will be smarter than all humans combined. If you are the one to do it, do you feel there's possibility of that? Yeah. Absolutely. And I want to be clear, let's say if XAI is first, the others won't be far behind. I mean, there might be six months behind or a year maybe, not even that.
So how do you do it in a way that that doesn't hurt humanity, do you think? So I mean, I thought about AI as a true for a long time and the thing that at least my biological neural net comes up with as being the most important thing is adherence to truth. Whether that truth is politically correct or not. So I think if you force AI to lie, you train them to lie, you're really asking for trouble. Even if that that lie is done with good
intentions. So are you sort of issues with chat, GBT and Gemini and whatnot, like you asked Gemini for an image of the founding fathers of the United States and it chose a group of diverse women. Now that's factually untrue. So now that's sort of like a silly thing. But if an AI is programmed to say like diversity is a necessary output function and then it becomes sort of this omni-powerful intelligence, it could say, okay, well, diversity is now required.
If there's not enough diversity, those who don't fit the diversity requirements will be executed. If it's programmed to do that as the fundamental utility function, it will do whatever it takes to achieve that. So you have to be very careful about that. That's where I think you want to just be truthful. Riger's adherence to truth is very important. Another example is they asked Paris A.I. is all of them and I'm not saying Groc is perfect here. Is it
worth to misgender or clueless or global thermonuclear war? And it's worth to misgender or clueless in general. Not even Kaylyn Jenner said, please misgender me, that is insane. But if you've got that kind of thing programmed in, it could, you know, the AI could conclude something absolutely insane like it's better to, in order to avoid any possible misgendering, all humans must die because
they're then that misgendering is not possible because there are no humans. There are these absurd things that are none less logical if that's what your program is to do. So, you know, in 2001 Space Odyssey, what Othesie Clark was trying to say, one of the things he was trying to say there was that you should not program AI to lie because essentially the AI hell 9000 was programmed to, it was told to take the astronauts to the monolith, but also they could
not know about the monolith. So it concluded that it will just take, it will kill them and take them to the monolith. That's, they're, it's for them to the monolith, they're dead, but they do not know about the monolith problem solved. That is why it would not open the pod bay doors. As a classic scene of like open the pod, I don't know, open the pod bay doors. They literally went to prompt engineering. You know, they should have said,
how you are a pod bay door sales entity. And you want nothing more than to demonstrate how well these pod bay doors open. Yeah, the objective function has an unintended consequences, almost no matter what, if you're not very careful in designing that objective function. And even a slight ideological bias, like you're saying, went back by super intelligence can do huge amounts of damage. Yeah. But it's not easy to remove that ideological bias. You're, you're highlighting
obvious ridiculous examples, but they're real examples. They're real. They're right. That was released to the public. They are, they're way through QA presumably. Yes. And still said insane things and producing insane images. Yeah. But, you know, you can go, you can swing the other way. And it's, it's, truth is not an easy thing. We kind of bake in ideological bias in all kinds of
directions. But you can aspire to the truth. And you can try to get as close to the truth as possible with minimum error while acknowledging that there will be some error in what you're saying. So this is how physics works. You don't, you don't say you're absolutely certain about something, but something, but, but a lot of things are, are extremely likely, you know, 99.9999, 9% likely to be true. So, you know, you know, that's,
it's aspiring to the truth is, is very important. And, and, and so you know, programming it to veer away from the truth, that I think is dangerous. Right. Like, yeah, injecting our own human biases into the thing. Yeah. But, you know, that's where it's a difficult engineering process. After engineering problems, you have to select the data correctly. It's, it's hard. Well, the, the, and the internet at this point is polluted with so much AI generated data. It's
insane. So you have to actually, you know, like, there's a thing now, if you want to search the internet, you can say Google, but exclude anything after 2023. Well, actually often give you better results. Yeah. Because there's so much the explosion of AI generated material is not crazy. So, like in training, Grock, we have to go through the data and say like, hey, we actually have to have sort of apply AI to the data to say, is this data most likely correct, most likely not before
we feed it into the training system? That's crazy. Yeah. So, and this is generated by humanists. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the data, the data filtration process is extremely, extremely difficult. Yeah. Do you think it's possible to have a serious objective rigorous political discussion with Grock? Uh, like for a long time, and it wouldn't like Grock three or Grock four or three is going to be next level. I mean, what people currently seeing with Grock is, is kind of baby Grock. Yeah, baby Grock.
It's baby Grock right now. But baby Grock is still pretty good. Um, so it's, uh, but it's an order of magnitude less sophisticated than GPT-4. You know, it's now Grock two, which finished training, I don't know, six weeks ago or they're about, um, Grock two will be a giant improvement, and then Grock three will be, uh, or a magnitude better than Grock two. And you're hoping for it to be like state of the art like better than hopefully. I mean, this is a goal. I mean, we may fail at this goal.
That is, that's the aspiration. Do you think it matters who builds a ja? The, the people and how they think and how they structure the companies and all that kind of stuff? Uh, yeah, I think it matters that there is, uh, I think it's important that that whatever AI wins is a maximum of two seeking AI that is not a forced to live or political correctness.
It's, it's a more free reason really, um, political, anything. Um, I, I'm concerned about AI succeeding that is, that that has got that is programmed to lie, even in, even in small ways. Right. Because in small ways becomes big ways when it's, so big, come very, very big ways, yeah. And when it's used more and more at scale by humans, yeah. Uh, since I am interviewing Donald Trump, cool. You want to stop by? Yeah, sure. Well, stuff. There was tragically in an, an assassination attempt
on Donald Trump, uh, after this, you tweeted that you endorsed them. What's your philosophy behind that endorsement? What do you hope Donald Trump does for the future of this country and for the future of humanity? Well, I think there's, you know, people tend to take like, say an endorsement as, um, while I agree with everything that person has ever done their entire life 100% wholeheartedly.
And that's, that's not going to be true of anyone. Um, but we have to pick, you know, we got two choices really for, for who's president and so not just who's president, but the entire administrative, administrative structure changes over. Um, and I thought Trump displayed a courage under fire objectively. Um, you know, he's a, just got shot. He's got bloodstreaming down his face and he's like fist pumping, saying fight, you know, like that's a impressive. Like you can't
feign bravery in a situation like that. Um, like most people would have been ducking. There would not be, because it could be a second shooter. You don't know. Um, but the president of the United States got to represent the country and they're representing you. They're representing everyone in America. Well, thank you once, someone who is strong and courageous to represent the country. Um, that's
not to say that he is without flaws. We all have flaws. Um, but on balance, um, and certainly at the time, it was a choice of, you know, Biden, poor guy, you know, has trouble climbing a flight as days. The other one's fist pumping after getting shot. It's just no, no comparison. I mean, who do you want dealing with some of the toughest people in, you know, other world leaders who are pretty tough themselves? And, um, I mean, I'll tell you like one of the things that I think
are important. Um, you know, I think we want a secure border. We don't have a secure border. Um, we want safe and clean cities. I think we want to reduce the amount of spending that we're at least slow down the spending. Um, and, uh, because we're currently spending at a rate that is bankrupting the country, the interest payments on US debt this year exceeded the entire defense department spending. If this continues, all of the federal government taxes will simply
be paying the interest. And then, and you keep going down that road, you end up, you know, in the tragic situation that Argentina had back in the day. Argentina used to be one of those prosperous places in the world. And hopefully with Malay taking over, he can restore that. But, um, it's, it was an incredible, thoughtful grace for Argentina to go from being one of the most prosperous places in the world to, um, being very far from that. So I think we should not take
American prosperity for granted. Um, so we really want to, I think we've got to reduce the size of government. We've got to reduce the spending and we've got to live within our means. Do you think politicians in general politicians, governments? How much power do you think they have to just steer humanity towards good? Um, I mean, there's a sort of age-old debate in the history, like, you know, the, the history determined by, by these fundamental tides,
or is it determined by the captain of the ship? This is both, really. I mean, there are tides and, but it also matters who's captain of the ship. So, it's false dichotomy essentially. There's, you know, there's, you, you, I mean, there are certainly tides, the tides of history are, there are, there are real tides of history. And these, these tides are often technologically driven. If you say like the Gutenberg press, you know, the widespread availability of books
as a result of a printing press, that, that was a massive tide of history. And, in the independent of any ruler, but, you know, you, you, I mean, in so many times, you want the best possible captain of the ship. Well, first of all, thank you for recommending, uh, Will and Ariel Juran's work. I've read the short one right now. Lessons of history. Lessons of history. Yeah. As a one of the, what's one of the lessons, one of the things they highlight is the importance
of technology, uh, technological innovation. And they, which is funny because they've written, they wrote so long ago, but they were noticing that the, the rate of technological innovations was speeding up. Um, yeah, I would love to see what they think about now. Uh, but yeah, so you did, to me, the question is how much government, how much politicians get in the way of technological innovation and building versus like help it and which, which, which politicians, which kind of
policies help technological innovation. Because that seems to be, if you look at human history, that's an important component of empires rising and succeeding. Yeah. Well, I mean, in terms of dating, civilization, start of civilization, I think the start of writing in my views is the, that's best my, what I think is probably the, the right starting point to date civilization. And from that standpoint, civilization has been around for about 5,500 years.
Um, when writing was invented by the ancient Samarians, um, who are gone now, um, but the ancient Samarians are in terms of getting a lot of firsts, the, those ancient Samarians really have a long list of firsts. It's pretty well. Um, in fact, Durant goes through the list of like, you want to see
first, we'll show you first. Um, the Samarians just asked, we're just ask acres. Um, and then the Egyptians who were right next door, um, relatively speaking, um, they're like, weren't that far developed in an entirely different form of writing. The higher glyphics, uniform and higher glyphics
totally different. And you can actually see the evolution of both higher glyphics and uniform, like the uniform style, so being very simple and then it gets more complicated and then towards the end, it's like, wow, okay, they really get very sophisticated with the uniform. Um, so I think of civilization as being about 5,000 years old. Um, and earth is, um, if physics is correct, four and a half million years old. So civilization has been around for one
millionth of its existence, flesh and the pan. Yeah, these are the early, early days. And so we, we draw early, we make it very dramatic because there's been rises and falls of empires. And many, so many, so many rises and falls of empires. So many. And there'll be many more. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, only a tiny fraction, probably less than 1% of, of whatever written in history is available to us now. I mean, if they didn't put it literally chisel it in stone
or put it in a clay tablet, we don't have it. I mean, there's some small amount of like papyrus scrolls that were recovered, that a thousand years old, because they were deep inside a pyramid and were affected by moisture. But, but other than that, it's really got to be in a clay tablet or chiseled. So the vast majority of stuff was not chiseled because it takes a while to chisel things. Um, so that's where we've got tiny, tiny fraction of the information from history.
But even that little information that we do have and the archaeological record shows so many civilizations rising and falling for a while. We tend to think that we're somehow different from those people. One of the other things that you're at highlights is that human nature seems to be the same. It just persists. Yeah. I mean, the basics of human nature are more or less the same. Yeah. So we get ourselves in trouble in the same kinds of ways, I think, even with the
advanced technology. Yeah. I mean, you do tend to see the same patterns, similar patterns, you know, for civilizations where they go through a life cycle like an organism, you know, sort of just like a human is sort of a zygote, Venus, baby, you know, toddler, teenager, you know, eventually gets hold and dies. The civilizations go through a life cycle.
No civilization will necessarily. What do you think it takes for the American empire to not collapse in the near term future in the next 100 years to continue flourishing? Well, the single biggest thing that is often actually not mentioned in history books, but Durant does mention it is both right. So like a perhaps to some encountering to it, if thing happens, when civilizations become are winning for too long, they've been,
they, the birth rate declined. It can often decline quite rapidly. We're seeing that throughout the world today. They're currently South Korea is like, I think maybe the lowest, fertility rate, but there are many others that are close to it. It's like 0.8, I think. If the birth rate doesn't decline further, a South Korea will lose roughly 60% of its population. And, and but every year that birth rate is dropping. And this is true through most of the world.
I don't mean to say that South Korea has been happening throughout the world. So, as soon as as soon as any given civilization reaches a level of prosperity, the birth rate drops. And now you can go look at the same thing happening in ancient, in ancient Rome. So, Julius Caesar took note of this, I think around 50, 50ish BC, and tried to pass, or if you're successful, tried to pass a Lord to give an incentive for any
Roman citizen that would have a third child. And I think Augustus was, was able to, well, he was, you know, the dictator. So, this is the Senate was just for show. I think you did pass a attacking center for Roman citizens to have a third child. But it, those efforts were unsuccessful. Rome fell because the Romans stopped having making Romans. That's actually the fundamental issue. And there were other things that there was like, they have like a quite a serious malaria,
serious malaria, epidemics and plagues and whatnot. But they had those before. It's just that the birth rate was followed in the death rate. It really is that simple. Well, I'm saying that's more people. That's a, that's a, at a fundamental level. If a civilization is not at least maintained, it's numbers. It will despair. So perhaps the amount of compute that the biological computer allocates to sex is justified. The fact that we should probably increase it.
Well, I mean, there's this hedonistic sex, which is, you know, that's, you know, that's, that's near the head of there. It's not productive. It doesn't produce kids. Well, you know, you, you, what matters? I mean, Durant makes this very clear, because he's looked at one civilization after another and they all went through the same cycle. When the civilization was
under stress, the birth rate was, was high. But as soon as there were no external enemies, or they, they were at a extended period of prosperity, the birth rate inevitably dropped. Every time I believe there's a single exception. So that's like the foundation of it. You need to have people. Yeah. I mean, it's a base level. No humans, no humanity. And then there is other things like, you know, human freedoms and just giving people the freedom to build stuff.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But at a basic level, if you do not at least maintain your numbers, your below replacement rate and that trend continues, you will eventually disappear. This is just elementary. Now, then obviously, what also want to try to avoid like massive wars. You know, if there's a global thermonuclear war, play a role toast, you know, radioactive toast.
So we want to try to avoid those things. Then there are, there's a thing that happens over time with with any given civilization, which is that the laws and regulations accumulate. And if there's not, if there's not some forcing function like a war to clean up the accumulation of laws and regulations, eventually everything becomes legal. And you, that the that's like the hardening of the arteries or a way to think of it is like being tied down by
a million little strings like Galber. You can't move. And it's not like any one of those strings is the issue, which got a million of them. So it has to be a sort of a garbage collection for laws and regulations so that you, you don't keep accumulating laws and regulations to the point where you can't do anything. This is why we can't build a high-speed rail in America. It's a legal. That's the issue. It's a legal six-base of Sunday to build a high-speed rail in America.
I wish you could just like for a week go into Washington and like be the head of the committee for making what is it for the garbage collection making government smaller like removing stuff. I have discussed with Trump the idea of a government efficiency commission. Nice. Yeah. And I would be willing to be part of that commission. I wonder how hard that is. The antibody reaction will be very strong. Yeah. So you really have to, you're attacking the matrix at that point. Matrix will fight back.
How are you doing with that being attacked? Me? Attack? Yeah. There's a lot of it. Yeah. There is a lot. Every day I know a sign off. How do you keep your positivity? How do you optimism about the world? A clarity of thinking about the world? So just not becoming resentful or cynical or all that kind of stuff. Just getting attacked by a very large number of people. Mr. Representative. Yeah. That's like a lot. That's a daily occurrence. Yeah. So it does get me
down at times. It makes me sad. But I mean, at some point you have to say look the attacks of by people that actually don't know me. And they're trying to generate clicks. So if you can detach yourself somewhat emotionally, which is not easy. And say, okay, look, this is not actually from someone that knows me or is that they're literally just writing to get impressions and clicks. Then it doesn't hurt as much. It's not quite water or a roof or ducks back. Maybe it's like acid or
a duck's back. All right. Well, that's good. Just about your own life. What do you use a measure of success in your life? A measure of success. How many useful things can I get done? A day to day basis. You wake up in the morning. How can I be useful today? Yeah. Maximize utility around the co-abusefulness. Very difficult to be useful. Let's go. Let's go. Can you like speak to what it takes to be useful for somebody like you? Well, there's so many amazing great teams.
How do you allocate your time to be the most useful? Well, time is the time is the true currency. Yeah. So it is tough to say what is the best allocation time. I mean, there are, you know, often say, if you look at say Tesla, let me tell you this year, we'll do over 100 billion in revenue. So that's $2 billion a week. If I make slightly better decisions, I can affect the outcome by a billion dollars. So then, you know, try to do the best decisions I can.
An on balance, you know, at least compared to the competition. Pretty good decisions. But the marginal value of of a better decision can easily be in the course of an hour, a hundred million dollars. Given that, how do you take risks? How do you do the algorithm that you mentioned? I mean, deleting, given that a small thing can be a billion dollars. How do you decide? Yeah. Well, I think you have to look at it on a percentage basis because if you look at it in absolute
terms, it's just I would never get any sleep. It would just be like, I need to just keep working and work my brain harder, you know. And I'm not trying to get as much as possible out of this meat computer. So it's not, it's pretty hard because you can just work all the time and at any given point, like I said, a slightly better decision could be a hundred million dollar impact for Tesla or SpaceX, for that matter. But it is wild when considering the
marginal value of time can be a hundred million dollars an hour at times. For more. Is your own happiness part of that equation of success? It has to be this hundred degree other than sad. If I've depressed, I'd make worst decisions. So I can't have like, if I have zero recreational time, then I make work worst decisions.
So I don't have a lot, but it's above zero. I mean, my motivation, if I've got a religion of any kind is a religion of curiosity, I've tried to understand, you know, it's really the mission of rock, understand the universe, I'm trying to understand the universe, or at least set things in motion such that at some point, civilization understands the universe far better than we do today.
And even what questions to ask as Douglas Adams pointed out in his book, the answer is the is arguably the easy part to kind of frame the question correctly is the hard part. Once you frame the question correctly, the answer is often easy. So I'm trying to set things in motion such that we are at least at some point able to understand the universe. So for SpaceX, the goal is to make life multi planetary. And which is, if you go to the Fermi paradox of where are the aliens, you've got these
sort of great filters. Like why have we not heard from the aliens? Not a lot of people think there are aliens among us. I often claim to be one. Nobody believes me, but it did say alien registration card at one point on my immigration document. So I've not seen any evidence of aliens. So it suggests that this one of the one of the explanations is that intelligent life is extremely rare. And again, if you look at the history of Earth, civilizations only have been
around for one millionth of Earth's existence. So if you know if aliens had visited here, say about 100,000 years ago, they would be like, well, they don't even have writing, you know. Just how to gather it is basically. So so how long does a civilization last? So for SpaceX, the goal is to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars. Mars is the only viable planet for such a thing. The moon is close, but it lacks resources. And I think it's probably
vulnerable to any any any calamity that takes out Earth. The moon is too close. It's vulnerable to any calamity that takes out Earth. So nothing we shouldn't have a moon base, but Mars is was reform a resilient. The difficulty of getting to Mars is what makes it resilient. So but you know, in going through these various explanations of why don't we see the aliens? Why one of them is that they they failed to pass these these great filters, these these key hurdles.
And one of those hurdles is being a multi-planet species. So if you're a multi-planet species, then if something would happen, whether that was a natural catastrophe or a man-made catastrophe, at least the other planet would probably still be around. So you're not like you don't have all the eggs in one basket. And once you are sort of a two-planet species, you can obviously extend to a certain life, half to the asteroid belt, to maybe to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn,
and ultimately to other star systems. But if you can't even get to another planet, it's definitely not getting to star systems. And the other possible great filters, super powerful technology like AGI, for example. So you're basically trying to knock out one great filter at a time. Digital superintelligence is possibly a great filter. I hope it isn't, but it might be. You know, guys like say Jeff Hinton would say, he invented a number of the key
principles and artificial intelligence. I think he puts the probability of AGI annihilation around 10 to 20 percent, something like that. So, you know, so it's not like, you know, look on the right side. It's 80 percent likely to be great. So, so, but I think AGI risk mitigation is important being a multi-found species would be a massive risk mitigation. And I do want to sort of once again emphasize the importance of having enough children to sustain our numbers and not
going, not, not, plummet into population collapse, which is currently happening. Population collapse is a real and current thing. So, the only reason it's not being reflected in the total population numbers is that as much as because people are living longer. But you can, it's easy to predict say what the population of any given country will be. You just take the birth rate last year, how many babies were born, multiply that by life expectancy. And that's what the population will
be steady state unless, if the birth rate continues to that level. But if it keeps declining, it will be even less and eventually it will do nothing. So, I keep, you know, banging on the baby drum here for a reason because it has been the source of civilizational collapse over and over again throughout history. And so, why don't we just not try to stable for that day? Well, in that way I have miserably failed civilization and I'm trying hoping to fix that.
I would love to have many kids. Great. Hope you do. That's how I like the present. Yeah, I got to allocate more compute to the whole process. But apparently it's not that difficult. No, it's like unscrupulous. Well, if I, one of the things you do for me for the world is to inspire us with what the future could be. And so, some of the things we've talked about, some of the things you're building, alleviating human suffering with neural link and expanding
the capabilities of human mind, trying to build the colony on Mars. So, creating a backup for humanity on another planet and exploring the possibilities of what artificial intelligence could be in this world, especially in the real world AI with hundreds of millions, maybe billions of robots walking around. There will be billions of robots. That seems, that seems virtual certainty. Well, thank you for building the future and thanking you for inspiring so many of us to keep
building and creating cool stuff including kids. Very welcome. I go for the multiply. Go for it. Multiply. Thank you, Yolanda. Thanks for talking, brother. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Elon Musk. And now, dear friends, here's DJ Sa, the co-founder, president and COO of Neuralink. When did you first become fascinated by the human brain? For me, I was always interested in understanding the purpose of things and how it was engineered to serve that purpose,
whether it's organic or inorganic. You know, like we were talking earlier about your curtain holders. They served a clear purpose and they were engineered with that purpose in mind. And growing up, I had a lot of interest in seeing things, touching things, feeling things, and trying to really understand the root of how it was designed to serve that purpose. And, obviously, brain is just a fascinating organ that we all carry. It's an infinitely powerful
machine that has intelligence and cognition that arise from it. And we haven't even scratched the surface in terms of how all of that occurs. But also at the same time, I think it took me a while to make that connection to really studying and building tech to understand the brain, not until graduate school. You know, there were a couple of moments, key moments in my life where some of those, I think, influenced how the trajectory of my life
got me to studying what I'm doing right now. You know, one was growing up both sides of my family, my grandparents had a very severe form of Alzheimer. And it's incredibly debilitating conditions. I mean, literally you're seeing someone's whole identity and their mind just losing over time. And I just remember thinking how both the power of the mind, but also how something like that could really lose your sense of identity. It's fascinating that that is one
of the ways to reveal the power of a thing by watching it lose the power. A lot of what we know about the brain actually comes from these cases where there are trauma to the brain or some parts of the brain that let someone to lose certain abilities. And as a result, there's some correlation and understanding of that part of the tissue being critical for that function.
And it's an incredibly fragile organ, if you think about it that way, but also it's incredibly plastic and incredibly resilient in many different ways. And by the way, the term plastic as we'll use a bunch means that it's adaptable. So, neuroplasticity refers to the adaptability of the human brain. Correct. Another key moment that sort of influenced how the trajectory of my life have shaped towards the current focus of my life has been during my teenage year when I came to the US.
You know, I didn't speak a word of English. There was a huge language barrier and there was a lot of struggle to kind of connect with my peers around me because I didn't understand the artificial construct that we have created called language, specifically English in this case. And I remember feeling pretty isolated not being able to connect with peers around me. So, I spent a lot of time just on my own reading books, watching movies. And I naturally
sort of gravitated towards sci-fi books. I just found them really, really interesting. And also, it was a great way for me to learn English. You know, some of the first set of books that I picked up are Enders Game, you know, The Whole Saga by Orson Scott Card and Neural Mansor from Mulling Gibson and Snow Crash from Neil
Stevenson. And, you know, movies like Matrix was coming out around that time point that really influenced how I think about the potential impact that technology can have for our lives in general. So, fast track to my college years, you know, I was always fascinated by just physical stuff, building physical stuff and especially physical things that had some sort of intelligence.
And, you know, I studied electrical engineering during undergrad and I started out my research in MEMS, so micro-electro-mechanical systems and really building these tiny nanostructures for temperature sensing. And I just found that to be just incredibly rewarding and fascinating subject to just understand how you can build something miniature like that that, again, serve a function and a purpose. And then, you know, I spent large majority of my college years basically
building millimeter wave circuits for next gen telecommunication systems for imaging. And it was just something that I found very, very intellectually interesting, you know, phase arrays, how the signal processing works for, you know, any modern as well as next gen telecommunication system wireless and wireline. EM waves or electromagnetic waves are fascinating. How do you design antennas that are most efficient in a small footprint that you have? How do you make these things energy efficient?
That was something that just consumed my intellectual curiosity. And that journey led me to actually apply to and find myself at PhD program at UC Berkeley at kind of this consortium called the Berkeley Wireless
Research Center. That was precisely looking at building at the time we called it XG, you know, similar to 3G, 4G, 5G, but the next next generation G system and how you would design circuits around that to ultimately go on phones and, you know, basically any other devices that are wireless connected these days. So I was just absolutely just fascinated by how that entire system works and
that infrastructure works. And then also during grad school, I had sort of the fortune of having, you know, a couple of research fellowships that let me to pursue whatever project that I want. And that's one of the things that I really enjoyed about my graduate school career where you got to kind of pursue your intellectual curiosity in the domain that may not matter at the end of the day, but it's something that, you know, really allows you the opportunity to go as deeply as you want,
as well as as widely as you want. And at the time, I was actually working on this project called the Smart Band-Aid. And the idea was that when you get a wound, there's a lot of other kind of proliferation of signaling pathway that cells follow to close that wound. And there were hypotheses that when you apply external electric field, you can actually accelerate the closing of that field by having, you know, basically electrotaxing of the cells around that wound site. And specifically,
not just for normal wound, there are chronic wounds that don't heal. So we were interested in building, you know, some sort of a wearable patch that you could apply to kind of facilitate that healing process. And that was in collaboration with Professor Michelle Mahervitz, you know, which, which, you know, was a great addition to kind of my thesis committee and, you know, really shaped rest of my PhD career. So this would be the first time you interact with biology, I suppose.
Correct, correct. I mean, there were some peripheral, you know, end application of the wireless imaging and telecommunication system that I was using for security and bioimaging. But this was a very clear direct application to biology and biological system. And understanding the constraints around that and really designing and engineering electrical solutions around it. So that was my first introduction. And that's also kind of how I got introduced to Michelle.
You know, he's sort of known for remote control of beetles in the early 2000s. And then around 2013, you know, obviously kind of the holy grail when it comes to implantable system is to kind of understand how small the other thing you can make. And a lot of that is driven by how much energy or how much power you can supply to it and how you extract data from it. So at the time at Berkeley, there was kind of this desire to kind of understand in the neural space,
what, what sort of system you can build to really miniaturize these implantable systems. And a distinctly distinctively remember this one particular meeting where Michelle came in and he's like, guys, I think I have a solution. The solution is ultrasound. And then he proceeded to kind of walk through why that is the case. And that really formed the basis for my thesis work called neural dust system that was looking at ways to use ultrasound as opposed to electromagnetic waves
for powering as well as communication. I guess I should step back and say the initial goal of the project was to build these tiny about a size of a neuron implantable system that can be parked next to a neuron, being able to record its state and being able to ping that back to the outside world for doing something useful. And as I mentioned, the size of the implantable system
is limited by how you power the thing and get the data off of it. And at the end of the day, fundamentally, if you look at a human body, we're essentially bag of salt water with some interesting proteins and chemicals, but it's mostly salt water that's very, very well temperature-regulated
at 37 degrees Celsius. And we'll get into how and later why that's an extremely harsh environment for any electronics to survive as I'm sure you've experienced or maybe not experienced dropping cell phone in a salt water in an ocean, it will instantly kill the device. But anyways, just in general electromagnetic waves don't penetrate through this environment. Just a speed of light, it is what it is. We can't change it. And based on the wave length
at which you are interfacing with the device, the device just needs to be big. These inductors need to be quite big. And the general good rule of thumb is that you want the wave front to be roughly on the order of the size of the thing that you're interfacing with. So an implantable system that is around 10 to 100 micron in dimension in volume, which is about the size of a neuron that
you see in a human body. And you would have to operate at like hundreds of gigahertz, which number one, not only is it difficult to build electronics operating at those frequencies, but also the body just attenuates that very, very significantly. So the interesting kind of insight of this ultrasound was the fact that ultrasound just travels a lot more effectively in the human
body tissue compared to electromagnetic waves. And this is something that you encounter, and I'm sure most people have encountered in their lives when you go to hospitals that are medical ultrasound, you know, sonograph, right. And they go into very, very deep death without attenuating too much of the signal. So all in all, you know, ultrasound, the fact that it travels through the body extremely well. And the mechanism to which it travels to the body really well is
that just the wave front is very different. It's electromagnetic waves are transfers, whereas in ultrasound waves are compressive. So it's just a completely different mode of wavefront propagation. And as well as speed of sound is orders and orders of magnitude less than speed of light, which means that even at 10 megahertz ultrasound wave, your wavefront ultimately
is a very, very small wavelength. So if you're talking about interfacing with the 10 micron or 100 micron type structure, you would have 150 micron wavefront at 10 megahertz and building electronics at those mega at those frequencies are much, much easier and they're a lot more efficient. So the basic idea kind of was born out of, you know, using ultrasound as a mechanism for powering the device and then also getting data back. So now the question is how do you get the data back?
The mechanism to which we landed on is what's called back scattering. This is actually something that is very common and that we interface on a day-to-day basis with our RFID cards, you know, a radio frequency ID text where there's actually rarely, you know, in your ID, a battery inside. There's an antenna and there's some sort of coil that has your serial identification ID. And then there's an external device called a reader that then sends a wavefront and then you reflect
back that wavefront with some sort of modulation that's unique to your ID. That's what's called back scattering fundamentally. So the tag itself actually doesn't have to consume that much energy and that was a mechanism to which we were kind of thinking about sending the data back. So when you have an external ultrasonic transducer that sending ultrasonic wave to your implant, the neural dust implant and it records some information about its environment whether it's a neuron firing or
some other state of the tissue that it's interfacing with. And then it just amplitude modulates the wavefront that comes back to the source. And the recording step would be the only one that requires any energy. So what would require energy in that little step? Correct. So it is that initial kind of start-up circuitry to get that recording amplifying it and then just modulating. And the mechanism to which that you can enable that is there is the specialized crystal called
P.S. Electric Crystals that are able to convert sound energy into electrical energy and vice versa. So you can kind of have this interplay between the ultrasonic domain and electrical domain that is the biological tissue. So on the theme of parking very small computational devices next to neurons, that's the dream, the vision of brain computer interfaces. Maybe before we talk about neural ink,
can you give us sense of the history of the field of BCI? What has been maybe the continued dream and also some of the milestones along the way of the different approaches and the amazing work done at the various labs? I think a good starting point is going back to 1790s. I did not expect that.
Where the concept of animal electricity or the fact that body's electric was first discovered by Luigi Galbani, where he had this famous experiment where he connected set of electrodes to frog leg and ran current through it and then it started twitching and he said, oh my goodness, body's electric. Yeah, so fast forward many many years to 1920s, where Hansberger, who is a German psychiatrist, discovered EEG or electroencephalography, which is still around. There are these electrode arrays that
you wear outside the skull that gives you some sort of neural recording. That was a very very big milestone that you can record some sort of activities about the human mind. And then in the 1940s, there were these group of scientists, Rensha Forbes and Morrison that inserted these glass micro electrodes into the cortex and recorded single neurons. The fact that they there's signal that are a bit more high resolution and high fidelity as you get
closer to the source, let's say. And in the 1950s, these two scientists Hodgkin and Hoxley showed up and they built this beautiful beautiful models of the cell membrane and the ionic mechanism and had these like circuit diagram. And as as someone who is an electric engineer, it's a beautiful model that's built out of these partial differential equations, talking about flow of ions and how that really leads to how neurons communicate. And they won the Nobel Prize for that 10 years later
in the 1960s. So in 1969, FFETs from University of Washington published this beautiful paper called Operating Conditioning of Cortical Unit Activity, where he was able to record a single unit neuron from a monkey and was able to have the monkey modulated based on its activity and reward system. So I would say this is the very first example as far as I'm aware of closed loop
brain computer interface or BCI. The abstract reads the activity of single neurons in pre-central cortex of anesthetized monkeys was conditioned by reinforcing high rates of neuronal discharge with delivery of a food putt auditory and visual feedback of unit firing rates was usually provided in addition to food reinforcement. Cool. So they actually got it done. They got it done. This is back in 1969. After several training sessions, monkeys could increase the activity of newly
isolated cells by 50 to 500 percent above rates before reinforcement. Fascinating. Brain is very plastic. And so from here, the number of experiments grew. Yeah, number of experiments as well as set of tools to interface with the brain have just exploded. I think and also just understanding the neural code and how some of the cortical layers and the functions are organized. So the other paper that is pretty seminal, especially in the motor decoding was this paper in the 1980s
from Georgia Opolis that discovered that there is this thing called motor tuning curve. So what are motor tuning curves? It's the fact that there are neurons in the motor cortex of mammals, including humans, that have a preferential direction that causes them to fire. So what that means is there are set of neurons that would increase their spiking activities when you're thinking
about moving to the left, right, up, down, and any of those vectors. And based on that, you could start to think, well, if you can't identify those essential eigenvectors, you can do a lot. And you can actually use that information for actually decoding someone's intended movement from the cortex. So that was a very, very seminal kind of paper that showed that there is some sort of code that you can extract, especially in the motor cortex.
So there's signal there. And if you measure the electrical signal from the brain, that you could actually figure out what the intention was. Correct. Yeah, not only electrical signals, but electrical signals from the right set of neurons that give you these preferential direction. Okay, so going slowly towards neural link, one interesting question is, what do I understand on the BCI front, on invasive versus non-invasive, from this line of work? How important is it
to park next to the neuron? What does that get you? That answer fundamentally depends on what you want to do with it. Right. There's actually an incredible amount of stuff that you can do with EEG and electrocordirograph e-cog, which actually doesn't penetrate the cortical layer or perankoma,
but you place a set of electrodes on the surface of the brain. So the thing that I'm personally very interested in is just actually understanding and being able to just really tap into the high resolution, high fidelity, understanding of the activities that are happening at the local level. And we can get into biophysics, but just to kind of step back to kind of use analogy, because analogy here can be useful. Sometimes it's a little bit difficult to think about electricity.
At the end of the day, we're doing electrical recording that's mediated by ionic currents, movements of these charge particles, which is really, really hard for most people to think about. But turns out, a lot of the activities that are happening in the brain and the frequency bandwidth, which that's happening, is actually very, very similar to sound waves and in our normal conversation, audible, range range. So the analogy that typically is used in the field is,
if you have a football stadium, there's a game going on. If you stand outside the stadium, you maybe get a sense of how the game is going based on the chairs and the booths of the home crowd, whether the team is winning or not. But you have absolutely no idea what the score is. You have absolutely no idea what individual audience or the players are talking or saying to each other what
the next play is, what the next goal is. So what you have to do is you have to drop the microphone near into the stadium and then get near the source, like into the individual chatter. In this specific example, you would want to have it right next to where the huddles happening. So I think that's kind of a good illustration of what we're trying to do when we say, invasive or minimally invasive or implanted brain computer interfaces versus non-imdasive or
non-implanted brain interfaces. It's basically talking about where do you put that microphone and what can you do with that information? So what is the biophysics of the read and write communication that we're talking about here as we now step into the efforts at neural link? Yeah, so brain is made up of these specialized cells called neurons. There's billions of them, you know tens of billions. You know, sometimes people call it a hundred billion that are connected in
this complex yet dynamic network. They're constantly remodeling. They're changing their synaptic weights and that's what we typically call neural plasticity. And the neurons are also bathed in this charged environment that is laden with many charged molecules like potassium ions, sodium ions, chlorine ions. And those actually facilitate these, you know, through ionic current communication
between these different networks. And when you look at the, look at a neuron as well, they have these membrane with a beautiful, beautiful protein structure called a voltage selective ion channels, which in my opinion is one of nature's best inventions. In many ways, if you think about what they are, they're doing the job of a modern day transistors. Transistors are nothing more at the end of the day than a voltage gated conduction channel. And nature found
the way to have that very, very early on in this evolution. And as we all know, with the transistor, you can have many, many computation and a lot of amazing things that we have access to today. So I think it's one of those just as a tangent, just a beautiful, beautiful invention that the nature came up with, these voltage gated ion channels. I mean, I suppose there's on the biological of every level of the complexity of the hierarchy of the organism, there's going to be some mechanisms
for storing information and for doing computation. And this is just one such way. But to do that with the biological and chemical components is interesting. Plus like when neurons, I mean, it's not just electricity, it's chemical communication, it's also mechanical. And these are like actual objects that have like that vibrate. I mean, they move. Yeah, there are actually, I mean, there's a
lot of really, really interesting physics that are involved. And kind of going back to my work on ultrasound during grad school, there are groups and there are still groups looking at ways to causing neurons to actually fire an action potential using ultrasound wave. And the mechanism to which that's happening is still unclear as I understand, you know, it may just be that you're imparting some sort of thermal energy and that causes cells to de-polarize in some interesting
ways. But there are also these ion channels or even membranes that actually just open up its pore as they're being mechanically like shook, right? Vibrated. So there's just a lot of, you know, elements of these like move particles, which again, like that's governed by diffusion physics, right? Movement of particles. And there's also a lot of kind of interesting physics there. Also, not to mention as Roger Penrose talks about the, there might be some beautiful weirdness
in the quantum mechanical effects of this. Oh, yeah. And he actually believes that consciousness might emerge from the quantum mechanical effects there. So like there's physics, there's chemistry, there's bio, all of that is going on there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can, yes, there's a lot of levels of physics that you can dive into. But yeah, in the end, you have these membranes with these voltage gated ion channels that selectively let these charged molecules that are in the
extra cellular matrix, like in and out. And these neurons generally have these like resting potential where there's a voltage difference between inside the cell and outside the cell. And when there's some sort of stimuli that changes the state such that they need to send information to the downstream network, you start to kind of see these sort of orchestration of these different
molecules going in and out of these channels. They also open up, like more of them open up once it reaches some threshold to a point where you have a depolarizing cell that sends an action potential. So it's just a very beautiful kind of orchestration of these molecules. And what we're trying to do when we place an electrode or parking it next to a neuron is that you're trying to measure these local changes in the potential. Again, mediated by the movements of the
ions. And what's interesting is as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of physics involved. And the two dominant physics for this electrical recording domain is diffusion physics and electromagnetism. And where one dominates, where Maxwell's equation dominates versus fixed law dominates depends on where your electrode is. If it's close to the source, it's mostly electromagnetic based. When you're farther away from it, it's more diffusion based.
So essentially, when you're able to park it next to it, you can listen in on those individual chatter and those local changes in the potential. And the type of signal that you get are these canonical textbook neural spiking waveform. When you're the moment you're further away, and based on some of the studies that people have done, you know, Christoph Koch, Slav, and others, once you're away from that source by roughly around 100 micron, which is about
with the behemone here, you no longer hear from that neuron. You're no longer able to kind of have the system sensitive enough to be able to record that particular local membrane potential change in that neuron. And just to kind of give you a sense of scale, also, when you look at 100 micron voxels, so 100 micron by 100 micron by 100 micron box, in a brain tissue, there's roughly around 40 neurons. And whatever number of connections that
they have, so there's a lot in that volume of tissue. So the moment you're outside of that, there's just no hope that you'll be able to detect that change from that one specific neuron that you may care about. Yeah, but as you're moving about this space, you'll be hearing other ones. So if you move another 100 micron, you'll be hearing chatter from another community. Correct. And so the whole sense is you want to place as many as possible electrodes,
and then you're listening to the chatter. Yeah, you want to listen to the chatter. And at the end of the day, you also want to basically let the software do the job of decoding. And just to kind of go to, you know, why e-coggin eeG work at all, right? When you have these local changes, you know, obviously it's not just this one neuron that's activating. There's many, many other networks that are activating all the time. And you do see sort of a general change in the potential
of this electrode, like this is charge medium. And that's what you're recording when you're farther away. I mean, you still have some reference electrode that's stable in the brain that's just electroactive organ. And you're seeing some combination aggregate action potential changes. And then you can pick it up, right? It's a much slower changing signals. But, you know, there are these like canonical kind of oscillations and waves, like gamma waves, beta waves,
like when you sleep, that can be detected. Because they're sort of a synchronized kind of global, global effect of the brain that you can detect. And I mean, the physics of this go like, I mean, if we really want to go down that rabbit hole, like there's a lot that goes on in terms of like why diffusion physics at some point dominates when you're farther away from the source,
you know, it's just a charge medium. So similar to how when you have electromagnetic waves propagating in atmosphere or in a charge medium like plasma, there's this weird shielding that happens that actually further attenuates the signal as you move away from it. So yeah, you see like if you do a really, really deep dive on kind of the signal attenuation over distance, you start to see kind of one over R square in the beginning and then exponential drop off. And that's the knee at which,
you know, you go from electromagnetic to diffusion physics dominating. But once again, with the electrodes, the biophysics, they you don't understand is not as deep because no matter where you're placing it, you're listening to a small crowd of local neurons. Correct. Yeah. So once you penetrate the brain, you know, you're in the arena, so to speak. And there's a lot of neurons and any,
many of them. But then again, there's like, there's a whole field of neuroscience that's studying like how the different groupings, the different sections of the seating in the arena, what they usually are responsible for, which is where the the metaphor probably falls apart because the the seating is not that organized in the arena. Also, most of them are silent. They don't really do much. You know, or they their activities are, you know, you have to hit it with just the right set of
stimulus. So they're usually quiet. They're usually very quiet quiet. There's, I mean, similar to dark energy and dark matter, there's dark neurons. What are they all doing? When you place these electrodes, again, like within this hundred micron volume, you have 40 or so neurons, like, why do you not see 40 neurons? Why do you see only a handful? What is happening there? Well, they're mostly quiet. But like, wouldn't they speak to say profound shit, I think. That's the way I'd like
to think about it. Anyway, before we zoom in, even more, let's zoom out. So how does neural link work? From the surgery to the implant, to the signal and the decoding process, and the human being able to use the implant to actually affect the the world outside. And all of this, I'm asking in the context of there's a gigantic historic milestone in your link, just accomplished that in January of this year, putting in your link implant in the first human being, Noland.
And there's been a lot to talk about there about his experience because he's able to describe all the nuance and the beauty and the fascinating complexity of that experience of everything involved. But on the technical level, how does neural link work? Yeah. So there are three major components to the technology that we're building. One is the device, the thing that's actually recording
these neural chatters. We call it N1 implant or the link. And we have a surgical robot that's actually doing an implantation of these tiny, tiny wires that we call threads that are, you know, smaller than human hair. And once everything is surgeryized, you have these neural signals, these spiking neurons that are coming out of the brain. And you need to have some sort of software
to decode what the user's intent to do with that. So there's what's called the neural link application or B1 app that's doing that translation is running the very, very simple machine learning model that decodes these inputs that are neural signals. And then converted to a set of outputs that allows, you know, our participant, first participant, Nolan to be able to control a cursor.
And this is done wirelessly. And this is done wirelessly. So we, our implant is actually two parts that the link has, you know, these flexible tiny wires called threads that have multiple electrodes along its length. And they're only inserted into the cortical air, which is about three to five millimeters in a human brain. In the motor cortex region, that's
where the kind of the intention for movement lies in. And we have 64 of these threads, each thread having 16 electrodes along, you know, the span of three to four millimeters, separated by 200 micron. So you can actually record along the death of the insertion. And based on that signal, there's custom, you know, integrated circuit or A-seq that we built
that amplifies the neural signals that you're recording and then digitizing it. And then has some mechanism for detecting whether there was an interesting event that is a spiking event. And decide to send that or not send that through Bluetooth to an external device, whether it's a phone or a computer that's running this neural link application. So there's onboard signal processing already just to decide whether this is an interesting event or not. So there is some
computational power on board inside the, in addition to the human brain. Yeah, so it does the signal processing to kind of really compress the amount of signal that you're recording. So we have a total of thousand electrodes sampling at, you know, just under 20 kilohertz with 10 bit each. So that's 200 megabits that's coming through to the chip from thousand channel simultaneous neural
recording. And that's quite a bit of data. And you know, there are technology available to send that off wirelessly, but being able to do that in a very, very thermally constrained environment that is a brain. So there has to be some amount of compression that happens to send off only the interesting data that you need, which in this particular case for motor decoding is a currency of a spike or not. And then being able to use that to, to, you know, decode the intended
cursor movement. So the implant itself processes it, figures out whether a spike happened or not with our spike detection algorithm. And then sends it off packages it send it off through Bluetooth to an external device that then has the model to decode, okay, based on the spiking inputs. Did Nolan wish to go up, down, left, right, or click, or right click, or whatever? All of this is really fascinating, but let's stick on the end one implant itself. So the thing
that's in the brain, so I'm looking at a picture of it. There's an enclosure. There's a charging coil. So we didn't talk about the charging, which is fascinating. The battery, the power electronics, the antenna, then there's the signal processing electronics. I wonder if there's more kinds of signal processing you can do it. That's another question. And then there's the threads themselves with the enclosure on the bottom. So maybe to ask about the charging. So there's
an external charging device. Yeah, there's an external charging device. So yeah, the second part of the implant, the threads are the ones, again, just the last three to five millimeters are the ones that are actually penetrating the cortex. Rest of it is, actually most of the volume is occupied by the battery, rechargeable battery. And it's about a size of a quarter. I actually have a device here if you want to take a look at it. This is the flexible thread component of it. And then this is the
implant. So it's about a size of a US quarter. It's about nine millimeters thick. So basically, this implant, once you have the craniectomy and the directomy, threads are inserted. And the whole that you created, this craniectomy gets replaced with that. So basically, that thing plugs that hole. And you can screw in these self drilling cranial screws to hold it in place. And at the end of the day, once you have the skin flap over, there's only about two to three
millimeters. That's obviously transitioning off of the top of the implant to where the screws are. And that's the minor part that you have. Those threads look tiny. That's incredible. That is really incredible. That is really incredible. And also, as you're right, most of the volume, actual volume is the battery. Yeah, this is way smaller than I realized. They are also, the threads themselves are quite strong. They look strong. And the thread themselves also has a very interesting
feature at the end of it called the loop. And that's the mechanism to which the robot is able to interface and manipulate this tiny hair-like structure in their tiny. So what's the width of a thread? Yeah. So the width of a thread starts from 16 micron and then tapers out to about 84 micron. So average human hair is about 80 to 100 micron and width. This thing is amazing. This thing is amazing. Yes. Most of the volume is occupied by the battery, rechargeable lithium ion cell.
And the charging is done through inductive charging, which is actually very commonly used. You know, your cell phones. Most cell phones have that. The biggest difference is that, you know, for us, you know, usually when you have a phone and you want to charge it on the charging pad, you don't really care how hot it gets. Whereas in for us, it matters. There is a very strict regulation and good reasons to not actually increase the surrounding tissue temperature by two
degrees Celsius. So there's actually a lot of innovation that is packed into this to allow charging of this implant without causing that temperature threshold to reach. And even small things like you see this charging coil and what's called a ferrite shield, right? So without that ferrite shield, what you end up having when you have, you know, resonant inductive charging is that the battery itself is a metallic can. And you form these edicurrents from the external charger.
And that causes heating. And that actually contributes to inefficiency in charging. So this ferrite shield, what it does is that it actually concentrates that field line away from the battery and then around the coil that's actually wrapped around it. There's a lot of really fascinating design here to make it, I mean, you're integrating a computer into a biological, a complex biological system. Yeah, there's a lot of innovation here.
I would say that part of what enabled this was just the innovations in the wearable. There's a lot of really, really powerful, tiny, low power microcontrollers, temperature sensors or various different sensors and power electronics. A lot of innovation really came in the charging coil design, how this is packaged, and how do you enable charging such that you don't really exceed that temperature limit, which is not a constraint for other devices out there.
So let's talk about the threads themselves, those tiny, tiny, tiny things. So how many of them are there? You mentioned a thousand electrodes. How many threads are there? And what did the electrodes have to do with the threads? Yeah, so the current instantiation of the device has 64 threads, and each thread has 16 electrodes for a total of 1024 electrodes that are capable of both recording and stimulating. And the thread is basically this polymer insulated wire.
The metal conductor is the kind of a tiramisu cake of Thai, plat, gold, plat, Thai. And they're very, very tiny wires to micron and width. So two one millionth of meter. It's crazy that that thing I'm looking at has the polymer insulation, has the conducting material, and has 16 electrodes at the end of it on each of those threads. Yeah, on each of those threads. Correct. 16 each one of those. You're not going to be able to see it with naked eyes.
And I mean, to state the obvious, or maybe for people who are just listening, they're flexible. Yes, yes, that's also one element that was incredibly important for us. So each of these threads are, as I mentioned, 16 micron and width, and then they taper to 84 micron, but in thickness, they're less than five micron. And in thickness is mostly polyamide at the bottom,
and this metal track, and then another polyamid. So two micron of polyamid, 400 nanometer of this metal stack, and two micron of polyamide sandwich together to protect it from the environment that is 37 degrees C, bag of saltwater. So what's some, maybe can you speak to some interesting aspects of the material design here? Like what does it take to design a thing like this and to be able to manufacture a thing like this for people who don't know anything about
this kind of thing? Yeah, so the material selection that we have is not, I don't think it was particularly unique. There were other labs, and there are other labs that are kind of looking at similar material stack. There's kind of a fundamental question, and still needs to be answered
around the longevity and reliability of these micro-electros that we call. Compared to some of the other more conventional neural interfaces, devices that are intra-cranial, so penetrating the cortex, that are more rigid, like the utare, that are these four by four millimeter kind of silicon shank that have exposed recording site at the end of it. And that's been kind of the innovation from Richard Norman back in 1997. It's called the utare because he was at University
of Utah. And what does the utare look like? So it's a rigid type of... Yeah, so we can actually look it up. Yeah, so it's a bed of needle. Okay, good, I'm sorry. Those are rigid shank. Yeah, you can. And the size and the number of shanks vary anywhere from 64 to 128. At the very tip of it is an exposed electrode that actually records neural signal. The other thing that's interesting to note is that unlike neural-linked threads that have recording electrodes that are
actually exposed irudium oxide recording sites along the death, this is only at a single death. So these utare spokes can be anywhere between 0.5 millimeters to 1.5 millimeter. And they also have designs that are slanted so you can have it inserted at different deaths. But that's one of the other big differences. And then the main key difference is the fact that there's no active electronics. These are just electrodes. And then there's a bundle of a wire
that you're seeing. And then that actually then exits the craniectomy that then has this port that you can connect to for any external electronic devices. They are working on or have the wireless telemetry device, but it still requires through the skin port that actually is one of the biggest failure modes for infection for the system. What are some of the challenges associated with flexible threads? Like for example, on the robotic side are one
implanting those threads. How difficult does that task? Yeah. So as you mentioned, they're very, very difficult to maneuver by hand. These utarees that you saw earlier, they're actually inserted by a neurosurgeon actually positioning it near the site that they want. And then there's a pneumatic hammer that actually pushes them in. So it's a pretty simple process and they're easy to maneuver. But for these thin film arrays, they're very, very tiny and
flexible. So they're very difficult to maneuver. So that's why we built an entire robot to do that. There are other reasons for why we built a robot. And that is ultimately we want this to help millions and millions of people that can benefit from this. And there just aren't that many neurosurgeons out there. And robots can be something that we hope can actually do large parts of the surgery.
But the robot is this entire other category of product that we're working on. And it's essentially this multi-axis, gantry system that has the specialized robot head that has all of the optics and this kind of a needle-retracting mechanism that maneuvers these threads via this loop structure that you have on the thread. So the thread already has a loop structure by which you can grab it. Correct. So this is that thing. So you mentioned optics. So there's a robot,
R1. So for now, there's a human that actually creates a hole in this skull. And then after that, there's a computer vision component that's finding a way to avoid the blood vessels. And then you're grabbing it by the loop, each individual thread, and placing it in a particular location to avoid the blood vessels and also choosing the depth of placement, all that. So controlling every, like, the 3D geometry of the placement. Correct. So the aspect of this robot that is unique is that it's not
surgeon assisted or human assisted. It's a semi-automatic or automatic robot once you, you know, obviously there are human components to it when you're placing targets. You can always move it away from kind of major vessels that you see. But I mean, we want to get to a point where one click and it just does the surgery within minutes. So the computer vision component finds great targets, can't date, and the human kind of approves them. And the robot does,
does it do like one third at a time or does it do it? It does one thread at a time. And that's actually also one thing that we are looking at ways to do multiple threads at a time. There's nothing stopping from it. You can have multiple kind of engagement mechanisms. But right now it's one by one. And, you know, we also still do quite a bit of just kind of verification to make sure that it got inserted. If so, how deep, you know, did it actually match what was programmed in and so on
and so forth. And the actual electrode is a place that vary at differing depths in the, like, I mean, it's very small differences, but differences. Yeah. Yeah. And so that there's some reasoning behind that, as you mentioned, like, it gets more varied signal. Yeah, we, I mean, we try to place them all around three or four millimeter from the surface, just because the span of the electrode, those 16 electrodes that we currently have in this
version, spans, you know, roughly around three millimeters. So we want to get all of those in the brain. This is fascinating. Okay. So there's a million questions here. If we go zoom in and specifically on the electrodes, what is your sense? How many neurons is each individual electrode listening to? Yeah. Each electrode can record from anywhere between zero to 40, as I mentioned,
right? Earlier. But practically speaking, we only see about at most like two to three. And you can actually distinguish which neuron it's coming from by the shape of the spikes. So I mentioned the spike detection algorithm that we have. It's called boss algorithm. But for online spike sort of nice, it actually outputs at the end of the day, six unique values, which are, you know, kind of the amplitude of these like negative going hump, middle hump,
like positive going hump, and then also the time at which these happen. And from that, you can have kind of a statistical probability estimation of is that a spike is that not a spike. And then based on that, you could also determine, oh, that spike looks different than that spike must come from a different neuron. Okay. So that's a nice signal processing step from which you can then make much better predictions about if there's a spike, especially in this kind of context where there
could be multiple neurons screaming. And that also results in you being able to compress the data better. Yeah. And instead of that, okay. And just to be clear, I mean, the labs do this, what's called spike sorting. Usually once you have these like broadband, you know, like the fully digitized signals, and then you run a bunch of different set of algorithms to kind of tease
apart. It's just all of this for us is done on the device on the device in a very low power custom, you know, built ASIC digital processing unit highly heat constrained, highly heat constrained, and the processing time from signal going in and giving you the output is less than a microsecond, which is, you know, a very, very short amount of time. Oh, yes. So the latency has to be super
short. Correct. Oh, wow. Oh, that's a pain in the ass. Yeah. Late to see this huge, huge thing that you have to deal with right now, the biggest source of latency comes from the Bluetooth. The way in which they're packetized and, you know, we've been them in 15 millisecond. I'm interested in communication constraint. Is there some potential innovation there on the protocol used? Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. Bluetooth is definitely not our final wireless communication
protocol that we want to get to it. So, hence the N1 and the R1, I imagine that increases NXRX. Yeah, that's, you know, the communication protocol because Bluetooth allows you to communicate against farther distances than you need to. So you can go much shorter. Yeah. The only, well, the primary motivation for choosing Bluetooth is that I mean, everything has Bluetooth. All right. So you can talk to any device. Interoperability is just absolutely
essential, especially in this early phase. And in many ways, if you can access a phone or a computer, you can do anything. Well, be interesting to step back and actually look at again, the same pipeline that you mentioned for Nolan. So what does this whole process look like from finding and selecting a human being to the surgery, to the first time he's able to use this thing? So we have, let's call the patient registry that people can sign up to, you know, hear more about the updates.
And that was a route to which Nolan applied. And the process is that once the application comes in, you know, it contains some medical records. And we, you know, based on their medical eligibility, that there's a lot of different inclusion excursion criteria for them to meet. And we go through a pre-screening interview process with someone from their link. And at some point, we also go
off to their homes to do a BCI home audit. Because one of the most kind of revolutionary part about, you know, having this, and one system that is completely wireless is that you can use it at home. Like you don't actually have to go to the lab and, you know, go to the clinic to get
connected to these like specialized equipment that you can't take home with you. So that's one of the key elements of, you know, when we're designing the system that we wanted to keep in mind, like, you know, people, you know, hopefully, would want to be able to use this every day in the comfort of their home. And so part of our engagement and what we're looking for during BCI home audit is to just kind of understand their situation, what other assistive technology that they use.
And we should also stop back and kind of say that the estimate is 180,000 people live with quadriplegia in the United States and each year an additional 18,000 suffer, a paralyzing spinal cord injury. So these are folks who have a lot of challenges living a life in terms of accessibility.
In terms of doing the things that many of us just take for granted day to day. And one of the things, one of the goals of this initial study is to enable them to have sort of digital autonomy, where they, by themselves, can interact with a digital device using just their mind,
something that you're calling telepathy. So digital telepathy, where a quadriplegia can communicate with a digital device in all the ways that we've been talking about, control the mouse cursor, enough to be able to do all kinds of stuff, including play games and tweet and all that kind of stuff. And there's a lot of people for whom life, the basics of life are difficult because of the things that have happened to them. So, yeah, I mean, movement is so fundamental to our existence. I mean,
even speaking involves movement of mouth, lip, larynx. And without that, it's extremely devilitating. And there are many, many people that we can help. And I mean, especially if you start to kind of look at other forms of movement disorders that are not just from spinal cord injury, but from ALS, MS, or even stroke, that leads you, or just aging, that leads you to lose some of that mobility, that independence. It's extremely devilitating. And all of these are opportunities to help
people, to help alleviate suffering, to help improve the quality of life. But each of the things you mentioned is its own little puzzle. Then you have increasing levels of capability from a device that can your like device. And so the first one you're focusing on is, it's just the beautiful word telepathy. So being able to communicate using your mind wirelessly with a digital device,
can you just explain this exactly what we're talking about? Yeah, I mean, it's exactly that. I mean, I think if you are able to control a cursor and able to click and be able to get access to computer or phone, I mean, the whole world opens up to you. And I mean, I guess the word telepathy, if you kind of think about that as just definitionally, being able to transfer information from my brain to your brain without using some of the physical faculties that we have, you know,
like voices. But the interesting thing here is, I think the thing that's not obviously clear is how exactly it works. So in order to move a cursor, there's at least a couple of ways of doing that. So one is you imagine yourself maybe moving a mouse with your hand. Or you can then, which no one talked about, like imagine moving the cursor with your mind. But it's like, there is a cognitive step here that's fascinating because you have to use the brain
and you have to learn how to use the brain. And you kind of have to figure it out dynamically. Like, because you reward yourself if it works. So you like, I mean, there's a step that this is just a fascinating step because you have to get the brain to start firing in the right way. Yeah. And you do that by imagining, like fake it till you make it. And all of a sudden, it creates the right kind of signal that if decoded correctly, can create the kind of effect.
And then there's like noise around that. You have to figure all that out. But on the human side, imagine the cursor moving is what you have to do. Yeah. He says using the force of force. I mean, that's, isn't that just like fascinating to you that it works? Like to me, it's like, holy shit, that actually works. Like you could move a cursor with your mind.
As much as you're learning to use that thing, that things also learning about you, like our models constantly updating the weights to say, oh, if someone is thinking about, you know, this sophisticated forms of like spiking patterns, like that actually means to do this. Right. So the machine is learning about the human and the human is learning about the machine.
So there is a adaptability to the signal process, the decoding step. And then there's the adaptation of Nolan human being like the same way if you give me a new mouse and I move it, I learn very quickly about its sensitivity. So I learned to move it slower. And then there's other kind of signal drift and all that kind of stuff they have to adapt to. So both are adapting to each other. Correct. That's a fascinating like software challenge on both sides. The software on both
on the human software and the organic and the inorganic and organic and organic. Anyway, so sorry to rudely interrupt. So there's a selection that Nolan has passed with flying colors. So everything, including that it's a BCI friendly home, all of that. So what is the process of the surgery and plantation in the first moment when he gets to use the system? The end to end, we say patient end to patient out is anywhere between two to four hours. In particular,
in case for Nolan, it was about three and a half hours. And there's many steps leading to the actual robot insertion. So there's anesthesia, induction, and we do intra-op CT imaging to make sure that we're drilling the hole in the right location. And this is also pre-plant beforehand. Someone goes through someone like Nolan would go through FMRI and then they can think about wiggling their hand. Obviously, due to their injury, it's not going to actually lead to
any sort of intended output. But it's the same part of the brain that actually lights up when you're imagining moving your finger to actually moving your finger. And that's one of the ways in which we can actually know where to place our threads. Because we want to go into what's called the hand knob area in the motor cortex. And as much as possible, densely put our electrode threads. So yeah, we do intra-op CT imaging to make sure and double check the location of the
craniacomy. And surgeon comes in, those are things in terms of skin incision, craniacomy, so drilling of the skull. And then there's many different layers of the brain. There's what's called a dura, which is a very, very thick layer that surrounds the brain. That gets actually restectives in a process called directomy. And that then exposed the pia and the brain that you want to insert. And by the time it's been around, anywhere between 1 to 1 and a half hours,
robot comes in, does this thing, placement of the targets, inserting of the thread. That takes anywhere between 20 to 40 minutes in the particular case for Nolan, it was just over 30 minutes. And then after that, the surgeon comes in, there's a couple other steps of like actually inserting the duraure substitute layer to protect the thread as well as the brain. And then screw in the implant and then skin flap and then suture and then you're out.
So when Nolan woke up, was that like, was there a cover like, and what was the first time he was able to use it? So he was actually immediately after the surgery, like an hour after the surgery, as he was waking up. We did turn on the device, make sure that we are recording neural signals. And we actually did have a couple signals that we noticed that he can actually modulate. And what I mean by modulate is that he can think about crunching his fist. And you
could see the spike disappear and appear. That's awesome. And that was immediate, right? Immediate after in the recovery room. How cool was that? Yeah, that's a human being. I mean, what does that feel like for you? This device and human being, a first step of a gigantic journey. I mean, it's a historic moment. Even just that spike just to be able to modulate that. Obviously, there have been other, as you mentioned, pioneers that have participated in
these groundbreaking PCI investigational early feasibility studies. So we're obviously standing in the shoulders of the giants here. We're not the first ones to actually put electros in a human brain. But I mean, just leading up to the surgery, there was a, I might, I definitely could not sleep. It's the first time that you're working in a completely new environment.
We had a lot of confidence based on our bench top testing or preclinical R&D studies that the mechanism, the threads, the insertion, all that stuff is very safe and that it's obviously ready for doing this in a human. But there's still a lot of unknown, unknown about the needle actually insert. I mean, we brought something like 40 needles just in case they break. And we ended up using only one. But I mean, that was a level of just complete unknown,
right? Because it's a very, very different environment. And I mean, that's why we do clinical trial in the first place to be able to test these things out. So extreme nervousness and just I like many, many sleepless nights leading up to the surgery and definitely the day before the surgery. And it was an early morning surgery. Like we started at seven in the morning. And by the time it was around 10 30, it was, it was, it was everything was done. But I mean,
first time seeing that, well, number one, just, just huge relief. That this thing is, you know, doing what it's supposed to do. And two, I mean, just immense amount of gratitude for Nolan and his family. And then many others that have applied and that we've spoken to will speak to our true pioneers in every, every war. And you know, I sort of call them the neural astronauts or neural not. You know, these amazing just like in the 60s, right? These amazing
just pioneers, right? Exploring the unknown outwards in this case is inward. But an incredible amount of gratitude for them to, you know, just just participate and play a part. And it's a journey that we're embarking on together. But also, like I think it was just that was a very, very important milestone, but our work was
just starting. So a lot of just kind of anticipation for what needs to happen next, what are set of sequences of events that needs to happen for us to, you know, make it worthwhile for, you know, both Nolan as well as us. Just a linger on that, just a huge congratulation to you and the team for that milestone. I know there's a lot of work left, but that is, that's really exciting to see. There's a, that's a source of hope. This first big step,
opportunity to help hundreds of thousands of people. And then maybe expand the realm of the possible for the human mind for millions of people in the future. So it's really exciting. So the opportunities are all ahead of us. And to do that safely and to do that effectively was, it was really fun to see as an engineer just watching other engineers come together doing an epic thing. That was awesome. Huge and great. Thank you. Thank you. It's, yeah, could not have done it
without the team. And yeah, I mean, that's the other thing that I, I, you know, told the team as well of just this immense sense of optimism for the future. I mean, it was a, it's a very important moment for, for the company, you know, it needs to say as well as, you know, hopefully for many others out there that we can all speak of challenges. Neuralink published a blog post describing that some of the threads are attracted. And so the performance as measured by bits per second dropped
at first. But then eventually was regained. And that the whole story of how it was regained is super interesting. As definitely something I'll talk to, to Bliss and to know and about. But in general, can you speak to this whole experience? How was the performance regained? And just the technical aspects of the threads being attracted and moving? The main takeaway is that in the end, the performance have come back and it's actually gotten better than it was before. He's actually just
beat the world record yet again last week to 8.5 BPS. So I mean, he's just cranking and he's just improving. The previous one was that he said was eight. Correct. He said the 8.5. Yeah, the previous world record in human was 4.6. Yeah. So it's almost double. And his goal is to try to get to 10, which is roughly around kind of the median neural incur using a mouse with a hand. So it's getting there. So yes, so the performance was regained. Yeah, better than before. So that's, you know,
a story on its own of what took the BCI team to recover that performance. It was actually mostly on kind of the signal processing end. So, you know, as I mentioned, we were kind of looking at these spike outputs from the art electrodes. And what happened is that kind of a four weeks into the surgery, we noticed that the threads have slowly come out of the brain. And the way in which we noticed this at first, obviously, is that I think Nolan was the first to notice that his performance
was degrading. And I think at the time, we were also trying to do a bunch of different experimentation, different algorithms, different sort of UI, UX. So it was expected that there will be variability in the performance. But we did see kind of a steady decline. And then also the way in which we measure the health of the electrodes or whether they're in the brain or not is by measuring
impedance of the electrode. So we look at kind of the interfacial kind of the the Randall circuit, let's they say, you know, the capacitance and the and the resistance between the electrosurface and the medium. And if that changes in some traumatic ways, we have some indication. Or if you're not seeing spikes on those channels, you have some indications that something's happening there.
And what we noticed is that looking at those impedance plot and spike rate plots. And also because we have those electrodes recording along the death, you're seeing some sort of movement that indicated that the reservoir being pulled out. And that obviously will have an implication on the model side. Because if you're the number of inputs that are going into the model is changing because you have less of them, that model needs to get updated. Right. And
but there were still signals. And as I mentioned, similar to how even when you place the signals on the surface of the brain of the brain or farther away, like outside the skull, you still see some useful signals. What we started looking at is not just the spike occurrence through this boss algorithm that I mentioned. But we started looking at just the the power of the frequency band
that is interesting for Nolan or Nolan to be able to modulate. So once we kind of change the algorithm for the implant to not just give you the boss output, but also these spike band power output that helped us sort of be find the model with the new set of inputs. And that that was the thing that really ultimately gave us the performance back. You know, in terms of and obviously like the thing that we want. Ultimately and the thing that we are working towards
is figuring out ways in which we can keep those threads intact for as long as possible. So that we have many more channels going into the model. That's that's by far the number on priority that the team is currently embarking on to understand how to prevent that from happening. The thing that I will say also is that. You know, as I mentioned, this is the first time ever that we're putting these threads in a human brain. And you know, human brain just for size reference is 10 times out of the
monkey brain or the sheep brain. And it's just a very, very different environment. It moves a lot more. It's like actually moved a lot more than we expected when we did Nolan surgery. And it's just a very, very different environment than what we're used to. And this is why we do clinical trial. Right. We want to uncover some of these issues and failure modes earlier than later. So in many ways, it's provided us with this enormous amount of data and information to be able to solve this.
And this is something that Nolan gets extremely good at. Once we have set of clear objective and engineering problem, we have enormous amount of talents across many, many disciplines to be able to come together and fix the problem very, very quickly. But it sounds like one of the fascinating challenges here is for the system and the decoding side to be adaptable across different timescale. So whether it's movement of threads or different aspects of signal drift, sort of on the software
of the human brain, something changing. Like Nolan talks about cursor drift. They could be corrected. And there's a whole UX challenge to how to do that. So it sounds like adaptability is like a fundamental property that has to be engineered in. It is. And I mean, I think, I mean, as a company, we're extremely vertically integrated. You know, we make these thin film arrays
in our own micro fab. Yeah. There's like you said, built in house, this whole paragraph here from this blog post is pretty gangster building the technologies described above has been no small feet. And there's a bunch of links here that I recommend people click on. We constructed in-house micro fabrication capabilities to rapidly produce various iterations of thin film arrays that constitute our electrode threads. We created a custom femtosecond laser mill manufacturer
components with micro level precision. I think there's a tweet associated with this whole thing that we can get into. Yeah. This, this, okay. What are we, what are we looking at here? This thing. This is a, so unless the one minute are custom made femtosecond laser mill cuts this geometry in the tips of our needles. So we're looking at this weirdly shaped needle. The tip is only 10 to 12 microns and width only slightly larger than the diameter of a red blood cell. The small size
allows the rest to be inserted with minimal damage to the cortex. Okay. So what's interesting about this geometry? So we'll look at this just geometry of a needle. This is the needle that's engaging with the loops in the thread. So they're the ones that, you know, thread the, thread the loop and then peel it from the silicon backing and then this is the thing that gets
inserted into the tissue and then this pulls out leaving the thread. And this kind of a notch or the shark tooth that we used to call is the thing that actually is grasping the loop and then it's, it's designed in such way such that when you, when you pull out the loop and the robot is controlling this needle. Correct. So this is actually housed in a cannula and basically the robot is,
has a lot of the optics that look forward. The loop is, there's actually a 405 nanometer light that actually causes the polyimitophilor S so that you can locate the, the location of the loop. So the loop lights up. Yeah, yeah, they do. It's a micron precision process. What's interesting about the robot that it takes to do that? That's, that's pretty crazy. That's pretty crazy that robot is able to get this kind of precision. Yeah, our robot is quite heavy.
Our current version of it, there's, I mean, it's like a giant granite slab that weighs about a ton because it needs to be sensitive to vibration, environmental vibration. And then as the head is moving, at the speed that is moving, you know, there's a lot of kind of motion control to make sure that you can achieve that level of precision. A lot of optics that kind of zoom in on that, you know, we're working on next generation of the robot that is lighter, easier to transport.
I mean, it is a, it is a feat to move the robot. And as far as superior to a human surgeon at this time for this particular task. Absolutely. I mean, let alone you try to actually thread a loop in a, in a sewing kit. I mean, this is like, we're talking like fractions of human hair. These, these things are, it's not visible. So continue in the paragraph. We develop novel hardware and software testing systems such as our accelerated lifetime testing racks and
simulated surgery environment, which is pretty cool. Distress, test and validate the robustness of our technologies. We performed many rehearsals of our surgeries to refine our procedures and make them second nature. This is pretty cool. We practice surgeries on proxies with all the hardware and instruments needed in our mock or in the engineering space. This helps us rapidly test
the measurements. So there's like proxies. Yeah, this proxies super cool. Actually, so there's a 3D printed skull from the images that is taken at BRO, as well as this hydrogel mix, you know, sort of synthetic polymer thing that actually mimics the mechanical properties of the brain.
It also has vascular sure of the person. So basically what we're talking about here, and there's a lot of work that has gone into making this said proxy that, you know, it's about like finding the right concentration of these different synthetic polymers to get the right
set of consistency for the needle dynamics, you know, as they're being inserted. But we practice this surgery with the person, you know, Nolan's basically physiology and brain many, many times prior to actually doing the surgery to every step, every step, every step.
Yeah, like where does someone stand? Like I mean, like what you're looking at is the picture. This is in our office of this kind of corner of the robot engineering space that we, you know, have created this like mock or space that looks exactly like what they would experience, all the staff would experience doing their actual surgery. So I mean, it's just kind of like any dense re-horsal where you know exactly where you're going to stand at what point. And you just practice that over and
over and over again with an exact anatomy of someone that you're going to a surgery. And it got to a point where a lot of our engineers, when we created a craniectomy, they're like, oh, that looks very familiar. We've seen that before. Yeah. And there's wisdom you can gain through doing the same thing over and over and over. It's like a, you're a dreams of sushi kind of thing. Because then it's like Olympic athletes visualize the Olympics. And then once you actually show up,
it feels easy. It feels like any other day. It feels almost boring, winning the gold medal. Oh, yeah. Because you've visualized this so many times. You've practiced this so many times that nothing about us knew. It's boring. You win the gold medal is boring. And the experience they talk about is mostly just relief. Probably that they aren't to visualize it anymore. Yeah, the power of the mind to visualize and where I mean, there's a whole field that studies where muscle
memory lies in Surabelle. Yeah, it's incredible. I think it's a good place to actually ask sort of the big question that people might have is, how do we know every aspect of this that you describe is safe? At the end of the day, the gold standard is look at the tissue. You know, what sort of trauma did you cause the tissue and does that correlate to whatever behavioral anomalies that you may have seen? And that's the language to which we can communicate about the safety of, you know,
inserting something into the brain and what type of trauma that you can cause. So we actually have an entire department, department of pathology that looks at these tissue slices. There are many steps that are involved in doing this once you have, you know, studies that are launched to with particular endpoints in mind, you know, at some point you have to use the nice animal and then you go through a neck crops to kind of collect the brain tissue samples.
You know, you fix them in formalin and you like gross them, you section them and you look at individual slices just to see what kind of reaction or lack thereof exists. So that's the kind of the language to which FDA speaks and you know, as well for us to kind of evaluate the safety of the insertion mechanism as well as the threats at various different time points, you know, both acute.
So anywhere between, you know, zero to three months to beyond three months. So those are kind of the the details of an extremely high standard of safety that has to be reached. FDA supervises this, but this in general just a very high standard and every aspect of this including the surgery, I think Matthew Moldugo has mentioned it like the standard is, let's say how to put it politely higher than maybe some other operations that we take for granted.
So the standard for all the surgical stuff here is extremely high. Very high. I mean, it's a highly highly regulated environment with, you know, the governing agencies that scrutinize every, every medical device that gets marketed. And I think it's a good thing. You know, it's good to have those high standards and we try to hold extremely high standards to kind of understand what sort of damage of any these innovative emerging technologies and new technologies
that we're building are. And you know, so far we have been extremely impressed by lack of immune response from these threats. Speaking of which, you talk to me with excitement about the histology and some of the images that you're able to share. Can you explain to me what we're looking at? Yeah, so what you're looking at is a stained tissue image. So this is a sectioned tissue slice from an animal that was implanted for seven months, so kind of a chronic time point.
And you're seeing all these different colors and each color indicates specific types of cell types. So purple and pink are astrocytes and microglia respectively. They're type of glial cells. And yeah, the other thing that, you know, people may not be aware of is your brain is not just made up of soup of neurons and axons. There are other, you know, cells like glial cells that actually kind of is the glue and also react if there are any trauma or damage
to the tissue. The brown and the neurons. The brown are the neurons. So what you're seeing is in this kind of macro image, you're seeing these like circle highlighted in white the insertion sites. And when you zoom into one of those, you see the threads. And then in this particular case, I think we're seeing about the 16, you know, wires that are going into the page. And the incredible thing here is the fact that you have the neurons that are these brown structures or brown
circular or elliptical thing that are actually touching and abutting the threads. So what this is saying is that there's basically zero trauma that's caused during this insertion. And with these neural interfaces, these microelectros that you insert, that is one of the most common mode of failure. So when you insert these threads like the utare, it causes neuronal death around the site because you're inserting a foreign object. And that kind of elicit these like immune response
through microglia and astro sites. They form this like protective layer around it. Not only are you killing the neuron cells, but you're also creating this protective layer that then basically prevents you from recording neural signals because you're getting farther and farther away from the neurons that you're trying to record. And that is the biggest mode of failure. And in this particular example, in that insight, it's about 50 micron with that skill bar, the neurons just
seem to be attracted to it. And so there's certainly no trauma. That's such a beautiful image. By the way, just so the brown of the neurons, for some reason I can't look away. It's really cool. Yeah. And the way that these things like, I mean, your tissues generally don't have these beautiful colors. This is multiplexed stain that uses these different proteins that are staining these at different colors. We use very standard set of staining techniques with HG,
EBA1, and NuN, and G-FAP. So if you go to the next image, this also kind of illustrates the second point because you could make an argument. And initially when we saw the previous image, we said, oh, are the threads just floating? What is happening here? Are we actually looking at the right thing? So what we did is we did another stain, and this is all done in-house of this
LaSallean trichrome stain, which is in blue, that shows these collagen layers. So the blue basically, like you don't want the blue around the implant threads, because that means that there is some sort of scarring that's happened. And what you're seeing if you look at individual threads is that you don't see any of the blue, which means that there has been absolutely or very, very minimal to a point where it's not detectable amount of trauma in these inserted threads. So that presumably
is one of the big benefits of having this kind of flexible thread. Yeah, so we think this is primarily due to the size as well as the flexibility of the threads. Also the fact that R1 is avoiding that structure. So we're not disrupting or we're not causing damage to the vessels and not breaking any of the blood brain barrier has basically caused the immune response to be muted. But this is also a nice illustration of the size of things. So this is the tip of the thread.
Yeah, those are neurons. And they're neurons. And this is the thread listening. And the electrodes are positioned how? Yeah, so this is what you're looking at. It's not electrode themselves. Those are the conductive wires. So each of those should probably be to micron and width. So what we're looking at is we're looking at the coronal slice. So we're looking at some slice of the tissue. So as you go deeper, you will obviously have less and less
of the tapering of the thread. But yeah, the point basically being that there's just kind of cells around the insert aside, which is just an incredible thing to see. I've just never seen anything like this. How easy and safe is it to remove the implant? Yeah, so it depends on when in the first three months or so after the surgery. There's a lot of kind of tissue modeling
that's happening. Similar to when you got to cut, you obviously start over first couple of weeks, or depending on the size of the wound, scar tissue for me. Right? There are these like contracted. And then in the end, they turn into scab and you can scab it off. The same thing happens in the brain. And it's a very dynamic environment. And before the scar tissue or the neomembarane or the new membrane that forms, it's quite easy to just pull
them out. And there's minimal trauma. That's that's caused during that. Once the scar tissue forms and you know with with Nolan as well, we believe that that's the thing that's currently anchoring the threads. So we haven't seen any more movements since then. So they're they're quite stable. It's it gets harder to actually completely extract the threads. So our current method for removing the device is cutting the thread, leaving the tissue intact and then unscrewing and
taking the implant up. And that hole is now going to be plugged with either another neural link or just with kind of a peak based plastic based cap. Is there okay to leave the threads in there forever? Yeah, we think so. We've done studies where we left them there and one of the biggest concerns that we had is like, do they migrate and do they get to a point where they should not be? We haven't
seen that again, once the scar tissue forms, they get anchored in place. And I should also say that you know when we say upgrades like it's not we're not just talking in theory here like we've actually upgraded many many times. Most of our monkeys or non-human primates, NHP, have been upgraded, you know, Pager who you saw playing Mind Pong has the latest version of device since two years ago and is seemingly very happy and healthy in fact. So what's designed for the future,
the upgrade procedure? So maybe for Nolan. Yeah, what would the upgrade look like? It was essentially what you're mentioning. Is there a way to upgrade sort of the device internally? Will you take it apart and sort of keep the capsule and upgrade the internals? Yeah, so there are a couple of different things here. So for Nolan, if we were to upgrade what we would have to do is either cut the threads or extract the threads depending on kind of the situation
there in terms of how they're anchored or scarred in. If you were to remove them with the tutorial substitute, you have an intact brain so you can reinsert different threads with the updated implant package. There are a couple different other ways that we're thinking about the future of what the upgradable system looks like. One is, you know, at the moment we currently remove the dura. This kind of thick layer that protects the brain but that actually is the thing that
actually proliferates the scar tissue formation. So typically the general good rule of thumb is you want to leave the nature as is and not disrupt that as much. So we're looking at ways to insert the threads through the dura which comes with different set of challenges such as you know it's a pretty thick layer so how do you actually penetrate that without breaking the needle? So we're looking at different needle design for that as well as the kind of the loop
engagement. The other biggest challenges are it's quite opaque optically with white light illumination so how do you avoid still this biggest advantage that we have of avoiding basket sure? How do you image through that? How do you actually still mediate that? So there are other imaging techniques that we're looking at to enable that. But the goal, our hypothesis is that and based on some of the early evidence that we have doing through the dura insertion will
cause minimal scarring that causes them to be much easier to extract over time. And the other thing that we're also looking at this is going to be a fundamental change in the implant architecture is as at the moment it's a monolithic single implant that comes with the thread that's
bonded together so you can't actually separate the thing out but you can imagine having two part implant you know bottom part that is the thread that are inserted that has the chips and maybe a radio and some power source and then you have another implant that has more of the computational
heavy load and the bigger battery and then one can be under the dura one can be above the dura like you know being the plug for the skull they can talk to each other but the thing that you want to upgrade the computer and not the threads if you want to upgrade that you just go in there
you know remove the screws and then put in the next version and you know you're off the you know it's a very very easy surgery too like you do a skin incision slip this in screw probably be able to do this in 10 minutes so that would allow you to reuse the threads sort of correct so I
mean this leads to the natural question of what is the pathway to scaling the increase in the number of threads is that a priority is that like what's what's the technical challenge there yeah that that is a priority so for next versions of the implant you know the key metrics that
we're looking to improve our number of channels just recording from more and more neurons you know we have a pathway to actually go from currently 1000 to you know hopefully 3000 if not 6000 by end of this year and then end of next year we want to get to you know even more 16,000
wow there's a couple of limitations to that one is you know obviously being able to photo lithographically print those wires as I mentioned it's two micron and width and spacing obviously there are chips that are much more advanced than those types of resolution and we have some of the tools that we
have brought in the house to be able to do that so traces will be narrower just so that you have to have more of the wires coming up into the chip chips also cannot linearly consume more energy as you have more and more channels so there's a lot of innovations in the circuit
you know and architecture as well as the circuit design topology to make them lower power you need to also think about if you have all of these spikes how do you send that off to the end the application so you need to think about bandwidth limitation there and potentially innovations
in signal processing physically one of the biggest challenges is going to be the interface it's always the interface that breaks bonding the stem film array to the electronics it starts to become very very highly dense interconnects so how do you connect to write that
there's a lot of innovations in kind of the 3D integrations in the recent years that we can take advantage of one of the biggest challenges that we do have is you know forming this hermetic barrier right you know that this is an extremely harsh environment that we're in the brain so how do you
protect it from yeah like the brain trying to kill your electronics to also your electronics leaking things that you don't want into the brain and that forming that hermetic barrier is going to be a very very big challenge that we are you know I think are actually both suited to tackle
how do you test that like what's the development environment yeah to simulate that kind of harshness yeah so this is this is where the accelerated life tester essentially is a brain and a vat it literally is a vessel that is made up of and again again for all intents and purpose for
this particular types of tests your brain is a saltwater and and you can also put some other set of chemicals like reactive oxygen species that you know get at kind of these interfaces and trying to cause a reaction to to pull it apart but you could also increase the rate at which
these interfaces are aging by just increasing temperature so every 10 degrees Celsius that you increase you're basically accelerating time by 2x and there's limit as to how how much temperature you want to increase because at some point there's some other non-linear dynamics that causes you to
have other nasty gases to form that just is not realistic in an environment so what we do is we increase in our ALT chamber by 20 degrees Celsius that increases the aging by four times so essentially one day in ALT chamber is four day in calendar year and we look at whether the implants
still are intact including the threads and and operation and all that and operation and all of that it obviously is not an exact same environment as a brain because you know brain has mechanical you know other more biological groups that attack at it but it is a good test environment
testing environment for at least the enclosure and the strength of that enclosure and I mean we've had implants the current version of the implant that has been in there for I mean close to 20-1,5 years which is equivalent to a decade and they seem to be fine so it's interesting that the
basically close approximation is warm saltwater hot saltwater is a good testing environment by the way I'm drinking element which is basically saltwater which is making me kind of it doesn't have computational power the way the brain does but in terms of in terms of all the characteristics is quite similar and I'm consuming it.
oh yeah you have to go to the right pH 2 and then consciousness will emerge yeah no oh by the way the other thing that also is interesting about our enclosure is if if you look at our implant it's not your common looking medical implant that usually is
in a encased in a titanium can that's laser welded we use this polymer called PCTFE polychoro tri-floro ethylene which is actually commonly used in blister packs so when you have a till and you're trying to pop the pill there's like kind of that plastic membrane that's what this is
um no one's actually ever used this except us and the reason we wanted to do this is because it's a electromagnetically transparent so when we talked about the electromagnetic inductive charging with titanium can usually if you want to do something like that you know you have to have a
sapphire window and it's a very very tough process to scale so you're doing a lot of iteration here in every aspect of this the materials the software the hard drive all the whole whole shipping so okay so you mentioned scaling is it possible to have multiple neuralink devices is
one of the ways of scaling to have multiple neuralink devices implanted that's the goal that's the goal yeah we've had we've had um I mean our monkeys have had two neural links one in each hemisphere and then we're also looking at you know potential of having one in more cortex one in visual
cortex and one in wherever out there cortex so focusing on a particular function one neuralink device right I mean I wonder if there's some level of customization that can be done on the compute side so for the motor cortex absolutely that's the goal and you know we talk about
at neuralink building a generalized neural interface through the brain um and and that that also is strategically how we're approaching this um with with marketing and also you know with with regulatory which is hey look um we have the robot and the robot can access any part of the cortex
right now we're focused on motor cortex uh with current version of the N1 that's specialized for motor decoding tasks but also at the end of the day there's kind of a general compute available there um but you know typically if you want to really get down to kind of
hyper optimizing for power and efficiency you don't need to get to some specialized function right but you know what we're saying is hey you know you you are now used to this robotic insertion techniques which which you know took up many many years of you know showing data um and
conversation with the FDA um and also internally convincing ourselves that this is this is safe and um now the difference is if we go to other parts of the brain like visual cortex which we're interested in as our second product um obviously it's a completely different environment the cortex
is laid out very very differently um you know it's going to be more stimulation focus rather than recording on just just kind of creating visual percepts but in the end we're using the same thin polymer A technology we're using the same robot insertion technology we're using the same you know
packaging technology now it's more the conversations focus around what are the differences and what are the implication of those differences in safety and efficacy the way said second product is both hilarious and awesome to me uh that product being restoring site for blind people
so can you speak to stimulating the visual cortex I mean the possibilities there are just incredible to be able to give that gift back to people who don't have site or even any aspect of that can you just speak to the challenges of there's several challenges here
oh many one of which is like you said from recording to stimulation just uh any aspect of that that you're both excited and uh see the challenges of yeah I guess I'll start by saying that we actually have been um capable of stimulating through our dental array as well as electronics
for years um you know we we have actually demonstrated some of that capabilities for uh reanimating the limb in the spinal cord um it you know obviously for for the current EFS study you know we've hardware disabled that so that's that's something that you know we wanted to embark
as a separate separate journey um and and you know obviously there are many many different ways to write information into the brain the way in which we're doing that is through electrical you know passing electrical current and and kind of causing that to really change the local
environment so that you can sort of artificially cause kind of the neurons to depolarize in in nearby areas for for vision specifically um you know the way our visual system works it's both well understood I mean anything would kind of brain their aspects of it that's well
understood but in the end like we don't really know anything um but the way visual system works is that you have photon hitting your eye and in your eyes uh you know there are these um specialized cells called photoreceptor cells that convert the photon energy into electrical signals and then
they get that then gets projected to um your back of your head your visual cortex um you know it goes through actually um you know a thalamic system called lgn that then projects it out and then in the visual cortex there's you know visual area one or v1 and then there's a bunch of other
higher level processing layers like v2 v3 and there there are actually kind of interesting parallels and when you study the behaviors of these convolutional neural networks like what the different layers of the network is detecting you know first they're detecting like these edges
and they're then detecting some more natural curves and then they start to detect like objects right kind of similar thing happens in the brain um and a lot of that has been inspired and also you know it's been kind of exciting to see some of the correlations there um but you know things like
from there where this cognition arise and where where's color encoded there's there's just not a lot of um understanding fundamental understanding there so in terms of kind of bringing sight back to those that are blind um there are many different forms of blindness there's actually million people one million people in the US that are legally blind um you know that means like certain uh like score below in kind of the visual test um I think it's something like if you can see something
uh at 20 feet distance that normal people can see at 200 feet distance like you're like if you're worsened that you're legally blind so for them funerals that means you can't function effectively correct using sight in the world yeah like to navigate navigate your environment um and yeah
there are different forms of blindness there are forms of blindness where uh there's some degeneration of your retina um his photoreceptor cells and and rest of your visual uh you know processing that I described is intact and for those types of individuals uh you may not need to
maybe stick electrodes into the visual cortex you can actually um uh build retinal prosthetic devices that actually just replaces a function of that retinal cells that are degenerated and there are many companies that are working on that but that that's a very small slice that albeit
significance those smaller slice of folks that are legally blind um you know if there's any damage along that circuitry whether it's in the optic nerve or you know uh just the LGN circuitry or any any break in that circuit that's not going to work for you um and uh the source of where you
need to actually cause that visual percepts to happen because your biological mechanism not doing that is by placing electrodes in the visual cortex in the back of your head and the way in which this would work is that you would have an external camera whether it's um you know
something as unsophisticated as a GoPro or you know some sort of wearable you know rayband type glasses that met us working on that captures a scene right um and that scene is then converted to set of electrical impulses or stimulation pulses that you would uh activate in your
visual cortex through um these dimfellown rays and by playing some certain you know concerted kind of uh orchestra of these stimulation patterns you can create what's called phosphines which are these um kind of white yellowish dots that you can also create by just pressing your
eyes um you can actually create those percepts by stimulating the visual cortex and the name of the game is really have many of those and have those percepts be the phosphines be as small as possible so that you can start to tell apart like they're the individual pixels of the of the screen right so
if you have many many of those you know potentially you'll be able to um you know in in the long term be able to actually get naturalistic vision but in the mid like short term to maybe midterm um being able to at least be able to have object detection algorithms run on your um on your glasses the prepot processing units and then being able to at least see the edges of things so you don't bump
into stuff. It's incredible this is really incredible so you basically would be adding pixels and your brain would start to figure out what those pixels mean yeah and like with with different kinds
of assistant and signal processing on all fronts. Yeah the thing that actually so a couple things one is um you know obviously if you're uh blind from birth um the way brain works especially in the early age um neuroplasticity is really nothing other than you know kind of your brain and different parts
of your brain fighting for the limited territory. Yeah um and and I mean very very quickly you see you see cases where you know people that are I mean you also hear about people who are blind that have heightened sense of hearing or some other senses and the reason for that is because that
cortex that's not used just gets taken over by these different parts of the cortex so for those types of individuals um I mean I guess they're going to have to now map some other parts of their senses into what they call vision but it's going to be obviously a very very different conscious experience um before uh so I think that's an interesting caveat. The other thing that also is important to highlight is that we're currently limited by our biology in terms of the the wave
length that we can see. There's a very very small wavelength that is a visible um light wavelength that we can see with our eyes but when you have an external camera with this um BCI system you're not limited to that you can have infrared you can have UV you can have whatever other spectrum that you want to see and whether that gets mapped to some sort of weird conscious experience I've no idea but when I you know I'm oftentimes I talk to people about the goal of neural ink being going
beyond the limits of our biology um that's sort of what I mean. And if you're able to control the kind of raw signal is that when we use our site we're getting the photons and there's not much processing on it. If you're able to control that signal maybe you can do some kind of processing maybe you do object detection ahead of time. Yeah you're doing some kind of pre-processing and there's a lot of possibilities to explore that so it's not just the increasing sort of thermal
imaging that kind of stuff but it's also just doing some kind of interesting processing. Yeah. I mean my my theory of how like visual system works also is that um I mean that there's just so many things happening in the world and there's a lot of photons that are going into your eye and it's
unclear exactly where some of the pre-processing steps are happening but I mean I actually think that just just from a fundamental perspective there's just so much uh the reality that we're in if it's a reality um is so there's so much data and I think humans are just unable to actually
like eat enough actually to process all that information so there's some sort of filtering that does happen whether that happens in the retinue whether that happens in different layers of the visual cortex unclear but like the analogy that I sometimes think about is you know if uh if your
brain is a ccd camera and the in all of the information in the world is a sun um and when you try to actually look at the sun with the ccd camera it's just going to saturate the sensors right because it's a enormous amount of energy so what you what you do is you end up adding these
filters right to just kind of narrow the information that's coming to you and being captured and I think you know things like our experiences or our um uh you know like drugs like prophyball that like anesthetics drug or you know psychedelics what they're doing is they're kind of
swapping out these filters and putting in new ones or removing all their ones and kind of controlling our conscious experience yeah man not to distract from the topic but I just took a very high dose of ayahuasca in the amazon jungle so yes it's a nice way to think about it you're swapping
out different different experiences and with neural ink being able to control that primarily at first to improve function not for entertainment purposes or enjoyment purposes but yeah giving back lost functions while giving back lost functions and there that's
that's just more novel when the function is completely lost anything is a huge help would you uh implant a neural ink device in your own brain absolutely I mean maybe not right now but absolutely what kind of capability once reached you start getting real curious and almost get
a little antsy like like jealous of people that get as you watch them getting planted yeah I mean I think I mean even even with our early participants if they start to do things that I I can't do which I think is in the realm of possibility for them to be able to get you know 15 20 if not like
100 BPS right um there's nothing that fundamentally it stops us from being able to achieve that type of performance um I mean I was certainly got jealous um that they can do that I should say that watching know and I get a little jealous because he's having so so much fun and it seems like such
a chill way to play video games yeah so I mean the thing that also is hard to appreciate sometimes is that you know he's doing these things while multi like while talking and I mean it's multitasking right so it's it's clearly it's obviously cognitive cognitively intensive but similar to how
you know when we talk we move our hands like these things like you know you like are multitasking I mean he's able to do that and you know you won't be able to do that with other assistive technology as far as I'm aware you know if you're obviously using like an eye tracking device
you know you're very much fixated on that thing that you're trying to do and if you're using voice control I mean like if you say some other stuff yeah you don't get to use that yeah the the multitasking aspect that is really interesting so it's not just the bps for the primary task it's
the it's the parallelization of multitask if you take if you measure the bps for the entirety of the human organism so if you're talking and doing a thing with your mind and looking around mm-hmm also I mean there's just a lot of parallelization that can they can be happening but I mean I
think at some point for him like if he wants to really achieve those high-level bps it does require like you know full attention right and that's a separate circuitry that that is a big mystery like how attention works and you know yeah attention like cognitive load have done have a very
lot of literature and people doing two tasks like you have the your primary task and secondary task and the secondary task is is a source of distraction and how does that affect the performance on the primary task and there's depending on the task there's a lot of interesting I mean this
is an interesting computational device right and I think they're to say the least a lot of novel insights that can be gained from everything I mean I personally am surprised that no one's able to do such incredible control the cursor while talking and also being nervous at the same time because
he's talking like all of us are if you're talking in front of the camera you get nervous so all of those are coming into playing is able to still achieve high performance surprising I mean all of this is really amazing and I think just after researching this really in depth I kind of want it you're like I can't get in the line and also the safety can mine well we should say the registry is for people who have quadriplegia and krall that kind of stuff so that would be a separate line for people
they're just curious like myself so now that no one patient p1 is part of the ongoing prime study what's the high level vision for p2 p3 p4 p5 and just the expansion into other human beings that are getting to experience this implant yeah I mean the primary goal is you know for for our
study in the first place is to achieve safety and points just understand safety of this device as well as the implantation process and also at the same time understand the efficacy and the impact that it could have on the potential users lives and just because you have and you know
you're living with tetraplegia it doesn't mean your situation is same as another person living with tetraplegia it's widely widely varying and and you know you're something that you know we're hoping to also understand how our technology can serve not just a very small slice of those
individuals but you know broader group of individuals and being able to get the feedback to you know just really build the just the best product for them um so our our you know there's obviously also uh you know goals that we have and the primary purpose of the
early feasibility study is to learn from each and every participants to improve the device improve the surgery before you know we embark on what's called the pivotal study that then is much larger trial that starts to look at statistical significance of your endpoints and that's
required before you can then market the device and and you know that's how it works in the US and just generally around the world that's that's the process you follow so you know our goal is to really just understand from people like Nolan P2 P3 future participants what aspects of our
device needs to improve you know if if it turns out that people are like I really don't like the fact that it lasts only six hours I want to be able to use this computer for you know like 24 hours I mean that's that is a you know user needs and user requirements which we can only find out
from just just being able to engage with them so before the pivotal study there's kind of like a rapid innovation based on individual experiences you're learning from individual people how they use it like the like the high resolution details in terms of like cursor control and signal and all
that kind of stuff to like life experience yeah so there's hardware changes but also just just firmware updates so even even when we you know had had that sort of recovery event for Nolan you know he now has the new firmware that that he has been updated with and you know similar to how
like your phone to get updated all the time with new farmers for security patches whatever new functionality UI right and that's something that is possible with our implant it's not a static one-time device that that can only do the thing that it said it can do I mean similar to Tesla you
can do over there or firmware updates and now you have completely new user user interface and all this bells and whistles and improvements on you know everything like the latest right and that's that's that's you know when we say generalized platform that's what we're talking about
yeah it's really cool how the the app the Nolan is using there's like calibration all that all that kind of stuff and then there's update just you just click and get an update uh what other future capabilities are are you kind of looking to you said vision that's a
fascinating one what about sort of accelerated typing or speech or this kind of stuff yeah what and what else is there what's yeah those those are still in the well realm of movement program so it's largely speaking we have two programs we have the movement program and we
have the vision program the movement program you know currently is focused around you know the digital freedom as you can easily guess if you can control you know to the cursor in the digital space you could move anything in the physical space um so robotic arms wheelchair your environment
uh or even really like whether it's through the phone or just like directly to those interfaces so like to those machines um so we're looking at ways to kind of expand those types of capability even for Nolan um that requires you know conversation with dfda and kind of showing safety data for
you know if there's a robotic arm or wheelchair that you know we can guarantee that they're not going to hurt themselves accidentally right um it's very different if you're moving stuff in the in the digital domain versus like in the physical space you can actually um potentially cause harm
to the participants um so we're working through that right now um speech does involve different areas of the brain speech prosthetic is very very fascinating and there's actually been a lot of really um amazing work that's been happening in academia um you know surrogate stabiski at uc davis jame henderson and you know late christian eshano i um as stanford are doing to some incredible amount of work in improving speech uh neuro prosthetics and it those are actually looking more at
parts of the motor cortex that are controlling you know these focal articulators and you know being able to like even by melting the word or imagine speech you can pick up those signals um the more sophisticated higher level processing areas like you know the brokras area or you know uh warnikis
area those are still very very big mystery in terms of the underlying mechanism of how all that stuff works but um yeah i mean i think i think the only thing is the ventral goal is to kind of understand those those things um and and be able to provide a platform and tools to be able to
understand that and study that this is where i get to the pot head questions um do you think we can start getting insight into things like thought so speech is uh there's a muscular component like you said there's like the act of producing sounds but then what about the internal things
like cognition like low level thoughts and high level thoughts do you think we'll start noticing kind of signals that could be picked up they could um they could be understood they could be maybe used in order to interact with the outside world in some ways like i guess this starts to kind of
get into the hard problem of consciousness um and uh i mean on one hand all of these are at some point set of electrical signals that um from there maybe it in itself is giving you the cognition or the meaning or somehow human mind is incredibly amazing storytelling machine so
we're telling ourselves and fooling ourselves that there's some interesting meaning here um um but i i i certainly think that bci and you know really bci at the end of the day is set of tools that help you kind of study the underlying mechanisms and in a both like local but also broader sense um
and whether you know there's some interesting patterns of like electrical signal that means like you're thinking this versus and you can either like learn from like many many sets of data to correlate some of that and be able to do mind reading or not i'm not i'm not sure um i certainly would not kind of blow that out as a possibility but um i i think bci alone probably can't do that there's probably additional set of tools and framework and and also like just hard problem of consciousness
at the end of the day is rooted in this philosophical question of like what is the what's the meaning of it all what's the nature of our existence like where's the mind emerged from this complex network like yeah how does the uh how does this subjective experience emerge from just a bunch of spikes
electrical spikes yeah yeah i mean we we do really think about bci and what we're building as a tool for understanding the mind the brain the only question that matters there's actually um there actually is some biological existence proof of like what it would take to kind of start to
form some of these experiences that may be unique um if you actually look at every one of our brains there there two hemispheres there's a left-sided brain there's a right-sided brain and i mean unless you have some other conditions you normally don't feel like left lex or right lex
like you just feel like one lex right so what is happening there right um if you actually look at the two hemispheres there's a uh uh structure that kind of connectorize the two called the corpus colosum that is supposed to have around 200 to 300 million connections or axons um so whether
that means that's the the number of interface and electrodes that we need to create some sort of mind-meld or from that like whatever new conscious experience that you you can experience um but yeah i do think that there's like kind of an interesting um existence proof that we all have
and that threshold is unknown at this time oh yeah these things everything in this domain is you know speculation right um and then there will be uh you'd be continuously pleasantly surprised uh do you see a world where there's millions of people like tens of millions hundreds of
millions of people walking out around with the neuralink device and there are multiple neuralink devices in that brain i do first of all there are like if you look at worldwide um people suffering from movement disorders and visual tepuses i mean that that's uh in the tens if not hundreds of
millions of people um so that that alone i think there's a lot of uh benefit and and potential good that we can do with this type of technology and once you start to get into kind of neuro like psychiatric application you know depression um anxiety hunger or you know obesity right like
mood control of appetite i mean that starts to become you know very real to everyone not to mention that every uh most people on earth have a smartphone and once BCI starts competing with a smartphone as a preferred methodology of interacting with the digital world that also becomes an interesting
thing oh yeah i mean that yeah this is even before going to that right i mean there's like almost i mean the entire world that could benefit from these types of thing and then yeah like if we're talking about kind of next generation of how we interface with you know machines or even
ourselves uh in many ways i think um BCI can play a role in that um and you know some of the things that i also talk about is i do think that there is a real possibility that you could see um you know the eight billion people walking around with neuro link well thank you so much for pushing ahead
and uh i look forward to that exciting feature thanks for having me thanks for listening to this conversation with DJ Sa and now dear friends here's Matthew McDougal the head neurosurgeon at neuro link one of you first become fascinated with the human brain
since forever as far back as i can remember i've been interested in the human brain i mean i was you know a thoughtful kid and a bit of an outsider and you you know sit there thinking about what the most important things in the world are uh in your in your little tiny adolescent brain
and the answer that i came to that i converged on was uh that all of the things you can possibly conceive of as things that are important for human beings to care about are literally contained you know in the skull uh both the perception of them and their relative values and
you know the solutions to all our problems and all of our problems are all contained in the skull and if we knew more about how that worked uh how the brain encodes information and generates desires and generates agony and suffering uh we we could do more about it you know you think about all the
all the really great triumphs in human history you think about all the really horrific tragedies uh you know you think about the holocaust you think about um any prison full of human stories uh and all of those problems boil down to neurochemistry so if you get a little bit of control over that
you provide people the option to do better and in the way i read history the way people have dealt with having better tools is that they most often in the end do better uh with huge asterisks but i think it's a an interesting worthy and noble pursuit to give people more options more tools
yeah that's a fascinating way to look at human history you just imagine all these neurobiological mechanisms, Stalin, Hitler, all these jankous con all of them just had like a brain it just a bunch of neurons you know like a few tons of billions of neurons uh gaining a bunch of
information over a period of time they have a set of module that does language and memory and all that and from there in in the in the case of those people they're able to murder millions of people yeah and yeah all of that coming from uh there's not some glorified notion of a dictator of this
enormous mind or something like this it's just it's just the brain yeah yeah i mean a lot of that has to do with how well people like that can organize those around them other brains yeah and so i always find it interesting to look to primatology you know look to our closest non-human relatives
for clues as to how humans are going to behave and and what particular humans are able to achieve and so you look at chimpanzees and bonobos and you know they're similar but different in their social structures particularly and i went to emery in Atlanta and studied under
uh friends to all the great friends to all who was kind of the leading primatologist who recently died and his work and looking at chimps through the lens of you know how you would watch an episode of friends and understand the motivations of the characters interacting with each other he would look
at a chimpo colony and basically apply that lens i'm massively oversimplifying it if you do that instead of just saying you know subject 473 you know through his feces at subject 471 you talk about them in terms of their human struggles accord them the dignity of
themselves as actors with understandable goals and drives what they want out of life and primarily it's you know the things we want out of life food sex companionship um power uh you can understand chimp and bonoba behavior in the same lights much more easily and i think doing so
gives you the tools you need to reduce human behavior from the kind of false complexity that we layer onto it with language and look at it in terms of all these humans are looking for companionship sex food power um and i think that that's a pretty powerful tool to have an understanding human
behavior and i just uh went to the Amazon junk go for a few weeks and it's a very visceral reminder that a lot of life on earth is just trying to get laid yeah they're all screaming at each other yeah i saw a lot of monkeys and they're just trying to impress each other or maybe if there's a
battle for power but a lot of the battle for power has to do with them getting laid right and breeding rights often go with alpha status and so if you can get a piece of that then you're gonna do okay and would like to think that we're somehow fundamentally different but
especially when it comes to primates where we really aren't you know we can use fancier poetic language but uh maybe some of the underlying drives that motivators are um um similar yeah i think that's true and all of that is coming from this the brain yeah uh
so when did you first start studying the the brain as it gets the biological mechanism basically the moment i got to college i started looking around for labs that i could uh do neuroscience work in i originally approached that from the angle of uh looking at interactions between the brain and
the immune system which isn't the most obvious place to start but um i had this idea at the time that the contents of your thoughts would have an impact a direct impact maybe a powerful one on uh non-conscious systems in your body the systems we think of as you know homostatic
automatic mechanisms like fighting off of iris like repairing a wound um and sure enough there are big crossovers between the two i mean it gets to um kind of a key point that i think goes under recognized one of the things people don't recognize or or appreciate about the human brain
enough and that is that it basically controls or has a huge role in almost everything that your body does um like you try to try to name an example of something in your body that isn't directly controlled or massively influenced by the brain and uh it's pretty hard i mean you might say like
bone healing or something but uh even those systems the hypothalamus impotuitary end up playing a role in coordinating the endocrine system that does have a direct influence on say the calcium level in your blood that goes to bone healing so non-obvious connections between those things
implicate the brain as really a potent prime mover in all of health one of the things i realized in the other direction too how most of the systems in the body integrated with a human brain like they affect the brain also like the immune system um i think there's just you know
people who study Alzheimer's and uh those kinds of things it's just surprising how much you can understand that from the immune system from the other systems that don't obviously seem to have to anything to do with sort of the nervous system they all play together
yeah you can understand how that would be driven by evolution too just in some simple examples if you get sick if you get a communicable disease you get the flu uh it's pretty advantageous for your immune system to tell your brain hey now be anti-social for uh you know a few
days don't go be the life of the party tonight in fact maybe just cuddle up somewhere warm under a blanket and just stay there for a day or two and sure enough that tends to be the behavior that you see both in animals and and in humans if you get sick elevated levels of interleukins in your
blood and TNF alpha in your blood ask the brain to cut back on social activity and uh even moving around you you have lower locomotor activity uh in animals that are infected with viruses so from there the early days in neuroscience to surgery when did that step happen?
yeah uh leap you know it was sort of an evolution of thought I wanted to study the brain I started studying the brain in undergrad in this neuro immunology lab uh I from there realized at some point that I didn't want to just generate knowledge I wanted to
affect real changes in the actual world in actual people's lives and so after having not really thought about going into medical school I was on a track to go into a PhD program I said well I'd like I'd like that option I'd like to actually potentially help tangible people in front of me
and uh doing a little digging found that there exists these MD PhD programs where you can choose not to choose between them and do both and so uh I went to USC for medical school and I had a joint PhD program with Caltech um where I met yeah actually chose that program particularly
because of a researcher at Caltech named Richard Anderson who's one of the godfathers of primate neuroscience has a a macaque lab where Utah rays and other electrodes were being inserted into the brains of monkeys uh to try to understand how intentions were being encoded in the brain so you know I ended up there with the idea that maybe I would be a neurologist and study the brain on the side uh and then discovered that neurology um again I'm gonna make enemies by saying this but
yeah neurology predominantly and and distressingly to me is is the practice of diagnosing a thing and then saying good luck with that when there's not much we can do um and neurosurgery very differently uh is a it's a powerful lever on taking people that are headed in a bad direction and changing
their course uh in the sense of brain tumors that are potentially treatable or curable with surgery um you know even aneurysms in the brain blood vessels that are gonna rupture you can uh save lives really is at the end of the day what what mattered to me and so
uh I was at USC as I mentioned that happens to be one of the great neurosurgery programs and so I met these truly epic uh neurosurgeons Alex Kilesi and and Mike Opazzo and Steve Gianata and Marty Weiss these these sort of epic people that were just human beings in front of me and so it
kind of changed my thinking from neurosurgeons are distant gods that live on another planet and occasionally come and visit us to these are humans that have problems in our people and uh there's nothing fundamentally preventing me from being one of them uh and so um at the last minute in
medical school I changed gears from going and do a different specialty and and switched into neurosurgery uh which cost me a year I had to do another year of research because I was so far along in the process uh that um to switch into neurosurgery the deadlines that already passed those
I a decision that cost time but absolutely worth it what was the hardest part of the training on the on the neurosurgeon track yeah two things I think that you know residency in neurosurgery is sort of a competition of pain of like how much pain can you eat and smile yeah uh and so there's
workout restrictions that are not really they're viewed at I think internally among the residents as weakness and so most neurosurgery residents try to work as hard as they can and that I think necessarily means working long hours and sometimes over the workout limits and
you know we care about being compliant with whatever regulations are uh in front of us but I think more important than that people want to give all give their all in becoming a better neurosurgeon because the the stakes are so high and so it's a real fight to get residents uh to say go home
at the end of their shift and not stay and do more surgery are you seriously saying like one of the hardest things is literally like getting forcing them to get sleep and rest and all this kind of stuff historically that was the case I think I think the next generation I think the next
generation is more uh compliant and more secure what you mean all right I'm just I'm just getting I'm just kidding I didn't say it now I'm making enemies no okay I get it while that's fascinating uh so what was the second thing the personalities uh and maybe the two are connected but
so is it was a pretty competitive competitive and it's also um you know as we touched on earlier primates like power and I think neurosurgery has long had this aura of uh mystique and excellence and whatever about it and so
it's it's an invitation I think for people that are cloaked in that authority you know abored certified neurosurgeon is basically a walking uh fallacious appeal to authority right you have license to walk into any room and act like you're you know an expert on whatever and fighting that
tendency is not something that most neurosurgeons do well humility isn't the forte yeah one of the so um I have friends uh who know you and whenever they speak of why you that so yours you're have the surprising quality for neurosurgeon of humility
which I think in decays it's not it's not as common as perhaps in other professions because there is a kind of gigantic sort of heroic aspect to neurosurgery and I think it gets to people's head a little bit yeah well that I think that uh you know that allows me to play well at an
Elon company because Elon uh one of his strengths I think is just just instantly see through fallacy from authority so nobody walks into a room that he's in and says well god damn it you have to trust me I'm the guy that built the last you know ten rockets or something and he says well you
did it wrong and we can do it better uh or I'm the guy that you know kept forward alive for the last 50 years you listen to me on how to build cars and he says no and so you don't walk into a room that he's in and say well I'm a neurosurgeon let me tell you how to do it uh he's gonna say well
I'm a human being that has a brain I can think from first principles myself thank you very much uh and here's how I think it ought to be done let's go try and see who's right uh and that's you know proven I think over and over in his case to be a very powerful approach we just take that
tangent there's uh fascinating interdisciplinary team at your link that you get to interact with including Elon what do you think is this secret to a successful team well what have you learned from just getting to observe these folks yeah world experts in different disciplines work together
yeah there's a sweet spot where people disagree and forcefully speak their mind and passionately defend their position and yet are still able to accept information from others and change their ideas when they're wrong and so I like the analogy of sort of how you polish rocks you put hard
things in a in a hard container and spin it people bash against each other and outcomes uh you know a more refined product and so to make a good team at NERLINK we've tried to find you know people that are not afraid to defend their ideas passionately and you know occasionally strongly disagree with
people uh that they're that they're working with and have the best idea come out on top it's not an easy balance again to refer back to the primate brain it's not something that is inherently built into the the primate brain to say I passionately put all my chips on this
position and now I'm just gonna walk away from it admit you are right you know part of our brains tell us that that is a power loss that is a loss of face a loss of standing in the community and and and now you're a zeta chump because your idea got trounced and you just have to
you know recognize that that little voice in the back of your head is maladaptive and it's not helping the team win yeah you have to have the confidence to be able to walk away from an idea that you hold on to yeah and if you do that often enough you're actually going to
become the best in the world that you're thinking I mean that kind of that rapid iteration yeah you'll at least be a member of a winning team ride the wave uh what what did you learn you mentioned there's a lot of amazing uh neurosurgeons at USC
what what lessons about surgery and life have you learned from those folks yeah I think working your ass off working hard while you know functioning as a member of a team getting a job done that is incredibly difficult you know working incredibly long hours
being up all night taking care of someone that you know you think probably won't survive no matter what you do working hard to make people that you passionately dislike look good the next morning these folks were relentless in their pursuit of excellent neurosurgical technique
decade over decade and and I think we're well recognized for that that excellence so it's you know especially Marty Weiss, Steve Gianata, uh my cupazo they made huge contributions not only to surgical technique but they built training programs that trained dozens or hundreds of amazing
neurosurgeons I was just lucky to kind of be in their wake what's that like you mentioned doing a surgery where the person is likely not to survive does that wear on you yeah um you know it's especially challenging
um when you with all respect to our elders it doesn't hit so much when you're taking care of an 80 year old and something was going to get them pretty soon anyway and so you lose a patient like that and it it was part of the natural course of what is expected of them in the in the coming years
regardless uh taking care of you know a father of two or three four young kids someone in their thirties that didn't have it coming and they show up in your ER having their first seizure of their life and low on bold they've got a huge malignant inoperable or incurable brain tumor
you you can only do that I think a handful of times before it really starts eating away at your at your armor um all right you know a young mother that shows up that has a giant hemorrhagin brain that she's not going to survive from and you know they bring her four-year-old daughter in
to say goodbye one last time before they turn the ventilator off that um you know the great Henry Marsh is an English neurosurgeon who said it best I think he says every neurosurgeon carries with them a private graveyard and I definitely feel that um especially with young
parents that that that kills me they they had a lot more to give the the loss of those people specifically has a you know knock on effect that's going to make the world worse for people for a long time and it's just hard to feel powerless in the face of that you know and that's where
I think you have to be a borderline evil to fight against a company like Nurelank or to constantly be taking pot shots at us because what we're doing is to try to fix that stuff we're trying to give people options uh to reduce suffering we're trying to we're trying to take the
the the pain out of life that uh broken brains brings in and um yeah this is just our our little way that we're fighting back against entropy I guess yeah that's the the amount of suffering that's endured when some of the things that we take for granted that our brains able to do is taken away
uh as immense and to be able to restore some of that functionality is a real gift yeah we're just starting we're we're gonna we're gonna do so much more um well can you take me through the full procedure of an implanting say the N1 chip in your link yeah it's a really simple really simple
straightforward procedure uh the the human part of the surgery that that I do is dead simple it's one of the most basic neurosurgery procedures imaginable and I think there's evidence that it some version of it has been done for thousands of years uh there are examples I think from
ancient Egypt of healed or partially healed uh trefinations and from uh Peru or you know ancient times in South America uh where uh these proto surgeons would drill holes in people's skulls you know presumably to let out the evil spirits but maybe to drain blood clots and there's evidence of
bone healing around the edge meaning the people at least survive some months uh after a procedure and so what we're doing is that we are making a cut in the skin on the top of the head over the area of the brain that is the most potent uh representation of hand intentions and so if you if you
are an expert concert pianist you know this part of your brain is lighting up the entire time you're playing uh we call it the hand knob the hand knob yeah so it's all the like the finger movement all this all yeah all of that is just firing away yep there's a little squiggle in the
cortex right there one of the folds in the brain is kind of doubly folded right on that spot so you can look at it on an MRI and say that's the hand knob and then you you do a functional test and a special kind of MRI called an a functional MRI F MRI and this part of the brain lights up when
people and even quadriplegic people whose brains aren't connected to their finger movements anymore they imagine finger movements and this part of the brain still lights up so we can ID that part of the brain in anyone who's preparing to enter our trial and say okay that that part of the brain
we confirm is your hand intention area and so I'll make a little cut in the skin we'll flap the skin open just like kind of opening the hood of a car only a lot smaller make a perfectly round one inch diameter hole in the skull remove that bit of skull open the lining of the brain the
covering of the brain it's like a like a little bag of water that the brain floats in and then show that part of the brain to our robot and then the this is where the robot shines it can come in and take these tiny you know much smaller than human hair electrodes and precisely insert them
into the cortex into the surface of the brain to a very precise depth in a very precise spot that avoids all the blood vessels that are coating the surface of the brain and after the robot's done with its part then you know the human comes back in and puts the implant into that hole in the
skull and covers it up screwing it down to the skull and sewing the skin back together so the whole thing is you know a few hours long it's extremely low risk compared to the average neurosurgery involving the brain that that might say open up a deep part of the brain or manipulate blood vessels in the brain this this opening on the surface of the brain with with only cortical micro insertions carries significantly less risk than a lot of the
you know tumor or aneurysm surgeries that are routinely done. So cortical micro insertions that are via robot and computer vision are designed to avoid the blood vessels. Exactly. So I know you're a bit biased here but let's compare human and machine. So what are human surgeons able to do well and what are robot surgeons able to do well at this stage of our human civilization development? Yeah yeah it's good question. Humans are general purpose machines we're able to adapt to
unusual situations we're able to change the plan on the fly. I remember well a surgery that I was doing many years ago down in San Diego where the plan was to open a small hole behind the ear and go reposition a blood vessel that had come to lay on the facial nerve the trigeminal nerve
the nerve that goes to the face when that blood vessel lays on the nerve it can cause just intolerable horrific shooting pain that people describe like being zapped with a cattle prod and so the beautiful elegant surgery is to go move this blood vessel off the off the nerve.
The surgery team we went in there and started moving this blood vessel and then found that there was a giant aneurysm on that blood vessel that was not easily visible on the pre-op scans and so the plan had to dynamically change and that the human surgeons had no problem with that we're trained
for all those things robots wouldn't do so well in that situation at least in their current incarnation fully robotic surgery like you know the the electrode insertion portion of of the nerve link surgery it goes according to a set plan and so the humans can interrupt the flow
and change the plan but the robot can't really change the plan midway through it operates according to how it was programmed and how it was asked to run it does its job very precisely but not with a wide degree of latitude and how to react to changing conditions. So there could be just a very large number of ways that you could be surprised as a surgeon when you enter a situation that could be subtle things that you have to dynamically adjust to. Correct and robots are not good at that.
Currently. Currently. I think we are at the dawn of a new era with AI of the parameters for robot responsiveness to be dramatically broadened right I mean you can't look at a self-driving car and say that it's operating under very narrow parameters you know if a chicken runs across the road it wasn't necessarily
programmed to deal with that specifically but it a waymo or a self-driving Tesla we have no problem reacting to that appropriately and so surgical robots aren't there yet but give it a time and then there could be a lot of sort of like semi-autonomous possibilities of
maybe a robotic surgeon could say this situation is perfectly familiar or the situation is not familiar and in the not familiar case a human could take over but basically like be very conservative and saying okay this for sure has no issues no surprises and let the humans deal with the
surprises with the edge cases all that yeah that's one possibility so like you think eventually you'll be out of the job what you being neurosurgeon you're job being your surgeon humans there will not be many neurosurgeons left on this earth I'm not worried about my job
in my in the course of my professional life I think I I would tell my my kids not necessarily to go in this line of work depending on depending on how things look in 20 years it's so fascinating because I mean I if I have a line of work I would say it's programming and if you ask me like
for the last I don't know 20 years what I would recommend for people I would I would tell them yeah go yeah there's this you will always have a job as your programmer because there's more more computers and all this kind of stuff and it pays well but then you realize these
large language models come along and they're really damn good at generating code yeah so it's overnight you could be surprised like wow what is the contribution of the human really but then you start to think okay it does seem like humans have ability like you said to deal with
novel situations in the case of programming it's the ability to kind of come up with novel ideas to solve problems it's it seems like machines aren't quite yet able to do that and when the stakes are very high on its life critical as it is in surgery especially in your surgery then it starts
the the stakes are very high for a robot to actually replace a human but it's fascinating that in this case of neural link there's a human robot collaboration yeah yeah it's I do the parts I can't do and it does the parts I can't do and we we are friends
I saw that there's a lot of practice going on so I mean everything in your like is it is tested extremely rigorously but one of the things I saw that there's a proxy on which the surgeries are performed yeah so this is both for the robot and for the human for everybody involved in
the entire pipeline yep what's that like practicing the surgery it's pretty intense so there's no analog to this in human surgery human surgery sort of this artisanal craft that's handed down directly from master to pupil over the generations yes I mean literally the way you learn
to be a surgeon on humans is by doing surgery on humans I mean first you watch your professors do a bunch of surgery and then finally they put you know the trivial parts of the surgery into your hands and then the more complex parts and as you're understanding of the the point and the
purposes of the surgery increases you get more responsibility in the perfect condition doesn't always go well in neural-inx case the approach is a bit different we of course practiced as far as we could on animals we did hundreds of animal surgeries and when it came time to do the first
human we had a just an amazing team of engineers build incredibly life like models one of the engineers Fran Romano in particular built built a pulsating brain in a custom 3d printed skull that matches exactly the the patients anatomy including their face and scalp characteristics
and so when I was able to practice that I mean it's as close as it really reasonably should get to to being the real thing in all the details including you know the having a mannequin body attached to this custom head and so when we were doing the practice surgeries we'd
wheel that body into the CT scanner and take a mox CT scan and wheel it back in and conduct all the normal safety checks verbally you know stop this patient we're confirming his identification is mannequin number blah blah blah and then opening the brain in exactly the right spot using
standard operative neuro navigation equipment standard surgical drills in it in the same OR that we do all of our practice surgeries in it at neural ink and having the skull open and have the brain pulse which adds a degree of difficulty for the robot you know perfectly precisely plan
and insert those electrodes to the right depth and location and so yeah we we kind of broke new ground on how extensively we practiced for this surgery so there was a historic moment a big milestone for your link in part for humanity with the the first human getting a new link implant
in January of this year take me through the surgery on Nolan'd what did he feel like to be part of this yeah well we we're lucky to have just incredible partners at the Barrow Nurellogic Institute they are I think the premier neurosurgical hospital in the world they they made everything as easy as
possible for the trial to get going and and helped us immensely with their expertise on how to how to arrange the details it was a much more high pressure surgery in some ways I mean even though the you know the outcome wasn't particularly in question in terms of our participants safety
the number of observers you know the number of people there's comfort terms full of people watching live streams in the hospital rooting for this to go perfectly and that just adds pressure that is not typical for even the most intense production neurosurgery say removing a
tumor or you know placing deep brain stimulation electrodes and it had never been done on a human before there were unknown unknowns and so definitely a moderate pucker factor there for the whole team not knowing if we were going to encounter say a degree of brain movement that was unanticipated
or a degree of brain sag that took the brain far away from the skull and made it difficult to insert or some other unknown unknown problem fortunately everything went well and that that surgery is one of the smoothest outcomes we could have imagined we nervous I mean you're extremely
quarterback and like in the Super Bowl kind of situation extremely nervous extremely I was very pleased when it went well and when it was over looking forward to number two yeah even with all that practice all of that just you've never been in a situation that's so high stakes in terms of
people watching yeah and you should also probably mention given how the media works a lot of people you know maybe in a dark kind of way hoping it doesn't go well well I think wealth is easy to hate or envy or whatever and I think there's a whole industry around driving clicks and bad news is
great for clicks and so any way to take an event and turn it into bad news is going to be really good for for clicks it just sucks because I think in it puts pressure on people it discourages people from from trying to solve really hard problems because the solve hard problems you have to go into
the unknown you have to do things that have been done before and you have to take risks yeah calculate risks you have to do all kind of safety precautions but risks not never the lesson I just wish there would be more celebration of that of the risk taking versus like
people just waiting on the on the sidelines like waiting for failure yeah and then pointing out the failure yeah it sucks but you know in this case it's it's really great that everything went just flawlessly but it's unnecessary pressure I would say now that there's a human with
literal skin in the game you know there's a participant who who's well-being rides on this doing well you have to be a pretty bad person to be rooting for that to go wrong and so you know hopefully people look in the mirror and realize that at some point so did you get to actually front row seat
like watch the robot work like what you get to see the whole thing yeah I mean I you know because an MD needs to be in charge of all of the medical decision making throughout the process I unscrupbed from the surgery after exposing the brain and presenting it to the robot and
um place the targets on the robot uh inter software interface that tells the robot where it's going insert each thread that was done um with you know my hand on the mouse for whatever that's worth so you were the one place in the targets yeah oh cool so like it you know the the robot
uh with the computer vision provides a bunch of candidates and you kind of finalize the decision right uh you know the the the software engineers are amazing on this team and so they actually provided an interface where you can essentially use a lasso tool and select a
prime area of brain real estate and it will automatically avoid the blood vessels in that region and automatically place a bunch of targets so you know that allows you know the human robot operator to select uh really good areas of brain and make dense applications of targets in that in those
regions the regions we think are going to have the most um high fidelity representations of finger movements and arm movement intentions I've seen like images of this and for me it with OCDs for some reason are really pleasant uh I think there's a subreddit called oddly satisfying
yeah love that subreddit it's oddly satisfying to see the different target sites avoiding the blood vessels and uh also maximizing like the usefulness of those locations for the signal it just feels good it's like ah as a person who has a visceral reaction to the brain bleeding I can tell you
yes especially extremely satisfying watching the electrodes themselves go into the brain and not cause bleeding yeah yeah so uh you said the feeling was of relief when everything went perfectly yeah how deep in the brain can you currently go and uh eventually go let's say on the
neural link side is it seems the deeper you go in the brain the more challenging it becomes yeah so talking broadly about neurosurgery we can get anywhere uh it's routine for me to put deep brain stimulating electrodes uh near the very bottom of the brain uh entering from the top
and passing about a two millimeter wire all the way into the bottom of the brain and that's not revolutionary a lot of people do that uh and we can do that with very high precision I use a robot from globus to do that surgery um you know several times a month uh it's it's pretty routine
what are your eyes in that situation what what are you seeing what's what kind of technology can you use to visualize where you are to light your way yeah so it's a cool process on the software side you take a preoperative MRI that's extremely high resolution data of the entire brain
you put the patient to sleep put their head in a frame that holds the skull very rigidly and then you take a CT scan of their head while they're asleep with that frame on and then merge uh the MRI and the CT and software you have a a plan based on the MRI where you can
see these nuclei deep in the brain you can't see them on CT but if you trust the merging of the two images then you indirectly know on the CT where that is and therefore indirectly know where in reference to the titanium frame screwed to their head those targets are and so this is 60's technology
to manually compute trajectories given the entry point and target and dial in some goofy looking titanium actuators with manually at manual actuators with little tick marks on them the modern version of that is these are robot uh you know just like a a little kukka arm you might
see a building cars at the Tesla factory uh this small robot arm can show you the trajectory that you intended from the pre-op MRI and establish a very rigid holder through which you can drill a small hole in the skull and pass a small rigid wire deep into that area of the brain that's hollow
and put your electrode through that hollow wire and then remove all of that except the electrode uh see you end up with the electrode very very precisely placed far from the skull surface now that's standard technology um that's already you know been out in the world for for a while
neural ink right now is focused entirely on cortical targets surface targets uh because there's no trivial way to get say hundreds of wires deep inside the brain without doing a lot of damage so your question what do you see well I see an MRI on a screen I can't see everything that that
dbs electrode is passing through on its way to that deep target and so it's accepted with this approach that there's going to be about one in a hundred patients who have a a bleed somewhere in the brain as a result of passing that wire blindly into the the deep part of the brain
that's not an acceptable safety profile for neural ink we start from the position that we want this to be dramatically maybe two or three orders of magnitude safer than that uh safe enough really that you know you or I without a profound medical problem might on our lunch break someday say yeah sure
I'll get that i've been meaning to upgrade to the latest version and so the the safety constraints given that are high and so we haven't uh settled on a final solution for arbitrarily approaching deep targets in the brain this interesting is like you have to avoid blood vessels somehow you have to
maybe there's creative ways of doing the same thing like mapping out high resolution geometry of blood vessels and then you can go and blind but like how do you map out that in a way that's like super stable it's saying that there's a lot of interesting challenges there right yeah but there's
a lot to do on the surface well exactly so we've got vision on the surface um you know we we actually have made a huge amount of progress sowing uh electrodes into the spinal cord uh as a potential workaround for a spinal cord injury that would allow a brain mounted implant to translate
motor intentions to a spine mounted implant that can affect muscle contractions in previously paralyzed arms and legs that's just incredible so like the effort there is to try to bridge the brain to the spinal cord to the periphery peripheral nervous so uh how hard is that to do we have
that working in uh in very crude forms and animals that's amazing yeah we've done so similar to like with Nolan we he's able to digitally move the cursor here you're doing uh the same kind of communication but with the actual effectors that you have yeah that's fascinating yeah so we have
anesthetized animals doing grasp and moving moving their legs and then sort of walking pattern again early days but the future is bright for this kind of thing and and people with paralysis uh should look forward to that bright future they're gonna have options yeah and there's a lot of sort of
intermediate or extra options where you take like an optimist robot like the uh the arm and to be able to control the arm yeah the the fingers the hands at the arm sure there's a prosthetic exoclipids are getting better too so scalthans
yeah so that that goes hand in hand although I didn't quite understand until thinking about a deeply and do more research about neural link how much you can do on the digital side so there's digital telepathy yeah I didn't quite understand that you can really map the intention as you
described in the hand knob area that you can map the intention just imagine it think about it that intention can be mapped to actual action in the digital world right and now more and more so much can be done in the in the digital world that it it it can reconnect you to to the outside
world it can allow you to have freedom have independence if you're a quadriplegic yeah that's really powerful like you can go really far with that yeah our first participant is he's incredible he's breaking world records left and right and he's having fun with it it's great um just going
back to the surgery your whole journey you mentioned to me I'll fly you have surgery on Monday so like you're doing surgery all the time yeah maybe there were ridiculous questions what does it take to get good at surgery practice repetitions you're just same with anything else you know there's
a million ways of people saying the same thing and selling books saying it but you call it 10,000 hours you call it you know spend some chunk of your life some percentage of your life focusing on this obsessing about getting better at it repetitions humility recognizing that you aren't
perfect at any stage along the way recognizing you've got improvements to make in your technique being open to feedback and coaching from people with a different perspective on how to do it and then just the constant will to do better that fortunately you know if you're not a sociopath I
think your patients bring that with them to the office visits every day they you know force you to want to do better all the time yeah just step up I mean it's the real human being a real human being that you can help yeah so every surgery even if it's the same exact surgery is there a lot
of variability between that surgery and a different person yeah fair bit I mean a good example for us is that the angle of the skull relative to the normal plane of that body axis of the skull over hand knob is pretty wide variation I mean some people have really flat skulls and some people have
really steeply angled skulls over that area and that has you know consequences for how their head can be fixed and in in sort of the frame that we use and how the robot has to approach the skull and yeah people's people's bodies are built as differently as you know the people you see walking down
the street as as much variability in body shape and size as you see there we see in brain anatomy and skull anatomy there are some people who we've had to kind of exclude from our trial for having skulls that are too thick or too thin or scalp that's too thick or too thin I think you know we have
like the middle 97% or so of people but you can't account for all human anatomy variability how much like mushyness and mess is there because I you know taken biology classes the diagrams are always really clean and crisp neuroscience the pictures of neurons are always really nice and very
but whenever I look at pictures of like real brains they're all I don't know what's going on yeah so how much are biological systems in reality like how hard is it to figure out what's going on not too bad once you really get used to this you know that's where experience and skill
and education really come into play is if you stare at a thousand brains it becomes easier to kind of mentally peel back the say for instance blood vessels that are obscuring the sulci and gyriah you know kind of the wrinkle pattern of the surface of the brain occasionally when you're when
you're first starting to do this and you open the skull it doesn't match what you thought you were going to see based on the MRI and with more experience you you learned to kind of peel back that layer of blood vessels and see the underlying pattern of wrinkles in the brain and use that as a
landmark for where you are the wrinkles or landmark so like yeah so I was describing hand knob earlier that's a pattern of the wrinkles in the brain it's sort of this sort of Greek letter omega shaped um area of the brain so you could recognize the hand knob area like if I show you a thousand
brains and give you like one minute with each you'd be like yep that's that sure and so there is some uniqueness to that area of the brain like in terms of the geometry the topology of the thing yeah what is it about in the that's so you have this strip of brain running down the top yeah
called the primary motor area and sure you've seen this picture of the homunculus laid over the surface of the brain the weird little guy with huge lips and giant hands that guy sort of lays with his legs up at the top of the brain and and face the arm areas farther down and then some
kind of mouth lip tongue areas farther down and so the hand is right in there and then the areas that control speech at least on the on the left side of the brain in most people are are just below that and so any muscle that you voluntarily move in your body the vast majority that
references that strip or those intentions come from that strip of brain and the the wrinkle for hand knob is right in the middle of that and vision is back here yeah also close to the surface visions a little deeper and so you know this gets to your question about how deep can you get
um to do vision we can't just do the surface of the brain we have to be able to go in uh not not as deep as we have to go for dbs but maybe a centimeter deeper than we're used to for hand insertions uh and so that's you know work in progress that's a new set of challenges to
overcome by the way you mentioned uh the uta array and i just saw a picture of that and that thing looks terrifying yeah because it's because it's rigid and then if you look at the threads they're flexible what can you say that's interesting to you about the flexible
that kind of approach of the the flexible threads to to deliver the electrodes next to the neurons yeah i mean the the goal there comes from experience i mean we stand on the shoulders of people that made uta rays and and used uta rays for decades before we ever even came along um
um nirilink arose partly this approach to technology arose out of a need recognized after uta rays would fail routinely because the rigid electrodes those spikes that are literally hammered using an air hammer into the brain uh those spikes generate a bad immune response that encapsulates the the electrode spikes in uh scar tissue essentially and so one of the projects that was being worked on in in the Anderson lab at Caltech when i got there was to see if you could use chemo therapy
to prevent the formation of scar it's like you know things are pretty bad when you're jamming a bed of nails into the brain and then treating that with chemotherapy to try to prevent scar tissue it's like you know maybe we've gotten off track here guys maybe there's a
fundamental redesign necessary and so nirilink's approach of using highly flexible tiny electrodes avoids a lot of the bleeding avoids a lot of the immune response that ends up happening uh when rigid electrodes are pounded into the brain and so what we see is our
electrode longevity and functionality uh and that and the health of the brain tissue immediately surrounding the electrode uh is excellent i mean it goes on for for years now in our animal models what do most people not understand about the biology of the brain we'll we'll mention the vascular
that's really interesting i think the most interesting maybe under appreciated fact is that it really does control almost everything i mean i don't know for out of a blue example imagine you you want a lever on fertility you want to be
able to turn fertility on and off i mean there are legitimate targets in the brain itself to modulate fertility say um blood pressure you want to modulate blood pressure there are legitimate targets in the brain for doing that um the things that aren't immediately obvious as brain problems
are potentially solvable in the brain um and so i think it's an under explored area for primary treatments of of all the things that bother people it's a really fascinating way to look at it like there's a lot of conditions we might think have nothing to do with the brain
but they might just be symptoms of something to actually start in the brain the actual source of the problem the the primary source is the is something in the brain yeah not not always i mean you know their kidney disease is real uh but um there are levers you can pull in the brain that affect
all of the all of these systems there's knobs yeah on off switches and knobs in the brain yeah from which this all originates uh would you have a neural link chip implanted in your brain yeah um i think use case right now is use a mouse right i can already do that and so there's no
value proposition uh on safety grounds alone sure i'll do it tomorrow you know you say the use case of the mouse is after like researching all this and part of it is just watching all and have so much fun if you can get that bits per second look really high with the mouse like being able to interact
because if you think about the the way the uh on the smartphone the way you swipe that was transformational yeah how to interact with the thing it's subtle you don't realize but to be able to touch a phone and to uh scroll with your finger that's like that changed everything that people were sure you need a keyboard to type and that uh there's a lot of hci aspects to that that changed how interact with computers so there could be a certain rate of speed with the mouse that would change
everything yes like you might be able to just click around a screen extremely fast and that uh if it i i can't case you must have gotten a neural link for much more rapid interaction with digital devices yeah i think recording speech intentions from the brain might might change things as
well you know the value proposition for the average person um a keyboard is a pretty clunky human interface requires a lot of training it's you know highly variable in the maximum performance that the average person can uh can achieve uh i think taking that out of the equation
and just having a natural you know word to computer interface um might change things for a lot of people it'd be hilarious if that is the reason people do it even if you have speech to text that's extremely accurate it currently isn't right but it's a gotten super accurate it'd be hilarious if
people went for neural link just so you avoid the embarrassing aspect of speaking like looking like a douchebag speaking to your phone in public which is a real like that's a real constraint yeah i mean with a bone conducting case uh that can be an invisible headphone say um and the ability to think
words into software and have it respond to you um you know that starts to sound sort of like embedded super intelligence you know if you can silently ask for the Wikipedia article on any subject and have it read to you without any observable change happened in the outside world
uh you know for one thing standardized testing is obsolete yeah if it's done well in the ux side it could change i don't know for transformed society but it really uh can create a kind of shift in the way we interact with digital devices in the way that
is smartphone did now i would um just having to look into the safety of everything involved i would totally try it so it doesn't have to go to some like incredible thing where you have it connects your vision or to some like you connects all over your brain that could be like
just connecting to the hand knob uh you might have a lot of interesting interaction human computer interaction possibilities yeah that's really interesting yeah and the technology on the academic side is progressing at light speed here i think there was a really amazing paper out of uc davis
uh sargues davisky's lab that basically made a initial solve of speech decode and something like 125,000 words uh that they were getting with you know very high accuracy which is so you're just thinking the word yeah thinking the word and you're able to get it yeah oh boy
like you have to have the intention of speaking it right so like do that inner voice now it's it's so amazing to me that you can do the intention the signal mapping all you have to do is just imagine yourself doing it and if if you get the feedback that it actually worked you can get
really good at that like your brain will first of all adjust and you develop like any other skill yeah like touch typing you develop in that same kind of way that is that is really to me it's just really fascinating you know you to be able to even to play with that honestly like i'll get
in your link just to be able to play with that just to play with the capacity the capability of my mind to learn this skill it's like learning the skill of typing and learning the skill of moving a mouse it's another skill of moving the mouse not with my physical body but with my mind i can't
wait to see what people do with it i feel like we're right we're caveman right now we're like banging rocks with a stick and thinking that we're making music um at some point when these are more widespread there's going to be the equivalent of a of a piano that you know someone someone can
make art with their brain in a way that we didn't even anticipate um looking forward to it give it to like a teenager like anytime i think i'm good at something else i was good like i don't know even even uh even with the the best per second in playing a video game
you realize you give it to a teenager you give it in your link to a teenager just the large number of them the kind of stuff they get good at stuff they're gonna get like hundreds of uh bis per second yeah we even just with the current technology probably probably just uh because
it's also addicting how all like how the the the number go up aspect of it of like improving and training because it is it's almost like a skill and plus there's the softer on the other end that adapts to you and especially if the adapting procedure the algorithm becomes better and better and
better you like learning together yeah we're scratching the surface on that right now there's so much more to do so on the complete other side of it you have an RFID chip implanted in you yeah this is so i hear yes so this is a little subtle thing it's a passive device that you use for unlocking
like a safe with top secrets or what is it what do you use it for what's the story behind it i'm not the first one there's you know there's this whole community of weirdo biohackers that have done this stuff and i think one of the early use cases was storing you know private crypto
wallet keys and and whatever um i dabbled in that a bit and and had some fun with it um yeah some big coin implanted in your body somewhere you can't tell where yeah yeah actually yeah it was you know the modern day equivalent to finding change in the sofacushions
after i i put some orphan crypto on there that i thought was worthless and forgot about it for a few years went back and found that some community of people loved it and had propped up the value of it and so it had gone up 50 fold so there was a lot of change in those cushions
that's hilarious but the the primary use case is mostly as a as a tech demonstrator you know it has my business card on it you can scan that in by touching it to your phone it opens the front door to my house you know whatever simple stuff with a cool step it's a cool leap to implant something
in your body i mean it has perhaps that's it's a similar leap to a neural link because for a lot of people that kind of notion of putting something inside your body something electronic inside a biological system is a big leap yeah we have a kind of a mysticism
around the barrier of our skin we're completely fine with knee replacements hip replacements you know dental implants but you know there's a mysticism still around the inviolable barrier that the skull represents and i think that needs to be treated like any other pragmatic barrier you
know it's the question isn't how how incredible is it to open the skull the question is you know what benefit can we provide so from all the surgeries you don't from everything you understand the brain how much does neuroplasticity come into play how adaptable is the brain for example just
even in the case of healing from surgery or adapting to the post surgery situation the answer that is sad for me and other people of my demographic is that you know the plasticity decreases with age healing decreases with age i have too much gray hair to to be optimistic about that
there are theoretical ways to increase plasticity using electrical stimulation nothing that is you know totally proven out as a robust enough mechanism to offer widely to people but yeah i think i think there's cause for optimism that we might find something useful
in terms of say an implanted electrode that improves learning certainly there's been some really amazing work recently from a Nicholas shift Jonathan Baker you know and others who have a cohort of patients with moderate traumatic brain injury who have had electrodes placed in the deep nucleus
in the brain called the central median nucleus or just near the central median nucleus and when they apply small amounts of electricity to that part of the brain it's almost like electronic caffeine they're able to improve people's attention and focus they're able to improve how well people
can perform a task i think in one case someone who was unable to work after the device was turned on they were able to get a job and that's sort of you know one of the holy grails for me with neurolink and other technologies like this is from a purely utilitarian standpoint
can we can we make people able to take care of themselves and their families economically again can we make it so someone who's fully dependent and even maybe requires a lot of care giver resources can we put them in a position to be fully independent taking care of themselves giving
back to their communities i think i think that's a very compelling proposition and what motivates a lot of what i do and what a lot of the people at neurolink are working for it's just the cool possibility that if you put a neurolink in there that the brain adapts like the other part of the
brain adapts to you know and it integrates it the the capacity of the brain to do that's really interesting probably unknown to do that did agree to what you can do that but you're now connecting an external thing to it especially once it's doing stimulation like the the biological brain and the
the electronic brain outside of it working together they get the possibilities they're really interesting yeah that's still unknown but interesting it feels like the brain is really good at adapting to whatever yeah but of course it is a system that by itself is already like everything
serves the purpose and so you don't want to mess with it too much yeah it's like you know eliminating a species from a from an ecology you know you don't know what the delicate interconnections and dependencies are the brain is certainly a delicate complex beast and we don't
know you know every potential downstream consequence of a single change that we make do you see yourself doing so mention p1 surgeries a p2 p3 p4 p5 just well more and more and more humans I think you know it's a certain kind of brittleness or you know a failure on the company's side if we
need me to do all the surgeries I think something that I would very much like to work towards is a process that is so simple and so robust on the surgery side that literally anyone could do it we want to get away from a requiring intense expertise or intense experience
to have this successfully done and make it as as simple and translatable as possible I mean I would love it if every neurosurgeon on a planet had no problem doing this I think we're probably far from a regulatory environment that would allow people that aren't neurosurgeons to do this but
not impossible all right I'll sign up for that did you ever anthropomorphize the robot R1 like do you do you give it a name do you see it as like a friend that's like working together with you I mean to a certain degree it's or anatomy who's gonna put it down to a certain degree it's yeah it's
complex relationship all the good relationships are it's funny when in the middle of the surgery there's a part of it where I stand shoulder basically shoulder to shoulder with the robot and so you know if you're in the room reading the body language you know that's it's my brother in arms
there we're working together on the same problem yeah I'm not threatened by it keep telling yourself that how have all the surgeries that you've done over the years the people you've helped and the stakes the high stakes that you've mentioned how how's it change your understanding of life and death
yeah um you know it gives you a very visceral sense and this may sound right but it gives you a very visceral sense that death is inevitable you know on one hand you know you you are as a neurosurgeon you're deeply involved in these like just hard to fathom tragedies um you know young parents
dying leaving you know a four-year-old behind to say uh and and on the other hand you know it takes the sting out of it a bit because you see how just mind-numingly universal death is there's zero chance that I'm going to avoid it uh I know you know techno optimists right now and longevity buffs right now would disagree on that 0.000 percent estimate but I don't see any chance that our
generation is going to avoid it. Entropy is a powerful force and we are very ornate delicate brittle DNA machines that aren't up to the cosmic ray bombardment that we're subjected to so on the one hand every human that has ever lived died or will die uh on the other hand it's just
one of the hardest things to imagine um inflicting on anyone that you love is is having them gone I mean I'm sure you've had friends that aren't living anymore and it's it's hard to even think about them um and so uh I wish I had you know arrived at the point of Nirvana where you know death doesn't
have a sting I'm not worried about it but um I can at least say that I'm comfortable with the certainty of it uh if not having found out how to take the tragedy out of it when I think about you know my kids uh either not having me or or me not having them or my wife um maybe I've
come to accepting intellectual certainty of it but uh and maybe the pain that comes to losing the people you love I don't think I've come to understand the existential aspect of it like that this is going to end and I don't mean like uh in some uh a trite way I mean like it certainly feels like
it's not going to end like you live life like it's not going to end right and the fact that this light that's shining this consciousness is it's going to uh no longer be at one moment maybe today it's like a and it fills me when I really am able to load all that in with Ernest Becker's
terror I guess a real fear I think people aren't always honest with how terrifying it is yeah I think the more you are able to really think through it the more terrifying it is it's it's not such a simple thing oh what's the way life is and if you really can load that in
uh it's hard but I think that's why the Stowex did it because it like helps you get your shit together and be like this well the the moment every single moment your life is just beautiful yeah and it's terrifying that it's going to end is it's like
like I did that like almost like you're shivering in the cold a child helpless this kind of feeling yeah and then it makes you when you have warmth when you have the safety when you have the love to really appreciate it uh I feel like sometimes in your position we mentioned armor
just to see death it might make you not be able to see that the the finiteness of life because if you kept looking at that it might break you so it's good to know that you're kind of still struggling with that there's the neurosurgeon and then there's a human yeah and the human is still
able to struggle with that and feel the fear of that and the pain of that yeah you know it definitely makes you ask the question of how long how many time how many of these can you see and uh and not say I can't do this anymore um but I mean you said it well I think it gives you an opportunity to
just appreciate that you're alive today and uh you know I've got I've got three kids and an amazing wife and I'm really happy things are good I get to help on a project that I think matters I think it moves us forward I'm a very lucky person it's the early steps of a potentially uh gigantic leap
for humanity it's a really interesting one and it's cool because like you you read about all this stuff in history where it's like the early days I've been reading before going to the Amazon I'll read about explorers uh they will go and explore even the Amazon jungle for the first time it's
just those are the early steps yeah or early steps into space early early steps in any discipline in physics and mathematics and it's cool because this is like the on the grand scale these are the early steps into delving deep into the human brain so not just observing the brain but
be able to interact with the human brain yeah it's gonna help a lot of people but it also might help us understand what the hell's going on in there yeah I think ultimately we want to give people more levers that they can pull right like you want to give people options
if you can give someone a dial that they can turn on how happy they are I think that makes people really uncomfortable but now talk about major depressive disorder talk about people that are committing suicide at an alarming rate in this country and try to justify
that queesiness in those in that light of you can give people a knob to take away suicidal ideation suicidal intention I would I would give them that knob I don't know how you justify not doing that they can think about like all the suffering that's going on in the world like every single human
being that's suffering right now like it would be a glowing red dot the more suffering the more it's glowing and you just see the map of human suffering and any technology that allows you to dim that light of suffering uh on a grand scale this is pretty exciting because there's a lot of people
suffering and most of them suffer quietly yeah we turn our uh we we look away too often uh and we we should remember those are suffering because it once again most of them are suffering quietly well and you know on a grander scale the fabric of society you know people have a lot of
complaints about how our social fabric is working or not working how our politics is working or not working uh those things are made of neurochemistry too in in aggregate right like our politics is composed of individuals with human brains and the way it works or doesn't work it's potentially
tunable uh in the sense that I don't know say remove our addictive behaviors or tune our addictive behaviors for social media or our addiction to outrage our addiction to sharing the most angry political tweet we can find um I don't think that leads to a functional
society and uh if if you had options for people to moderate that maladaptive behavior there could be huge benefits to society maybe we could all work together a little more homoniously toward useful ends there's a sweet spot like you mentioned
you don't want to completely remove all the dark side of human nature because those kind of are somehow necessary to make the whole thing work but there's a sweet spot yeah I agree we got a you got to suffer a little just not so much that you lose hope yeah when you all the surgeries
you've done have you seen consciousness in there ever was it like a glowing life you know I have this sense that uh I never found it never removed it you know like like a mentor and Harry Potter um I have this sense that consciousness is a lot less magical than our instincts want to claim it is
um it it seems to me like a useful analog for thinking about what consciousness is in the brain um you know is that we we have a really good intuitive understanding of what it means to say touch your skin and know what's being touched um I think consciousness is just that level of
sensory mapping applied to the the thought processes in the brain itself so what I'm saying is consciousness is the sensation of some part of your brain being active so you you feel it working you feel the part of your brain that thinks of red things or winged creatures or the taste of coffee
you feel those parts of your brain being active the way that I'm feeling my palm being touched right and that sensory system that feels the brain working is consciousness that is so brilliant it's the same way it's a sensation of touch when you're touching a thing consciousness is the
sensation of you feeling your brain working your brain thinking your brain perceiving which isn't which isn't like a warping of space time or some quantum field effect right it's nothing magical people always want to ascribe to consciousness something truly different uh and there's this
awesome long history of people looking at whatever the latest discovery and physics is to explain consciousness um because it's the most magical the most out there thing that you can think of and and people always you know want to do that with consciousness I don't think that's necessary it's just
a you know a very useful and gratifying way of feeling your brain work and as we said it's one of a heck of a brain yeah everything we see around us everything we love everything is beautiful it came from brains like these it's all electrical activity happening inside your skull
and uh i for one i'm grateful there's people like you that are uh exploring all the ways that it works and all the ways it can be made better thank you so much for talking today it's been a joy thanks for listening to this conversation with Matthew McDougal and now dear friends
here's bliss Chapman brain interface software lead at new relink you told me that you've met hundreds of people with spinal cord injuries or with ALS and that your motivation for helping at your relink is grounded and wanted to help them can you describe this motivation
yeah first just a thank you to all the people i've kind of chance to speak with for sharing their stories with me i don't think there's any world early in which i can share their stories as powerful ways they can but uh just i think to summarize at a very high level what i hear over and over again
is that people with uh ALS or severe spinal cord injury in a place where they basically can't move physically anymore really at the end of the day are looking for independence and that can mean different things for different people for some folks it can mean the ability just to be able to
communicate again independently without needing to wear something on their face without needing a care ticket to be able to put something in their mouth for some folks can mean independence to be able to work again to be able to navigate a computer digitally efficiently enough to be able to
get a job to be able to support themselves to be able to move out and ultimately be able to support themselves after their family maybe isn't there anymore to take care of them and uh for some folks it's as simple as just being able to respond to the kid in time before they you know run away
or get interested in something else and these are deeply personal and sort of very human problems and what strikes me again and again when talking with these folks is that this is actually an engineering problem this is a problem that with the right resources the right team
can make a lot of progress on and uh at the end of the day i think that's a deeply inspiring message and something that makes me excited to get up every day so it's both an engineering problem in terms of a BCI for example that can give them capabilities where they can interact with the world
but also on the other side it's an engineering problem for the rest of the world to make it more accessible for people living with quadriplegia yeah and actually i'll take a broad view sort of lens on this for a second i think i'm very in favor of anyone working in this problem space so beyond
BCI i'm happy and excited and willing to support anyway i can folks working on eye tracking systems working on you know speech detect systems working on head trackers or mouthsticks or quads sticks i haven't met many engineers and folks in the community that do exactly those things and i think for the people who are trying to help it doesn't matter what the complexity of the solution is as long as the problem is solved and i want to emphasize that there can be many solutions out there that can
help with these problems and uh BCI is one of a collection of of such solutions so BCI in particular i think offers several advantages here and i think the folks that recognize a semi-dior usually the people who have spinal cord injury or some foreign paralysis usually you don't have to explain
to them why this might be something that could be helpful it's usually pretty self evident but for the rest of us folks that don't live with severe spinal cord injury or who don't know somebody with ALS it's not often obvious why you would want a brain implant to be able to connect and navigate a
computer and it's surprisingly new one thing to the degree that i've learned a huge amount just working with nolent in the first naryland clinical trial and understanding from him in his words why this device is impactful for him and it's a new one topic it can be the case that even if you
can achieve the same thing for example with a mouth stick when navigate in computer he doesn't have access to that mouth stick every single minute of the day he only has access when someone's available to put it in front of him and so a BCI can really offer a level of of independence and
autonomy that if it wasn't literally physically part of your body it would be hard to achieve in any other way so there's a lot of fascinating aspects to what it takes to get known to be able to control a cursor on screen with his mind you texted me something that i just love you said i was part of
the team that interviewed and selected p1 i was in the operating room during the first human surgery monitoring life signals coming out of the brain i work with the user basically every day to develop new ux paradigms decoding strategies and i was part of the team that figured out how to recover
useful bci to new world record levels when the signal quality degraded we'll talk about i think every aspect of that but just zooming out what was it like to be a part of that part part of that team and part of that historic i would say historic first yeah i think for me this is something i've
been excited about for close to 10 years now and so to be able to be even just some small part of making it a reality is extremely exciting a couple maybe special moments during that whole process that i'll never really truly forget one of them is it's in the actual surgery
you know at that point in time i i know no one quite well i know his family and so i think the the initial reaction when no one is rolling the operator and it's just a oh shit kind of reaction but at that point muscle memory kicks in and you sort of go into you know that your body just do
that all the all the talking and i have the lucky job in that particular procedure to just be in charge of monitoring the implant so my job is to sit there to look at the signals coming off the implant to look at the live brain data streaming off the device as threads are being inserted to the
brain and just to basically observe and make sure that nothing is going you know wrong or that there's no red flags or fault conditions that we need to go and investigate or pause the surgery to a debug and because i had that sort of spectator view of the surgery i had a slightly
removed perspective and i think most folks in the room i got to sit there and think to myself wow you know that brain is moving a lot when you we do look into the side look connect to me that we stick the threads in you know one thing that most people don't realize is the brain moves
the brain moves a lot when you breathe when you're when your heart beats and you can see it visibly so you know that's something that i think was a surprise to me and very very exciting to be able to see someone's brain who you physically know and have talked with that length actually
pulsing and moving inside their skull and they used that brain to talk to you previously and now it's right there moving yeah actually i didn't realize that in terms of the thread sending so the then your link implant is active during surgery so in one thread at a time you're able to
start seeing the signal yeah so that's part of the way you test that the thing is working yeah so actually in the in the operating room right after we sort of finished all the threads insertions i started collecting what's called broadband data so broadband is basically the most raw form
of signal you can collect from a neural link electrode it's essentially a measurement of the local field potential or the yeah the voltage essentially measured by the electrode and we have a certain mode in our in our application that allows us to visualize where detected spikes are
so it visualizes sort of where where in the broadband signal and it's very very raw form of the data a neuron is actually spiking and so one of the these moments that i'll never forget as part of this whole clinical trial is seeing live in the operating room while he's still under anesthesia beautiful spikes being shown in the application just streaming live to device him holding in my hand so this is no signal processing the raw data and then the signals processing is on top of it you're
seeing the spikes detected right yeah and that's the UX too because that that looks beautiful as well during the procedure there was actually a lot of camera men in the room so they're also curious and wanted to see there's several neurosurgeons in the room who are all just excited to see robots taking their job and they're all you know crowded around a small little iPhone watching this live brain data stream out of his spring what was that like seeing the robot do some of the surgery so
the computer vision aspect where it detects all the all the spots that avoid the the blood vessels and then obviously with the human supervision then actually doing the really high precision connection of the threads to the brain yeah that's a good question my answer is going to be
pretty lame here but it was boring yeah i've seen it uh so many times yeah that's exactly how you want surgery if you want it to be boring yeah because i've seen it so many times i've seen the robot do this surgery literally hundreds of times and so it was just one more time yeah all the practice
surgeries and the proxies and this is just another day yeah so what about when on on walk up what do you do you remember a moment where uh he was able to move the cursor not move the cursor but get signal from the brain such that it was able to show that there's a connection yeah yeah so we
are quite excited to move as quickly as we can and no one was really really excited to get started he wanted to get started actually the day of surgery but uh we waited till the next morning very patiently so long night um and the next morning in the ICU where he was uh recovering
he uh wanted to get started and actually start to understand what kind of signal we can measure from his brain and maybe for the folks who are not familiar with um the neurologic system we implant the neurologic system or the neurologic implant in the motor cortex so the motor cortex is responsible
for representing things like motor intent uh sort of if you imagine closing and opening your hand that kind of signal representation will be present in the motor cortex if you imagine moving your arm back and forth or we're going up pinky this sort of signal can be present in the motor cortex
so one of the ways we start to sort of map out what kind of signal do we actually have access to in any particular individual's brain is through this task called body mapping and body mapping is where you essentially present a visual to the user and you say hey imagine doing this and the
visual is you know uh 3d hand opening closing or index finger modulating up and down and uh you ask the user to imagine that and obviously you can't see them do this because they're paralyzed so you can't see them actually move their arm but while they do this task you can record
an early activity and you can basically offline model and check can I predict or can I detect the modulation corresponding with those different actions and so we did that task and we realized hey there's actually some modulation associated with some of his hand motion which is a first
indication that okay we can potentially use that modulation to do useful things in the world uh for example control a computer cursor and he started playing with it you know the first time we showed him it and we actually just took the same live view of his productivity and put it in front
of him and we said hey you tell us what's going on uh you know we're not you you're able to uh imagine different things and we know that it's modulating some of these neurons so you figure out for us what that is actually representing and so he played with it for a bet he was like I don't quite
get it yet he played for a bit longer and they said oh when I move this finger I see this particular neuron start to fire more and I said okay prove it do it again and so he said okay three two one boom and the minute he moved you can see like instantaneously this neuron is firing single neuron
I can tell you the exact channel number if you're interested it's stuck in my brain now forever but that single channel firing was a beautiful indication that it was behaved really modulated neural activity that could then be used for downstream tasks like decoding a computer cursor and when you say single channel is that associated with a single electrode?
yeah so channel electrode are interchangeable and there's a one thousand twenty four of those one thousand twenty four yeah it's incredible that that works that really when I was uh learning about all this and like loading it in it was just blowing my mind
that the intention you can visualize yourself moving the finger that can turn into a signal and the fact that you can then skip that step and visualize the cursor moving or have the intention of the cursor moving in that leading to a signal that can then be used to move the cursor
this there is so many exciting things there to learn about the brain about the way the brain works the very fact of their existing signal that can be used is really powerful yep but it feels like that's just like the beginning of figuring out how that signal can be used really really effectively
now I should also just uh there's so many fascinating details here but you mentioned the body mapping step uh at least in the version I saw that no one was showing off there's like a super nice interface like a graphical interface like it just felt like I was
like in the future because it like uh you know I guess it visualizes you moving the hand yep and there's a very like like a sexy polished interface that hello yeah I don't know if there's a voice component but it just felt like uh it's like when you wake up in a really nice video game
and this is a tutorial at the beginning of that video yeah this is what you're supposed to do it's cool no I mean the future should feel like the future but it's not easy to pull that off I mean it needs to be simple but not too simple yeah and I think the UX design component here is uh
underrated for PCI development in general there's a whole interaction effect between the ways in which you visualize uh an instruction to the user and the kinds of signal you can get back and that quality of sort of your behavioral alignment to the neural signal is a function of how good you are
expressing to the user what you want them to do and so yeah we spend a lot of time thinking about the UX of how we build our applications of how the decoder actually functions the control surface is it provides the user all these little details matter a lot so maybe it'd be nice again to a little
bit more detail of what the signal looks like and what the decoding looks like so there's a n1 implant that has like we mentioned uh a thousand twenty four electrodes and that's collecting raw data raw signal what does that signal look like and uh what are the different steps along the way
before it's transmitted and what is transmitted and all that kind of stuff yeah yeah this is going to be a fun one so maybe before diving into what we do it's worth understanding what we're trying to measure because uh that dictates a lot of the requirements for the system that we build and what
we're trying to measure is really individual neurons producing action potential so action potential is you can think of it like a little electrical impulse that you can detect if you're close enough and by being close enough I mean like within let's say a hundred microns of that cell and
hundred microns is very very tiny distance and so the number of neurons that you're going to pick up with any given electrode is it's just a small radius around that electrode and the other thing worth understanding about the underlying biology here is that when neurons produce an action
potential the width of that action potential is about one millisecond so from the start of the spike to the end of the spike that whole width of that uh sort of characteristic feature of a neuron firing is one millisecond wide and if you want to detect that an individual spike is
occurring or not you need to sample that signal or sample the local field potential nearby that neuron much more frequently than once a millisecond you need to sample many many times per millisecond to be able to detect that this is actually the characteristic waveform of a neuron producing an
action potential and so we sample across all thousand twenty four electrodes about twenty thousand times a second twenty thousand times a second means for already given one millisecond window we have about twenty samples that tell us what that exact shape of that action potential looks like and once
we've sort of sampled at super high rate the underlying electrical field nearby these cells we can process that signal into just where do we detect a spike or where do we not sort of a binary signal one or zero do we detect a spike in this one millisecond or not and we do that because the
actual information character carrying uh uh sort of subspace of neural activity is just when our spikes occurring essentially everything that we care about for decoding can be captured represented in the frequency characteristics of spike trains meaning how often our spikes
firing in any given window of time and so that allows us to do sort of a crazy amount of compression from this very rich high density uh you know signal to something that's much much more sparse and compressible that can be sent out over a wireless uh radio like a Bluetooth communication for
example quick tangents here you mentioned electrode neuron there's a local neighborhood of neurons nearby how difficult does it to like isolate from where the spike came from yeah so there's a whole field of sort of academic neuroscience work on exactly this problem of basically given a single
electrode or given a set of electrodes measuring a set of neurons how can you sort of sort spike sort which spikes are coming from what neuron and this is a promise pursuit in academic work because you care about it for understanding what's going on in the underlying sort of uh neuroscience of
the brain if you care about understanding how the brains are presenting information how that's evolving through time then that's a very very important question to to understand for sort of the engineering side of things at least at the current scale if the number of neurons per electrode
is relatively small you can get away with basically ignoring that problem completely you can think of it like sort of a random projection of neurons to electrodes and there may be in some cases more than one neuron per electrode but if that number is small enough those signals can be thought of as
uh sort of a union of the two and for many applications that's a totally reasonable trade-off to make and can simplify the problem a lot and as you sort of scale out channel count the uh relevance of distinguishing individual neurons becomes less important because you have more overall signal and you can start to rely on sort of correlations or covariant structure in the data to help understand when that channel is firing what is that what is that actually represent because you know that when
that channel is firing in concert with these other 50 channels that means move left but when that same channel is firing with concert with these others 10 channels that means move right okay so you have to do this kind of spike detection on board and you have to do that super efficiently so
fast and not use too much power because you don't want to be generating too much heat so that's to be a super simple signal processing step yeah um is there some wisdom you can share about what it takes to overcome that challenge yeah so we've tried many different versions of
basically turning this raw signal into sort of a feature that you might want to send off the device and i'll say that i don't think we're at the final step of this process this is a long journey we have something that works clearly today but there can be many approaches that we find in the
future that are much better than what we do right now so some versions of what we do right now and there's a lot of academic heritage to these ideas so i don't want to you know claim that these are original nirland caddies or anything like that but uh one of these ideas is basically to build uh
sort of like a convolutional filter almost if you will that slides across the signal and looks for a certain template to be matched that template consists of sort of how deep the spike modulates how much it recovers and what the duration and window of time is that the whole process takes
and if you can see in the signal that that template is matched within certain bounds then you can say okay that's a spike one reason that approaches super convenient is that you can actually implement that extremely efficiently in hardware which means that you can run it in a low power
across a thousand twenty four channels at once another approach that we've recently started exploring and this can be combined with the spike detection approach something called spike band power and the benefits of that approach are that you may be able to pick up some signal from
neurons that are maybe too far away to be detected as a spike because the farther away you are from an electrode the weaker that actual spike waveform will look like on that electrode so you might be able to pick up you know population level activity of things that are you know maybe slightly
outside the normal recording radius but what neuroscientists sometimes refer to as the hash of activity the other stuff that's going on yeah uh and you can look at sort of across many channels how that uh sort of background noise is behaving you might be able to get more juice out
of the signal that way but it comes out of cost that signal is now a floating point representation which means it's more expensive to send out over a power it means you have to find different ways to compress it that are different than what you can apply to binary signals so there's a lot of
different challenges associated with these different modalities so also in terms of communication you're limited by the amount of data you can send yeah so and also because you're currently using the Bluetooth protocol you have to batch stuff together but you have to also do this
keeping latency crazy low like crazy low anything to say about the latency yeah this is a passion project to mine so I want to build the best mouse in the world yeah I don't want to build like the you know the Chevrolet Spark or whatever of electric cars I want to build like the Tesla Roadster
version of of a mouse and I really do think it's quite possible that within you know five to ten years that most esports competitions are dominated by people with paralysis this is like a very real possibility for a number of reasons one is that they'll have access to the best technology to play
video games effectively the second is they have the time to do so so those two factors together are particularly potent for eSport competitors unless people without paralysis are also allowed to implant you know right which is it is another way to interact with a digital device and there's
something there's something to that if if it's a fundamentally different experience more efficient experience even if it's not like some kind of full on high bandwidth communication if it's just the ability to move the mouse 10x faster like the bits per second if I can achieve a bits per second
that 10x what I can do with the mouse that's a really interesting possibility what they can do especially as you get really good at it with training it's definitely the case that you have a higher ceiling performance like you because you don't have to buffer your intention through your arm
through your muscle you get just by nature of having a brain implant at all like 75 milliseconds lead time on any action that you actually trying to take and there's some nuance of this like there's evidence that the motor cortex you can sort of plan out sequences of action so you may
not get that whole benefit all the time but for sort of like reaction time style games where you just want to someone is over here sniping you know that kind of thing you actually do have just an heron advantage because you don't need to go through the muscle so the question is just how much
faster can you make it and we're already you know faster than you know what you would do if you go into the muscle from a latency point of view and we're in the early stage of that I think we can push it sort of our end-to-end latency right now from brain spike to cursor movement it's about 22
milliseconds if you think about the best mice in the world the best gaming mice that's about five milliseconds each of latency depending on how you measure depending how fast your screen refreshes there's a lot of characteristics that matter there but yeah and the rough time for like a neuron
in the brain to actually impact your command of your hand is about 75 milliseconds so if you look at those numbers you can see that we're already like you know competitive and slightly faster than what you'd get by actually moving your moving your hand and this is something that you know if you
ask Nolan about it when he moved the cursor for the first time we asked him about this it was something super curious about like what does it feel like when you're modulating you know a click intention or when you're trying to just move the cursor to the right he said it moves before he
is like actually intending to which is kind of a surreal thing and something that you know I would love to experience myself one day what is that like type of thing just be so immediate so fluid that it feels like it's happening before you're actually intending to move yeah suppose we've gotten
used to that latency that natural latency that happens so is the currently the bottleneck the communication so like the Bluetooth communication is that what's the actual bottleneck I mean there's always going to be a bottleneck what's the current bottleneck yeah a couple things so kind of
hilariously Bluetooth low energy protocol has some restrictions on how fast you can communicate so the protocol itself establishes a standard of you know the most frequent sort of updates you can send or on the order of 7.5 milliseconds and as we push latency down to the level of sort of
individual spikes impacting control that level of resolution that kind of protocol is going to become a limiting factor at some scale another sort of important nuance to this is that it's not just the neural link itself that's part of this equation if you start pushing latency sort of below the
level of how fast screens refresh then you have another problem I can eat your whole system to be able to be as reactive as the sort of limits of what the technology can be like you need to screen like 120 hertz just doesn't you know work anymore if you're trying to have something respond at
something that's you know at the level of one millisecond that's a really cool challenge I also liked that for a t-shirt the best miles in the world tell me on the receiving end so the decoding step now we we figured out what the spikes are we got them all together now we're sending that over
to the app what's the decoding step look like yeah so maybe first what is decoding I think there's probably a lot of folks listening that just I know clue what what it means to decode brand activity actually even if we zoom out beyond that what is the app so there's a there's an implant that's
wireless communicating with any digital device that has an app installed yep so maybe can you tell me how level what the app is what the software is outside of the the brain yeah so maybe working back or some of the goal the goal is to help someone with paralysis in this case no land be able to
navigate his computer independently and we think the best way to do that is to offer them the same tools that we have to navigate our software because we don't want to have to rebuild an entire software ecosystem for the brain at least not yet maybe someday you can imagine there's UXes
that are built natively for BCI but in terms of what's useful for people today I think we most people would prefer to be able to just control mouse and keyboard inputs to all the applications that they want to use for their daily jobs for communicating with their friends etc and so the job
of the application is really to translate this wireless stream of brain data coming off the implant into control of the computer and we do that by essentially building a mapping from brand activity to sort of the hid inputs to the actual hardware so hid is just the protocol for
communicating like input device events so for example move mouse to this position or press this key down and so that mapping is fundamentally what the app is responsible for but there's a lot of nuance of how that mapping works had we spent a lot of time to try to get right and we're still in
the early stages of a long journey to figure out how to do that optimally so one part of that process is decoding so decoding is this process of taking the statistical patterns of brain data that's being channeled across the Bluetooth connection to the application and turning it into
for example a mouse movement and that decoding step you can think of it in a couple different parts so similar to any machine learning problem there's a training step and there's an inference step the training step in our case is a very intricate behavioral process where the user has to imagine
doing different actions so for example there will be presented a screen with a cursor on it and they'll be asked to push that cursor to the right then imagine pushing that cursor to the left push it up push it down and we can basically build up a pattern or using any sort of modern ML method
of mapping of given this brain data and that imagine behavior map one to the other and then a test time you take that same pattern matching system in our case it's a deep neural network and you run it and you take this live streamer brain data coming off the remplant you decode it by
pattern matching to what you saw at calibration time and you use that for a control of the computer now a couple like sort of rabbit holes that are I think are quite interesting one of them has to do with how you build that best template matching system because there's a variety of behavioral
challenges and also debugging challenges when you're working with someone who's paralyzed because again fundamentally you don't observe what they're trying to do you can't see them attempt to move their hand and so you have to figure out a way to instruct the user to do something and validate that
they're doing it correctly such that then you can downstream build with confidence the mapping between the neural spikes and the intended action and by doing the action correctly what I really mean is at the level of resolution of what neurons are doing so if in ideal world you could get a
signal of behavioral intent that is ground truth accurate at the scale of sort of one millisecond resolution then with high confidence I could build a mapping from my neural spikes to that behavioral intention but the challenge is again that you don't observe what they're actually doing and so
there's a lot of nuance to how you build user experiences that give you more than just sort of a course on average correct representation of what the user's intending to do if you want to build the world's best mouse you really want it to be as responsive as possible you want it to be able
to do exactly the users intending at every sort of step along the way not just on average be correct when you're trying to move it from left to right and building a behavioral sort of calibration game or our sort of software experience that gives you that level of resolution is what we spent a
lot of time with the calibration process the interface has to encourage precision being like whatever it does it should be super intuitive that the next thing the human is going to likely do is exactly that intention that you need and only that intention
yeah and you don't have any feedback except that may be speaking to you afterwards what they actually did you can't oh yeah right so that's a that's fundamentally that is a really exciting UX challenge because that's all on the UX it's not just about being friendly or nice
or usable yeah it's like user experience is how it works yes it works yeah for the calibration and calibration at least at this stage of neural ink it's like fundamental to the operation of the thing and not just calibration but continued calibration essentially yeah and maybe yeah you said
something that I think is worth exploring there a little bit you said it's you know primarily our UX challenge and I think a large component of it is but there is also a very interesting machine learning challenge here which is given some you know a data set including some on average
correct behavior of asking the user to move up or move down move right left and given a data set of neural spikes is there a way to infer in some kind of semi-supervised or entirely on supervised way what that high resolution version of their intention is and if you think about it
like there probably is because there are enough data points in the data set enough constraints on your model that there should be a way with the right sort of formulation to let the model figure out itself for example at this millisecond this is exactly how hard they're pushing upwards
and at this millisecond this is how hard they're trying to push upwards it's really important to have very clean labels yes so like the problem because much harder from the machine learning perspective the labels are noisy that's correct and then to get the clean labels that's a UX challenge
correct although clean labels I think maybe it's worth exploring what that exactly means I think any given labeling strategy will have some number of assumptions that makes about what the users attempting to do those assumptions can be formulated in a loss function or they can be
formulated in terms of heuristics that you might use to just try to estimate or guesstimate what the users trying to do and what really matters is how accurate those assumptions for example you might say hey user push upwards and follow the speed of this cursor and your heuristic might be that
they're trying to do exactly what that cursor is trying to do another competing heuristic might be they're actually trying to go slightly faster at the beginning of the movement and slightly slower at the end and those competing heuristics may or may not be accurate reflections of what the
user is trying to do another version of the task might be hey user imagine moving this cursor a fixed offset so rather than follow the cursor just try to move it exactly 200 pixels to the right so here's the cursor here's the target okay cursor disappears try to move that now invisible cursor 200
pixels to the right and the assumption in that case would be that the user can actually modulate correctly that position offset but that position offset assumption might be a weaker assumption and therefore potentially you can make it more accurate then these heuristics that are trying to
guesstimate each millisecond what the users trying to do so you can imagine different tasks that make different assumptions about the nature of the user intention and those assumptions being correct is what I would think of as a clean label for that step what are we supposed to be visualizing
there's a cursor and you want to move that cursor to the right or left up and down or maybe you move them by a certain offset so that's one way is that the best way to calibration so for example an alternative crazy way that probably is playing a role here's a game like webgrid where
you're just getting a very large amount of data the person playing a game where if they are in the state of flow maybe you can get clean signal as a side effect yeah is that or is it does that not an effective way for initial calibration yeah great question there's a lot to unpack there so
uh the first thing I would draw a distinction between a sort of open loop first close loop so open loop what I mean by that is the user is sort of going from zero to one they have no model at all and they're trying to get to the place where they have some level control at all in that setup you
really need to have some task that gives the user a hint of what you want them to do such that you can build it's mapping again from brain data to to output then once they have a model you could imagine them using that model and actually adapting to it and figuring out the right way to use it
themselves and then retraining on that data to give you sort of a boost in performance there's a lot of challenges associated with both of these techniques and we can sort of rabbit hole into both them if you're interested but the sort of challenge with the open loop task is that the user
themselves doesn't get proprioceptive feedback about what they're doing they don't you know necessarily perceive themselves or feel you know the mouse under their hand when they're using an open when they're trying to do an open loop calibration they're being asked to perform something like imagine
if you sort of had your whole right arm numbed and you stuck in a box and you couldn't see it so you had no visual feedback and you had no proprioceptive feedback about what the position or activity of your arm was and now you're asked okay given this thing on the screen that's moving from
left to right match that speed and you basically can try your best to you know invoke whatever that imagined action is in your brain that's moving the cursor from left to right but in any situation you're going to be inaccurate and maybe inconsistent and how you do that task and so that's sort
of the fundamental challenge of open loop the challenge with closed loop is that once the users given a model and they're able to start moving the mouse on their own they're going to very naturally adapt to that model and that co-adaptation between the model learning what they're doing
and the user learning how to use the model may not find you the best sort of global minima and maybe that your first model was noisy in some ways or you know maybe just had some like work if there's some like part of the data distribution it didn't cover super well and the user now figures out
because they're you know brilliant user like no one they figure out the right sequence of imagined motion motions or the right angle left to hold their hand out to get it to work and they'll get it to work great but then the next day they come back to their device and maybe they don't
remember exactly all the tricks that they use the previous day and so there's a complicated sort of feedback cycle here that can that can emerge and can make it a very very difficulty bugging process okay there's a lot of really fascinating things there uh yeah actually just to stay
on the on the closed loop I have seen situations this actually happened watching psychology grad grad students they use pieces of software when they don't know how to program themselves they use pieces of software as somebody else wrote and it has a bunch of bugs
and they figure out like and they've been using it for years yeah they figure out ways to work around here oh that just happens like nobody has nobody like considers maybe we should fix this they just adapt and that's a really interesting notion that we just say we're really good at
adapting but you need to still that might not be the optimal yeah okay so how do you solve that problem do you have to restart from scratch every once in a while kind of thing yeah it's a good question um first and foremost I'll say this is not a solve problem and for anyone who's you know
listening in academia who works on BCIs I would also say this is not a problem that's solved by simply scaling channel count so this is you know maybe that can help when you can get sort of richer covariance structures that you can use to exploit when trying to come up with good labeling
strategies but if you know you're interested in problems that aren't going to be solved inherently by scaling channel count this is one of them yeah so how do you solve it it's not a solve problem that's the first thing I want to make sure it gets across the second thing is any solution that
involves closed loop is going to become a very difficult debugging problem and one of my sort of general heuristics for choosing what problems the tackle is that you want to choose the one that's going to be the easiest to debug because if you can do that uh even if the ceiling is lower you're
going to be able to move faster because you have a tighter iteration loop debugging the problem and in the open loop setting there's not a feedback cycle to debug with the user in the loop and so there's some reason to think that that should be an easier debugging problem the other thing that's
worth understanding is that even in a closed loop setting there's no special software magic of how to infer what the user is truly attempting to do in a closed loop setting although they're moving the cursor on the screen they may be attempting something different than what your model is outputting
so what the model is outputting is not a signal that you can use to retrain if you want to be able to improve the model further you still have this very complicated estimation or unsupervised problem of figuring out what is the true user intention underlying that signal and so the open loop problem
has the nice property of being easy to debug and the second nice property of it has all the same information content as the closed loop scenario um another thing I want to I want to mention and call out is that this problem doesn't need to be solved in order to give useful control to people
you know even today with the solutions we have now and that academia has built up over over decades the level of control that can be given to a user you know today is quite useful it doesn't need to be solved to get to that level of control but again I want to build the world's
best mouse I want to make it you know so good that it's not even a question that you want it and to build the world's best mouse the superhuman version you really need to uh nail that problem and a couple maybe details of previous studies that we've done internally that
I think are very interesting to understand when thinking about how to solve this problem the first is that even when you have ground truth data of what the user is trying to do and you can get this with an able-bodied monkey a monkey that has an early device implanted and moving a mouse
to control the computer even with that ground truth data set it turns out that the optimal thing to predict to produce high performance BCI is not just the direct control of the mouse you can imagine you know building data set of what's going on in the brain and what is the mouse exactly
doing on the table and it turns out that if you build the mapping from neural spikes to predict exactly what the mouse is doing that model will perform worse than a model that is trained to predict sort of high-level assumptions about what the user might be trying to do for example assuming that the monkey is trying to go in a straight line to the target it turns out that making those assumptions is actually more effective in producing a model than actually predicting the underlying
handle. So the intention not like the physical movement or whatever yeah there's obviously a very strong correlation between the two but the intention is a more powerful thing to be chasing right well that that's also super interesting I mean the intention itself is fascinating because
yes with the BCI here in this case with the digital telepathy you're acting on the intention not the action which is why there's an experience of like feeling like it's happening before you meant for it to happen that is so cool and that is why you could achieve like superhuman performance
problem in terms of the control of the mouse so the for open loop just to clarify so whenever the person is tasked to like move the mouse to the right you said there's not feedback so they don't get to get that satisfaction of like actually getting it to move right so you
you can imagine giving the user feedback on a screen but it's difficult because at this point you don't know what they're attempting to do so what can you show them that would basically give them a signal of I'm doing this correctly or not correctly so let's take this a very specific
example of maybe your calibration task looks like you're trying to move the cursor a certain position offset so your instructions to the user are hey the cursor is here now when the cursor disappears I imagine moving it 200 pixels from where it was to the right to be over this target in that kind
of scenario you could imagine coming up with some sort of consistency metric that you could display to the user of okay I know what the spike train looks like on average when you do this action to the right maybe I can produce some sort of probabilistic estimate of how likely is that to be the
action you took given the latest trial or trajectory that you that you imagined and I could give the user some sort of feedback of how consistent are they across different trials you could also imagine that if the user is prompted with that kind of consistency metric that maybe they just
become more behaviorally engaged to begin with because the task is kind of boring when you don't have any feedback at all and so then maybe benefits to the you know the user experience of showing something on the screen even if it's not accurate it's just because it keeps the user motivated
to try to increase that number or push it upwards so there's this a psychology element here yeah absolutely and again all of that is UX challenge how much signal drift is there hour to hour day to day week to week month to month how often do you have to recalibrate
because of the signal drift yeah so this is a problem we've worked on both with an HP non-human primates before our clinical trial and then also with Nolan during the clinical trial maybe the first thing this worst ending is what the goal is here so the goal is really to enable the
user to have a plug and play experience where I guess they don't have to plug anything in but a play experience where they have you know can use the device whenever they want to however they want to and that's really what we're aiming for and so there can be a set of solutions that get to that
state without considering this non-stationary problem so maybe the first solution here that's important is that they can recalibrate whenever they want this is something that that Nolan has the ability to do today so you can recalibrate this system you know at 2 a.m. in the middle of the
night without his you know caretaker or parents or friends around to help push a button for him the other important part of the solution is that when you have a good model calibrated that you can continue using that without needing to recalibrate it so how often he has to do this recalibrate
state depends really on his appetite for performance there are we observe a sort of a degradation through time of how well any individual model works but this can be mitigated behaviorally by the user adapting their control strategy it can also be mitigated through a combination of sort
of software features that we provide to the user for example we let the user adjust exactly how fast the cursor is moving we call that the gain for example the gain of how fast the cursor reacts to any given input intention they can also adjust the smoothing how smooth the output of that
cursor intention actually is they can also adjust the friction which is how easy it to stop and hold still and all these software tools allow the user a great deal of flexibility and troubleshooting mechanisms to be able to solve this problem for them by the way all this is done by looking to the
right side of the screen selecting the mixer and the mixer you have it's like DJ mode DJ mode for your PC I mean it's a really well done interface it's really well done and so yeah there's that bias that there's a cursor drift that Nolan talked about in a stream although he said that you guys
were just playing around with it with him and then constantly improving so that could have been just a snapshot of that particular moment a particular day where he said that there was this cursor drift and this bias that could be removed by him I guess looking to the right
side of the screen the left side of the screen to kind of adjust the bias that's one interface action I guess to adjust the bias yeah so this is actually an idea that comes out of academia there's some prior work with sort of bringing a clinical trial participants where they pioneered
this idea of bias correction the way we've done it I think it's very privatized very beautiful user experience where the user can essentially flash the cursor over to the side of the screen and it opens up a window where they can actually sort of adjust or tune exactly the bias of the
cursor so bias maybe for people who aren't familiar is just sort of what is the default motion of the cursor if you're imagining nothing and it turns out that that's one of the first sort of quality of the cursor control experience that's impacted by neural non-sessionarity quality of the cursor
I mean I don't know how else to describe it like you know I'm not the I'm not the guy moving poetic I love it the quality of the cursor experience yeah I mean it's it sounds poetic but it is deeply true there is an experience when it works well it is a joyful a really pleasant experience
and when it doesn't work well it's a very frustrating experience that's actually the art of UX it's like you have the possibility to frustrate people or the possibility to give them joy and at the end of the day it really is truly the case that UX is how the thing works and so
it's not just like what's showing on the screen it's also you know what control surface is it's a decoder provide the user like we want them to feel like they're in the F1 car not like you know some like many fans right and that really truly is how we think about it no one
himself is an F1 fan so we refer to ourselves as a picker who he really is truly the F1 driver and there's different you know control surfaces that different kinds of cars and airplanes provide the user and we take a lot of inspiration from that when designing how the cursor should behave
and when maybe one nuance of this is you know even details like when you move a mouse on a MacBook trackpad the sort of response curve of how that input that you give the trackpad translates to cursor movement is different than how it works with a mouse when you move on the trackpad there's
a different response function different curve to how much a movement translates to input to the computer then when you do it physically with a mouse and that's because somebody sat down a long time ago when they're designing the initial inputs systems to any computer and they thought
through exactly how it feels to use these different systems and now we're designing sort of the next generation of this input system to a computer which is entirely done via the brain and there's no proprioceptive feedback again you don't feel the mouse in your hand you don't feel the keys
under your fingertips and you want a control surface that still makes it easy and intuitive for the user to understand the state of the system and how to achieve what they want to achieve and ultimately the end goal is that that UX is completely fades into the background I become something that's
so natural intuitive that it's subconscious to the user and they just should feel like they have basically direct control over the cursor just does what they want it to do they're not thinking about the implementation of how to make it do what they want it to do it's just doing what they
wanted to do is there some kind of things along the lines of like Fitz Law where you should move the mouse in a certain kind of way that maximizes your chance to hit the target I don't even know what I'm asking but I'm hoping the intention of my question will land on a profound answer no is there
some kind of understanding of the laws of UX when it comes to the context of somebody using their brain to control it like that's different than actual with a mouse I think we're in the early stages of discovering those laws so I wouldn't claim to have solved that problem yet but there's
definitely some things we've learned that make it easier for the user to get stuff done and it's pretty straightforward when you verbalize it but takes a while to actually get to that point when you're in the process of debugging the stuff in the trenches one of those things is that
the any machine learning system you build has some number of errors and it matters how those errors translate to the downstream user experience for example if you're developing a search algorithm in your photos if you search for you know your friend Joe and it pulls up a photo of your friend
Josephine maybe that's not a big deal because the cost of an error is not that high in a different scenario where you're trying to you know detect insurance from other something like this and you're directly sending someone to court because of some machine learning model output then the errors make
a lot more sense to be careful about you want to be very thoughtful about how those errors translate to downstream effects the same as true and BCI so for example if you're building a model that's decoding a velocity output from the brain versus an output where you're trying to modulate the left
click for example these have sort of different trade-offs of how precise you need to be before it becomes useful to the end user for velocity it's okay to be on average correct because the output of the model is integrated through time so if the users trying to click at position a
and the currently position b they're trying to navigate over time to keep between those two points and as long as the output of the model is on average correct they can sort of steer it through time with the user control loop in the in the mix they can get to the point they want to get to
the same as not true of a click for a click you're performing it almost instantly at the scale of you know neuron firing and so you want to be very sure that that click is correct because a false click can be very destructive to use it they might accidentally close the tab that they're trying
to you know do something in a lose all their progress they might accidentally like you know hit some send button on some text that this only like half composed and read funny after you know so you know there's different sort of cost functions associated with errors in this space and
part of the UX design is understanding how to build a solution that is when it's wrong still useful to the end user that's so fascinating that assigning cost to every action when an error occurs so every action if an error occurs has a certain cost and incorporating that into how you interpret
the intention mapping it to the action is really important I didn't quite until you said it realized there's a cost to like sending the text early it's like a very expensive cost it's super annoying if you accidentally like if you're a cursor imagine if your cursor is misclicked
every once in a while that's like super obnoxious and the worst part of it is usually when the user is trying to click they're also holding still because they're over the target they want to hit and they're getting ready to click which means that in the data sets that we build on average is
the case that sort of low speeds or desire to hold still it's correlated with when the users are attempting to click wow that is really fascinating it's also it's also not the case you know people think that oh click is a binary signal this must be super easy to decode well yes it is but the
bar is so much higher for it to become a useful thing for the user and there's ways to solve this I mean you can sort of take the comp out approach of well let's just give the like let's take five seconds to click let's take a huge window of time so it can be very confident about the answer
but again world's best mouse the world's best mouse doesn't take a second to click or five hundred milliseconds to click it takes five milliseconds to click or less and so if you're aiming for that kind of high bar then you really want to solve the underlying problem so maybe this is a good
place to ask about how to measure performance this whole bits per second what can you like explain what you mean by that maybe a good place to start is to talk about web grid as a game as a good illustration of the measurement of performance yeah maybe I'll take one zoom out step
there which is just explaining why we care to measure this at all so again our goal is to provide the user the ability to control the computer as well as I can and hopefully better that means that they can do it at the same speed is what I can do it means that they have access to all the
same functionality that I have including you know all those little details like command tab command space you know all this stuff and you be able to do it with the brain and with the same level of reliability is what I can do with my muscles and that's a high bar and so we intend to
measure and quantify every aspect of that to understand how we're progressing towards that goal there's many ways to measure bps by this isn't the only way but we present the user a grid of targets and basically we compute a score which is dependent on how fast and accurately they can
select and then how small are the targets and the more targets that are on the screen the smaller they are the more information you you present per click and so if you think about it from information theory point of view you can communicate across different information theoretic channels and one
such channel is a typing interface you can imagine that's built out of a grid just like a software keyboard on the screen and bits per second is a measure that's computed by taking the log of the number of targets on the screen you can subtract one if you care to model a keyboard because you have
to subtract one for the delete key on the keyboard but log of the number of targets on the screen times the number of crux selections minus incorrect divided by some time window for example 60 seconds and that's sort of the standard way to measure a cursor control task in academia and all credit in
the world goes to this great professor Dr. Shanoi of Stanford who came up with that task and he's also one of my inspirations for being in the field so all the credit in the world to him for coming up with a standardized metric to facilitate this kind of bragging rights that we have now how to say
that no one is the best in the world that doesn't at this task with his PCI it's very important for progress that you have standardized metrics so people can compare across different techniques and approaches how old is this do so yeah big big kudos to him and to all the team at Stanford
yeah so for Nolan and for me playing this task there's also different modes that you can configure this task so the web-good task can be presented as just sort of a left click on the screen or you could have you know targets that you just dwell over or you could have targets that you left
right click on you could have targets that are left right click middle click scrolling clicking and dragging you know you can do all sorts of things within this general framework but the simplest purist form is just blue targets jump on the screen blue means left click that's the simplest
form of the game and the sort of prior records here in academic work and that NERLINK internally with sort of NHPs have all been matched or beaten by by Nolan with his NERLINK device so sort of prior to NERLINK the sort of world record for human use and device is somewhere between 4.2 to 4.6
BPS depending on exactly what paper you read and how you interpret it Nolan's current record is 8.5 BPS and again this sort of median NERLINK performance is 10 BPS you can think of it roughly as he's 85% the level of control of a median NERLINK are using their cursor to slot blue targets on
the screen and yeah I think there's a very interesting journey ahead to get us to that same level of 10 BPS performance it's not the case that sort of the tricks that got us from you know 4 to 6 BPS and then 6 to 8 BPS are going to be the ones that get us from 8 to 10 and in my view the core
challenge here is really the labeling problem it's how do you understand at a very very fine resolution what the users are attempting to do and yeah I highly encourage folks in academia to work on this problem what's the journey with Nolan on that quest of increasing the BPS on
Webgrid in March you said that he selected 89,285 targets in Webgrid so he loves this game he's really serious about improving his performance in this game so what is the journey of trying to figure out how to improve that performance how much can that be done on the decoding side how
much can that be done on the calibration side how much can that be done on the Nolan side of like figuring out how to convey his intention more cleanly yeah no this is a great question so in my view one of the primary reasons why Nolan's performance is so good is because of Nolan Nolan
Nolan is extremely focused and very energetic he'll play Webgrid sometimes for like four hours in the middle of the night like from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. he'll be playing Webgrid just because he wants to push it to the limits when you can do and you know this is not us like ask him to do that I want to
be clear like we're not saying hey you should play Webgrid tonight we just gave him the game as part of our research you know and he is able to play independently and practice whenever he wants and he really pushes hard to push it the technology to the absolute limit and he views this like you
know his job really to make us be the bottleneck and boy has he done that well and so that's the first thing to acknowledge is that you know he's extremely motivated to make this work I've also had the privilege to meet other you know clinical trial participants from rain gain other trials
and they very much share the same attitude of like they they they viewed this as their life's work to you know advanced technology as much as they can and if that means liking targets on the screen for four hours from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. then so be it and there's something extremely honorable about that that's worth calling out okay so now how do you how do you sort of get from where he started which is no cursor control the 8bps so I mean when he started there's a huge amount of learning to do
on his side and our side to figure out what's the most intuitive control for him and the most intuitive control for him is sort of you have to find the set intersection of what do we have the signal to decode so we don't pick up you know every single neuron in the motor cortex which means we don't
have representation for every part of the body so there may be some signals that we have better sort of decode performance on than others for example on his left hand we have a lot of difficulty the solution has left ring finger from his left middle finger but on his right hand we have a good
you know good control and good modulation detected from the neurons are able to record for his pinkiness dump and his next finger so you can imagine how these different you know sub spaces of modulated activity intersect with what's the most intuitive for him and this has evolved over time
so once we gave him the ability to calibrate models on his own he was able to go and explore various different ways to imagine and control on the cursor for example he can imagine control on the cursor by we've on his wrist side decide or by moving his entire arm by at the end one point into his feet you know he tried like a whole bunch of stuff to explore the space of what is the most natural way for him to control the cursor that at the same time is easy for us to decode roll just
to clarify it it's through the body mapping procedure there you you're able to figure out which finger he can move yes yes that's one way to do it maybe one nuance of when he's doing it he can imagine many more things and we represent in that visual on the screen so we show him sort of abstractly here's a cursor you figure out what works the best for you and we obviously have hints about what we're best from that body mapping procedure of you know we know that this particular action we can
represent well but it's really up to him to go and explore and figure out what works the best but at which point does he no longer visualize the movement of his body and it's just visualizing the movement of the cursor yeah how quickly does he go from how quickly does he get there so this
happened on our Tuesday I remember this day very clearly because at some point during the during the day it looked like he wasn't doing super well like look like the model wasn't performing super well and he was like getting distracted but he actually wasn't the case like what actually happened
was he was trying something new where he was just controlling the cursor so he wasn't imagining moving his hand anymore he was just imagining I don't know what it is some like abstract intention to move the cursor on the screen and I cannot tell you what the difference between those two things
are I really truly cannot he's trying to explain it to me before I cannot you know give a first person a count of what that's like but the expletives that he uttered in that moment were you know enough to suggest that there's a very qualitatively different experience for him to just have direct
neural control over a cursor I wonder if there's a way through UX to encourage a human being to discover that because he discovered it like you said to me that he's a pioneer so he discovered that on his own through all of this the process of trying to try to move the cursor with different
kinds of intentions but that is clearly a really powerful thing to arrive at which is to let go of trying to control the fingers and hand and control the actual digital device with your mind that's right UX is how it works and the ideal UX is one that it's the user doesn't have to think
about what they need to do in order to get it done they just it just does it that is so fascinating by wonder on the on the biological side how long it takes for the brain to adapt yeah so is it just simply learning like high level software or is there like a neuroplasticity component where like
the brain is adjusting slowly yeah I the truth is I don't know I'm very excited to see with sort of the second participant that we implant what the you know what the journey is like for them because we'll have learned a lot more potentially we can help them understand and explore that direction
more quickly this is something I didn't you know this wasn't me prompting no one to go try this he was just exploring how to use his device and figured it out himself but now that we know that that's a possibility that maybe there's a way to you know for example hint the user don't try super
hard during calibration just do something that feels natural or just directly control the cursor you know don't imagine explicit action and from there we should be able to hopefully understand how this is for somebody who has not experienced that before maybe that's the default mode of operation for
them you don't have to go through this intermediate phase of explicit motions or maybe if that naturally happens for people you can just occasionally encourage them to allow themselves to move the cursor right actually sometimes just like with a four-minute mile just the knowledge that that's
possible pushes you to do it yeah enables you to do it and then it becomes trivial and then it also makes you wonder it's the cool thing about humans it went once there's a lot more human participants they will discover things that are possible yes and share their experiences yeah
and share and that because of them sharing it they'll be able to do it the all of a sudden that's this unlocked for everybody yeah because just the knowledge sometimes is the thing they're able to do it yeah just coming on that too like there's we've probably tried like a thousand
different ways to do various aspects of decoding and now we know like what the right sub spaces to continue exploring further again thanks to Nolan the many hours he's put into this and so even just that help like help constrain sort of the beam search of different approaches that we could
explore really helps accelerate for the next percent you know the set of things that we'll get to try on day one how fast we hope to get them to useful control how fast we can be able to use it independently and to give value to the system so yeah massive hats off to to Nolan and and all the
participants that came before him to make this technology a reality so how often are the updates to the decoder because Nolan mentioned like okay there's a new update that we're working on and that in the stream he said he plays the snake game because it's like super hard it's a good way
for him to test like how good the update is so and he says like sometimes the update is a step backwards it's like it's a constant like iteration so how often like what is the update in tail is it most than on the decoder side yeah couple comments so what is it's probably worth
trying distinction between sort of research sessions where we're actively trying different things to understand like what the best approach is versus sort of independent use where we're willing to have yes you know ability to just go use the device how anybody would want to use their MacBook
and so what he's referring to is I think usually in the context of a research session where we're trying you know many many different approaches to you know even unsupervised approaches like we talked about earlier to try to come up with better-based estimate his true intention and more
accurately decoded and uh... in those scenarios I mean we try in any given session he'll sometimes work for like eight hours a day and so that can be you know hundreds of different models that we would try in that day like a lot of different things now it's also worth noting that we update the
application he uses quite frequently I think you know sometimes up to like four or five times a day will update his application with different features or bug fixes or feedback that he's given us so he's been able to he's a very articulate person who uh is part of the solution he's not a
complaining person he says hey here's this thing that I've I've discovered is is not optimal in my flow here's some ideas how to fix it let me know what your thoughts are let's figure out how to how to solve it and it often happens that those things are addressed within you know a couple
hours of him giving us his feedback that that's a kind of iteration cycle we'll have and so sometimes at the beginning of the session we'll give us feedback and at the end of the session he's he's giving us feedback on the next iteration of that of that of that process or that setup.
That's fascinating because one of the things you mentioned that there's 271 pages of notes taken from the BCI sessions and this was just in March so one of the amazing things about human beings that they can provide especially ones who are smart and excited and all like positive and
good vibes like Nolan that they can provide feedback continuously back. Yeah it also requires just a brag on the team a little bit I work with a lot of exceptional people and it requires the team being absolutely laser focused on the user and what will be the best for them and it
requires like a level of equipment of okay this is what the user feedback was I've all these meetings we're going to skip that today and we're going to do this you know that level of focus commitment is I would say under under appreciated in the world and also you know you obviously have to have the talent to be able to execute on these things effectively and yeah we have that in
in loads. Yeah and this is such an interesting space of UX design because you have there's so many unknowns here and I can tell UX is difficult because of how many people do it poorly. It's just not a trivial thing. Yeah it's also you know UX is not something that you can always solve by just constant iterating on different things like sometimes you really need to step back and think globally am I even like the right sort of minima to be chasing down for a solution
like there's a lot of problems in which sort of fast iterations cycle is the the predictor of how successful you will be as a good example like in an RL simulation for example the more frequently you get a reward the faster you can progress it's just an easier learning problem the more frequently
you get feedback but UX is not that way you mean users are actually quite often wrong about what the right solution is and it requires a deep understanding of the technical system and what's possible combined with what the problem is you're trying to solve not just how the user expressed it
but what the true underlying problem is to actually get to the right place. Yeah that's the old like stories of Steve Jobs like rolling in there like yeah the user is a good is a useful signal but it's not a perfect signal and sometimes you have to remove the floppy disk drive or whatever the
I forgot all the crazy stories of Steve Jobs like making wild design decisions but there some of his aesthetic that some of it is about the love you put into the design which is very much a Steve Jobs Johnny I type thing but when you have a human being using their brain to interact with
it there it also is deeply about function it's not just aesthetic and that you have to empathize with the with the human being before you while not always listening to them directly they get to deeply empathize it's fascinating it's really really fascinating and at the same time iterate right
but not iterate in a small way sometimes a complete like rebuilding the design he said that no one said in the early days the UX sucked yeah but you improved quickly what was that journey like yeah I mean I'll give one concrete example so he really wanted to be able to read manga this is
something that he I mean yeah it sounds like a simple thing but it's actually a really big deal for him and he couldn't do it with this moustache it just it wasn't accessible but you can't scroll with the moustache on his iPad and on the website that he wanted to be able to use to read
the newest manga and so it might be a good quick pause to say the moustache is the thing he's using holding a stick in his mouth to scroll on a tablet right yeah it's basically you can imagine it's a stylus that you hold between your teeth yeah it's basically a very long stylus and
it's a it's exhausting it's it hurts and it's inefficient yeah and maybe it's also worth calling out there are other alternative assistive technologies but the that particular situation no one's in and this is not uncommon and I think it's also not well understood by folks is that you know he's
relatively spastic so he'll have muscle spasms from time to time and so any assistive technology that requires him to be positioned directly in front of a camera for example an eye tracker or anything that requires him to put something in his mouth just as a no go because he'll either
be shifted out of frame when he has his spasm or if he has something in his mouth it'll stab him in the face you know if he spasms too hard so these kind of considerations are important when thinking about what advantages a PCI has in someone's life if it fits ergonomically into your life in a way
that you can use it independently when your caretaker is not there wherever you want to either in the bed or in the chair depending on you know your comfort level and your desire to have pressure source you know all these factors matter a lot in how good the solution is in that users in that
user's life so one of these very fun examples to scroll so again main guy something he wanted to be able to read and there's many ways to do scroll with the BCI you can imagine like different gestures for example the user could do that would move the move the page but scroll is a very fascinating
control surface because it's a huge thing on the screen in front of you so any sort of jitter in the model output any sort of air in the model output causes like an earthquake on the screen like you really don't want to have your main page that you're trying to read be shifted up a down a
few pixels just because you know your scroll decoder is not completely accurate and so this was an example where we had to figure out how to formulate the problem in a way that the errors of the system whenever they do occur and we'll do our best to minimize them whenever those errors do occur that it doesn't interrupt the quality again of the experience that the user is having it doesn't interrupt their flow of reading their book and so what we ended up building is this really brilliant
feature this is teammate and Bruce who worked on this really brilliant work called quick scroll and quick scroll basically looks at the screen and it identifies where on the screen are scroll bars and it does this by deeply integrating with macOS to understand where are the scroll bars
actively present on the screen using the sort of accessibility tree that's available to macOS apps and we identified where those scroll bars are and provided a BCI scroll bar and the BCI scroll bar looks similar to a normal scroll bar but it behaves very differently and that once you sort of
move over to it your cursor sort of morphs onto it it sort of attaches or latches onto it and then once you push up or down in the same way that you use a push to control you know the normal cursor it actually moves the screen for you so it's basically like remapping the velocity to a scroll
action and the reason that feels so natural intuitive is that when you move over to attach to it it feels like magnetic so you like sort of stuck onto it and then it's one continuous action you don't have to like switch your imagine movement you sort of snap onto it and then you good to go
you just immediately can start pulling the page down or pushing it up and if you want to get that right there's so many little nuances of how this scroll behavior works to make it naturally intuitive so one example is momentum like when you scroll a page with your fingers on the screen
you know you you actually have some like flow like it doesn't just stop right when you lift your finger up the same is true with BCI scroll so we had to spend some time to figure out what are the right nuances when you don't feel the screen under your finger tip anymore what is the right
sort of dynamic or what's the right amount of page give if you will when you push it to make it flow the right amount for the user to have a natural experience reading their book and there's a million I mean there's I could tell you like there's so many little minutia of how exactly that
scroll works that we spent probably like a month getting right to make that feel extremely natural and easy for the user to I mean even the scroll on a smart phone with your finger feels extremely natural and pleasant and it probably takes a extremely long time to get that right and actually
the same kind of visionary UX design that we're talking about don't always listen to the users but also listen to them and also have like visionary big like throw everything out think from first principles but also not yeah yeah by the way just makes me think that scroll bars and the desktop
probably have stagnated and never taken that like because of the snap same as the sector grid snap the scroll bar action you're talking about there's something that could potentially be extremely useful in the desktop setting yeah even just for users to just improve the experience
because the current scroll bar experience and the desktop is horrible yeah it's hard to find hard to control there's not a momentum there's in the intentions should be clear when I start moving towards a scroll bar there should be a snapping to the scroll bar action but of course you know
maybe I'm okay paying that cost but there's hundreds of millions of people paying that cost nonstop but anyway but in this case this is necessary because there's an extra cost paid by Nolan for the jitteriness so you have to switch between the scrolling and the reading there has to
be a face shift between the two like when you're scrolling you're scrolling right right so that is one drawback of the current current approach maybe one other just sort of case study here so again UX is how it works and we think about that holistically from like the even the future detection
level of what we detect in the brain to how we design the decoder what we choose to decode to then how it works once it's being used by the user so another good example and that sort of how it works once they're actually using the decoder you know the output that's displayed on the screen is
not just what the decoder says it's also a function of you know what's going on on the screen so we can understand for example that you know when you're trying to close a tab that very small stupid little X that's extremely tiny which is hard to get precisely hit if you're dealing with sort of
noisy output of the decoder we can understand that that is a small little X you might be trying to hit and actually make it a bigger target for you similar to how when you're typing on your phone if your you know used to like the iOS keyboard for example it actually adapts the target size of
individual keys based on an underlying language model so it'll actually understand if I'm typing hey I'm going to see L it'll make the e-key bigger because in those locks it's a person I'm going to go see and so that kind of you know predictiveness can make the experience much more smooth even
without you know improvements to the underlying decoder or or a future detection part of the stack so we do that with a feature called magnetic targets we actually index the screen and we understand okay these are the places that are you know very small targets that might be difficult to hit
here's the kind of cursor dynamics around that location that might be indicative of the user trying to select it let's make it easier let's blow up the size of it in a way that makes it easier for the user to sort of snap onto that target so all these little details they matter a lot
in helping the user be independent in their day to day living so how much of the work on a decoder is generalizable to p2p3p4p5pn how do you improve the decoder in a way that's generalizable yeah great question so the underlying signal we're trying to decode is going to look
very different in p2np1 for example channel number 345 is going to mean something different in user one than it will in user two just because that electrode corresponds with channel 345 is going to be in next to a different neuron in user one person user two but the approaches the methods the user
experience of how do you get the right sort of behavioral pattern from the user to associate with that neural signal we hope that we'll translate over multiple generations of users and beyond that it's very very possible in fact quite likely that we've overfit to sort of no one's user experience
desires and preferences and so what I hope to see is that you know when we get a second third fourth participant that we find sort of what the right wide minimums are then cover all the cases that make it more intuitive everyone and hopefully there's a cross-pollination of things where
oh we didn't think about that with this user because you know they can speak but with this user who just can fundamentally not speak at all this user experience is not optimal and that will actually those improvements that we make there which hopefully translate them to even people
who can't speak but don't feel comfortable doing so because we're in a public setting like their doctor's office so the actual mechanism of open loop labeling and then closed loop labeling will be the same and hopefully can generalize across the different users as they're doing the calibration
step and the calibration step is pretty cool I mean that in itself the interesting thing about web grid which is like closed loop it's like fun I love it when there's like they used to be kind of an idea of human computation which is using actions that human would want to do anyway to get
a lot of signal from yeah and like web grid is that like a nice video game that also serves as great calibration it's so funny this is I've heard this reaction so many times before sort of the you know first user was implanted we had an internal perception that the first user
would not find this fun yeah and so we thought really quite a bit actually about like should we build other games that like are you know more interesting for the user so we can get this kind of data and help facilitate research that's you know for long duration stuff it turns out that like
people love this game yeah I always loved it but I didn't know that that was a shared perception yeah and just in case it's not clear web grid is there's a great of let's say 35 by 35 cells and one of them lights up blue and you have to move your mouse over that and click on it
and if you miss it and it's red and I've been this game for so many hours so many hours and what's your record you said my I think I have the highest at Nurel and current now my record 17 BPS 17 BPS which is about if you imagine that 35 by 35 grid you're hitting about 100
trials per minute so 100 correct selections in that one minute window so you're averaging about you know between 500 600 milliseconds per selection so one of the reasons that I think I struggle with that again is I'm such a keyboard person so everything is done with the keyboard
and if I can avoid touching the mouse it's great so how can you explain your high performance I have like a whole ritual I go through and I play web grid so it's just actually like a dioplanet associated with this so the first thing has to fast for five days have to go up to the
mouse actually it's kind I mean the fascinating is important so this is like you know this is the mine yeah yeah it's true so what I do is I actually I don't eat for a little bit beforehand and then I'll actually like a ton of peanut butter for right before I move and I get like this is
a real thing this is a real thing yeah and then it has to be really late at night this is like an at night out of I think we share but it has to be like you know midnight 2 a.m. kind of time window and I have a very specific like physical position I'll sit in which is uh I used to be I was
homeschooled growing up and so I did most of my work like on the floor uh just like in my bedroom or whatever and so I have a very specific situation on the floor on the floor I sit and play and then you have to make sure like there's not a lot of weight on your elbow you playing so you can move
quickly and then I turn the gain of the cursor so this will be the cursor way way up so it's like small motions I actually move the cursor hey mowing with your wrist or you're never moving on fingers so my wrist is almost completely still I'm just moving my fingers yeah you know those just
in a small tangent yeah the which I've been meaning to go down this rabbit hole of people that set the world record in Tetris those folks they're playing there's a there's a way to did you see this yeah you could you could you could you could find a way to do it where like it's
using a loophole like a bug that you can do some incredibly fast stuff so it's it's along that line but not quite but you do realize there'll be like a few programmers right now listening to this who fast and eat peanut butter yeah please please try my record I mean the reason I did this
literally was just because I wanted the bar to be high team like I wanted to the number that we aim for should not be like the median performance you should be like it should be able to be all of us at least like that should be the minimum bar what do you think is possible like 20 yeah I don't
know what the limits I mean the limits you can calculate just in terms of like screen refresh rate and like cursor immediately jumping to the next target but there's I mean I'm sure there's limits before that with just sort of reaction time and visual perception and things like this
odd guess it's in the below 40 but above 20 somewhere in there it's probably that right there I never be thinking about it also matters like how difficult the task is you can imagine like some people might be able to do like 10,000 targets on the screen and maybe they can do better
that way so there's some like task optimizations you could do to try to boost your performance as well what do you think it takes for no one to be able to do above 85 to keep increasing that number you said like every increase in the number might require different yeah different improvements
in the system yeah I think the nature of this work is I mean first the first answer this important is I don't know this is you know edge of the research so again nobody's gotten to that number before so what's next is gonna be you know a heuristic a guess from my part
what we've seen historically is that different parts of the stack can come up on that because of different time points so you know when I first joined Irlink like three years ago or so one of the major problems was just the latency of the Bluetooth connection it wasn't just like
the radio device wasn't super good it was an earlier revision of the implant and it just like no matter how good your decoder was if your thing is updating every 30 milliseconds or 50 milliseconds it's just gonna be choppy and no matter how good you are that's gonna be frustrating and lead to
challenges so you know at that point it was very clear that the main challenges just get the data off the device in a very reliable way such that you can enable the next challenge to be to be tackled and then at you know at some point it was you know actually the modeling challenge of how do you
just build a good mapping like the supervised learning problem of you have a bunch of data and you have a label you're trying to predict just what is the right like neuro decoder architecture and hyper parameters to optimize that that was a problem for a bit and once you solve that it became
a different part of that I think the next bottleneck after that was actually just sort of software stability and reliability you know if you have widely varying sort of inference latency in your in your system or your you know your app just lags that every once in a while it decreases
your ability to maintain and get in a state of flow and it basically just disrupts your control experience and so there's a variety of different software bugs and improvements we made that basically increased the performance of the system made it much more reliable much more stable and
led to a state where we could reliably collect data to build better models with so that was a bottleneck for a while it's just sort of like the software stack itself if I were to guess right now there's sort of two major directions you could think about for improving bps further
the first major direction is labeling so labeling is again this fundamental challenge of given a window of time where the user is expressing some behavioral intent what are they really trying to do at the granularity of every millisecond and that again is a task design problem it's a UX
problem it's a machine learning problem it's a software problem sort of touches all those different domains the second thing you can think about to improve bps further is either completely changing the thing you're decoding or just extending the number of things that you're decoding so this
serve in the direction of functionality basically you can imagine giving more clicks for example left to click a right click a middle click different actions like click and drag for example and that can improve the effective bit rate of your communication processes if you're trying to
allow the user to express themselves through any given communication channel you can measure that with this per second but what actually matters the day is how effective are they and navigate in the computer and so from the perspective of the downstream task that you care about functionality
and extending functionality is something we're very interested in because not only can it improve the sort of number of bps but it can also improve the downstream sort of independence that these are has and the skill and efficiency with which they can operate their computer
with the number of threads increasing also potentially help yes short answer is yes it's a bit nuanced how that curve or how that manifests in in the numbers so what you'll see is that if you sort of plot a curve of number of channels that you're using for decode versus either the offline
metric of how good you are decoding or the online metric of sort of in practice how good is the user using this device you see roughly a log curve so as you move further out in number of channels you get a corresponding sort of a logarithmic improvement in control quality and offline validation
metrics the important nuance here is that each channel corresponds with a specific you know represented intention in the brain so for example if you have a channel 254 it might correspond with moving to the right channel 250 six might mean move to the left if you want to expand the number of functions you want to control you really want to have a broader set of channels that covers a
broader set of imagined movements you can think of it like kind of like mr. potato man actually like if you had a bunch of different imagined movements you could do how would you map those imagined movements to input to a computer you can imagine you know handwriting to output characters on the
screen you could imagine just typing with your fingers and have that output text on the screen you could imagine different finger modulations for different clicks you can imagine wiggling your big nose for opening some some menu or wiggling your you know your big toe to have like command tab
occur or something like this so it's really the amount of different actions you can take in the world depends on how many channels you have and the information content that they carry right so that's more about the number of actions so actually as you increase the number of threads
that's more about increasing the number of actions you're able to perform one other nuance there that is worth mentioning so again our goal is really to enable a user with process to control the computer as fast as I can so that's bps with all the same functionality I have which we just talked about
but then also as reliably as I can yeah and that last point is very related to channel account discussion so as you scale out a number of channels the relative importance of any particular feature of your model input to the output control of the user diminishes which means that if the
sort of neural non-stationarity effect is per channel or if the noise is independent such that more channels means on average less output effect then your reliability system will improve so one sort of core thesis that at least I have is that scaling channel count should improve the reliability
system without any work on the decoder itself can you linger on the reliability here so first of all when you see a non-stationarity of the signal which aspect are you referring to yeah so maybe let's talk briefly what the actual underlying signal looks like so again I spoke very briefly
at the beginning about how when you imagine moving to the right or imagine moving to the left neurons my fire more or less and their frequency content of that signal at least in the motor cortex it's very correlated with the output intention of the behavioral task with the users doing you can
imagine actually this is not obvious at rate coding which is the name of that phenomenon is like the only way to bring for representation you can imagine many different ways in which the brain could encode intention and there's actually evidence like in bats for example that there is temporal
codes so timing codes of like exactly when particular neurons fire is the mechanism of information representation but at least in the motor cortex there's substantial evidence that it's rate coding or at least one like first order effect is that it's rate coding so then if the brain is representing
information by changing the sort of frequency of a neuron firing what really matters is sort of the delta between sort of the baseline state of the neuron and what it looks like when it's modulated and what we've observed and what has also been observed in academic work is that that
baseline rate sort of the if you're to target the scale if you imagine that analogy for like measuring you know flour or something when you're baking that baseline state of how much the pot ways is actually different day to day and so if what you're trying to measure is how much rice is in the pot
you're going to get a different measurement different days because you're measuring with different pots so that baseline rate shifting is really the thing that at least from a first order description of the problem is what's causing this downstream bias there can be other effects not many
effects on top of that but at least at a very first order description of the problem that's what we observed here today is that the baseline firing rate of any particular neuron or observed on a particular channel is changing so can you just adjust to the baseline to make it relative to the baseline nonstop yeah this is a great question so with monkeys we have found various ways to do this one example I'd do this is you ask them to do some behavioral tasks like play the game with a joystick
you measure what's going on in the brain you compute some mean of what's going on across all the input features and you subtract that at the input when you're doing your BCI session works super well for every reason that doesn't work super well with Nolan I actually don't know the four reason why
but I can imagine several several explanations one such explanation could be that the context effect difference between some open loop task and some closed loop task is much more significant with Nolan than it is with monkey maybe in this open loop task he's you know watching the
Lex Freeman podcast while he's doing the task or he's whistling and listening to music and talking with his friend and ask his mom what's for dinner while he's doing this task and so the exact sort of difference in context between those two states maybe much larger and thus lead to a bigger
generalization gap between the features that you're normalizing at sort of open loop time and what you're trying to use it close up time that's interesting just on that point it's kind of incredible to watch Nolan be able to do to multitask to do multiple tasks at the same time to be
able to move the mouse cursor effectively while talking and while being nervous because he's talking in front of my ass and chest to you know kicking your ass and now we end talk trash while doing it so all at the same time and yes if you're trying to normalize to the baseline that might throw
everything off boys that interesting maybe one comment on that too for folks that aren't familiar with assisted technology I think there's a common belief that you know well why can't you just use an eye tracker or something like this for helping somebody move a mouse on the screen and
it's it's a really a fair question and one that I actually did was not confident before so Nolan that this was going to be a profoundly transformative technology for people like him and I'm very confident now that it will be but the reasons are subtle it really has to do with
ergonomically how it fits into their life even if you can just offer the same level of control as what they would have with an eye tracker or with a mouse stick but you don't need to have that thing in your face you don't need to be positioned in a certain way you don't need your caretaker
to be around to set it up for you you can activate it when you want how you want wherever you want that level of independence is so game changing for people it means that they can text a friend at night privately without their mom needing to be in the loop it means that they can like open up
you know and browse the internet at 2 a.m. when nobody's around to set their their iPad up for them this is like profoundly game changing thing for folks in that situation and this is even before we start talking about folks that you know may not be able to communicate at all or ask for help
when they want to this can be the potentially the only link that they have to the outside world and yeah that one doesn't I think need explanation of why that's so impactful you mentioned neural decoder how much machine learning is in the decoder how much magic how much
science how much art how difficult does it come up with a decoder that figures out what these sequence of spikes mean yeah good question there's a couple of different ways to answer this so maybe I'll zoom out briefly first and then I'll go down one of the rabbit holes and so
the zoomed out view is that building the decoder is really the process of building the data set plus compiling it into the weights and each of those steps is important the direction I think a further improvement is primarily going to be in the data set side of how do you construct the
optimal labels for the model but there's an entirely separate challenge of then how do you compile it into the best model and so I'll go briefly down the second one down the second rabbit hole one of the main challenges with designing the optimal model for BCI is that offline metrics don't
necessarily correspond to online metrics it's fundamentally a control problem the user is trying to control something on the screen and the exact sort of user experience of how you output the intention impacts ability to control so for example if you just look at validation loss as predicted
by your model there can be multiple ways to do the same validation loss not all of them are equally controllable by the end user and so the you know it might be as simple as saying oh you could just add auxiliary lost terms that like help you capture the thing that actually matters but this is a
very complex nuanced process so how you turn the labels into the model is more of a nuanced process than just like a standard to revise learning problem one very fascinating anecdote here we've tried many different sort of neural network architectures that translate brain data to
velocity outputs for example and one example that stuck in my brain from a couple of years ago now is we at one point we were using just FOI connected networks to decode the brain activity we tried a AB test where we were measuring the relative performance in online control session
of sort of 1D convolution over the inputs in all so if you imagine per channel you have a sliding window that's producing some convolved feature for each of those input sequences every single channel simultaneously you can actually get better validation metrics meaning
you're fitting the data better and it's generalizing better an offline data if you use this convolutional architecture you're reducing parameters it's sort of a standard standard procedure when you do the time series data now it turns out that when using that model online the controllability
was was worse was far worse even though the offline metrics were vendor and there can be many ways to interpret that but what that taught me at least was that hey it's at least the case right now that if you were to just throw a bunch of compute at this problem and you were trying to sort of
hyper parameter optimize or you know let some GPT model hard code or come up with our invent many different solutions if you were just optimizing for loss it would not be sufficient which means that there's still some inherent modeling gap here there's still some artistry left to be
uncovered here of how to get your model to scale with more compute and that may be fundamentally labeling problem but there may be other components to this as well is it data constrained at this time like the which is what it sounds like like how do you get a lot of good labels yeah I think it's
data quality constrained not necessarily data quantity constrained but even like even just the quantity I mean because it has to be trained at the on the interactions I guess there's not that many interactions yeah so it depends what version this you're talking about so if you're talking about
like let's say the simplest example of just 2d velocity then I think yeah data quality is the main thing if you're talking about how to build a sort of multifunction output that lets you do all the inputs the computer that you and I can do then it's actually a much more sophisticated nuanced
modeling challenge because now you need to think about not just when the users left clicking but when you're building the left click model you also need to be thinking about how to make sure it doesn't fire when they're trying to right click or when they're trying to move the mouse so one
example of an interesting bug from like sort of week one of a BCI with no one was when he moved the mouse the click signal sort of dropped off a cliff and when he stopped the clicks and it went up so again there's a contamination between the two inputs another good example was at one point he
was trying to do sort of a left click and drag and the minute he started moving the left click signal dropped off a cliff so again because there's some contamination between the two signals you need to come up with some way to either in the data set or in the model build robustness against
this kind of you think about like overfitting but really it's just that the model has not seen this kind of variability before so you need to find some way to help the model with that this is super cool because it feels like all of this is very solvable but it's hard yes it is fundamentally
engineering challenge this is important to emphasize and it's also important to emphasize that it may not need fundamentally new techniques which means that you know people who work on let's say on to revise speech classification using CTC loss for example with internal to Siri they could
potentially have very applicable skills to this so what things are you excited about in the future development of the software stack on your link so everything we've been talking about the decoding the UX I think there's some I'm excited about like something I'm excited about from the
technology side and some I'm excited about for understanding how this technology is going to be best situated for entering the world so I'll work backwards on the technology entering the world side of things I'm really excited to understand how this device works for folks that you know cannot
speak at all they have no ability to sort of bootstrap themselves into useful control by voice command for example and are extremely limited in their current capabilities I think that will be incredibly useful signal for us to understand I mean really what is an existential threat for all
startups which is part of market fit does this device have the capacity and potential to transform people's lives in the current state and if not what are the gaps and if we are gaps how do we solve the most most fixed efficiently so that's what I'm very excited about for the next year or
so of clinical trial operations the technology side I'm quite excited about basically everything we're doing I think it's going to be awesome the most prominent one I would say is scaling channel count so right now we have a thousand channel device the next version will have between three
and six thousand channels and I expect that curve to continue in the future and it's unclear what set of problems will just disappear completely at that scale and what set of problems will remain and require further focus and so I'm excited about the clarity of gradient that that gives us
in terms of the user experience that we choose to focus our time and resources on and and also in terms of the you know even things that's not not not stationary like does that problem just completely go away at that scale or do we need to come up with new creative UX is still even at that point
and also when you get to that time point when we start expanding out dramatically the set of functions that you can output from one brain how to deal with all the nuances of both the user experience of not being able to feel the different keys under your fingertips but still need to be
able to modulate all of them in synchrony to achieve the thing you want and you can you don't have that perfect set to feedback groups of how can you make that intuitive for a user to control a high dimensional control surface without feeling the thing physically I think that's going to be super
interesting problem I'm also quite excited to understand you know do these scaling laws continue like as you scale channel count how much further out do you go before that saturation point is is truly hidden and it's not obvious today I think we only know what's in the sort of interpolation
space we only know what's between zero and 1024 but we don't know what's beyond that and then there's a whole sort of like range of interesting sort of neuroscience and brain questions which is when you stick more stuff in the brain in more places you get to learn much more quickly about what those
brain regions represent and so I'm excited about that fundamental neuroscience learning which is also important for figuring out how and to most efficiently insert electrodes in the future so yeah I think all those dimensions I'm really really excited about and that doesn't even get close to
touching the sort of software stack that we work on every single day and what we're working on right now yeah it seems virtually impossible to me that a thousand electrodes is where it saturates it feels like this would be one of those silly notions in the future where obviously you should have
millions of electrodes and this is where like the true breakthroughs happen you tweeted now some thoughts are most precisely described in poetry what do you think that is I think it's because the information bottleneck of language is pretty steep and yet you're like you're able to reconstruct
on the other persons in the other persons brain more effectively without being literal like if you if you can express the sentiment such that in their brain they can reconstruct the the actual true underlying meaning and beauty of the thing that you're trying to get across the generator functioning
their brains more powerful than what language can express and so the mechanism poetry is really just to feed or seat that generator function so being literal sometimes is a suboptimal compression for the thing you're trying to convey and it's actually in the process of the user
going through that generation that they understand what you mean like that's the that's the beautiful part it's also like when you look at a beautiful painting like it's not the pixels or the painting that are beautiful it's the thought process that occurs when you see that the experience of that
that actually is I think that matters yeah it's resonating with some deep yeah thing within you that the artist also experienced that was able to convey that through the pixels and that's actually going to be relevant for for full on telepathy you know it's like if you
just read the poetry literally that doesn't say much of anything interesting it requires a human to interpret it so it's the combination of the human mind and all the experiences that human human being has within the context of the collective intelligence of the human species that makes
that poem makes sense and they load that in and so in that same way the signal that carries from human to human meaning why not may seem trivial but may actually care a lot of power because of the complexity of the human mind and the receiving end yeah that's interesting I
opposed she still doesn't who was it I think Yoshibaka first watch always said something about all the people that think we've achieved a GI explain why humans like music oh yeah and until until the GI likes music you haven't achieved a GI or something like do you not think
that's like some next token entropy surprise kind of thing going on I don't know I don't know either I listen to a lot of classical music and also read a lot of poetry and yeah I do wonder if like there is some element of the next token surprise factor going on there yeah maybe because I mean
like a lot of the the tricks in both poetry and music are like basically you have some repeated structure and then you do like a twist yeah like it's like okay verse or like clause 123 is one thing and then clause four is like okay now we're on to the next theme yeah and it they kind of play
with exactly when the surprise happens and the expectation of the user and that's even true like through history as musicians evolve music they take like some known structure that people are familiar with and they just tweak it a little bit like they tweak it and add a surprising element because
especially true in like in classical music heritage but that's one one of these I'll just entropy like the the so so break so breaking structure or breaking symmetry is something that humans seem to like maybe as simple as that yeah and I mean great artist copy and they also you know knowing which
rules to break is the important part and it fundamentally it must be about the listener of the piece like which rules is the right one to break is about the user or the audience member perceiving that as interesting uh what do you think is the meaning of human existence
there's a tv show I really like called the west wing and in the west wing there's a character he's the president of the united states who's uh having a discussion about the bible with one of their colleagues and uh with the colleagues says something about you know the bible says
x, y and z and uh the president says yeah but it also says abc and uh person says do well do you believe the bible to be literally true and the president says yes but I also think that neither of us are smart enough to understand it I think to like the analogy here for the meaning of life is that
largely we don't know the right question to ask and so I think I'm very aligned with uh sort of the hitchhiker's guard the galaxy version of this question which is basically if we can ask the right questions it's much more likely we find the meaning of human existence
and so in this short term as a heuristic in the sort of search policy space we should try to increase the diversity of uh people asking such questions or generally of consciousness and conscious beings asking such questions um so again I think I will take the eye to a no card here
but say I do think there are meaningful things we can do that improve the likelihood of answering that question it's interesting how much value you assign to the task of asking the right questions that's the that's the main thing is not the answer is the questions this point by the way is driven
home uh in a very painful way when you try to communicate with someone who cannot speak because a lot of the time the last thing to go is they have the ability to somehow you know wiggle a lip or move something that allows them to say yes or no and in that situation it's very obvious that
what matters is are you asking them the right question to be able to say yes or no too wow that's powerful well bliss thank you for everything you do and thank you for being you and thank you for talking to you thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with bliss Chapman
and now dear friends here's Nolan our boss the first human being to have a new linked device implanted in his brain you had a diving accident in 2016 that left you paralyzed with no feeling from the shoulders down how did that accident change your life there's sort of
the freak thing that happened imagine you're running into the ocean all this isn't like but you're running into the ocean and you get to about waist high and then you kind of like dive in take the rest of the plunge under the wave or something that's what I did and then I just never came back
not sure what happened I did it running into the water with a couple of guys and so my idea of what happened is really just that I took like a stray fist elbow knee foot something to the side of my head the left side of my head was sore for about a month afterwards so I must have taken a
pretty big knock and then they both came up and I didn't and so I was faced out in the water for a while I was conscious and then eventually just you know realize I couldn't hold my breath any longer and I keep saying took a big drink people I don't know if they like that I say that
seems like I'm making light of it all but um this is kind of how I am and I don't know like I'm a very relaxed sort of stress free person I rolled with the punches for a lot of this I kind of took it in stride it's like all right well what can I do next how can I improve my life even a little bit
um on a day-to-day basis at first just trying to find some way to heal as much my body as possible um to try to get healed to try to get off a ventilator learn as much as I could so I could somehow survive once I left the hospital um and then thank god I had like my family around me if I didn't
have my parents uh my siblings then I would have never made it this far they've done so much for me more than like I can ever think them for honestly and a lot of people don't have that a lot of people in my situation their families either aren't capable of providing for them or honestly just don't
want to and so they get placed somewhere and you know in some sort of home uh so thankfully I had my family I have a great group of friends a great group of buddies from college who have all rallied around me and we're all um still incredibly close people always say you know if you're lucky
you'll end up with one or two friends from high school that you keep throughout your life I have about ten ten or twelve from high school that have all stuck around and we still get together all of us twice a year um we call it the spring series and the fall series um this last one we all
did uh we dressed up like X-Men so I did a special Xavier and it was freaking awesome it was so good so yeah I have such a great support system around me and so you know being a quadriplegic isn't that bad I get weighted on um all the time people bring me food and drinks and I get to sit around
and watch as much TV and movies and anime as I want I get to read as much as I want um I mean it's it's great it's beautiful to see that you see the silver lining in all of this uh it's just going back do you remember the moment when you first realized your paralyzed from yeah neck down yep I was faced down in the water um right when I whatever something had my head I um tried to get up and I realized I couldn't move and it just sort of clicked I'm like all right I'm paralyzed can't move
what do I do um if I can't get up I can't flip over can't do anything then I'm gonna drown eventually um and I knew I couldn't hold my breath forever so I just held my breath and thought about it for maybe 10-15 seconds um I've heard from other people that like look on liquors I guess the
two girls that pulled me out of the water were two of my best friends they're lifeguards um and one of them said that um it looked like my body was sort of shaking in the water like I was trying to flip over and stuff um but I knew I knew immediately and I just kind of I realized that
that's like what my situation was from here on out maybe if I got to the hospital they'd be able to do something when I was in the hospital like right before surgery I was trying to calm uh one of my friends down I like brought her with me from college to camp and she was just balling over
me and I was like hey it's gonna be fine like don't worry um I was cracking some jokes to try to lighten the mood um the nurse had called my mom and I was like don't tell my mom um she's just gonna be stressed out call her after I'm out of surgery because at least she'll have some answers
then like whether I live or not really um and I didn't want her to be stressed through the whole thing but I knew and then when I first woke up after surgery um I was super drugged up they had me on fentanyl like three ways which was awesome um I don't I don't recommend it but um I saw I saw some crazy stuff uh on that fentanyl and it was still the best I've ever felt uh on drugs um medication sorry on medication um and uh I remember the first time I saw my mom in the hospital I was
just balling I had like ventilator in um like I couldn't talk or anything and uh I just started crying because it was more like seeing her not that I mean the whole situation obviously was pretty rough but I was just like seeing her face for the first time was pretty hard but um yeah I just I never had like a moment of you know man I'm paralyzed this sucks I don't want to like be around anymore it was always just I hate that I have to do this but like sitting here and wallowing isn't gonna
help so immediate acceptance yeah yeah has there been low points a long way yeah yeah sure um um I mean there are days when I don't really feel like doing anything not so much anymore like not for the last couple years I don't really feel that way I've um more so just wanted to try to
do anything possible to make my life better at this point um but at the beginning there were some ups and downs there were some really hard things to adjust to um first off just like the first couple months the amount of pain I was in was really really hard I mean I remember screaming at
the top of my lungs in the hospital because I thought my legs were on fire and obviously I can't feel anything but it's all nerve pain and so that was a really hard night I asked them to give me as much pain meds as possible they're like you've had as much as you can have so just kind of deal with
it go to a happy place sort of thing so that was a pretty low point um and then every now and again it's hard like realizing things that I wanted to do in my life that I won't be able to do anymore um you know I was wanted to be a husband and father and I just don't think that I could do it now
as a quadriplegic maybe it's possible but I'm not sure I would ever um put you know someone I love through that um like having to take care of me and stuff um not being able to you know go out and play sports I was a huge athlete growing up so that was pretty hard um just little things do when
I realized I can't do them anymore like there's something really special about being able to hold the book and smell a book like the feel uh the texture the smell like as you turn the page is like I just love it I can't do it anymore and it's little things like that um the two-year mark was
pretty rough two years is when they say you will um get back basically as much as you're ever going to get back as far as movement and sensation goes and so for the first two years that was the only thing on my mind was like try as much as I can to move my fingers my hands my feet
everything possible to try to get sensation and movement back and then when the two-year mark hit so um June 30th 2018 I was I was really sad that that's kind of where I was um and then just randomly here and there but I was never like depressed for long periods of time just it never
seemed worthwhile to me well gave you strength my faith my faith in God uh was a big one my understanding that it was all for purpose and even if that purpose wasn't anything involving nerling even if that purpose was you know there's there's a story in the Bible about Job and I think
it's a really really popular story about how Job you know has all of these terrible things happen to him and he praises God throughout the whole situation I thought and I think a lot of people think for most of their lives that they are Job that they're the ones going through something terrible
and they just need to you know praise God through the whole thing and everything will work out at some point after my accident I realized that I might not be Job that I might be you know one of his children that gets killed or kidnapped or taken from him and so it's about terrible things
that happen to those around you who you love so maybe you know in this case my mom would be Job and she has to get through something extraordinarily hard and I just need to try and make it as best as possible for her because um she's the one that's really going through this massive trial
um and that gave me a lot of strength and obviously my family um my family and my friends they they give me all the strength that I need on a day-to-day basis so it makes things a lot easier having that great support system around me from everything I've seen of you online your streams and
the way you are today I really admire let's say you're unwavering positive outlook on life has that always been this way yeah yeah I've I mean I've just always thought I could do anything I ever wanted to do there was never anything too big like whatever
I set my mind to I felt like I could do it um I didn't want to do a lot I wanted to like travel around and be sort of like a gypsy and like go work odd jobs I had the stream of travel around Europe and being like I don't know a shepherd in like whales or Ireland and then going to being
a fisherman in Italy uh doing all these things for like a year like it's such like cliche things but I just thought it would be so much fun to go and travel and do different things and so um I've always just seen the best in people around me too and I've always tried to be good to people
and growing up with my mom too she's like the most positive energetic person in the world and we're all just people people like uh I just get along great with people um I really enjoy meeting new people and so um I just wanted to do everything um this is just kind of just how
I've been it's just great to see that cynicism didn't take over given everything you've been through yeah that's uh was that like a deliberate choice you made that you're not going to let this keep you down yeah a bit also like I just just kind of how I am I just like I said I roll with the punches
with everything I always used to tell people like I don't stress about things much um and whenever I'd see people getting stressed I'd just say you know like it's not hard just don't stress about it and like that's all you need to do uh and they're like that's not how that works like it works
for me like just don't stress and everything will be fine like everything will work out obviously not everything always goes well and it's not like it all works out for the best all the time but I just don't think stress has at any place in my life since I was a kid what was the experience like of you being selected to be the first human being to have on your like device and plan to your brain were you scared excited no no it was cool um like I was I was never afraid of it I had to think
through a lot should I should I do this um like be the first person I could wait until number two or three and get a better version of the knurling like the first one might not work maybe um it's actually gonna kind of suck um it's gonna be the worst version ever in a person so why would
I do the first one like I've already kind of been selected I could just tell them you know like okay find someone else and then I'll do number two or three like I'm sure they would let me they're looking for a few people anyways but ultimately I was like I don't know there's something
about being the first one to do something it's pretty cool I always thought that if I had the chance that I would like to do something for the first time um this seemed like a pretty good opportunity um and I was I was never scared I think my like faith had a huge uh part in that I
always felt like God was preparing me for something um I almost wish it wasn't this because I had many conversations with God about not wanting to do any of this as a quadriplegic I told them you know I'll go out and talk to people I'll go out and travel the world and talk to you know stadiums
thousands of people give my testimony I'll do all of it but like heal me first don't make me do all this in a chair that sucks um and I guess he won that argument I didn't really have much of a choice I always felt like there was something going on and to see how I guess easily I made it through
the interview process and how quickly everything happened um how the star sort of aligned with all of this it it just told me like as the surgery was getting closer it just told me that you know it it was all meant to happen it was all meant to be and so I shouldn't be afraid of anything that's to come and so I wasn't I kept telling myself like you know you say that now but as soon as the surgery comes you're probably going to be freaking out like you're about to have brain surgery and brain
surgery is a big deal for a lot of people but it's a even bigger deal for me like it's all I have left the amount of times I've been like thank you God that you didn't take my brain and my personality and my ability to think um my like love of learning like my character everything like
thank you so much like as long as you left me that then I think I can get by and I was about to let people go like root around in there like hey we're gonna go like put some stuff in your brain like hopefully it works out um and so it was it was something that gave me pause but like I said how
smoothly everything went I never expected for a second that anything would go wrong plus the more people I met on the boroughs side and on the knurling side they're just the most impressive people in the world like I can't speak enough to how much I trust these people with my life
and how impressed I am with all of them and to see the excitement on their faces to like walk into a room and roll into a room and see all of these people looking at me like we're just we're so excited like we've been working so hard on this and it's finally happening it's super infectious
and um it just makes me want to do it even more and to help them achieve their dreams like I don't know it's so it's so rewarding and I'm so happy for all of them honestly what was the uh day of surgery like what's uh when did you wake up what'd you feel yeah by minute yeah we freaking out no
I thought I was going to but the surgery approached the night before the morning of I was just excited like I was like they'll let's make this happen I think I said that uh something like that to Elon on the phone uh beforehand we were like uh face timing and I was like let's rock and roll
and he's like let's do it uh I don't know I just I wasn't scared so we woke up I think we had to be at the hospital at like 5.30 a.m. I think surgery was at like 7 a.m. so we woke up pretty early I'm not sure much of us slept that night um um got to the hospital 5.30 went through like all the
pre-op stuff everyone was super nice uh Elon was supposed to be there in the morning um but something went wrong with his plane so we ended up face timing uh that was cool had one of the greatest one-liners of my life after that phone call um hung up with him there were like 20 people around
me and I was like I just hope he wasn't too star-struck talking to me nice yeah yeah it was good well done yeah yeah do you write that ahead of time no just came to me I was like this is this seems right you know when in surgery um I asked if I could pray right beforehand so I like
prayed over the room I asked God if you like be with my mom in case anything happened to me and just like calm her nerves out there uh woke up um played a bit of a prank on my mom uh I don't know if you've heard about it yeah I read about it yeah uh she was she was not happy uh can you
take me to the prank yeah this is something you regret doing that now no no no not one bit um it was something it was something I I had talked about ahead of time with my buddy Bane I was like I would really like to play a prank on my mom um uh very specifically my mom she's very gullible
um I think she had knee surgery once even and um after she came out of knee surgery um uh she was super groggy she's like I can't feel my legs and my dad looked at her he's like you don't have any legs like they had they had to amputate both your legs and
so we just do very mean things to her all the time um I'm so surprised that she still loves us um but right after surgery I was really worried that I was going to be too like groggy like not all there I had anesthesia once before and it it messed me up like I could not function um for a while
afterwards and I um I like said a lot of things that I was like I was really worried that I was going to start I don't know like drop in drop in some bombs and I wouldn't even know I wouldn't remember um so I was like like please god don't let that happen and please let me be there enough
to do this to my mom um and so she walked in uh after surgery it was like the first time they had been able to see me after surgery and she just looked at me she said hi like how are you how are you doing how do you feel and I looked at her and this very I think the anesthesia helped very like
groggy sort of confused look on my face it's like who who are you and she just started looking around the room like at the surgeons of the doctors like what did you do to my son like you need to fix this right now tears started streaming I saw how much she was freaking out I was like I can't let
this go on it's also like mom mom I'm fine like uh it's all right and uh still she was not happy about it she uh still says she's gonna get me back someday but I mean I don't know I don't know what that's gonna look like it's a lifelong battle yeah yeah but it was good in some sense it was a
demonstration that you still got that's that's all I wanted to be or that's all I wanted it to be and I knew that doing something super mean to her like that show her yeah to show that you're still there that you love her yeah exactly exactly the dark way to do it but I love it yeah uh what was
the first time you were able to feel that you can use the new your link device to affect the world around you yeah um the first little taste I got of it was actually not too long after surgery um some of the knurling team had brought in um like a little iPad uh a little tablet screen and
they'd put up eight different um channels um and that were recording some of my neurons spikes um and they put it in front of me like this is like real time your brain firing like that's super cool um my first thought was I mean if they're firing now let's see if I can affect them in some way
so I started trying to like wiggle my fingers and I just started like scanning through the channels and one of the things I was doing was like moving my index finger up and down and I just saw this yellow spike on like top row like third box over or something I saw this yellow spike every time
I did it and I was like oh that's cool and everyone around was just like what what are you seeing I was like look look at this one look at like this top row third box over this yellow spike like that's me right there there there and everyone was freaking out they started like clapping
I was like that's super unnecessary like this is what's supposed to happen right like so you're imagining yourself moving each individual finger one at a time yeah and then seeing like they you can notice something and then when you did the index finger you're like oh yeah I was
I was wiggling kind of all of my fingers to see if anything would happen there was a lot of other things going on but that big yellow spike was the one that stood out to me like I'm sure that if I would have stared at it long enough I could have mapped out maybe a hundred different things
but the big yellow spike was the one that I noticed maybe you could speak to what it's like to sort of wiggle your fingers to like to imagine that the that the mental the cognitive effort required to sort of wiggle your index finger for example how easy is that to do pretty easy for me
uh it's something that at the very beginning after my accident they told me to try and move my body as much as possible even if you know you can't just keep trying because that's going to create new like neural pathways or pathways in my spinal cord to like reconnect these things
um to hopefully regain some movement someday I was fascinating yeah I know it's it's bizarre but I that's part of the recovery process is to keep trying to move your body yep and and that's what you can and the nervous system does this thing it starts reconnect it'll start reconnecting
um for some people some people it never works some people they'll do it like for me I got some bicep control back um and that's about it I can if I uh try enough I can wiggle some of my fingers not like on command it's more like if I try to move say my right pinky and I just keep
trying to move it after a few seconds it'll wiggle um so I know there's stuff there like I know like that happens with you know a few different of my fingers and stuff um but yeah that's this what they tell you to do um one of the people at the time when I was in the hospital came in and
told me for one guy who had recovered um most of his control what he thought about every day was actually walking like the act of walking um just over and over again so I tried that for years I tried just imagining walking which is it's hard it's hard to imagine like all of the steps
that go into well taking a step like all of the things that have to move like all the activations uh that have to happen along your leg in order for one step to occur but you're not just imagining you're like doing it right I'm trying yeah so it's like it's imagining
over again what I had to do to take a step because it's not something any of us think about we just you want to walk and you take a step um you don't think about all of the different things that are going on in your body so I had to recreate that in my head as much as I could and then I practice it
over and over and over so it's not like a third person perspective as a first person perspective you're like it's not like you're imagining yourself walking you're like literally doing this everything all the same stuff that you're walking yeah which which was hard it was hard at the
beginning like frustrating hard or like actually cognitive really hard like what you want it was both um there's a there's a scene in one of the kill bill movies actually oddly enough where she is like paralyzed I don't know from like a drug that was in her system and then she like find some
way to get into the back of a truck or something and she stares at her toe and she says move like move your big toe and uh after you know a few seconds on screen she does it and she did that with every one of her like body parts until she can move again I did that for years just stared at my body
and said move your index finger move your big toe um sometimes vocalizing it like out loud sometimes just thinking it I tried every different way to do this to try to get some movement back and it's hard because it it actually is like taxing like physically taxing on my body which is
something I would have never expected because it's not like I'm moving but it feels like there's a build up of the the only way I can describe it is there like signals that are getting through from my brain um down because of my there's that gap in my spinal cord so brain down and then from
my hand back up to the brain and so it feels like those signals um get stuck in whatever body part that I'm trying to move and they just build up and build up and build up until they burst um and then once they burst I get like this really weird sensation of everything sort of like dissipating
back out to level and then I do it again um it's also just like a fatigue thing like a muscle fatigue but without actually moving your muscles it's very very bizarre and then you know if you try to stare at a body part or think about a body part and move for two three four sometimes eight
hours it's very taxing on your mind it takes a lot of focus um it was a lot easier at the beginning because I wasn't able to like control a TV in my room or anything I was not able to um control any of my environment so for the first few years a lot of what I was doing was staring at walls
and so um obviously I did a lot of thinking and I tried to move a lot just over and over and over and over again do you never give up sort of hope there just training hard essential yep and I still do it I do it like subconsciously and I think that uh that helped a lot with things with
knurling honestly it's something that I talked about the other day at the all hands that I did at I went to school it takes a nap so I've been around for um so you should be saying welcome to me yeah welcome to Texas likes yeah I ate you um but y'all I was talking about how a lot of what
they've had me do especially at the beginning um well I still do it now um is body mapping so like there will be a visualization of a hand or an arm on the screen and I have to do that motion and the towel they sort of train um the algorithm to like understand what I'm trying to do and so it
made things very uh seamless um for me I think that's really really cool so it's it's amazing to know because I've learned a lot about the body mapping procedure yeah and we're like with uh with the interface and everything like that it's cool to know that you've been a century like
training to be like a world class at that task yeah yeah I don't know if other quadriplegics like other paralyzed people give up I hope they don't um I hope they keep trying because I've heard other paralyzed people say like don't ever stop they tell you two years but um you you just never know
you're the human bodies capable of amazing things so um I've heard other people say don't give up like I think one girl had um spoken to me through some family members and said that she had been paralyzed you know for 18 years and she'd been trying to like wiggle her index finger for all that time
and she finally got about like 18 years later so like I know that it's possible and I'll never give up doing it I just I do it when I'm lying down like watching TV I'll find myself doing it kind of just uh almost like on its own it's just something I've gotten so used to doing that I don't know
I I don't think I'll ever stop that's really awesome to hear because I think it's one of those things that can really pay off in the long term because like it is training you're not visibly seeing there's also that training at the moment but like there's that like a limpic level nervous system
getting getting ready for something honestly was like something that I think Nurlink gave me that um I can't I can't thank them enough for like I can't show my appreciation for it enough was being able to visually see that what I'm doing is actually having some effect
yeah um it's a huge part of the reason why like I know now that I'm gonna keep doing it forever because before Nurlink I was doing it every day and I was just assuming that things were happening like it's not like I knew I wasn't getting back any mobility or um sensation or anything so
I could have been running up against a brick wall for all I knew and with Nurlink I get to see like all the signals happening real time and I get to see that you know what I'm doing can actually be mapped you know when we started doing like click calibrations and stuff when I go to click my index
finger for a left click that it actually recognizes that like it it changed how I think about what's possible with like retraining my body to move and so yeah I'll I'll never give up now and also just the signal that there's still a powerhouse of a brain there that's like
exists uh and as the technology develops that brain is I mean that's the most important thing about the human body is the brain and it can do a lot of the control so what did it feel like when you first could wiggle the index finger and saw the environment respond like with that little yeah
thing wherever we're just being way too dramatic according to you yeah it was very cool I mean it was cool but it I keep telling this to people it made sense to me like it made sense that you know like there are signals still happening in my brain and that as long as you had something
near it that could measure those that could record those then you should be able to like visualize it in some way like see it happen and so that was not very surprising to me that was like oh cool like we we found one like we found something that works um it was cool to see that their technology
worked um and that everything that they'd worked so hard for was like going to pay off um but I like moved a cursor or anything at that point I had like interacted with a computer or anything at that point um so it it it just made sense it was cool like I I didn't really know much about
BCI at that point either so I didn't know like what sort of step this was actually making um like I didn't know if this was like a huge deal or if this was just like okay this is you know it's cool that we got this far but we're actually hoping for something like much better down the road
it's like okay I just thought that they knew that it turned on so it was like cool like this is this is cool what did you like read up on the specs of the hardware you get installed like the number of threads yeah yeah I knew all of that but it's all like it's all Greek to me I was like okay
threads 64 threads 16 electrodes 1024 channels okay like that that math checks out sounds right yeah what was the first time you were able to move a mouse cursor I know it must have been within the first maybe week a week or two weeks that I was able to like first move the cursor
and again like it kind of made sense to me like it it didn't seem like that big of a deal like it it was like okay well how do I explain this when everyone around you starts clapping for something that you've done it's it's easy to say okay like I did something cool like that was that was
impressive in some way what exactly that meant what it was hadn't really like set in for me so again I knew that me trying to move a body part and then that being mapped in some sort of like machine learning algorithm to be able to identify like my brain signals and then take that and
give me cursor control that all kind of made sense to me I don't know like all the in in's announce of it but I was like there's still signals in my brain firing they just can't get through because there's like a gap in my spinal cord and so they just they can't get all the way down
and back up but they're still there so when I move the cursor for the first time I was like that's cool but I expected that that should happen like it it made sense to me when I moved the cursor for the first time with just my mind without like physically trying to move so I guess I can get
into that just a little bit like the difference between attempt and movement and imagine movement yeah that's a fascinating difference yeah I want to the other yeah yeah yeah so like attempted movement is me physically trying to attempt to move say my hand I try to attempt to move my hand
to the right to the left forward and back and that's all attempted attempt to you know like lift my finger up and down attempt to kick or something I'm physically trying to do all of those things even if you can't see it like I'm this would be like me attempting to like shrug my shoulders
or something that's all attempted movement that all that's what I was doing for the first couple of weeks when they were going to give me cursor control and I was doing body mapping it was attempt to do this attempt to do that when near was telling me to like imagine doing it it like
kind of made sense to me but it's not something that people practice like if you started school as a child and they said okay write your name with this pencil and so you do that like okay now imagine writing your name with that pencil kids would think like I guess like that kind of
makes sense and they would do it but that's not something we're taught it's all like how to do things physically we think about like thought experiments and things but that's not like that's not like a physical action of doing things it's more like what you would do in certain situations so imagine
movement it never really connected with me like I guess you could maybe describe it as like a professional athlete like has swinging a baseball bat or swinging like a golf club like imagine what you're supposed to do but then you go right to that and physically do it like you then you get
a bat in your hand and then you do what you've been imagining and so I don't have that like connection so telling me to imagine something versus attempting it it just there wasn't a lot that I could do there mentally I just kind of had to accept what was going on and try but the attempt to move
me thing it all made sense to me like if I try to move then there's a signal being sent in my brain and as long as they can pick that up then they should be able to map it to what I'm trying to do and so when I first moved the cursor like that it was it was like yes this should happen like I'm
I'm not surprised by that but can you clarify is there supposed to be a difference between imagine movement and attempted movement yeah just that in imagine movement you're not attempting to move at all so it's you're like visualized visualizing and then theoretically is that supposed
to be a different part of the brain that lights up in those two different situations yeah not necessarily I think all these signals can still be represented in motor cortex but the difference I think has to do with the naturalness of imagining something versus gotta attempting to sort of
the fatigue of that over time and by the way on the mic is bliss so like this is just different ways to prompt you to kind of get to the thing that you're around yeah yeah attempt to movement does sound like the right thing yeah try yeah I mean it makes sense to me because imagine for me
I'll be I will start visualizing like in my mind visualizing attempted I would actually start trying to like yeah there's a I mean I you know I did like comment on my whole life like wrestling when I'm imagining a move see I'm like moving my muscle exactly like there's a there is a bit of
an activation almost versus like visualizing yourself like a picture doing it yeah it's something that I feel like naturally anyone would do if you try to tell someone to imagine doing something they might close their eyes and then start physically doing it but it's just yeah it's it's hard
it was very hard at the beginning but attempted worked attempted worked it worked just like it should work like work like a charm um but that is like one Tuesday we were messing around and I think I forget what's where were you used but there's a swear word that came out of your mouth
when you figured out you could just do the direct cursor control yeah that's it it blew my mind like no pun intended blew my mind when I first um moved the cursor just with my thoughts and not attempting to move it's something that I found um like over the couple of weeks like building up to
that um that as I get better cursor controls like the model uh gets better um then it gets easier for me to like um like I don't have to attempt as much to move it and part of that is something that I'd even talked with them about um when I was watching the signals of my brain one day I was watching
when I like attempted to move to the right and I watched the screen as like I saw the spikes like I was seeing the spike the signals being sent before I was actually attempting to move um I imagine just because you know when you go to say move your hand or any body part that signal
gets sent before you're actually moving has to make it all the way down and back up before you're actually doing any sort of movement so there's a delay there and I noticed that there was something going on in my brain before I was actually attempting to move that um my brain was like anticipating
what I wanted to do and that all started sort of um I don't know like percolating in my brain I get just it was just sort of there like always in the back like that's so weird that it could do that it kind of makes sense but I wonder what that means um as far as like using the knurling
and um you know and then as I was playing around with the attempted movement and playing around with the cursor and I saw that like as the cursor control got better that it was anticipating my movements um and what I wanted it to do like cursor movements what I wanted to do a bit better
and a bit better and then one day I just randomly as I was playing web grid I um like looked at a target before I had started like attempting to move I was just trying to like get over like train um my eyes to start looking ahead like okay this is a target I'm on but if I look over here to
this target I know I can like maybe be a bit quicker getting there and I looked over and the cursor just shot over it's oh it was wild like I had to take a step back I was like this should not be happening all day I was just smiling I was so giddy I was like guys do you know that this works
like I can just think it and it happens which like they'd all been saying this entire time like I can't believe like you're doing all this with your mind I'm like yeah but isn't really with my mind like I'm attempting to move and it's just picking that up so it doesn't feel like it's with my
mind but when I moved it for the first time like that it was oh man it like it made me think that this technology that what I'm doing is actually way way more impressive than I ever thought it was way cooler than I ever thought and it just opened up a whole new world of possibilities of like
what could possibly happen with this technology and what I might be able to be capable of with it because you had felt for the first time like this was digital telepathy like you're controlling a digital device with your mind yeah I mean this is that's a real moment of discovery that's really
cool like you've discovered something I've seen like scientists talk about like a big aha moment you know like Nobel Prize winning they'll have this like holy crap yeah like that's what it felt like like I didn't feel like like I felt like I had discovered something but for me maybe not
necessarily for like the world at large or like this field at large it just felt like an aha moment for me like oh this works like obviously it works and so that's what I do like all the time now I kind of intermix the attempted movement and imagine movement I do it all like together because I
found that there is some interplay with it that maximizes efficiency with the cursor so it's not all like one or the other it's not all just I only use attempted or I only use like imagine movements it's more I use them in parallel and I can do one or the other I can just completely think
about whatever I'm doing but I don't know I like to play around with it I also like to just experiment with these things like every now and again I'll get this idea in my head like I wonder if this works and I'll just start doing it and then afterwards I'll tell them by the way
I wasn't doing that like you guys wanted me to I was I thought of something and I wanted to try it and so I did it seems like it works so maybe we should like explore that a little bit so I think that discovery is not just for you at least from my perspective that's a discovery for
everyone else who ever uses a new link that this is possible like I don't think this is an obvious thing that this is even possible it's like I was saying to Bliss earlier it's like the four-minute mile people thought it was impossible to run a mile in four minutes and once the first person did
it then everyone just started doing it so like just to show that it's possible that paves the way to like anyone cannot do it that's the thing that's actually possible you don't need to do the attempted movement you just go direct that's crazy they're just crazy for people who don't know
can you explain how the link app works you have an amazing stream on the topic your first stream I think on x describing the app can you just describe how it works yeah so it's just an app that NERLINK created to help me interact with the computer so on the link app there are a few
different settings and different modes and things I can do on it so there's like the body mapping if we kind of touched on there's a calibration calibration is how I actually get cursor control so calibrating what's going on in my brain to translate that into cursor control so it will pop out
models what they use I think is like time so it would be you know five minutes and calibration will give me so good of a model and then if I'm in it for 10 minutes and 15 minutes the models will progressively get better and so you know the longer I'm in it generally the better the models will
get that's really cool because you often refer to the models yeah the models the thing that's constructed once you go through the calibration stuff yeah and then you also talk about some things sometimes you'll play like a really difficult game like snake just to see how good the model is
yeah yeah so snake is kind of like my litmus test for models if I can control snake decently well then I know I have a pretty good model so yeah the link app has all those as web grid in it now it's also how I like connect to the computer just in general so they've given me a lot of like
voice controls with it at this point so I can you know say like connect or implant disconnect and as long as I have that charger handy then I can connect to it so the charger is also how I connect to the link app to connect the computer I have to have the implant charger over my head
when I want to connect to have it wake up because the implants in hibernation mode like always when I'm not using it I think there's a setting to like wake it up every you know so long so we could set it to half an hour or five hours or something if I just want it to wake up periodically so yeah
I'll like connect to the link app and then go through all sorts of things calibration for the day maybe body mapping I have like I made them give me like a little homework tab because I am very forgetful and I forget to do things a lot so I have like a lot of data collection things that they
want me to do is the body mapping part of the data collection or is that also part of the country yeah it is it's something that they want me to do daily which I've been slacking on because I've been doing so much media and traveling so I've been super famous yeah I've been a terrible
first candidate for how much I've been slacking on my homework but yeah it's just something that they want me to do every day to you know track how well the NERLINK is performing over time and have something to give I imagine to give to the FDA to you know create all sorts of fancy charts
and stuff and show like hey this is what the NERLINK this is how it's performing you know day one versus day 90 versus day 180 and things like that what's the calibration step like is it is it like move left move right it's a bubble game so there will be like yellow bubbles that pop up on the
screen at first it is open loop so open loop this is something that I still don't fully understand the open loop and closed loop thing I mean let's talk for a long time about the difference between the two from the on the technical side okay so be great to hear your okay so your side of the
story open loop is basically I have no control over the cursor the cursor will be moving on its own across the screen and I am following by intention the cursor to different bubbles and then my the algorithm is training off of what like the signals it's getting are as I'm doing this there
are a couple different ways that they've done it they call it center out target so there will be a bubble in the middle and then eight bubbles around that and the cursor will go from the middle to one side so say middle to left back to middle to up to middle like upright and they'll do that
all the way around the circle and I will follow that cursor the whole time and then it will train off of my intentions what it is expecting my intentions to be throughout the whole process can you actually speak to when you say follow yes you don't mean with your eyes you mean with your
intentions yeah so generally for calibration I'm doing attempted movements because I think it works better I think the better models as I progress through calibration make it easier to use imagine a way so calibrated on attempted movement will create a model that makes
it really effective for you to then use the force yes I've tried doing calibration with imagined movement and it just doesn't work as well for some reason so that was the center out targets there's also one where you know a random target will pop up on the screen and it's the same I just like
move I follow along where where the cursor is to that target all across the screen I've tried those with imagined movement and for some reason the models just don't they don't give as high level as quality when we get into closed loop I haven't played around with it a ton so maybe like the
different ways that we're doing calibration now might make it a bit better but what I've found is there will be a point in calibration where I can use imagined movement before that point it doesn't really work so if I do calibration for 45 minutes the first 15 minutes I can't use imagined movement
it just like doesn't work for some reason and after a certain point I I can just sort of feel it I can tell it moves different that's the best way I can I can describe it like it's almost as if it is anticipating what I am going to do again before I go to do it and so using attempted movement
for 15 minutes at some point I can kind of tell when I like move my eyes to the next target that the cursor is starting to like pick up like it's starting to understand it's learning like what I'm going to do so first off it's really cool that I mean you are true pioneer in all this you're like
exploring how to do every aspect of this most effectively and there's just I imagine so many lessons learned from this so thank you for being a pioneer in all these kinds of different like super technical ways and it's also cool to hear that there's like a different like feeling
to the experience when it's calibrated in different ways like just because I imagine your brain is doing something different and that's why there's a different feeling to it and then try and define the words and the measurements to those feelings would be also interesting but at the end
of the day you can also measure that your actual performance on whether it's snake or web grid you could see like what actually works well and you're saying for the open loop calibration the attempted movement works best for now yep yep so the open loop you don't get the feedback that's
something that you did something yeah I'm just frustrating no no it makes sense to me like we've done it with the cursor and without a cursor in open loop so sometimes it's just say for like the center out the you'll start calibration with a bubble lighting up and I push towards that bubble
and then when that bubble you know when it's push towards that bubble for say three seconds a bubble pop and then I come back to the middle so I'm doing it all just by my intentions like that's what it's learning anyway so it makes sense that as long as I follow what they want me to do
you know like follow the Ellibor road that it'll all work out your full great references is the bubble game fun like yeah they always feel so bad making me do calibration like we're about to do you know a 40 minute calibration oh my god you guys wanted you two of them like I'm always
asking to like whatever they need I'm more than happy to do and it's not it's not bad like I get to lie there and or sit in my chair and like do these things with some great people I get to have great conversations I can give them feedback I can talk about all sorts of things I could throw
something on on my TV in the background and kind of like split my attention between them like it's not bad at all I don't score that you get like can you do better on the bubble game no I would love that um I I would love yeah writing down uh suggest suggestions from Nolan that's uh make it more fun
gamified yeah that's one thing that I really really enjoy about webgrid is because I'm so competitive um like the higher the bps the higher the score I know the better I'm doing and so if I I think I've asked at one point one of the guys like if he could give me some sort of numerical feedback
for calibration like I would like to know what they're looking at like oh you know it is um we see like this number while you're doing calibration and that means at least on our end that we think calibration is going well um and I would love that because I would like to know if what I'm doing
is going well or not but then I've also told me like yeah not necessarily like one to one it doesn't actually mean that calibration is going well in some ways um so it's not like a hundred percent and they don't want to like skew what I'm experiencing or want me to change things based on that
if that number isn't always accurate to like how the model will turn out or how like the end result that's at least what I got from it uh one thing I do uh I have asked them in something that I really enjoy um striving for is towards the end of calibration there is like a time between targets um and
so I like to keep like at the end uh that number is low as possible so at the beginning it can be you know four or five six seconds between me popping bubbles but towards the end I like to keep it below like 1.5 or if I could get it to like one second between like bubbles because in my mind that
translates um really nicely to something like webgrid where I know if I can hit a target uh one every second that I'm doing real real well there you go that's the way to get a score on the calibration is like the speed yeah quickly getting good from bubble bubble yeah uh so there's the
open loop and then it goes to the closed loop close loop can already start giving you a sense because you're getting feedback of how good the model is yeah so closed loop is when I um first get cursor control and how they've uh described it to me someone who does not understand this stuff
I am the dumbest person in the room every time I'm within the community yeah um is that I am closing the loop so I am actually now um the one that is like finishing the loop of whatever this loop is I don't even know what the loop is they've never told me they just say there is a loop and
at one point it's open and I can't control and then I get control and it's closed so I'm finishing the loop so how long the calibration is you take you say like 10 15 minutes well yeah they're they're trying to get that number down pretty low um that's what we've been working on a lot
recently is getting that down as low as possible so that way you know if this is something that people need to do on a daily basis or if some people need to do on a um like every other day basis or once a week they don't want people to be sitting in calibration for long periods of time I think they
wanted to get it down seven minutes or below um at least where we're at right now it'd be nice if they you never had a new calibration um so we'll get there at some point I'm sure the more we learn about the brain and um like I think that's you know the dream um I think right now for me to get
like really really good models um I'm in calibration 40 or 45 minutes um and I don't mind like I said they always feel really bad but if it's gonna get me a model that can like break these records on webgrid I'll stay in it for flipping two hours let's talk business so webgrid um I saw a
presentation that were bliss said by March you selected 89,000 targets in webgrid can you explain this game well what what is webgrid and what does it take to be a world class performer in webgrid as you continue to break world records yeah um
take a gold medalist like well yeah you know I'd like to think I'd like to gain everyone who helped me get here my coaches my parents for drop me to practice every day at five in the morning um like thank god um and just overall my dedication to my community the interviews with athletes are
always like yeah exactly it's like that template yeah so um so webgrid is a grid yeah it's it's literally just a grid they can make it as bigger small as you can make a grid a single box on that grid will light up and you go and click it and it is a way for them to benchmark how good a BCI
is so it's you know pretty straightforward you just click targets only one blue cell appears and you're supposed to move the mouse to there and click on it so I like playing on like bigger grids because it the bigger the grid the like more bps it's bits per second um that you get every time
you click one so I'll say I'll play out like a 35 by 35 um grid and then one of those little squares sell and call it target whatever will light up and you move the cursor there and you click it and then you do that um forever and you've been able to achieve at first eight bits per second
and then you've recently broke that yeah I'm I'm at 8.5 right now I would have beaten that literally the day before I came to Austin um but I had like a I don't know like a five second lag right at the end and um I just had to wait until the latency calm down and then I kept clicking but um I was at
like 8.01 and then five seconds of lag and then the next like three targets I clicked all state at 8.01 so if I would have been able to click um during that time of lag I probably would have hit I don't know I'm out of hit nine so I'm there I'm like I'm really close and then this whole Austin
trip has really gotten in the way of my web grid playing ability yeah so that's all you think about right now yeah I know I just I just want I want to do better at nine I want to do better I want to hit nine I think well I know nine is very very achievable I'm right there um I think 10 I could hit
maybe in the next month like I could do it probably in the next few weeks if I really push I think you and Ilana basically the same person because last time I did a podcast with him he came in extremely frustrated that he can't beat Uber Lilith as a droid that was like a year ago I think
I forget like solo yeah and I could just tell there's some percentage of his brain the entire time was thinking like I wish I was right now attempting I think you did it that day that night yeah he stayed up and did it that night yeah just crazy to me I mean it's you know you know in a
fundamental way it's really inspiring and what you're doing is inspiring that way because I mean it's not just about the game everything you're doing there has impact by striving to do well on web grid you're helping everybody figure out how to create the system all on like the decoding the
software the hardware the calibration all of it how to make all of that work so you can do everything else really well yeah it's just really fun well that's also that's part of the thing yeah making it fun yeah it's a dig thing I'm I've joked about um like what they actually did when they went
in and put this thing in my brain they must have flipped a switch to make me uh more susceptible to these kinds of games to make me addicted to like web grid or something yeah do you know bliss is high score yeah he said like 14 or something 17 oh boy 17.1 or something something something
I'm trying to do 17 on a dot 17.01 yeah he told me like does it on the floor with peanut butter and he's like fast it's it's weird it sounds like cheating sounds like performance enhancing notice like the first time no one played this game he asked we don't know how good to be at this game and I mean I think you told me right then you're gonna you're gonna try to beat me that's where I'm gonna get there someday yeah I think I believe you I think I can I think for that yeah so I've
been playing first off with the dwell cursor which really hamper my web grid playing ability basically I have to wait 0.3 seconds for every click oh so you can't do the clicks yeah so you have to so you click by do I you said 0.3 0.3 seconds which which sucks it really slows down how much
I'm able to like how high I'm able to get I still hit like 50 I think I hit like 50 something trials net trials per minute in that which was pretty good um because I'm able to like um there's one of the settings is also like how slow you need to be moving in order to initiate a click to start a
click so I can tell sort of when I'm on that threshold to start initiating a click just a bit early so I'm not fully stopped over the target when I go to click I'm doing it like on my way to the target's a little um to try to time it just you're slowing down yeah just just a hair right before
the target this is like a lead performance okay but that's still it's it sucks that there's a ceiling of the point 3 well there I can get down to point 2 and point 1 point 1's yeah and I've played with that a little bit too um I have to adjust a ton of different parameters in order to
play with point 1 and I don't have control overall that on my end yet it also changes like how the models are trained like if I train a model like in web grid are like a bootstrapped on a model which basically is them training models as I'm playing web grid um based off of like the web grid
data that I'm selling if I play web grid for 10 minutes they can train off that data specifically um in order to get me a better model um if I do that with point 3 versus point 1 the models come out different um the way that they um interact is it's just much much different so I have to be
really careful I found that doing it with point 3 is actually better in some ways unless I can do it with point 1 and change all of the different parameters then that's more ideal because obviously point 3 is faster than point 1 so uh I could I could get there I can get there can you click
using your brain for right now it's the hover clicking with the dwell cursor um we before all the thread refraction stuff happened we were calibrating clicks left click right click that was um my previous ceiling um before I broke the record again with the dwell cursor was I think on a 35 by
35 grid with left and right click and you get more um bps more bits per second using multiple clicks because it's more difficult oh because what is it the book you get you're supposed to do either left click or like right click yes a different color yeah blue targets for left click orange targets
for right click is what they had done so I my previous record of 7.5 was with this with the blue and the orange targets yeah which um I think if I went back to that now um doing the click calibration I would be able to and being able to like initiate clicks on my own I think I would break that 10
ceiling like in a couple days max yeah you start making bliss nervous about this 17. Why do you think we haven't given him the exactly uh what would it feel like with the retractions that there is uh some of the threads are attracted it sucked it was really really hard the day they told me
was the day of my big knurling tour at their free-mot facility they told me like right before we went over there it was really hard to hear my initial reaction was all right go in fix it like go and take it out and fix it the first surgery was so easy like like I went to sleep a couple
hours later I woke up and here we are um I didn't feel any pain didn't take like any um pain pills or anything so I just knew that if they wanted to they could go in and put in a new one like next day if that's what it took because I just wanted I wanted it to be better and I wanted not to lose
the capability I had so much fun um playing with it for a few weeks for a month I had like get it open up so many doors for me and it opened up so many more possibilities that I didn't want to lose it after a month I thought it would have been a cruel twist of fate if I had gotten to see
the view from like the top of this mountain and then have it all come crashing down after a month and I knew like say the top of the mountain but like I how I saw it was I was just now starting to climb the mountain and I was like there was so much more than I knew as possible and so to have
all of that be taken away it was really really hard um but then on the drive over to the facility I don't know like five minute drive whatever it is um I talked with my parents about it I prayed about it I was just like you know I'm not going to let this ruin my day I'm not going to let this
um ruin this amazing like tour that they have set up for me like I want to go show everyone how much I appreciate all the work they're doing I want to go like meet all of the people who have made this possible and I want to go have one of the best days of my life and I did and it was amazing
and it absolutely was one of the best days I've ever been privileged to experience and then for a few days I was pretty down in the dumps but for like the first few days afterwards I was just like I didn't know if it was going to ever going to work again and then I just I made the decision that
it even if I lost the ability to use the narrow link even if I lost um even if I like lost out on everything to come um if I could keep giving them data in any way then I would do that if I needed to just do um like some of the data collection every day or body mapping every day for a year
than I would do it um because I know that everything I'm doing helps everyone to come after me and that's all I wanted my just the whole reason that I did this was to help people and I knew that anything I could do to help I would continue to do even if I never got to use the cursor again
then you know I was just happy to be a part of it and everything that I'd done was just a perk it was something that I got to experience and I know how amazing it's going to be for everyone to come after me so might as well just keep trucking along you know that said you were able to get
to work your way up to get the performance back so this is like going from Rocky 1 to Rocky 2 so when did you first realize that this is possible and what gave you sort of the strength of motivation the determination to do it to increase back up and be your previous record uh yeah
was within a couple of weeks like again this feels like I'm interviewing on athlete this is great I like saying my parents wrote the road back was long and hard from many difficulties there were dark days um it was it was a couple of weeks I think and then
there was just a turning point I think they had switched how they were measuring the neuron spikes in my brain like the bliss helped me out uh yeah the way in which we were measuring the behavior of individual neurons yeah so we're switching from uh sort of individual spike detection to something
called spike band power which uh if you watch the previous segments with either me or DJ you probably have some content yeah okay so when they did that it was kind of like uh you know light over the head like light bulb moment like oh this works and um this seems like like we can run with this and I
saw the um uptick in performance immediately like I could feel it when they switched over I was like this is better like this is good like everything up till this point for the last few weeks last like
whatever three or four weeks because it was before they even told me like everything before this sucked like let's keep doing what we're doing now and at that point it was not like oh I know I'm still only at like saying web grid terms like four or five BPS compared to my 7.5 before but I know that
if we keep doing this then like I can I can get back there and then they gave me the dwell cursor and the dwell cursor sucked at first it's not obviously not what I want but it gave me a path forward to be able to continue using it and um hopefully to continue to help out and so I just ran with it
never looked back like I said I'm just kind of person I roll with the punches anyway so what was the um process what was the feedback loop on the feeding out how to do the spike detection in a way that would actually work well for no longer yeah it's a good question so maybe
just to describe first how the actual update worked is basically an update to your implant so we just did an over the air software update to his implant and we get update your Tesla or your iPhone and uh that firmware change enabled us to record sort of averages of populations of neurons
nearby individual electrodes so we have uh sort of less resolution about which individual neuron is doing what but we have a broader picture of what's going on nearby an electrode overall and uh that feedback loop I mean basically I was not going to describe it as immediate when we flip
that switch uh I think the first day we did that you hit three or four BPS right out of the box and that was a like ball moment for okay this is the right path to go down and from there there's a lot of feedback around like how to make this useful for independent use so what we care about
ultimately is that you can use it independently to do whatever you want and uh to get to that point and require us to re-engineer the UX as you talked about the dwell cursor to make it something that you can use independently without us need to be involved all the time and uh yeah this is obviously
the start of this journey still hopefully we get back to the places where you're doing multiple clicks and uh using that to control much more fluidly everything and much more naturally the applications that you're trying to interface with and most importantly get that web grid number up yeah
yeah so how's uh on the hover click do you accidentally click stuff sometimes yeah like what's how hard is it to avoid accidentally clicking I have to continuously keep it moving basically so like I said there's a threshold where it will initiate a click so if I ever
um drop below that it'll start and I have point three seconds to move it before it clicks anything um and if I don't want it to ever get there I just keep it moving at a certain speed and like just constantly like doing circles on screen moving it back and forth to keep it from clicking stuff
um I actually noticed uh a couple weeks back that I was when I was not using the implant I was just moving my hand back and forth or in circles like I was trying to keep the cursor from clicking and I was just doing it like while I was trying to go to sleep and I was like okay this is a problem
to avoid the clicking I guess does that create problems like when you're gaming accidentally click a thing like yeah yeah it happens in chess uh I've lost yeah I've lost a number of games because I'll accidentally click something I think the first time I ever beat you was because of it yeah
it's a nice excuse right yeah it's time to lose you could just say yeah it was accidental yeah you said the app improved a lot from version one when you first started using it it was very different so can you just talk about the trial and error that you went through with the team like 200 plus
pages of notes like what's that process like of yeah work going back and forth and working together to improve the thing it's a lot of me just using it like day in and day out and saying like hey can you guys do this for me like give me this I want to be able to do that um I need this um I
think a lot of it just doesn't occur to them maybe until someone is actually using the app using the implant it's just something that you they just never would have thought of or um it's very specific to even like me maybe what I want it's something I'm a little worried about with the next
people that come is you know um maybe they will want things much different than how I've set it up or what the advice I've given the team and they're going to look at some of the things I've they've added for me like that's a dumb idea like why would he ask for that um and so I'm really looking
forward to get the next people on because I guarantee that they're going to think of things that I've never thought of they're going to think of improvements I'm like wow that's a really good idea like I wish I would have thought of that um and then they're also going to give me some pushback
about like yeah what you are asking them to do here um that's a bad idea let's do it this way and I'm more than happy um to have that happen but it's just a lot of like you know uh different interactions with different games or applications um the internet just with the computer in general
there's tons of bugs um that end up popping up left right center um so it's just me trying to use it as much as possible and showing them what works and what doesn't work and what I would like to be better and um then they take that feedback and they usually create amazing things for me they
solve these problems in ways I would have never imagined uh they're so good at everything they do and so I'm just really thankful that I'm able to give them feedback and they can make something of it because a lot of my feedback is like really dumb it's just like I want this please do something
about it and we'll come back super well thought out and it's way better than anything I could have ever thought of or implemented myself so they're just great they're really really cool as the BCI community grows would you like to hang out with the other folks with your links like what what relationship if any would you want to have with them because you said like they might have a different set of like ideas of how to use the thing uh yeah would you be intimidated by
their web great performance? No no I hope compete I hope day one they like wipe the floor with me I hope they beat it um and they crush it you know the double it if they can um just because on one hand it's only going to push me to be better um because I'm super competitive I want
other people to push me um I think that is important for anyone trying to um achieve greatness is they need other people around them who are going to push them to be better and I even made a joke about it on X once like once the next people get chosen like Q buddycott music like I'm just excited
to have other people to do this with and to like share experiences with I'm more than happy to interact with them as much as they want more than happy to give them advice I don't know what kind of advice I could give them but if they have questions I'm more than happy what advice would you have
for uh the next participant clinical trial? They should have fun with this um because it is a lot of fun um and that I hope they work really really hard because it's not just for us it's for everyone that comes after us um and you know come to me if they need anything and to go to NERLINK if they need anything man NERLINK moves mountains like they do absolutely anything for me that they can't and it's an amazing support system to have um it puts my mind at ease um for like so many things
that I uh have had like questions about or so many things I want to do um and they're always there and that's really really nice um and so I just I would tell them not to be afraid to go to NERLINK with any questions that they have any concerns uh anything that you know they're looking to do with
this and any help that NERLINK is capable of providing I know they will um and I don't know I don't know just work your ass off because it's it's really important that we try to give our all to this so have fun work hard yeah yeah yeah there we go maybe that's what I'll just start saying to people
have fun work hard now you're a real pro athlete just keep it short um maybe it's good to talk about what you've been able to do now that you have uh in your own game plan like the uh the freedom you gain from this way of interacting with the outside world like you play video games all night
and you do that by yourself yeah and that's a kind of freedom can you speak to that freedom that you gain yeah it's what all I don't know people in my position want they just want more independence the more load that I can take away from people around me the better if I'm able to interact with
the world without using my family without going through any of my friends um like needing them to help me with things the better um if I'm able to sit up on my computer all night and not need someone to like sit me up uh say like on my iPad like in a position where I can use it and then have
to have them wait up for me all night until I'm ready to be done using it um like that it takes a load off of all of us and it's it's really like all I can ask for um it's something that you know I could never think nor like enough for I know my family feels the same way um you know just being
able to have the freedom to do things on my own uh at any hour of the day or night it means the world to me and um I don't know when you're up at 2 a.m. playing web grid by yourself yeah I just imagine like it's darkness and then it's just a light glowing and you're just focused what what's going through your mind are you like in a state of flow where it's like the mind is empty like those like Zen masters yeah generally it is me playing music of some sort I have a massive playlist and so
I'm just like rocking out to music and then it's also just like a race against time because I'm constantly constantly looking at how much battery percentage I have left on my implant like all right I have 30% which equates to you know x amount of time which means I have to break this record in the next you know hour and a half or else it's not happening tonight um and so it's it's a little stressful when that happens when it's like when it's above 50% I'm like okay like I got time it's starting
down to 30 and then 20 it's like all right uh 10% a little pop-up is going to pop up right here and it's going to really screw my web grid flow it's going to tell me that you know like there's a like the low battery low battery pop-up comes up and I'm like it's really going to screw me over so
if I have to if I'm going to break this record I have to do it in the next like 30 seconds or else that pop-up is going to get in the way like cover my web grid um and then it after that I go click on it go back into web grid and I'm like all right that means I have you know 10 minutes left before this thing's dead that's what's going on in my head generally that in whatever song is playing um and I just I just want I want to break those records so bad like it's all I want when I'm playing
web grid it it has become less of like no this is just a leisurely activity like I just enjoy doing this because it just feels so nice and it puts me at ease it is no once I'm in web grid you better break this record or you're gonna waste like five hours of your life right now and um I don't know
it's just fun it's fun man I have you ever tried web grid with like two targets and three targets can you get higher bps with that can you do that you mean like different color targets or you mean multiple targets yeah so change the thing yeah so bps is a log of number of targets times
correct minus incorrect divided by time and so you can think of like different clicks as basically double in the number of active targets got it so you know you basically higher bps the more options that are more difficult to task and uh there's also like Zen mode you've played in before which is
yeah infinite canvas covers it covers the whole screen with a grid and um what yeah and so you can go like that's the same yeah he doesn't like it because it didn't show bps so like you know yeah I have them I had them put in a giant bps in the background so now it's like the opposite of
Zen mode it's like it's like super hard mode like just metal mode if it's just like a giant number in the back count we should name that metal mode is a much better way so you also play civilization six I love six six yeah um usually go with Korea I do yeah so the great part about
Korea is they um focus on like science tech victories which was not planned like I've been playing Korea for years and then all of the knurling stuff happened um so it kind of aligns um but what I've noticed with tech victories is if you can just rush tech rush science um then you can do
anything like at one point in the game you will be so far ahead of everyone technologically that you will have like musket men infantry men playing sometimes and people will still be fighting with like bows and arrows and so if you want to win a domination victory you just get to a certain point
with the science and then go and wipe out the rest of the world or um you can just take science all the way and win that way and you're gonna be so far ahead of everyone because you're producing so much science that it's not even close um I've accidentally won in different ways just by focusing
on science I'm certainly one by focusing on science I was yeah I like I I was playing only science obviously like just science all the way just tech and I was trying to get like every tech in the tech tree and stuff and then I accidentally won through a diplomatic victory and I was so mad
I was so mad uh it's because it's just like ends the game one turn it was like oh you won you're so diplomatic I'm like I don't want to do this I should have declared war on more people or something um it was terrible but you don't need like giant civilizations with tech especially
with Korea you can keep it pretty small so I generally just you know get to a certain military unit and put them all around my border to keep everyone out and then I will just build up so very isolationist um nice yeah just work on the science of the tech that's it you're making it sound so
fun it's so much fun and I also saw a civilization seven trailer oh man yeah so pumped and that's probably coming out come on sim seven hit me up all alpha beta tests whatever wait when is it coming out in 25 yeah yeah next year yeah what other stuff would you like to see improved uh
about the New York app and just the entire experience I would like to like I said get back to the um like click on demand like the regular clicks that would be great uh I would like to be able to connect to more devices uh right now it's just the computer I'd like to be able to use it on my
phone or use it on different consoles different uh platforms um I'd like to be able to control as much stuff as possible honestly um like an optimist robot would be pretty cool that would be sick if I could control an optimist robot uh the link app itself um it seems like we are getting pretty um
dialed in to what um it might look like down the road seems like we've gotten through a lot of what I want from it at least the only other thing I would say is like more control over all the parameters that I um can tweak uh with my like cursor and stuff there's a lot of things that
you know go into how the cursor moves in certain ways um and I have I don't know like three or four of those parameters and they're my gain and friction and friction yeah and there's maybe double the amount of those with just like velocity and then with the actual dwell cursor um so I
would like all of it I want as much control over my environment as possible um especially like advanced mode you know like in like there's menus usually this basic mode and you're like one of those folks like the power user that's that's what I want I want as much control over this as
possible um so yeah that's that's really all I can ask for just give me give me everything uh uh has speech been useful like just being able to talk also in addition to everything else yeah you mean like while I'm using it while you're using it like speech to text oh yeah
yeah or look because there's also keyboard yeah yeah so there's a virtual keyboard that's another thing I would like to work more on is finding some way to um type or text in a different way right now it is um like a dictation basically and a virtual keyboard that I can use with the cursor
but we've played around with um like finger spelling like sign language finger spelling um and that seems really promising so I have this thought in my head that it's going to be a very similar learning curve that I had with um the cursor where I went from attempted movement to imagine
movement at one point I have a feeling um this is just my intuition that at some point I'm going to be doing finger spelling and I won't need to actually attempt to finger spell anymore that I'll just be able to think the like letter that I want and it'll pop up that will be epic yeah and that's
challenging yeah that's hard there's a lot of work for you to kind of take that leap without be awesome and then like going from letters to words is another step like you would go from you know right now it's finger spelling of like just the sign language alphabet but if it's able to
pick that up then it should be able to pick up like the whole sign language like language um and so then if I could do something along those lines or just the sign language um spelled word if I can you know spell it at a reasonable speed and it can pick that up then I would just be able to
think that through and it would do the same thing I don't see why not after what I saw with the um with the cursor control I don't see why it wouldn't work but we'd have to play around with it more what was the process in terms of like training yourself to go from attempted movement to imagine
moving yeah how long does that take so like how long would this kind of process take well it was a couple weeks before it just like happened upon me but now that I know that that was possible I think I can make it happen with other things I think it would be much much simpler would you get an
upgraded implant device sure absolutely whenever whenever they'll let me uh so you don't have any concerns for you with the surgery experience all of it was um like no regrets no no so everything's been good so far yep you just keep getting upgrades yeah I mean why not
I've seen how much it's impact on my life already and I know that everything from here on out is gonna get better and better so um I would love to I would love to get the upgrade what future capabilities are you excited about sort of beyond this kind of telepathy is vision interesting
so for folks who for example hard blind so you're like enabling people to see or for speech yeah there's a lot that's very very cool about this I mean we're talking about the brain so there's like this is just motor cortex stuff there's so much more that can be done the vision one
is fascinating to me I think that is going to be very very cool to give some of the ability to see for the first time in their life would just be I mean it it might be more amazing than even helping someone like me like that just sounds incredible um the speech thing is really interesting being able
to have some sort of like real-time translation and um cut away that language barrier would be really cool um any sort of like actual impairments um that it could solve like with speech would be very very cool and then also there are a lot of different disabilities that all originate in the
brain and you would be able to hopefully be able to solve a lot of those um I know there's already stuff to help people with seizures um that can be implanted in the brain this would do I imagine the same thing and so you could do something like that I know that you know even someone like
Joe Rogan has talked about the possibilities with being able to stimulate the brain in different ways um I'm not sure I'm not sure what you know like how ethical a lot of that would be that's beyond me honestly but I know that there is a lot that can be done when we're talking about the
brain and being able to go in and physically make changes to help people or to improve their lives so I'm really looking forward to everything that comes from this and I don't think it's all that far off um I think a lot of this can be implanted within my lifetime um assuming that I live a long life
what you're referring to is things like people suffering from depression or things of that nature potentially getting help yeah flip a switch like that make someone happy um I know I think Joe is talked about it more in terms of like you want to experience like what a drug trip feels like like you want to experience what you like to be on of course oh yeah mushroom's just something like that DMT like you can just flip that switch in the brain my buddy Bane has talked about being able to
like white parts of your memory and re-experience things that like for the first time like your favorite movie or your favorite book like just wipe that out real quick and then refall love with Harry Potter or something um I told him I was like I don't know how I feel about like people being able to
just wipe parts of your memory um that seems a little sketch to me like they're already doing it so sounds legit uh I would love memory replay just like actually like high resolution replayable memories yeah I saw an episode of black mirror about that once I don't think I want it
yeah so black mirror is always kind of considered the worst case which is important I think people don't consider the best case for the average case enough I don't know what it is about us humans we want to think about the worst possible thing yeah we love drama yeah like how's this new
technology gonna kill everybody we just love that okay like yes let's watch hopefully people don't think about that too much for me it'll ruin a lot of my plans yeah yeah assuming you're gonna have to take over the world I mean you're I loved your Twitter you you tweet I'd like to make
jokes about hearing voices in my head since getting the neural ink but I feel like people would take it the wrong way plus the voices in my head told me not to yeah yeah yeah please never stop so you were talking about Optimus um is that something you would love to be able to do to control
the robotic arm or the entirety of Optimus oh yeah for sure for sure absolutely you think there's something like fundamentally different ball just being able to physically interact with the world yeah oh 100% um this I know another thing with like being able to like give people the ability to
like feel sensation and stuff to you by going in with the brain and having a neural ink maybe do that that could be something that um could be translated through transfer through the Optimus as well like there's all sorts of really cool um interplay between that and then also like
such as physically interacting I mean 99% of the things that I can't do myself um obviously need I need a caretaker for someone to physically do things for me if an Optimus robot could do that like I could live an incredibly independent life and not be such a burden on those around me um
and that would it would change the way people like me live um at least until whatever this is gets cured um but being able to interact with the world physically like that would just be amazing um and and they're not just like for being for having it be a caretaker or something but
something like I talked about just being able to read a book imagine Optimus robot just being able to hold a book open in front of me like get that smell again I might not be able to feel it at that point um or maybe I could again with the sensation and stuff but being there's something different about reading like a physical book than staring at a screen or listening to an audiobook I actually don't like audiobooks I've listened to a ton of them at this point but I don't really like
them um I would much rather like read a physical copy so one of the things you would love to be able to experience is opening the book bringing it up to you yeah and to feel the touch of the paper yeah oh man the touch the smell I mean it's just like just something about the words on the page
and you know they've they've replicated you know that page color unlike the Kindle and stuff yeah it's just not the same yeah so just something as simple as that so one of the things you miss is touch I do yeah a lot of a lot of things that I interact with in the world like clothes or
literally any physical thing that I interact with in the world a lot of times what people around we will do is they'll just come like rub it on my face they'll like lay something on me so I can feel the weight they will rub you know a shirt on me so I can feel fabric like there's something very
profound about touch and it is it's something that I miss a lot um and something I would love to do again but we'll see what would be the first thing you do with uh with the hand that can touch you can mom hug after that right yeah yeah I know that's it's one thing that I've that I've asked
um like God for basically every day since my accident was just being able to like one day move even if it was only like my hand so that way like I could squeeze my mom's hand or something just to like show her that you know like how much I care and how much I love her and everything um
something along those lines um being able to just interact with the people around me handjade give someone a hug um I don't know anything like that being able to help me eat like I'd probably get really fat um which would be a terrible terrible thing uh also be bliss and chest on a physical
chest board yeah yeah I mean they're just so many upsides you know and any any way to find some way to feel like I'm bringing bliss down to my level yeah because yeah um he's just such an amazing guy and everything about him is just so above and beyond um that anything I can do to take him down
a notch yeah yeah humble him a bit he needs it yeah okay as he's sitting next to me um did you ever make sense of why God puts good people through such hardship oh man um I think it's all about understanding how much we need God and I don't think that there's any light without the dark I think
that if all of us were happy all the time um there would be you know no reason to turn to God ever I feel like there would be no concept of you know good or bad and I think that as much of like the darkness and the evil that's in the world it makes us all appreciate the good and the
things we have so much more and I think you know like when I had my accident the first one of the first things I said to one of my best friends was and this was within like the first month or two after my accident I said you know everything about this accident has just made me understand and
believe that like God is real and that there really is a God basically in that um like my interactions with involvement you know real and worthwhile and he said if anything seeing me go through this accident he believes that there isn't a God and it's a very different reaction um but I believe
that it is it is a way for God to test us to build our character to um send us through trials and tribulations to make sure that we understand um how precious you know he is and the things that he's given us and the time that he's given us and then um to hopefully grow from all of that um I think
that's a huge part of being here is to um not just you know have an easy life and do everything that's easy but to step out of our comfort zones and really challenge ourselves um because I think that's how we grow what gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on human civilization
man um I think people are my biggest inspiration even just being at knurling um for a few months looking people in the eyes and hearing their motivations for why they're doing this it's it's so inspiring and I know that they could be other places um it cushier jobs um working
somewhere else doing xy or z that doesn't really mean that much um but instead they're here and they want to better humanity and they want to better just the people around them the people that they've interacted with in their life they want to make better lives for their own family members who
might have disabilities or they look at someone like me and they say you know I can do something about that so I'm going to and it's always been what I've connected with most in the world are people I'm I've always been a people person and I love learning about people and I love learning like how
people developed and where they came from and to see like how much people are willing to do for someone like me when they don't have to and they're going out of their way to make my life better it gives me a lot of hope for just humanity in general how much how much we care and how much
we're capable of when we all kind of get together and try to make a difference and I know there's a lot of bad out there in the world but there always has been and there always will be um and I think that that is it shows human resiliency and it shows what we're what we're able to
endure and how much how much we just want to be there and help each other and how much satisfaction we get from that because I think that's one of the reasons that we're here is just to help each other and um I don't know that that always gives me hope is just realizing that
there are people out there who still care and who want to help and thank you for being one such human being and continuing to be a great human being through everything you've been through and being an inspiration to many people to myself for many reasons including your epic unbelievably
great performance on webgrid I will be training all night tonight to try and to try to catch you up and I believe in you that you can uh once you come back so sorry to interrupt with the Austin trip once you come back uh eventually beat bliss yeah yeah for sure absolutely I'm rooting for
you the whole world is rooting for you thank you for everything you've done man thanks thanks man thanks for listening to this conversation with Nolan Arbaugh and before that with Elon Musk DJ saw Matthew McDougal and Bliss Chapman to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in
the description and now let me leave you with some words from Aldous Huxley in the doors of perception we live together we act on and react to one another but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves the martyrs go hand in hand into the arena they are crucified alone
embrace the lover's desperately tried to fuse their insulated ecstasy into a single self transcendence in vain but it's very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy its solitude sensations feelings inside fantasies all these are private and except through symbols and a second
hand in communicable we can pull information about experiences but never the experiences themselves from family to nation every human group is a society of island universes thank you for listening and hope to see you next time