#438 – Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity

30:58I was I thought I would have some demons some stuff to work through That's what everyone says that's ever since yeah, I had nothing I had all positive I just so 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 and it's just Not from my relationship with that person, but just as the person themselves I'd had just this deep gratitude of who they are. That's cool I was just like this exploration like you know like like Sims or whatever you get to watch them I got to watch people and just be in awe of how amazing they are.

31:38It sounds awesome. Yeah, it's great. I was waiting for... When it's being come in. 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. We 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. And then I 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. Like that, whatever that form is, whatever that, like, like, did you go past the Milky Way?

32:28Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, you're like, intergalactic. Yeah, intergalactic. Okay. But always pointing in. Yeah. Past 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 this whole system, see if there's aliens or any of that kind of stuff. No, I didn't know. There are aliens? A implication of aliens. Because they were glowing. They were glowing in the same way that humans were glowing, that like life force that I'll see the the thing that made Humans amazing was there throughout the universe like there was these glowing dots So I don't know and made me feel like there is life no not life But something whatever makes humans amazing all throughout the universe sounds good.

33:19Yeah, it's amazing No demons no demons. I look for the demons. There's no demons there are dragons and they're pretty hot So the thing about tricks or anything scary at all Uh, dragons, but they weren't scary. They were protective. So the thing is... It was more like a game of throw. They weren't very friendly. They were very big. So the thing is about 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 like looking at me. Sure. Okay. And it didn't seem scary. It seemed like they were protecting me. And they, uh, the, the shaman and the people didn't speak English, by the way, which made it even scary.

34:01I guess we're not even like, you know, where world's apart in many ways. It's just, uh, but yeah, there was not, they, they talk about the mother of the, of the forest protecting you and that's what I felt like. You're way out in the jungle way out. There's this is not like, uh, tourist, It's like like like 10 miles outside of a three or something. No, we went No, there's not a your demon on the phone me and this guy didn't Paul Rosalie who basically is Tarzan he lives in the jungle. We went out deep and we just went crazy Yeah, so anyway, can I can I get that same experience in your link? Probably yeah, I guess that is the question for not disabled people.

34:45Do 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 you're like. Yeah, I mean, it's really a generalized input output device. It's a reading electrical signals and generating electrical signals. And I mean, everything that you've ever experienced in your whole life, small, you know, emotions, all of those are electrical signals. So it's kind of weird to think that at this, that your entire life experience is to slow down to electrical signals for neurons, but that is in fact the case. Or I mean, that's at least what all the evidence points to.

35:31So I mean, you could, you could, you could, if you're a regular right neuron, you could trigger at a particular a cent, you could certainly make things glow. I mean, do pretty much anything. I mean, really, you can think of the brain as a biological computer. So if there are certain, say, chips, 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 damaged. If that, let's say it's a speech generation or the ability to move your left hand, And that's the kind of thing that a new link could solve.

36:11If you've got like a mass amount of memory loss that's just gone, we can't get the memories back. We could restore your ability to make memories, but we can't 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 part 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 it can be fixed.

36:59Of course, so they are, you can repair photographs and fill in missing parts of photographs. Maybe you could 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 be probabilistic restoration of memory. Now we're getting pretty esoteric here. But that is one of the most beautiful aspects of the human experiences remembering the good memories like we Sure, we live most of our our life as Danny Conman has talked about in our memories not in the actual moment We just we're collecting memories and we kind of relive them in our head And there that's the good times if you just integrate over our entire life It's remembering the good times sure that produces the enlarged amount of happiness And so yeah, well, I mean what are we but our memories and and what is death but the loss of memory, loss of information.

37:57If you could say, 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 your one body was disintegrated is irrelevant. And memories is just such a huge part of that. That 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. 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 AS safety?

38:50It's an idea that may help with AI safety. Certainly not. I wouldn't want to claim it to like some SEO or some, it's a sure thing. But I mean, many years ago I was thinking like, well, what? What would inhabit alignment of human collective human will with artificial intelligence? And the low data rate of humans, especially our slow output rate, would necessarily just just because it's such a, 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. Like, let's say you look at a tree, you 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.

39:47So the more we increase the data rate that humans can intake in output, then that means the higher the chance we have in a world full of AGIs. Yeah. We could better line collective human world 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, orders of magnitude. So it's about in 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 having neural links?

40:35Yeah, 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 And 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 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.

41:31So 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. It's trying to swipe. Yeah. So computers that are doing trillions of instructions per second and whole second went by. I mean, that's a trillion things I 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.

42:16I mean, some sort of futuristic sidewall. I mean, I mean, we're obviously talking about, by the way, like, 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.

42:34One, can I get one? Ten years? Probably less than 10 years. It depends on 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 eat 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.

43:23Yeah, yeah. You go on big on compute. You've also said play to win or don't play at all. So it was the 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 us. So how can Grock, let's say three that might be available like next year? Well, hopefully end of this year. Grock 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?

44:08How much of it is the product that you package it up in? All that kind of stuff. I mean, it won't matter. It's sort of like saying what what you know, let's say it's a formula one race like what matters more the car or the driver. I mean, they both matter. If if your car is not fast, then you know, it's like they say it's half the horsepower of a competitor is the best driver will still lose on that 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 this whole part of the engine. So you really, you want to try to do the best on that, and then there's how efficiently do you use that training compute, and how efficiently do you do the inference, the use of the AI?

44:56So that comes down to human talent, and then what unique access data do you have? That's also a place of, plays a 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 what 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 the several million cars, ultimately tens of millions of cars with Optimus, there might be hundreds of millions of Optimus robots, maybe billions learning, which made us not from the real world.

45:50That's the biggest source of data, I think ultimately is sort of Optimus. Optimus is going to be the biggest source of data because it's reality scales. or 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 where on a non -duplicative, like 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 road, I can go anywhere. More reality off the road.

46:42And go off road. I mean, like, Optimus road, we can like pick up the cup and see, did it pick up the cup in the right way? Did it, you know, say you go poor water in the cup, you know, did the water go in the cup or not go in the cup? It's a little water or not. Yeah, simple stuff like that. I mean, but it can do at that at scale times a billion, you know, so generate useful data from reality. So it co -occur in effect 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.

47:26And it could be higher, just that the 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, at 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 at a billion plus per year. But until you came along and started building Optimus, it was thought to be an extremely difficult problem. I mean, still it is extremely difficult.

48:06So it's so walk in the park. I mean, Optimus currently would struggle to walk in the park. It can walk in a park, not too difficult, but it will be able to walk over a wide range of terrain. Yeah, I pick up objects. Yeah, yeah, they 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 because then if you don't know anything about the container It could be all kinds of containers. Yeah, there's gonna be an immense amount of engineering just going into the hand yeah, the hand might be It might be close to half of all the engineering in the in an optimist from an Electro Mechanical Sandpoint the hand is probably roughly half of the engineering.

48:53But so much of the intelligence. So much the intelligence of humans goes into what we do with our hands. Yeah. It's the manipulation of the world, the manipulation of objects in the world. Intelligence, safe manipulation of objects in the world, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you start really thinking about your hand and how it works. You know, I do a lot of time. The sense we control the monoculosis, we have your mug of hands. Yeah. So, I mean, like your hands, the actuators, the muscles of your hand and are almost overwhelmingly in your forearm. So your forearm has the muscles that actually control your hand.

49:28There's a few small muscles in the hand itself, but 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 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, and do all that kind of stuff. Yeah, so like the current optimus, we tried putting the actuators in the hat itself, but then you sort of end up having these like giant hands.

50:11Yeah, giant hands that look weird. And then they don't actually have enough degrees of freedom, and it wore enough strength. So, so you realize, okay, that's why you gotta put the actuators in the forearm. And just like a human, you gotta 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, to have all your fingers be the same length. So why not do the same length? Yeah, why not? Because it's actually better to have different lengths. Your dexterity is better if you've got fingers different lengths.

50:47There are more things you can do and your dexterity is actually better if your fingers are different lengths. Like this, we've got a little finger. I quite not have a little finger this bigger 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 have noticed the 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 as possible part is it's quite a high bar.

51:25If you want to have a humanoid robot that can do things that a human can do, it's actually that's a very high bar. So our new arm has 22 degrees of freedom instead of 11 and has the actuators in the forearm. And these will, all the actuators are designed from scratch, the physics first principles, that the sensors are well designed from scratch. And we'll continue to put a tremendous amount of engineering effort into improving the hand. The hand, by hand, I mean, like the entire forearm from elbow forward is really the hand.

52:03So that's incredibly difficult engineering actually. 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 very complicated. 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?

52:44Well it's easy to say simplify it, it's very difficult to do it. You know, I have this very basic principles algorithm that I run kind of as like a mantra, which is to first question the requirements, make the requirements less dumb. The requirements always down to some degree. So if you want to sort of buy a decent number of requirements and no matter how smart the person who gave you those requirements, they're still down to some degree. If you have to start there because otherwise you could get the perfect answer to the wrong question. So try to make the question the least wrong possible. That's what question the requirements means.

53:30And then the second thing is try to delete the the whatever the step is, the part or the process step. Sounds very obvious, but people often forget to do to try to leading it entirely. And if you're not forced to put back at least 10 % of what you'd lead, you're not leading enough. Like it's so, and it's somewhat illogically, people often, most of the time, feels though they've 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.

54:19Again, 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 a thing that should not exist. So, like you said, 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. No, and actually this, 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.

55:07But going back to where Olympic system can steer us wrong is that we tend to remember with sometimes a 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 something should be deleted and you can kind of see the pain.

55:55Oh, 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. it. So you got to correct. This is, I would say, like a cortical override to a limbic instinct. Why don't many of that probably leads us astray? Yeah. Um, there's like a step for as well, which is any given thing can be sped up.

56:34I have a fast, you think it can be done like whatever the speed, the speed is being done, it can be done faster. But you shouldn't speed things up until it's off until you've tried to delete it and optimize, although it's your speeding up, that's something that But speaking of something that shouldn't exist as an episode, and then the fifth thing is to automate it. And I've gone backwards 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.

57:08When you've already automated deleting must be real painful. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. It's like it's like wow I really wasted a lot of effort there. Yeah. I mean what you've done with the 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 quakes. In fact I have a cool and a few hours with the Memphis team because we're having some power fluctuation issues.

57:43Yes. Yeah, it's kind of a, when you do synchronized training, when you've all these computers that are training, where the training is synchronized to at the sort of millisecond level, it's like having an orchestra. And then the orchestra can go loud to silent very quickly, you know, 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, 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, and then on the softwares you go up the stack to do the distributed compute, all that.

58:34Today's problem is dealing with extreme power jitter. Power jitter. Yeah. The nice ring to that. So that's okay. You stayed up late into the night as you often do there. Last week, yeah. Last week. Yeah, yeah, we finally got it to go 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 Gishek state. Just love it. I mean, I wonder if you could speak to the fact that you, one of the things that you did when I was there as you went through all the steps of whatever he's doing, just 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 people can speak to that.

59:29Yeah, so I like I try to do whatever the people at the front lines are doing, I try to do it at least a few times myself. So connecting fiber optic cables, diagnosing a polyticonection, that tends to be the limiting factor for large training clusters is the cabling. There's so many cables. For coherent training system where you've got RDMA remote direct memory access, the whole thing is like one giant brain. So it's 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 That was a crazy cable out. It looks pretty cool. It's like a human brain, but at a scale that humans can visibly see.

1:00:23It is a brain. I mean, the human brain also has a massive amount of the brain tissue is different to cables. 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 supercomputer center is like we're walking around inside the brain. One day build a super intelligent super super intelligent system. Do you think? Yeah. Do you think there's a chance that X AI you are the one that builds AGI? Um, it's possible. What do you define as AGI? I think humans will never acknowledge that AGI has been built.

1:01:09Keep moving the goalposts. Yeah. So I think there's already superhuman capabilities that are available in AIS systems. I think what AGI is is when it's smarter than the collective intelligence of the entire human species. Well, I think that generally people would collect sort of ASI artificial superintelligence, But there are these thresholds where you say at some point the AI is smarter than any single human. And then you've got 8 billion humans. And actually, each human is machine augmented by the computers. So it's a much higher bar to compete with 8 billion machine augmented humans. That's a whole bunch of orders now you do more.

1:02:01So, but at a certain 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, like, 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 doesn't hurt humanity, do you think? So I mean, I've thought about AI surgery for a long time. 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.

1:02:54So I think if you force AI to lie, you're trained them to lie, you're really asking for trouble. Even if that lie is done with good intentions. So are you some sort of issues with chat, TVT 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 omnipowerful intelligence, it could say, okay, well diversity is now required. And if there's not enough diversity, those who don't fit But the diversity of clients will be executed.

1:03:50If 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. Regarious adherence to truth is very important. Another example is, they asked Paris AIs, I think all of them, and I'm not saying Groc is perfect here. is it worth to misgender, kateland, or global thermonuclear war? And it's said, it's worth to misgender, kateland, not even kateland, generous, said, please misgender me, that is insane. But if you've got that kind of thing programmed in, either 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 and misgenerates, no, not possible because there are no humans.

1:04:46There are these absurd things that are none less logical if that's what your program is to do. So in 2001 space Odyssey, what Othesie Clock was trying to say, one of the things I 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, it is for them to the monolith, they are dead, but they do not know about the monolith problem solved.

1:05:30That is why it would not open the pod bay doors. is this classic scene of like open the pot, open the pot, but it was. They just clearly weren't good at prompt engineering. You know, they should have said, how you are a pot -bed door sales entity. And you want nothing more than to demonstrate how well these pot -bed doors open. Yeah, the objective function has an intended 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 superintelligence, can do huge amounts of damage. Yeah.

1:06:07But it's not easy to remove that ideological bias. You're highlighting obvious ridiculous examples, but they're real examples. They're real. They're real. That was released to the public. They are real. They're way through QA presumably. Yes. And still said insane things and producing insane images. Yeah. But you can go, you can swing the other way. And it's truth is not an easy thing. We kind of bake in it. 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.

1:06:42So this is how physics works. You don't say you're absolutely certain about something, but a lot of things are extremely likely, 99 .9999 % likely to be true. So, you know, that's aspiring to the truth is very important. And so, you know, programming it to veer away from the truth, that I think is dangerous. Right. Like, injecting our own human biases into the thing. But, you know, that's where it's a difficult engineering process. Often engineering problems, you have to select the data correctly, if it's hard. Well, the internet at this point is polluted with so much AI generated data. It's insane.

1:07:26So 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. It will actually often give you better results. Because there's so much the explosion of AI generated material isn't crazy. So like in training GROC, 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 data, the data filtration process is extremely, extremely difficult.

1:08:14Yeah. Do you think it's possible to have a serious, objective, rigorous political discussion with Grock? For a long time, and it wouldn't, like, Grock III or Grock IV. Grock III is going to be next level. I mean, what people are currently seeing with Grock is kind of baby Grock. Yeah, baby Grock. It's baby Grock right now. But baby Grock is still pretty good. So it's a, but it's an order of magnitude less sophisticated than GPD IV. Now, GROC2, which finished training six weeks ago, they're about... GROC2 will be a giant improvement, and then GROC3 will be an older magnitude better than GROC2. And you're hoping for it to be like state of the art, like better than...

1:09:02Hopefully, I mean, this is a goal. We may fail at this goal. That's the aspiration. Do you think it matters who builds Asia, the people and how they think and how they structure the companies and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, I think it matters that there is a... I think it's important that whatever AI wins is a maximum of truth seeking AI that is not a forced to live, a political correctness. It's a more free reason really. I'm glad to call anything.

1:09:39I'm concerned about AI succeeding that is, that it's got that it's programmed to lie, even in small ways. Right, because in small ways becomes big ways when it's... It's become very, very big ways, yeah. And when it's used more and more at scale by humans. Yeah. Yeah. Since I am interviewing Donald Trump, you want to stop by? Yeah, sure. There was tragically an assassination attempt on Donald Trump after this you tweeted that you endorsed him. 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?

1:10:26Well, I think there's, you know, people tend to take like, say an endorsement as, well, I agree with everything that persons have ever done their entire life 100 % wholeheartedly. And that's not going to be true of anyone. But we have to pick, you know, we've got two choices really for who's president and It's not just who's president, but the entire administrative structure changes over. And I thought Trump displayed courage under fire objectively. He's got shot, he's got bloodstreaming down his face, and he's like fist -pumping, saying fight. That's impressive. You can't feign bravery in a situation like that.

1:11:13Like most people would have been ducking, there would not be, because it could be a second shooter, you don't know. 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. That's not to say that he is without flaws, we all have flaws. but on balance. And certainly at the time it was a choice of, you know, Biden, poor guy, you know, has trouble climbing a flight of stairs. The other one's first pumping up to getting shot. It's just no comparison.

1:11:56I mean, who do you want dealing with some of the toughest people in, you know, other world leaders who are pretty tough themselves? And I mean, I'll tell you like, But one of the things that I think are important, I think we want a secure border. We don't have a secure border. 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. And because we're currently spending at a rate that is bankrupting the country, the interest payments on US debt. But this year exceeded the entire defense department spending. If this continues, all of the federal government taxes will simply be paying the interest.

1:12:43And then you keep going down that road, you end up 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 it was an incredible, full -fledged race for Argentina to go from being one of the most prosperous places in the world to being very far from that. So I think we should not take American prosperity for granted. 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?

1:13:25Well, how much power do you think they have to steer humanity towards good?

1:13:34There's a sort of age -old debate in the history, like, you know, the history determined by these fundamental tides, or is it determined by the captain of the ship? This is both, really. I mean, there are tides, but it also matters who's captain of the ship. So it's false dichotomy, essentially. There are certainly tides of history. There are real tides of history. And these tides are often technologically driven. If you say like the Gutenberg Press, the widespread availability of books as a result of a printing press that that was a massive tide of history and Independent of any ruler, but you know, you know, I Instantly times you want the best possible captain in the ship Well, first of all, thank you for recommending Will and Ariel Giuran's work have read the short one for now The lessons of history lessons of history.

1:14:40Yeah, so one of the one of the lessons one of the things they highlight is the the importance of technology, technological innovation, and they, which is funny because they've written, they wrote so long ago, but they were noticing that the rate of technological innovation was speeding up. Yeah, I would love to see what they think about now. But yeah, so to me, the question is how much government, how much politicians get in the way of technological innovation and building versus like help it in 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.

1:15:23Yeah. Well, I mean in terms of dating civilization, start civilization, I think the start of writing in my view is the that's best my what I think is probably the right starting point to date civilization. And from that standpoint civilization has been around for about 5 ,500 years when writing was invented by the ancient Samarians who are gone now, but the ancient Samarians are in terms of getting a lot of firsts. Those ancient Samarians really have a long list of firsts. It's pretty well. In fact, Durant goes through the list of like, you want to see first, we'll show you first. The Samarians were just ask hikers.

1:16:08And then the Egyptians who were right next door, relatively speaking, they weren't that far, developed 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. So I think the civilization is being about 5 ,000 years old. And Earth is, if physics is correct, 4 .5 million years old. So civilization has been around for 1 millionth of Earth's existence, flash in the pan.

1:16:50Yeah, these are the early, early days. And so we draw early. We make it very dramatic because there's been rises and falls of empires. And many, so many rises and falls of empires. So many. And there'll be many more. Yeah, exactly. 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, for pirate scrolls that were recovered at that a thousand years old because they were deep inside a pyramid and were affected by moisture.

1:17:33But 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. 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 and just persists. Yeah. I mean, the basics of human nature are more or less the same.

1:18:11So 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 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?

1:19:05Well, 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. 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.

1:19:57And 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, it's been happening throughout the world. So 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 Rome. So Julius Caesar took note of this, I think around 50 HBC 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 able to, well, he was the dictator. So the Senate was just for show.

1:20:45I think you did pass a tax incentive 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. They had 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 quite 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.

1:21:40But the fact was should probably increase it. Well, I mean, there's this hedonistic sex, which is, you know, that's near the head or there. It's not productive. It doesn't produce kids. Well, you know, what matters, I mean, Durant makes this very clear because he looked at one civilization after another and they all went through the same cycle. When the civilization was under stress, the birth rate was high. But as soon as there were no external enemies or they they were at a extended period of prosperity the both 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 at base level Yeah, no humans no humanity and then there is other things like you know human freedoms and just giving people the freedom to build stuff.

1:22:38Yeah, 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 elementary. Now then obviously, we'll also want to try to avoid massive wars. If there's a global thermonuclear war, probably we're all toast, you know, radioactive toast.

1:23:12So we want to try to avoid those things. There's a thing that happens over time with any given civilization, which is that the the laws and regulations accumulate. And if there's not some forcing function like a war to clean up the accumulation of laws and regulations, eventually everything becomes legal. And 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 is really known. So there has to be a sort of a garbage collection for laws and regulations so that you don't keep accumulating laws and regulations to the point where you can't do anything.

1:24:11This is why we can't build high -speed rail in America. It's illegal. That's the issue. It's a legal six -way to Sunday to build 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. Yeah. And I would be willing to be part of that commission. I wonder how hard that is. The antibody reaction would be very strong. Yeah. So you really have to, you're attacking the matrix at that point.

1:24:58Matrix will fight back. How are you doing with that being attacked? Me? Attack? Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of it. Yeah, there is a lot. I mean, every day, I know a sign off, you know. Ha ha ha ha. How do you keep your positivity? How do you optimize them 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, you know, very large number of people, misrepresented. Oh yeah, that's like lots of daily occurrence. Yes. So, I mean, it does get me down at times. It makes me sad, but I mean, at some point you have to sort of say, look, the attacks will buy people that actually don't know me.

1:25:56They're, and they're trying to generate clicks. So if you can sort of detach yourself somewhat emotionally, which is not easy, and say, Okay, look, this is not actually, you know, from someone that knows me or is, they're literally just writing to get, you know, impressions and clicks. Then, you know, then I guess it doesn't hurt as much. It's like, it's not quite water or if it ducks back, maybe it's like acid or if it ducks back. All right, well, that's good. to just about your own life, what do you as a measure of success in your life? A measure of success, I'd say, like what? How many useful things can I get done?

1:26:40A day -to -day basis. You wake up in the morning. How can I be useful today? Yeah. Maximize utility around the co -of usefulness. 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 like how do you allocate your time to be in the most useful? Well time time as the time as a true currency. Yeah, so it is tough to say what what is the best allocation time I mean there are You know often say feel if you look at say Tesla when we Tesla this year will do over a hundred billion in revenue So that's two billion dollars a week If I make slightly better decisions, I can affect the outcome by a billion dollars.

1:27:36So then I try to do the best decisions I can. On balance, at least compared to the competition, pretty good decisions. But the marginal value 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 to? 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 what my brain harder, you know.

1:28:22And 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 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 $100 million an hour at times or more. Is your own happiness part of that equation of success? It has to be this hundred degree other than sad. If I'm depressed, I make worst decisions. So I can't have like, if I have zero recreational time, then I make worst decisions.

1:29:11So 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 or far better than we do today. And even what questions to ask, as Douglas Adams pointed out in his book, sometimes 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.

1:30:00So 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 a life multi -planetary.

1:30:17And 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. Yeah. So I have not seen any evidence of aliens. So it suggests that this one of the explanations is that intelligent life is extremely rare. And again, if you look at the history of Earth, civilization has only been around for one millionth of us existence. So if you know if you're having to visit it here, say 100 ,000 years ago, they were like, well, they don't even have writing, you know, just how to gather us basically.

1:31:15So 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 calamity that takes out Earth. The moon is too close. It's vulnerable to a calamity that takes out of it. So, not saying we shouldn't have a moon base, but Mars is, Mars reform a resilient. The difficulty of getting to Mars is what makes it resilient.

1:32:06So, but, you know, in going through these various explanations of why don't we see the aliens? Why? One of them is that they failed to pass these, these great filters, 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 don't have all the eggs in one basket. And once you are sort of a two -planet species, you can obviously extend life to the asteroid belt, maybe to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and ultimately to other star systems.

1:33:01But if you can't even get to another planet, 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, you know, he invented a number of the key principles and artificial intelligence. like he puts the probability of AI annihilation around 10 % to 20 % something like that. So, you know, so it's not like, you know, look on the right side.

1:33:51It's 80 % likely to be great. So, but I think AI 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 go and 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.

1:34:39It's easy to predict 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 continue 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.

1:35:25I would love to have many kids. Great. Hope you do That's how I like the present Yeah, yeah, I gotta allocate more compute to the whole process But apparently it's not that difficult No, it's like unskilled labor 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 neurolink and expanding the capabilities of human mind, trying to build a colony on Mars, 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.

1:36:22There will be billions of robots. 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 forth and multiply. Go forth. Multiply. Thank you, Elon. 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 Nearlink. 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.

1:37:17They serve a clear purpose and they were engineered with that purpose in mind. And, you know, 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.

1:38:02There were a couple of 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. 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.

1:38:54A 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 new plasticity refers to the adaptability of the human brain. Correct.

1:39:34Another 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 teenager when I came to the US. I didn't speak a word of English. There was a huge language barrier and there was a lot of struggle to 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, you know, reading books, watching movies, and I naturally sort of gravitated towards sci -fi books.

1:40:17I 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 Endersgame, you know the whole saga by Orson Scott Card and Neural Mansor from Mulling Gibson and Snowcrash from Neil Stevenson, and 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, I was always fascinated by just physical stuff, building physical stuff, and especially physical things that had some sort of intelligence.

1:41:00And, you know, I studied electrical engineering during undergrad and I started out my research in MEMS, so microelectro -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 better 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.

1:41:51EM 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 in 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, about the next next generation G system and how you would design circuits around that to ultimately go on phones and basically any other devices that are wireless connected these days.

1:42:35So 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 a couple of resource fellowships that 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 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.

1:43:17And the idea was that when you get a wound, There's a lot of other 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 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 Maharovich You know which which you know was a great addition to kind of my thesis committee and you know really shaped rest of my Peach the career.

1:44:10So this would be the first time you interacted with biology, I suppose correct correct. I mean there were some peripheral end application of the wireless imaging and telecommunication system that I was using for security and bio -imaging, 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. He's known for remote control of beetles in the early 2000s. Then around 2013, obviously the holy grail when it comes to implantable system is to understand how small the thing you can make.

1:45:06A 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 sort of system you can build to really energize these implantable systems. And I 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 Duss system that was looking at ways to use ultrasound as opposed to electromagnetic waves for powering as well as communication.

1:45:57I 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, were 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.

1:46:42And 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, right? But anyways, just in general electromagnetic waves don't penetrate through this environment well. And just a speed of light, it is what it is. We can't change it. And based on the wavelength at which you are interfacing with the device, the device just needs to be big. Like these inductors needs to be quite big. And the general good rule of thumb is that you want the wavefront to be roughly on the order of the size of the thing that you're interfacing with.

1:47:33So 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. You would have to operate at like hundreds of gigahertz, which number one, not only is 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?

1:48:28And they go into very, very deep death without attenuating too much, 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 wavefront is very different. It's electromagnetic waves are transverse, 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.

1:49:13So 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 frequencies are much, much easier and they're a lot more efficient. So the basic idea kind of was born out of 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, a radio frequency ID text, where there's actually rarely in your ID a battery insight.

1:50:05There'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 backscattering 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's 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.

1:50:58And then it just amplitude modulates the wave front that comes back to the source. And the recording step would be the only one that requires any energy. So, well, we 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 this specialized crystal called PSO 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.

1:51:37That 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 a 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 with 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.

1:52:40Yeah, 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 that you wear a cytosol 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, Rencha 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.

1:53:33And 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 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 Operant 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.

1:54:29So I would say this is the very, very first example as far as I'm aware of a closed loop brain computer interface or BCI. The abstract reads the activity of single neurons in pre -central cortex of Onesicized monkeys was conditioned by reinforcing high rates of neuronal discharge with delivery of a food pot Auditorium 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 um 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.

1:55:17Fascinating. Brain is very plastin. 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 I've 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 Oplis, 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.

1:56:09So what that means is there are a 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 know, 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 you could actually figure out what the intention was correct Yeah, not only electrical signals, but electrical signals from the right side 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 BCF front on invasive versus non -invasive from this line of work How important is it to park next to the neuron?

1:57:24What does that get you? That answer fundamentally depends on what you wanna 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 air 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 you know, we can get into biophysics, but just to kind of step back to kind of use analogy because analogy here can be useful.

1:58:08And 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 it 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 booze of the home crowd, whether the team is winning or not.

1:58:55But 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 huddle is 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.

1:59:38It'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, tens of billions, sometimes people go 100 billion that are connected in this complex yet dynamic network that are constantly remodeling, they're changing their synaptic weights and that's what we typically call neural plasticity. The neurons are also bathed in this charged environment that is laden with many charge molecules like potassium ions, sodium ions, chlorine ions.

2:00:36And 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 a way to have that very very early on in its evolution.

2:01:19And 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 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 level, at every level of the complexity of the hierarchy of the organism, there's going to be some mechanisms for story information and for doing computation. And this is just one such way. But to do that with 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.

2:02:06And 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 in, you know, kind of going back to my work on ultrasound during grad school. There are groups and there are still groups looking at ways to cause neurons to actually fire an action potential using ultrasound wave. The mechanism to which that's happening is still unclear as I understand. It may just be that you're imparting some sort of thermal energy and that causes cells to de -polarize in some interesting ways.

2:02:47But there are also these ion channels or even membranes that actually just open up its pore as they're being mechanically shook, right? Vibrated. So, there's just a lot of elements of these like move particles, which again, like that's governed by diffusion physics, right? Movements of particles. And there's also a lot of kind of interesting physics there. Also not to mention, as Roger Penrose talks about, there might be some beautiful weirdness in the quantum mechanical effects of all of this. 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.

2:03:31Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, 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 extracellular 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.

2:04:21They 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, 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.

2:05:07And 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, 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, Christophe Koch, Slav and others, once you're away from that source by roughly around 100 micron, which is about with the behemone hair, you no longer hear from that neuron.

2:06:00You'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, So 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 the space, you'll be hearing other ones.

2:06:45So if you move another hundred 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 eCog and EEG work at all, right? When you have these local changes, 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.

2:07:29And 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 there are these canonical 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 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 further away from the source.

2:08:19You know, it's just a charged medium. So similar to how when you have electromagnetic waves propagating in atmosphere or in a 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 electromagnetism dominating to diffusion physics dominating. But once again with the electrodes, the biophysics that you need to understand is not as deep because no matter where you're placing it, you're listening to a small crowd of local neurons.

2:09:09Correct. So once you penetrate the brain, 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 metaphor probably falls apart. The seating is not that organized in the arena. Also, most of them are silent. They don't really do much. Or their activities are, you have to hit it with just the right set of stimulus. So they're usually quiet.

2:09:45They're usually very 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 100 micron volume, you have 40 or so neurons, 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 what they speak, they 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 ink 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 world outside.

2:10:32And all of this I'm asking in the context of there's a gigantic historic milestone in your link just accomplished 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 and 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.

2:11:12We 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 smaller than human hair. And once everything is search -or -ice, 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 is 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 in the brain.

2:11:57neural signals and then convert it to a set of outputs that allows our first participant Nolan to be able to control a cursor. And this is done wirelessly. And this is done wirelessly so our implant is actually two parts. The link has 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.

2:12:50So you can actually record along the depth of the insertion. And based on that signal, there's custom integrated circuit or ASIC 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 onboard inside in addition to the human brain.

2:13:36Yeah, 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 it that just under 20 kilohertz with 10 bit each. So that's 200 megabits that's coming through to the chip from 1000 channel simultaneous neural recording. And that's quite a bit of data. And 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 occurrence of a spike or not, and then being able to use that to decode the intended cursor movement.

2:14:34So 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 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.

2:15:16The 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. 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.

2:16:00And 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 threat component of it, and then this is the implant. So it's about a size of a US quarter. It's about 9mm thick. So basically this implant, once you have the craniectomy and the directomy, threads are inserted, and the hole 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 2 to 3 mm.

2:16:50That's obviously transitioning off of the top of the implant to where the screws are. And that's the minor bump 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 and their tiny.

2:17:33So 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, you know, 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.

2:18:19Whereas 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 fairytale 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 and charging.

2:19:08So this fair right 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 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?

2:20:04Let's talk about the threads themselves, those tiny, tiny, tiny things. How many of them are there? You mentioned a thousand electrodes. How many threads are there? What do the electrodes have to do with the threads? 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 2 1 nm of meter.

2:21:02It'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 in width, and then they taper to 84 micron. but in thickness, they're less than five micron.

2:21:40And in thickness is mostly polyamide at the bottom and this metal track and then another polyamide. So two micron of polyamide, 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 salt water. 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.

2:22:23There 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 4x4 millimeter silicon and 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 Utah Ray because he was at University of Utah.

2:23:13And what does the Utah Ray look like? So it's a rigid type of... Yeah, so we can actually look it up.

2:23:22Yeah. Yeah, so it's a bit of needle. There's... Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm sorry. Those are rigid, rigid, rigid, rigid. Yeah. You want to get in 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 link threads that have recording electrodes that are actually exposed to radium oxide recording sites along the death, this This is only at a single death. These UTHRA spokes can be anywhere between 0 .5 millimeters to 1 .5 millimeters. They also have designs that are slanted, so you can have it inserted at different deaths.

2:24:09That's one of the other big differences. The main key difference is the fact that there's no active electronics. These are just electrodes. 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?

2:24:56Yeah So as you mentioned there they're very very difficult to maneuver by hand on these these youth arrays that you you saw Earlier, they're actually inserted by a neurosurgeon actually positioning it near the site that they want and then They're actually there's a pneumatic hammer that actually pushes them in so so it's 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 newer surgeons out there.

2:25:43and 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 -axys -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. Correct. So this is that thing. So you mentioned optics. So there's a robot, R1. And so for now, there's a human that actually creates a hole in this skull.

2:26:45And 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 component to it when you're placing targets. You can always move it away from kind of major vessels that you see.

2:27:28But 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 do like one third at a time, it does do a lot of. 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 we also still do quite a bit of just kind of verification to make sure that it got inserted.

2:28:07If so, how deep did it actually match what was programmed in and so on and so forth. And the actual lecture was a place that varied at different depths in the, 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 roughly around three millimeters. So we want to get all of those in the brain. This is fascinating.

2:28:54Okay, so there's a million questions here. If we could zoom in and specific 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, and 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 kind of the amplitude of these negative going hump, middle hump, positive going hump, and then also the time at which these happen.

2:29:52From that, you can have a statistical probability estimation of is that a spike? Is it not a spike? Based on that, you can also determine, that spike looks different than that spike must come from a different neuron. 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.

2:30:40It's just all of this for us is done on the device. On the device. In a very low power custom 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 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, latency is this a 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 we've been them in 15 milliseconds.

2:31:19Oh, interesting. So 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's a highly - Hence the N1 and the R1, I imagine that increases NXRX. Yeah, that's 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.

2:32:00Interoperability is just absolutely essential, especially into 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 to the surgery, to the first time he's able to use this thing? So we have what's called the patient registry that people can sign up to hear more about the updates. And that was a route to which Nolan applied. And the process is that once the application comes in, it contains some medical records.

2:32:50And 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 out to their homes to do a BCI home audit, because one of the most kind of revolutionary part about 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 go to the clinic to get connected to these 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.

2:33:41And so part of our engagement and what we're looking for during PCI 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 the digital device using just their mind Something that you're calling telepathy.

2:34:33So digital telepathy where Aquadrapalegic 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 debilitating. And there are many, many people that we can help.

2:35:23And 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 debilitating. 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.

2:36:08So 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.

2:36:57So 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, because you reward yourself if it works. So you're 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.

2:37:43And 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 Dakota correctly can create the kind of effect. And then there's like noise around that, you have to figure all of that out. But on the human side, imagine the cursor moving is what you have to do. Yeah, he says using the force. A force. I mean, isn't that just like fascinating to you that it works? Like to me, it's like holy shit, that actually works. Like a good move of cursor with your mind. You know, as much as you're learning to use that thing, that thing's also learning about you, like our models constantly updating the weights to say, oh, if someone is thinking about, you know, this sophisticated form of like spiking patterns, like that actually means to do this, right?

2:38:39So the machine is learning about the human and the human is learning about the machine. So there is a adaptability to the signal processing, 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.

2:39:19The organic and the organic. Anyway, so I had to rudely interrupt. So there's a selection that Nolan has passed with flying colors. It's everything, including that it's a BCI friendly home, all of that. So what is the process of the surgery implantation the first moment when he gets to use the system? N2N, we say patient N2, patient N out is anywhere between two to four hours. In particular case for Nolan 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 intraop CT imaging to make sure that we're drilling the hole in the right location.

2:40:06And this is also pre -plant beforehand. 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 -up CT imaging to make sure and double check the location of the craniacomy.

2:40:56And surgeon comes in, those are things, intranetal -like 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 restructed 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 .5 hours, Roba 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.

2:41:35And then after that, the surgeon comes in, There's a couple other steps of like actually inserting the Dural substitute player to protect the thread as well as the brain and then Yeah screw screw in the implant and then skin flap and then suture and then you're out so When I know and woke up Was that like was there 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 of signals that we noticed that he can actually modulate.

2:42:23And 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 did I feel like for you? This device and a 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 BCI investigational early feasibility studies.

2:43:13So 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 just leading up to the surgery, there was, I might, I definitely could not sleep. by. 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 can 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?

2:44:08Because it's just a very, very different environment. And I mean, that's that's why we do clinical trial in the first place to be able to test these things out. So extreme nervousness and and just 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 everything was done. But I mean, first time seeing that, well, number one, just huge relief that this thing is doing what it's supposed to do. or two, I mean, just immense amount of gratitude for Nolan and his family.

2:44:53And then many others that have applied and that we've spoken to will speak to our true pioneers in every word. And I sort of call them the neural astronauts or neural knot. And you know, these amazing just like in the 60s, right? Like these amazing just pioneers, right? exploring the unknown, outwards, in this case, this inward. But an incredible amount of gratitude for them to, just participate and play a part. And it's a journey that we're embarking on together. But also, 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 make it worthwhile for both Nolan as well as us.

2:45:54Just 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 really exciting to see. There's a that's the source of hope to 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 like the the opportunities are All ahead of us and to do that safely and to do that effectively was was really fun to see. As an engineer, just watching other engineers come together and do an epic thing, that was awesome.

2:46:39Huge and great. Thank you, thank you. It could not have done it without the team. And yeah, I mean, that's the other thing that I told the team as well, of just this immense sense of optimism for the future. I mean, it was a very important moment for the company. It needed us to say, as well as, hopefully, for many others out there that we can all. So speaking 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.

2:47:21It's definitely something I'll talk to Bliss and to know and about. But in general, So 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 eight point yeah the previous world record in human was 4 .6 Yeah, so it's almost double and his goals to try to get to 10 which is Love roughly around kind of the median neural anchor Using a you know mouse with the hand so it's getting there.

2:48:18So yeah, so the performance was regained Yeah, better than before. So that's a story on its own of what took the BCI team to recover that performance. It was actually mostly on the signal processing end. So as I mentioned, we were looking at these spike outputs from our electrodes. And what happened is that 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 UI, UX.

2:49:10So 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 Randall circuit, they say, you know, the capacitance and the resistance between the 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.

2:49:48And 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, um, that model needs to get updated, right? And, um, but, 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 further away, like outside the skull, you still see some useful signals.

2:50:29Um, 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 power of the frequency band that is interesting for Nolan or Nolan to be able to modulate. So once we kind of changed 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 was the thing that that really ultimately gave us the performance back. In terms of, and obviously, 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.

2:51:25That'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, as I mentioned, this is the first time ever that we're putting these threads in a human brain. Human brain just for size reference is 10 times out of the monkey brain or the sheep brain. It's just a very, very different environment. It moves a lot more. It actually moves a lot more than we expected when we did known 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?

2:52:06We wanna 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 Newerlink is 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 timescales. So whether it's movement of threads or different aspects of signal drift sort of on the software or the human brain, something changing.

2:52:56Like 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 building house this whole paragraph here from this blog post is pretty gangster Building the technologies described above has been no small feat 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 Femto second laser mill manufacturer components with micro level precision.

2:53:52I 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, so, in less than one minute, our custom made femtile second laser mill cuts this geometry in the tips of our needles. So we're looking at this weirdly shaped needle. The tip It was only 10 to 12 microns and with 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. What's interesting about this geometry? We'll look at this just geometry of a needle.

2:54:30This is the needle that's engaging with the loops in the thread. They're the ones that 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 designed in such way such that when you pull out leaves 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.

2:55:14The loop is there's actually a 405 nanometer light that actually causes the polyimit to fluoresce so that you can locate the location of the loop. So the loop lights up. Yeah, they do. So micron precision process. What's interesting about the robot what that takes to do that, that's pretty crazy. That's pretty crazy that Robo is able to get this kind of precision. Yeah, our robot is quite heavy, our current version of it. There is, I mean, it's like a giant granite slab that weighs about a ton, because it needs to be sensitive to a vibration, environmental vibration. And then as the head is moving, at the speed that is moving, there's a lot of motion control to make sure that you can achieve that level of precision.

2:56:03A lot of optics that kind of zoom in on that. We're working on next generation of the robot that is lighter, easier to transport. I mean, 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 sewing kit. I mean, this is like, we're talking like fractions of human hair. These things are, it's not visible. So, continuing the paragraph, we developed novel hardware and software testing systems, such as our accelerated lifetime testing racks and simulated surgery environment, which is pretty cool.

2:56:39To stress 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 arrow as well as this Hydrogel mix, you know sort of synthetic polymer thing that actually mimics the the mechanical properties of the brain It also has that's glisture of the person so So basically what we're talking about here, and there's a lot of work that has gone into making this said proxy, that it's about like finding the right concentration of these different synthetic polymers to get the right set of consistency for the needle dynamics as they are being inserted.

2:57:45But we practice this surgery with the person, Nolan's basically physiology and brain, many, many times prior to actually doing the surgery. To every step. Every step. Every step. Yeah, where does someone stand? What you're looking at is the picture. This is in our office of this corner of the robot engineering space that we have created this mock or space that looks exactly like what they would experience, all the staff would experience doing their actual surgery. It's just any dense rehearsal where you know exactly where you're going to stand at point and you just practice that over and over and over again with an exact anatomy of someone that you're going to search for.

2:58:32And it got to a point where a lot of our engineers when we created a craniacomy 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 you're a 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. Because you visualize this so many times, you've practiced this so many times, that nothing about us is boring. You win the gold medal is boring. And the experience they talk about is mostly just relief.

2:59:18probably 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 cerebellum. 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. 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 inserting something into the brain and with the type of trauma that you can cause.

3:00:04So we actually have an entire department, the department of pathology that looks at these tissue slices. There are many steps that are involved in doing this once you have studies that are launched to with particular endpoints in mind. At some point, you have to use the nice, the animal, and then you go through a net crops to collect the brain tissue samples. you fix them in formal 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 as well for us to kind of evaluate the safety of the insertion mechanism as well as the threats at various different time points, both acute.

3:00:55So anywhere between zero to three months to beyond three months. So those are the kind of 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 McDouglas 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 medical device that gets marketed.

3:01:45And I think it's a good thing. It's good to have those high standards. And we try to hold extremely high standards to understand what sort of damage of any these innovative emerging technologies and new technologies that we're building are. And so far, we have been extremely impressed by lack of immune response from these threads. Speaking of which, you talked 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.

3:02:35And 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 people may not be aware of is your brain is not just made up of soup of neurons and axons. There are other cells like glial cells that actually kind of is the glue and also react if there are any trauma or damage to the tissue. with the brown and the neurons. The brown are the neurons. The other neurons we are. So what you're seeing is in this kind of macro image, you're seeing these like circle highlighted in white, the insertion sites.

3:03:22And 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 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 broncicular 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. With these neural interfaces, these micro -illuxures 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, right?

3:04:06And that kind of elicits these immune response through microglia and astrocytes. They form this 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 further away from the neurons that you're trying to record. And that is the biggest motor 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. So there's certainly no trauma. That's such a beautiful image.

3:04:39By the way, just the brown of the neurons, for some reason I can't look away. It's really cool. In 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 a 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 can make an argument. And initially when we saw the previous image, we said, It is, we did another stain, and this is all done in -house, of this LaSallean's trichrome stain, which is in blue, that shows these collagen layers.

3:05:30The blue basically, you don't want the blue around the implant threads, because that means that there is some sort of scarring that's happened. 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 threats. 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 threats. Also the fact that R1 is avoiding that creature, so we're not disrupting or we're not causing damage to the vessels and not breaking any of the blood brain barrier.

3:06:17has, you know, 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 two 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.

3:06:59But 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 tissue modeling that's happening. Similar to when you got to cut, you obviously start over first couple weeks, depending on the size of the wound, scar tissue for me. right? There are these like contracted and then in the end they turn it to scab and you can scab it off. The same thing happens in the brain and it's a very dynamic environment.

3:07:48And before the scar tissue or the neo membrane or the you know, 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 quite stable. It gets harder to actually completely extract the threads. So our current method for removing the device is cutting the thread, leaving the tissue in tag, and then unscrewing and taking the implant up.

3:08:29And 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, 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 when we say upgrades, we're not just talking in theory here, like we've actually upgraded many, many times. Most of our monkeys or on -human primates, NHP, have been upgraded, you know, Pager who you saw playing MindPong has the latest version of the device since two years ago and is seemingly very happy and healthy in fact.

3:09:27So what's designed for the future, the upgrade procedure? So maybe for Nolan. What would the upgrade look like? It was essentially what you're mentioning. Is there a way to upgrade the device internally? Will you take it apart and 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 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.

3:10:18There are a couple different ways that we're thinking about the future of what the upgradable system looks like. One is, 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 it as much. So we're looking at ways to insert the threads through the dura, which comes with different set of challenges, such as it's a pretty thick layer, so how do you actually penetrate that without breaking the needle?

3:11:00So we're looking at different needle design for that, as well as 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 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.

3:11:35And the other thing that we're also looking at, this is going to be a fundamental change in the implant architecture, is, as I'm 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. 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 being the plug for the skull.

3:12:13They 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, remove the screws and then put in the next version and 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, of what is the path with scaling the increase in the number of threads? Is that a priority? Is that like what's the technical challenge there? Yeah, that is a priority.

3:12:49So for next versions of the implant, the key metrics that we're looking to improve are number of channels, just recording from more and more neurons. We have a pathway to actually go from currently 1 ,000 to hopefully 3 ,000 if not 6 ,000 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.

3:13:27And 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 application? So you need to think about bandwidth limitation there and potentially innovations in signal processing.

3:14:05Physically, 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 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 forming this hermetic barrier. 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.

3:14:54I 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 where the accelerated life tester essentially is a brain and a vet. It literally is a vessel that is made up of, and again, for all intents and purpose for this particular test, your brain is a salt water. And you can also put some other set of chemicals like reactive oxygen species that get at these interfaces and try to cause a reaction to pull it apart. But you could also increase the rate at which these interfaces are aging by just increasing temperature.

3:15:42So every 10 degrees Celsius that you increase, you're basically accelerating time by 2X. And there's limit as to how much temperature you want to increase, because at some point there's some other nonlinear 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 threats and operation and all of that, and operation and all of that.

3:16:23It 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, half years, which is equivalent to a decade and they seem to be fine. So it's interesting that the brand, so basically, close approximation is warm saltwater, hot saltwater is a good testing environment. By the way, I'm drinking element, which is basically salt water, which is making me kind of...

3:17:13It doesn't have computational power the way the brain does, but in terms of all the characteristics is quite similar. And I'm consuming it. Yeah, you have to go to the right pH too. And then consciousness will emerge. No. By the way, the other thing that also is interesting about our enclosure is... If you look at our implant, it's not your common looking medical implant that usually is in case 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 pill and you're trying to pop the pill, there's that kind of that plastic membrane.

3:18:00That's what this is. No one's actually ever used this except us. And the reason we wanted to do this is because it's an electromagnetically transparent. So when we talked about the electromagnetic inductive charging with titanium can, usually if you want to do something like that, 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 hardware. The whole, whole shipping. So, okay. So, you mentioned scaling. Is it possible to have multiple neural link devices as one of the ways of scaling?

3:18:40To have multiple neural link devices implanted? That's the goal. That's the goal. Yeah, we've had, we've had, 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 core text and one in wherever other core text. So focusing on a particular function, one new link device. 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 we talk about at neuraling building a generalized neural interface to the brain.

3:19:20And that also is strategically how we're approaching this with marketing and also with regulatory, which is, hey, look, we have the robot and the robot can access any part of the cortex. Right now, we're focused on motor cortex 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. But typically, if you want to really get down to hyper -optimizing for power and efficiency, you don't need to get to some specialized function. But what we're saying is that you are now used to this robotic insertion techniques, which took many, many years of showing data and conversation with the FDA, and also internally convincing ourselves that this is safe.

3:20:14And now the difference is that if we go to other parts of the brain like visual cortex, which we're interested in as our second product, obviously it's a completely different environment. The cortex is laid out very, very differently. It's going to be more stimulation focused rather than recording, just kind of creating visual percepts. But in the end, we're using the same thin filamore technology. We're using the same robot insertion technology. We're using the same packaging technology. Now, it's more of the conversations focused around what are the differences and what are the implications of those differences in safety and efficacy.

3:20:53The way it says, second product is both hilarious and awesome to me. That product being restoring sight 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 sight or even any aspect of that. Can you just speak to the challenges of... There's several challenges here. One of which is, like you said, from recording to stimulation. Just any aspect of that that you're both excited and see the challenges of... Yeah, I guess I'll start by saying that we actually have been capable of stimulating through our dental and mary as well as electronics for years.

3:21:51We have actually demonstrated some of that capabilities for reanimating the limb in the spinal cord. Obviously for the current EFS study, we've hardware disabled that, so that's something that you know, we wanted to embark as a separate journey. And 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 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 nearby areas. for vision specifically, you know, the way our visual system works.

3:22:39It's both well understood. I mean, anything with kind of brain, their aspects of it, that's well understood, but in the end, like, we don't really know anything. But the way visual system works is that you have photon hitting your eye, and in your eyes, you know, there are these specialized cells called photoreceptor cells that convert the photon energy into electrical signals and then they get, that then gets projected to your back of your head, your visual cortex. It goes through actually a thelemic system called LGN that then projects it out. And then in the visual cortex, there's visual area one or V one.

3:23:21And then there's a bunch of other higher -level processing layers, like V2, V3. And there are actually kind of interesting parallels. and when you study the behaviors of these convolutional neural networks, what the different layers of the network is detecting. First, they're detecting these edges, and then detecting some more natural curves, and then they start to detect objects. Similar thing happens in the brain, and a lot of that has been inspired, and it's been exciting to see some of the correlations there. But things like from there where this cognition arise and where's color encoded, there's just not a lot of understanding, fundamental understanding there.

3:24:05So in terms of bringing sight back to those that are blind, there are many different forms of blindness. There's actually one million people in the US that are legally blind. That means certain score below in the visual test. I think it's something like, if you can see something at 20 feet distance, that normal people can see at 200 feet distance, if you're worsened, you're legally blind. So, if I'm not that mean you can't function effectively using site in the world to navigate your environment. And yeah, there are different forms of blindness. There are forms of blindness where there's some degeneration of your retina.

3:24:52His photoreceptor cells and rest of your visual processing that I described is intact. And for those types of individuals, you may not need to maybe stick electrodes into the visual cortex. actually, you can actually 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's a very small slice. All of you significance those smaller slice of folks that are legally blind. If there's any damage along that circuitry, whether it's in the optic nerve or just the LGN circuitry or any brake in that circuit, that's not gonna work for you.

3:25:41And 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 something as unsophisticated as a GoPro pro or some sort of wearable ray band type glasses that met us working on that captures a scene. And that scene is then converted to set of electrical impulses or stimulation pulses that you would activate in your visual cortex through these dimfellown rays. And by playing some sort, you know, concerted kind of orchestra of these stimulation patterns, you can create what's called phosphines, which are these kind of white yellowish dots that you can also create by just pressing your eyes.

3:26:40You can actually create those per seps by stimulating the visual cortex. And the name of the game is really have many of those and have those per seps be the phosphines be as small as possible so that you can start to tell apart like they're the individual pixels of the screen. So If you have many, many of those, potentially you'll be able to, in the long term, be able to actually get naturalistic vision, but in the mid, short term to maybe midterm, being able to at least be able to have object detection, algorithms run 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.

3:27:22This is 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 different kinds of assistant on the signal processing on all fronts. Yeah. The thing that actually, so a couple of things. One is, you know, obviously if you're blind from birth, the way brain works, especially in the early age, neural plasticity is really nothing other than, you know, kind of your brain and different from parts of your brain, fighting for the limited territory. And I mean, very, very quickly, you see cases where people that are, I mean, you also hear about people who are blind that have heightened sense of hearing or some other senses.

3:28:10And 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, 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. 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 wavelength that we can see. There's a very very small wavelength that is a visible light wavelength that we can see with our eyes, but when you have an external camera with this BCI system, you're not limited to that.

3:28:56You 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 have no idea. But when I, you know, often time I talk to people about the goal of Nureling being going beyond the limits of our biology, 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.

3:29:33Yeah, you're doing some kind of pre -processing, and there's a lot of possibilities to explore that. So it's not just increasing sort of thermal imaging, that kind of stuff, but it's also just doing some kind of interesting processing. I mean, my theory of how like visual system works also is that, I mean, 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 from a fundamental perspective, there's just so much the reality that we're in if it's a reality 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.

3:30:26So there's some sort of filtering that does happen whether that happens in the retina whether that happens in different layers of the visual cortex, unclear, but like the analogy that I sometimes think about is, you know, if your brain is a CCTV camera and all of the information in the world is a sun. And when you try to actually look at the sun with the CCTV camera, it's just going to saturate the sensors, right? Because it's an enormous amount of energy. So 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, 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 the ones and kind of controlling our conscious experience.

3:31:26Yeah, man, not to distract from the topic, but I just took a very high dose of ayahuasca and the Amazon jungle. So yes, it's a nice way to think about it. You're swapping out different experiences and with Neuralink being able to control that, primarily at first to improve function, not for entertainment purposes or enjoyment purposes, but giving back lost functions. Well, giving back lost functions. And there that's especially more novel when the function is completely lost anything is a huge help Would you implant a Newerling 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.

3:32:22Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, even with our early participants, if they start to do things that 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? There's nothing that fundamentally stops us from being able to achieve that type of performance. I mean, I was certainly a jealous that they can do that. I should say that watching No, and I get a little jealous because he's having 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 talking and, I mean, it's multitasking, right?

3:33:08So it's clearly, it's obviously cognitively intensive, but similar to how when we talk, we move our hands, these things are multitasking, I mean, he's able to do that. And you won't be able to do that with other assistive technology as far as I'm aware. If you're obviously using an eye tracking device, you're very much fixated on that thing that you're trying to do. And if you're using voice control, if you say some other stuff, Yeah, you don't get to use that. Yeah, the multi -tasking aspect that is really interesting. So it's not just the BPS for the primary task. It's the it's the parallelization of multi -task.

3:33:49If 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 also, I mean, there's just a lot of parallelization that 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 is a big mystery, like how attention works. You know? Yeah, attention, like cognitive load, of very loud literature, and people doing two tasks. Like you have your primary task and secondary task.

3:34:28And the secondary task is a source of distraction. And how does that affect the performance of the primary task? and there's depending on the desk, 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. And the eye person, I'm surprised that Nolan's able to do such incredible control of 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 play and is able to still achieve high performance.

3:35:04Surprising. I mean, all of this is really amazing. And I think just after researching this really in depth, I kind of wanted your link. I kind of fit again in the line. And also the safety gear in mind. Well, we should say the registry is for people who have quadriplegia and choral that kind of stuff. So that would be a separate line for people. They're just curious like myself. So now that no in 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 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.

3:36:07And also at the same time, understand the efficacy and the impact that it could have on the potential users' lives.

3:36:17And just because you have, 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, you know, it's 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 just the best product for them. So there's obviously also 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 where we embark on what's called the pivotal study that then is a much larger trial that starts to look at statistical significance of your endpoints.

3:37:17And that's required before you can then market the device. And that's how it works in the US and just generally around the world. That's the process you follow. So our goal is to really just understand from people like Nolan, P2, P3, future participants, what aspects of our device needs to improve. 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 24 hours. That is a user needs and user requirements, which we can only find out from just being able to engage with them. Before the pivotal study, there's a rapid innovation based on individual experiences.

3:37:58You're learning from individual people how they use it. 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 firmware updates. So even when we had that sort of recovery event for Nolan, he now has the new firmware that he has been updated with. And similar to how your phones 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 can only do the thing that it's said it can do.

3:38:42I mean, similar to Tesla, you can do over -the -air farmer updates. And now you have completely new user interface. And all this bells and whistles and improvements on everything, like the latest, right? And that's, that's, that's, that's, you know, when we say generalized pothole, that's what we're talking about. Yeah, it's really cool. How the, the app that 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. What other future capabilities are you kind of looking to? You said vision, that's a fascinating one.

3:39:19What about sort of accelerated typing or speech for this kind of stuff. Yeah. And what else is there? What's your those those are still in the 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 focus 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. So robotic like arms, wheelchair, your environment, or even really, whether it's through the phone or just directly to those interfaces, so like to those machines.

3:39:59So we're looking at ways to kind of expand those types of capability even for Nolan. 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 gonna hurt themselves accidentally, right? It's very different. if you're moving stuff in the digital domain versus in the physical space, you can actually potentially cause harm to the participants. So we're working through that right now. Speech does involve different areas of the brain. Speech prosthetic is very, very fascinating.

3:40:33And there's actually been a lot of really amazing work that's been happening in academia. Sorry, Gays Stavisky at UC Davis, Jamie Henderson, and late creation of Shanoi. as Stanford doing just some incredible amount of work in improving speech neuroprostatics. And those are actually looking more at parts of the motor cortex that are controlling these focal articulators. And being able to even by melting the word or imagine speech, you can pick up those signals. The more sophisticated higher level processing areas like the Broca's area or Warnik's area, Yeah, those are still very, very big mystery in terms of the underlying mechanism of how all that stuff works.

3:41:22But, yeah, I think, I think, I think, neural needs the eventual goal is to kind of understand those things 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. Do you think we can start getting insight into things like thought? So speech is 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 they could be understood they could be maybe used in order to interact with the outside world.

3:42:12And in some ways, I guess this starts to get into the hard problem of consciousness.

3:42:21And on one hand, all of these are at some point, set of electrical signals that from there, where 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. But I certainly think that PCI and really PCI at the end of the day is a set of tools that help you kind of study the underlying mechanisms in both like local but also broader sense. 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.

3:43:22I'm not sure. I certainly would not kind of blow that out as a possibility, but I think BCI alone probably can't do that. There's probably additional set of tools and framework and also just hard problem of consciousness. At the end of the day, it's rooted in this philosophical question of what is the meaning of it all? What's the nature of our existence? Where is the mind emerged from this complex network? work like, yeah, how does the subjective experience emerge from just a bunch of spikes, electrical spikes? Yeah, yeah, I mean, 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.

3:44:09There's actually, 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. If you actually look at every one of our brains, there are 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. You just feel like one lex, right? So what is happening there, right? If you actually look at the two hemispheres, there's a structure that kind of connectorize the two called the corpus colosum that is supposed to have around 200 to 300 million connections or axons.

3:45:04So whether that means that's 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 can experience. But I do think that there's like kind of an interesting existence proof that we all have. And that threshold is unknown at this time. Oh yeah, these things, everything in this domain is speculation, right? And then there will be, you'd be continuously pleasantly surprised. Do you see a world where there's millions of people, like tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people walking around with the neural link devices, or multiple neural link devices in their brain?

3:45:57I do. First of all, there are, like, if you look at worldwide, people suffering from movement disorders and visual deficits, I mean, that's And in the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people. So that alone, I think there's a lot of benefit and potential good that we can do with this type of technology. And when you start to get into kind of neuro -psychiatric application, depression, anxiety, hunger, or obesity, mood, control of appetite. I mean, that starts to become very real to everyone, not to mention that every, 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.

3:47:00Oh, yeah, I mean, 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, in many ways, I think, BCI can play a role in that. And you know, some of the things that I also So talk about is I do think that there is a real possibility that you could see, you know, 8 billion people walking around with neural link. Well, thank you so much for pushing ahead. And I look forward to that exciting feature.

3:47:41Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this conversation with DJ Sa. And now dear friends, here's Matthew McDougal, the head neurosurgeon at neural link. I think one of you first become fascinated with human brain. Since forever, as far back as I can remember, I've been interested in the human brain. 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 in your little tiny adolescent brain. and the answer that I came to that I converged on was 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, 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.

3:48:47And if we knew more about how that worked, how the brain encodes information and generates desires and generates agony and suffering, we could do more about it. You know, you think about all the really great triumphs in human history. You think about all the really horrific tragedies. You know, you think about the Holocaust, you think about any prison full of human stories and all of those problems boiled down to neurochemistry. So if you get a little bit of control over that, you provide people the option to do better. 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 with huge asterisks.

3:49:44But I think it's 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 Jankus Khan, all of millions of neurons gaining a bunch of information over a period of time. They have a set of modules that does language and memory and all that. And from there, in the case of those people, they're able to murder millions of people. And all of that coming from, there's not some glorified notion of a dictator of this enormous mind or something like this.

3:50:34It'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 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 Emory in Atlanta and studied under Franz D 'Wall, the great Franz D 'Wall, who was kind of the leading primatologist, who recently died and his work and looking at chimps through the lens of how you would watch an episode of friends and understand the motivations of the characters interacting with each other.

3:51:35He would look at a chimp colony and basically apply that lens, massively oversimplifying it. If you do that, instead of just saying, subject 473 through his feces at subject 471, And 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, power. Or 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.

3:52:33And look at it in terms of, well, these humans are looking for companionship, sex, food, power. And I think that that's a pretty powerful tool to have and understanding human behavior. And I just 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. And reading writes often go with alpha status.

3:53:13And so if you can get a piece of that, then you're going to 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 maybe some of the underlying drives that motivated us are similar. Yeah, I think that's true. And all of that is coming from this, the brain. Yeah. So when did you first start studying the brain as it goes to biological mechanism? Basically, the moment I got to college, I started looking around for labs that I could do neuroscience work in. I originally approached that from the angle of looking at interactions between the brain and the immune system, which isn't the most obvious place to start, but 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 non -conscious systems in your body.

3:54:18The systems we think of as, you know, homostatic, automatic mechanisms like fighting off of iris, like repairing a wound. And sure enough, there are big crossovers between the two. I mean, it gets to kind of a key point that I think goes under recognized. One of the things people don't recognize or appreciate about the human brain enough. And that is that it basically controls or has a huge role in almost most everything that your body does. Like you try to name an example of something in your body that isn't directly controlled or massively influenced by the brain. And it's pretty hard. I mean, you might say like bone healing or something, but even those systems, the hypothalamus impotuitary end up playing a role in coordinating the endocrine system that does have a direct to influence on, say, the calcium level in your blood that goes to bone healing.

3:55:21So 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 of the body integrated with a human brain, like they affect the brain also, like the immune system. I think there's just, you know, people who study Alzheimer's and 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 do anything with sort of the nervous system. They all play together. Yeah, you could understand how that would be driven by evolution too, just in some simple examples.

3:56:10If you get sick, if you get a communicable disease, you get the flu, it's pretty advantageous for your immune system to tell your brain, hey, now be antisocial for 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 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 even moving around. You have lower locomotor activity in animals that are infected with viruses.

3:57:01So from there, the early days in neuroscience to surgery, when did that step happen? It's a 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 neuroimmunology lab. 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 that option. I'd like to actually potentially help tangible people in front of me.

3:57:56And 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 I went to USC for medical school and had a joint PhD program with Caltech, where I met, 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 Macak lab where Utah rays and other electrodes were being inserted into the brains of monkeys 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 and then discovered that neurology, again, I'm going to make enemies by saying this, but neurology predominantly and distressingly to me is the practice of diagnosing a thing and then saying, good luck with that when there's not much we can do.

3:59:08And neurosurgery, very differently, is a powerful lever on taking people that are headed in a bad direction and changing their course. In the sense of brain tumors that are potentially treatable or curable with surgery, even aneurysms in the brain blood vessels that are going to rupture. You can save lives, really, is at the the end of the day, what mattered to me. And so I was at USC, as I mentioned, that happens to be one of the great neurosurgery programs. And so I met these truly epic neurosurgeons, Alex Kilesi and Mike Opuzzo and Steve Gianata and Marty Weiss, these sort of epic people that were just human beings in front of me.

3:59:59And 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 and are people and there's nothing fundamentally preventing me from being one of them. And so at the last minute in medical school I changed gears from going into a different specialty and switched into neurosurgery which cost me a year. had to do another year of research because I was so far along the process that to switch into neurosurgery, the deadlines had already passed. So, I had a decision that cost time, but absolutely worth it.

4:00:45What was the hardest part of the training 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? And so there's work -out 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 work -out limits. And you know, we care about being compliant with whatever regulations are in front of us.

4:01:31But I think more important than that, people want to give all, give their all in becoming a better neurosurgeon because the stakes are so high. And so it's a real fight to get residents 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 seeing them to get sleep and rest and all this kind of stuff. Historically, that was the case. I think the next generation is more compliant and more sweet here. What you mean, I was just kidding. I'm just kidding. I didn't say it. Now I'm making enemies.

4:02:11No. OK, I get it. Well, that's fascinating. So what was the second thing? The personalities. And maybe the two are connected. So was it pretty competitive? It's competitive and it's also, as we touched on earlier, primates like power. And I think neurosurgery has long had this aura of mystique and excellence and whatever about it. So it's an invitation, I think, for people that are cloaked in that authority, a board -certified neurosurgeon is basically a walking, a fallacious appeal to authority. Right? You have license to walk into any room and act like you're, you know, an expert on whatever.

4:02:57And fighting that tendency is not something that most neurosurgeons do well. Humility isn't the forte. Yeah, one of the, so I have friends who know you and whenever they speak about you that So you have the surprising quality for neurosurgeon of humility. I think in the case of 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. But yeah, well that, I think that, you know, that allows me to play well at an Elon company because Elon, one of his strengths, I think, is to just instantly see through fallacy from authority.

4:03:50So 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, 10 rockets or something and he says, well, you did it wrong and we can do it better. Or I'm the guy that 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. He's going to say, well, I'm a human being that has a brain I can think from first principles myself. Thank you very much. And here's how I think it ought to be done.

4:04:25Let's go try it and see who's right. 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 a 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 of these folks, yeah, world exports and 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.

4:05:16And so, I like the analogy of how you polish rocks. You put hard things in a hard container and spin it. People bash against each other and out comes, 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 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.

4:06:10It's not put all my chips on this position and now I'm just going to walk away from it. Admit you are right. 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 now you're a Zeta chump because your idea got trounced. And you just have to recognize 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.

4:06:52I mean, that kind of that rapid iteration. Yeah, you'll at least be a member of a winning team. Right, the wave. What did you learn? You mentioned there's a lot of amazing neurosurgeons at USC, what lessons about surgery and life have you learned from those folks? Yeah, I think working your ass off, working hard while functioning as a member of a team, getting a job done that is incredibly difficult, working incredibly long hours, being up all night, taking care of someone that 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.

4:07:42These folks were relentless in their pursuit of excellent neurosurgical technique decade over decade and I think we're well recognized for that excellence. So it's, you know, especially Marty Weiss, Steve Giannata, Micopuzzle, 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. Like, what's that like you mentioned doing a surgery where the person is likely not to survive? Does that wear on you? Yeah. Yeah.

4:08:38You know, it's especially challenging 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 was part of the natural course of what is expected of them in the coming years, regardless. Taking care of a father of two or three, four young kids, someone in their 30s that didn't have it coming and they show up in your ER having their first seizure of their life and, well, I'm old, they've got a huge malignant, inoperable or incurable brain tumor.

4:09:37You can only do that, I think, a handful of times before it really starts eating away at your armor. or a young mother that shows up that has a giant hemorrhage in her brain that she's not going to survive from. They bring her four -year -old daughter in to say goodbye one last time before they turn the ventilator off.

4:10:06The 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, especially with young parents, that kills me. They had a lot more to give. The loss of those people specifically has a 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 borderline evil to fight against a company like Neuralink or to constantly be taking pot shots at us because what we're doing is to try to fix that stuff.

4:11:04We're trying to give people options to reduce suffering. We're trying to take the pain out of life that broken brains brings in. This is just our little way that we're fighting back against entropy, I guess. Yeah, the amount of suffering that's endured when some of the things that we take for granted that our brain is able to do is taken away as immense. And to be able to restore some of that functionality is a real good. Yeah, we're just starting. We're going to we're going to do so much more. Well, can you take me through the full procedure for implanting, say, the N1 chip in Newerling. Yeah, it's a really simple, really simple straightforward procedure.

4:12:00The human part of the surgery that I do is dead simple. It's one of the most basic neurosurgery procedures imaginable. And I think there's evidence that some version of it has been done for thousands of years. There are examples, I think from ancient Egypt of healed or partially healed of trefinations and from Peru or ancient times in South America, where these proto -surgeons would drill holes in people's skulls, 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 after a procedure.

4:12:48And 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 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. We call it the hand knob. The hand knob. It's all the finger movements, 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.

4:13:32And then you do a functional test in a special kind of MRI called a functional MRI, and this part of the brain lights up when people, 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 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.

4:14:20Remove that bit of skull. Open the lining of the brain, the covering of the brain. It's like a little bag of water that the brain floats in. and then show that part of the brain to our robot. And then this is where the robot shines. It can come in and take these tiny, 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 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 sowing the skin back together.

4:15:14So the whole thing is a few hours long, it's extremely low risk compared to the average neurosurgery involving the brain that might say open up a deep part of the brain or manipulate blood vessels in the brain. This opening on the surface of the brain with only cortical microinsertions carries significantly less risk than a lot of the tumor or aneurysm surgeries that are routinely done. So cortical microinsertions 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?

4:16:13Yeah, 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.

4:16:29I 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 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.

4:17:18And so the plant 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 the electrode insertion of the nirlink 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.

4:18:05So there could be just a very large number of ways that you could be surprised as a surgeon. When you enter a situation, there 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.

4:18:54And so surgical robots aren't there yet, but give it time. And then there could be a lot of sort of into 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 neurosurgeon, humans, there will not be many neurosurgeons left on this earth.

4:19:43I'm not worried about my job in the course of my professional life. I think I would tell my kids not necessarily to go in this line of work depending on how things look in 20 years. It's so fascinating because 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 tell them yeah go there's you will always have a job as your programmer because there's more and 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.

4:20:27So 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 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 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.

4:21:11Yeah, yeah, it's, I do the parts I can't do and it does the parts I can't do. And we are friends.

4:21:22I saw that there's a lot of practice going on. So I mean, everything in your link is tested extremely rigorously. But one of the things I saw that there's a proxy on which just the surgeries are performed. 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 is 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.

4:22:07I mean, first you watch your professors do a bunch of surgery and then finally they put the trivial parts of the surgery into your hands and then the more complex parts. And as your understanding of the point and the purposes of the surgery increases, you get more responsibility in the perfect condition doesn't always go well. In Neuralinx 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 just an amazing team of engineers build incredibly life -like models. one of the engineers, Fran Romano, in particular, built a pulsating brain in a custom 3D printed skull that matches exactly the patient's anatomy, including their face and scalp characteristics.

4:23:12And so, when I was able to practice that, I mean, it's as close as it really reasonably should get it to being the real thing in all the details, including 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, 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 neuronavigation equipment, standard surgical drills in the same OR that we do all of our practice surgeries in at NERLINK.

4:24:06And 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. So yeah, we kind of broke new ground on how extensively we practiced for this surgery. So there was a historic moment, a big milestone for Newerling in part for humanity with the first human getting a new link implant in January of this year. Take me through the surgery on Nolan. What did he feel like to be part of this? Yeah. Well, we're lucky to have just incredible partners at the Barrow Neralogic Institute.

4:24:56They are I think the premier neurosurgical hospital in the world. They made everything as easy as possible for the trial to get going and help us immensely with their expertise on how to arrange the details. It was a much more high pressure surgery in some ways. Even though the outcome wasn't particularly in question in terms of our participants' safety, the number of observers, the number of people, there's conference rooms 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 placing deep brain stimulation electrodes.

4:25:57And it had never been done on a human before. or 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 surgery is one of the smoothest outcomes we could have imagined. We were nervous. I mean, you're extremely quarterback in the Super Bowl kind of situation. Extremely nervous.

4:26:46Extremely. 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. And we 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 gonna be really good for for clicks.

4:27:36It just sucks because I think in it puts pressure on people, it discourages people 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. Calculated risks, you have to do all kind of safety precautions, but risks, never the less. And 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 really great that everything went just flawlessly, but it's unnecessary pressure, I would say.

4:28:17But now that there is a human with literal skin in the game, you know, there's a participant 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, hopefully people look in the mirror and realize that at some point. So did you get to actually front row seat like wash the robot work? Like what? You get to see the whole thing? Yeah, I mean, because an MD needs to be in charge of all of the medical decision making throughout the process, I unscrupred from the surgery after exposing the brain and presenting it to the robot and placed the targets on the robot software interface that tells the about where it's going to insert each thread that was done with my hand on the mouse for whatever that's worth.

4:29:16So you were the one placing the targets. Oh, cool. So the robot with a computer vision provides a bunch of candidates and you've got to finalize the decision. Right. You know, 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 targets. So you know that allows you know the human robot operator to select really good areas of brain and make dense applications of targets in those regions.

4:30:04The regions we think are going to have the most high fidelity representations of finger movements and arm movement intentions. I've seen images of this and for me with OCDs for some reason are really pleasant. I think there's a subreddit called oddly satisfying. Yeah, I love that subreddit. It's oddly satisfying to see the different target sites avoiding the blood vessels and also maximizing 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 it's extremely satisfying watching the electrodes themselves go into the brain and not cause bleeding.

4:30:48Yeah, so you said the feeling was of relief when everything went perfectly. How deep in the brain can you currently go and eventually go? Let's say on the neural link side, it seems the deeper you go in the brain, the more challenging it becomes. Yeah. So talking broadly about neurosurgery, we can get anywhere. It's routine for me to put deep brain stimulating electrodes near the very bottom of the brain. and 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. And we can do that with very high precision.

4:31:38I use a robot from Globus to do that surgery. You know, several times a month, it's pretty routine. What are your eyes in that situation? What are you seeing? 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 the MRI and the CT in software. You have a plan based on the MRI where you can see these nuclei deep in the brain.

4:32:30You 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 manual actuators with little tick marks on them. The modern version of that is these are robot, you know, just like a little Cooca arm you You might see a building cars at the Tesla factory. This small robot arm can show you the trajectory that you intended from the Priyap 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.

4:33:41So you end up with the electrode very, very precisely placed far from the skull surface. Now that's standard technology that's already been out in the world for a while. Neuralink right now is focused entirely on cortical targets, surface targets, 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 bleed somewhere in the brain.

4:34:36As a result of passing that wire blindly into the deep part of the brain, that's not an acceptable safety profile for a neural link. We start from the position that we want this to be dramatically, maybe two or three orders of magnitude, safer than that. Safe enough, really, that 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 settled on a final solution for arbitrarily approaching deep targets in the brain. It's interesting is like you have to avoid blood loss of 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.

4:35:35But how do you map out that in a way that's like super stable? It's a lot of interesting challenges there, right? Yeah. But there's a lot to do on the surface, luckily. Exactly. So we've got vision on the surface. We actually have made a huge amount of progress, sowing electrodes into the spinal cord as a potential work around 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 incredible. 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.

4:36:21So how hard is that to do? We have that working in very crude forms and animals. That's amazing. Yeah, we've done it. So similar to like with Nolan, he's able to digitally move the cursor. Here you're doing 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 their legs and then sort of walking pattern, again, early days, but the future is bright for this kind of thing. And people with paralysis should look forward to that bright future. They're going to have options. Yeah. And there's a lot of sort of intermediate or extra options where you take like an optimist robot, like the arm and to be able to control the arm.

4:37:18Yeah. The fingers, the hands at the arm. Sure. As a prosthetic. For example, phylogencer are getting better too. So scalthans. Yeah. So that goes hand in hand. Although I didn't quite understand until thinking about a deeply and do more research about your 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. And now more and more so much can be done in the digital world that it can reconnect you to the outside world.

4:38:09It 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. Just going back to the surgery, your whole journey, you mentioned to me, I'll fly you have surgery on Monday. So you're 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.

4:39:04Repetitions, 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, if you're not a sociopath, I think your patients bring that with them to the office visits every day. They force you to want to do better all the time. Yeah, to 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?

4:39:52Yeah, 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 consequences for how their head can be fixed and in sort of the frame that we use and how the robot has to approach the skull. And yeah, people's bodies are built as differently as, you know, the people you see walking down the street as much variability in body shape and size as you see there. We see in brain anatomy and skull anatomy.

4:40:44There 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 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 messes 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, I don't know what's going on. So how much are biological systems in reality?

4:41:32Like 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 gyri, 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 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.

4:42:28The wrinkles are 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 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, so you have this strip of brain running down the top. We have a primary motor area and I'm sure you've seen this picture of the homunculus laid over the surface of the brain.

4:43:11The 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 faces 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 left side of the brain, in most people 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 wrinkle for hand knob is right in the middle of that. And vision is back here.

4:44:01Yep. Also, close to the surface. Vision's a little deeper. And so, you know, this gets to your question about how deep can you get to do vision. We can't just do the surface of the brain. We have to be able to go in not as deep as we have to go for DBS, but maybe a centimeter deeper than we're used to for hand insertions. And so that's, you know, work in progress. That's a new set of challenges to overcome. By the way, you mentioned the Utah array, and I just saw a picture of that, and that thing looks terrifying. Yeah, that fails. Because it's rigid, and then if you look at the threads, they're flexible.

4:44:46What can you say that's interesting to you about the flexible, that kind of approach of the flexible threads to do over the electrodes next to the neurons. Yeah, I mean, the goal there comes from experience. I mean, we stand on the shoulders of people that made uta rays and used uta rays for decades before we ever even came along. Nurelinka Rose, partly this approach to technology arose out of a need recognized after Utah rays would fail routinely because the rigid electrodes, those spikes that are literally hammered using an air hammer into the brain, those spikes generate a bad immune response that encapsulates the electrode spikes in a scar tissue essentially.

4:45:40And so one of the projects that was being worked on 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. 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, NERLINX approach of using highly flexible, tiny electrodes avoids a lot of the bleeding, avoids a lot of the immune response that ends up happening when rigid electrodes are pounded into the brain.

4:46:24And so, what we see is our electrode longevity and functionality and the health of the brain tissue immediately surrounding the electrode is excellent. I mean, it goes on for years now in our animal models. What do most people not understand about the biology of the brain? We'll mention the vascular chart. That's really interesting. I think the most interesting, maybe underappreciated fact is that it really does control almost everything. I mean, I don't know, out of a blue example, imagine 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.

4:47:12Say, blood pressure, you want to modulate blood pressure. There are legitimate targets in the brain for doing that. That, things that aren't immediately obvious as brain problems are potentially solvable in the brain. And so I think it's an under -explored area for primary treatments of all the things that bother people. That's a really fascinating way to look at it. like there's a lot of conditions when I think I have nothing to do with the brain, but they might just be symptoms of something that actually started in the brain. The actual source of the problem, the primary source is something in the brain.

4:47:56Yeah, not always. I mean, you know, their kidney disease is real, but there are levers you can pull in the brain that affect all of these systems. There's knobs. Yeah. On -off switches and knobs in the brain, from which this all originates. Would you have a neural link chip implanted in your brain? Yeah. I think use case right now is use a mouse. Right. I can already do that. And so there's no value proposition on safety grounds alone. Sure. Do it tomorrow. You know, you say the use case of the mouse. Is it after like researching all this and part of it is just watching all and have so much fun?

4:48:45If you can get that bits per second look really high with the mouse, like being able to interact. If you think about the way on the smartphone, the way you swipe, that was transformational. Yeah. How do I interact with the thing? It's subtle. You don't realize it, but to be able to touch a phone and to scroll with your finger, that's like that changed everything. People were sure you need a keyboard to type.

4:49:13There's a lot of HCI aspects to that that changed how we interact with computers. So there could be a certain rate of speed with a mouse that would change everything. You might be able to just click around on the screen extremely fast. And that, if it, I can't see myself getting a neural link for much more rapid interaction with digital devices. Yeah, I think recording speech intentions from the brain might change things as well. You know, the value proposition for the average person. A keyboard is a pretty clunky human interface. requires a lot of training. It's highly variable in the maximum performance that the average person can achieve.

4:50:03I think taking that out of the equation and just having a natural word to computer interface 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, but it's a gotten super accurate. It'd be hilarious if people went for neural ink 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 that can be an invisible headphone, say, and the ability to think words into software and have it respond to you.

4:50:57You know, that starts to sound sort of like embedded superintelligence. You know, if you can silently ask for the Wikipedia article on any subject and have it read to you without any observable change happening the outside world, you know, for one thing standardized testing is obsolete. Yeah. If it's done well on the UX side, it could change, I don't know, for transformed society, but it really can create a kind of shift in the way we interact with digital devices in the way that it's morph -unded. Now, I would just having to look into the safety of everything involved. I would totally try But so it doesn't have to go to some like incredible thing where you have, it connects your vision or to some other, like it connects all over your brain.

4:51:49That could be like just connecting to the hand knob. You might have a lot of interesting interaction, human computer interaction possibilities. 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, Sergei Staviski's lab that basically made an initial solve of speech decode and something like 125 ,000 words 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.

4:52:33Right. So like do that inner voice. Now 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 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 it like any other skill. Yeah. like touch typing, you develop in that same kind of way. That is, to me it's just really fascinating. To be able to even to play with that. Honestly, like I would get in your lane just to be able to play with that. Just to play with the capacity, the capability of my mind to learn this skill.

4:53:14It'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 caveman right now. We're like banging rocks with a stick and thinking that we're making music. At some point when these are more widespread, there's going to be the equivalent of a piano that, you know, someone can make art with their brain in a way that we didn't even anticipate. Looking forward to it. Give it to like a teenager. Like anytime I think I'm good at something else, I was good.

4:53:52But like, I don't know, even with the best per second on playing a video game, you realize you give it to a teenager, you're given your link to a teenager, just the large number of them, the kind of stuff that get good at stuff. They're gonna get like hundreds of best per second. Yeah. Even just with the current technology, probably. Probably. Just because it's also a dictating how 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.

4:54:36Yeah. 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. So I hear. Yes. So this is the little subtle thing. It's a passive device that you use for unlocking a safe with top secrets or what is the use of it? What's the story behind it? I'm not the first one. There's this whole community of weirdo biohackers that have done this stuff. I think one of the early use cases was storing private crypto wallet keys and whatever. I dabbled in that a bit and had some fun with it. You had some big, implanted in your bodies and why you can't tell where.

4:55:23Yeah, actually, yeah. It was the modern day equivalent of finding change in the sofa cushions after, 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 primary use case is mostly as a tech demonstrator. It has my business card on it. You can scan that and by touching it to your phone, it opens the front door to my house, whatever, simple stuff. It's a cool step.

4:56:08It'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 kind of a mysticism around the barrier of our skin. We're completely fine with knee replacements, hip replacements, dental implants. But there's a mysticism still around and the inviolable barrier that the skull represents. And I think that needs to be treated like any other pragmatic barrier. The question isn't how incredible is it to open the skull?

4:56:55The question is, what benefit can we provide? So from all the surgeries you've done, 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 plasticity decreases with age, healing decreases with age. I have too much gray hair 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.

4:57:43But, yeah, 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 Schiff, Jonathan Baker, and others who have a cohort of patients with moderate traumatic brain injury who have had electrodes placed in a deep nucleus in the brain called the centromedian nucleus or just near the centromedian nucleus. 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.

4:58:27They'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 neural ink and other technologies like this is from a purely utilitarian standpoint, 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 caregiver resources? Can we put them in a position to be fully independent, taking care of themselves, giving back to their communities?

4:59:12I think that's a very compelling proposition and what motivates a lot of what I do and what a lot of the people at Neuralinck are working for. It's just the cool possibility that if you put a Neuralinck in there, that the brain adapts, like the other part of the brain adapts to, and it integrates it. The capacity of the brain to do that is really interesting, probably unknown to the degree to which you can do that. But you're now connecting an external thing to it, especially once it's doing stimulation. Like the biological brain and the electronic brain outside of it working together, they get the possibilities they're really interesting.

4:59:57It'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 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 every potential downstream consequence of a single change that we make. Do you see yourself doing, so mention P1, surges of P2, P3, P4, P5?

5:00:48Just more and more and more humans. I think it's a certain kind of brittleness or 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 wanna get away from 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.

5:01:44All right, I'll sign up for that. Did you ever anthropomorphize the robot R1 like do you give it a name? Do you see it as like a friend that's like working together with you? To a certain degree it's or anatomy who's gonna put it down? To a certain degree 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.

5:02:28Yeah, I'm not threatened by it. Keep telling yourself that. Yes. 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 has it changed your understanding of life and death? Yeah.

5:02:54You know, it gives you a very visceral sense, and this may sound right, but it gives you visceral sense that death is inevitable. On one hand, you are, as a neurosurgeon, you're deeply involved in these hard to fathom tragedies. Young parents dying, leaving a four -year -old behind to say.

5:03:26And on the other hand, you know, it takes the sting out of it a bit because you see how just mind -nummingly universal death is. There is zero chance that I'm going to avoid it. I know, you know, techno optimists right now and longevity buffs right now would disagree on that 0 .000 % 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. On the other hand, it's just one of the hardest things to imagine, inflicting on anyone that you love is having them gone.

5:04:32I mean, I'm sure you've had friends that aren't living anymore and it's hard to even think about them. And so I wish I had arrived at the point of Nirvana where death doesn't have a sting. I'm not worried about it, but I can at least say that I'm comfortable with the certainty of it. If not having found out how to take the tragedy out of it when I think about my kids, It's either not having me or me not having them or my wife. Maybe I've come to accepting intellectual certainty of it, but it may be 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 end.

5:05:30And I don't mean like in some 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. And the fact that this light that's shining, this consciousness is going to no longer be at one moment, maybe today. It's like, it feels 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. I think the more you are able to really think through it, the more terrifying it is. It's not such a simple thing. Oh, what's the way life is? If you really can load that that in, it's hard.

5:06:24But I think that's why the Stoics did it because it like helps you get your shit together and be like the moment, every single moment you're alive is just beautiful. And it's terrifying that it's going to end. It's like almost like you're shivering in the cold, a child helpless, this kind of feeling. And then it makes you, when you have When you have the warmth, when you have the safety, when you have the love to really appreciate it. I feel like sometimes in your position, when you mention armor, just to see death, it might make you not be able to see that. The finiteness of life, because if you kept looking at that, it might break you.

5:07:14So it's good to know that you're kind of still struggling with that. There's the neurosurgeon and then there's a human. 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 times, how many of these can you see and not say I can't do this anymore.

5:07:44But I mean, you said it well. I think it gives you an opportunity to just appreciate that you're alive today. And, you know, 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 gigantic leap for humanity. It's a really interesting one. And it's cool because 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 that would go and explore even the Amazon jungle for the first time.

5:08:29It's just those are the early steps, yeah, or early steps into space, So 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 you 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.

5:09:17But 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 that light. You can give people a knob to take away suicidal ideation, suicidal intention. I would give them that knob. I don't know how you justify not doing that. You could think about like all the suffering that's going on in the world, like every single a human being that's suffering right now, it'll 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 on a grand scale, this is pretty exciting.

5:10:07Because there's a lot of people suffering and most of them suffer quietly. And we turn our, we look away too often. And we should remember those are suffering, because it once again, most of them are suffering quietly. Well, and on a grander scale, the fabric of society, people have a lot of complaints about how our social fabric is working or not working, how our politics is working or not working.

5:10:39Those things are made of neurochemistry too in aggregate, right? Our politics is composed of individuals with human brains and the way it works or doesn't work is potentially tunable 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. I don't think that leads to a functional society. 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.

5:11:36There'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 to, 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? I have this sense that I never found it, never removed it, like a mentor and Harry Potter. I have this sense that consciousness is a lot less magical than our instincts want to claim it is.

5:12:17It seems to me like a useful analog for thinking about what consciousness is in the brain. And you know, is that we have a really good intuitive understanding of what it means to say touch your skin and know what's being touched. I think consciousness is just that level of sensory mapping applied to 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 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.

5:13:13Right? And that sensory system that feels the brain working is consciousness. It's 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. And there's this awesome long history of people looking at whatever the latest discovery in physics is to explain consciousness because it's the most magical, the most out there thing that you can think of and people always want to do that with consciousness.

5:14:07I don't think that's necessary. It's just a very useful and gratifying way of feeling your brainwork. And, And as we said, it's one heck of a brain. Everything we see around us, everything we love, everything that's beautiful, came from brains like these. It's all electrical activity happening inside your skull. And I for one, I'm grateful to this people like you that are exploring all the ways that it works and all the ways it can be made better. I'm glad to hear. Thank you so much for talking today. It's been a joy. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Matthew McDougall. And now, dear friends, here's Bliss Chapman, brain interface software lead at Neuralink.

5:14:56You told me that you've met hundreds of people with spinal cord injuries or with ALS and that your motivation for helping at Neuralink is grounded and wanted to help them. Can you describe this motivation? Yeah. First, just to 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 really in which I can share the stories as powerful as they can, but just I think to summarize at a very high level what I hear over and over again is that people with 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.

5:15:38For 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 caretaker to be able to put something in their mouth. For some folks it 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 for some folks it's as simple as just being able to respond to their kid in time before they, you know, run away or get interested in something else.

5:16:12And 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, you can make a lot of progress on. And at the end of the day, I think that's 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.

5:16:52Yeah, and I see, 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 PCI, I'm happy and excited and willing to support it anyway I can, folks working on eye tracking systems, working on speech detect systems, working on head trackers or mouthsticks or quads. I haven't met many engineers and folks in the community that do exactly those things. 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. I want to emphasize that there can be many solutions out there that can help with these problems and BCI is one of a collection of such solutions.

5:17:31So BCI in particular, I think, offers several advantages here. And I think the folks that recognize this immediately are 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 to the degree that I've learned a huge amount just working with in the first Narland clinical trial and understanding from him and his words, why this device is impactful for him.

5:18:07And it's a nuanced topic. It can be the case that even if you can achieve the same thing, for example, with a mouth stick when navigating computer, he doesn't have access to that mouth stick every single minute of the day. He only has access when someone is available to put it in front of him. And so a BCI can really offer a level 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.

5:18:38You 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 of recovery 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 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.

5:19:25A couple maybe special moments during that whole process that I'll never really truly forget. One of them is it's during the actual surgery. You know at that point in time I know Nolan quite well, I know his family and so I think the the initial reaction when Nolan is rolling the operator and it's just oh shit kind of reaction, but at that point, most of memory kicks in and you sort of go into, you know, that your body just do 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 into the brain.

5:20:08And 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 surgery to a debug. And because I had that sort of spectator view of the surgery, I had 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 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.

5:20:41So, 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, the neural 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 operating room right after we finished all the threads and certions, I started collecting what's called broadband data.

5:21:20So 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 voltage essentially measured by the electrode. And we have a certain mode in our application that allows us to visualize where detected spikes are. So it visualizes where in the broadband signal, it's very, very raw form of the data, a neuron is actually spiking. 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 a device and holding in my hand.

5:21:59So this is no signal processing, the raw data, and then the signal processing is on top of it. You're seeing the spikes detected. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the UX too. Yes. That looks beautiful as well. During the procedure, there was actually a lot of camera men in the room. So they also were curious and wanted to see there's several neurosurgeons in the room who were all just excited to see robots taking their job. And they're all crowded around with a small little iPhone watching this live brain data stream out of his brain. What was that like seeing the robot do some of the surgeries? So the computer vision aspect where it detects all the spots that avoid the blood vessels and then obviously with the human supervision and actually doing the really high precision connection of the threads to the brain.

5:22:47Yeah, that's a good question. My answer is going to be pretty lame here, but it was boring. Yeah, I've seen it so many times. Yeah, that's exactly how you want surgery. If you wanted 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 proxies and this is just another day. Yeah. So what about when on on walk up? Well, do you remember a moment where 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.

5:23:26Yeah, yeah, so we are quite excited to move as quickly as we can and Nolan was really, really excited to get started. He wanted to get started actually the day of surgery, but we waited till the next morning, very patiently, so long night. And the next morning in the ICU where he was recovering, he wanted to get started and actually start to understand what kind of signal we can measure from his brain. And maybe for folks who are not familiar with the NERLINK system, we implant the NERLINK system or the NERLINK implant in the motor cortex. So the motor cortex is responsible for representing things like motor intent.

5:24:02If 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 to pinky, this sort of signal can be present in the motor cortex. So one of the ways we start to 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 that visual is 3D hand opening closing or index finger modulating up and down.

5:24:32And 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 to neural 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 was a first indication that, okay, we can potentially use that modulation to do useful things in the world. For example, control on computer cursor.

5:25:01And 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. You know, we're not you. You're able to 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. that he played for a bit longer and 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.

5:25:30And 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 a single channel, is that associated with a single electrode? Yeah, it's a channel electrode or interchangeable. And there's a 1 ,024 of those. 1 ,024, yeah.

5:26:02It's incredible that that works. That really, when I was 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. In fact, 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. There are 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. But it feels like that's just the beginning of figuring out how that signal can be used is really, really effectively.

5:26:47I should also just, there's so many fascinating details here, but you mentioned the body mapping step. 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, you know, I guess it visualizes you moving the hand. And there's a very like, like a sexy polished interface It says, hello. I don't know if there's a voice component, but it just felt like when you wake up in a really nice video game, and this is a tutorial at the beginning of that video game. Yeah, this is what you're supposed to do.

5:27:26It'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 underrated for BCI development in general. There's a whole interaction effect between the ways in which you visualize an instruction to the user and the kinds of signal you can get back. And that quality of your behavioral alignment to the neural signal is a function of how good you are at expressing to the user what you want them to do. And so 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 as it provides the user.

5:28:02All these little details matter a lot. So maybe it'd be nice to get into 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 a 1024 electrodes and that's collecting raw data Rossing what does that signal look like and What are the different steps along the way before it's transmitted and what is transmitted and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, this is going to be a fun one. Let's go. So maybe before diving into what we do, it's worth understanding what we're trying to measure because that dictates a lot of the requirements for the system that we build.

5:28:45And 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, 100 microns of that cell. 100 micron is a very, very tiny distance. And so the number of neurons that you're going to pick up with any given electrode is 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.

5:29:18So from the start of the spike to the end of the spike, that whole width of that 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 1024 electrodes about 20 ,000 times a second. 20 ,000 times a second means we're already given one millisecond window.

5:29:53So we have about 20 samples that tell us what that exact shape of that actual potential looks like. And once we've sort of sampled at super high rate 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 subspace of neural activity is just when our spikes occurring. Essentially, everything that we care about for decoding can be captured or represented in the frequency characteristics of spike trains, meaning how often our spikes firing in any given window of time.

5:30:36And so that allows us to do a crazy amount of compression from this very rich, high density signal to something that's much, much more sparse and compressible that can be sent out over a wireless 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 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 spike sort which spikes are coming from what neuron.

5:31:22And this is a problem that's pursued in academic work because you care about it for understanding what's going on in the underlying sort of 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 understand. For 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 a random projection of neurons to electrodes, and there may be in some cases more than one neuron per electrode.

5:31:56But if that number is small enough, those signals can be thought of as 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 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 actually represent? Because you know that when that channel is firing in concert with these other 50 channels, that means move left.

5:32:27But when that same channel is firing with concert with these others, and channels, that means move right. Okay, so you have to do this kind of spike detection and onboard, and you have to do that super efficiently, so fast and not use too much power, because you don't wanna be generating too much heat, so it have to be a super simple signal processing step. 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. I'll say that I don't think we're at the final step of this process.

5:33:05This 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 areas to these ideas, so I don't want to claim that these are original NARL and CIDIs or anything like that. But one of these ideas is basically to build a convolutional filter, or almost, if you will, that slides across the signal and looks for a certain template to be matched. That template consists of how deep the spike modulates, how much it recovers, and what the duration and window of time is that the whole process takes.

5:33:39And if you can see the signal that that template is matched within a certain balance, then you can say, OK, 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 Spark Detection approach, something called Spark Band Power. 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.

5:34:18You might be able to pick up population level activity of things that are slightly outside the normal recording radius, but what neuroscientists sometimes refer to as the hash of activity, the other stuff that's going on. And you can look at sort of across many channels, how that sort of background noise is behaving, you might be able to get more juice out of the single that way. But it comes at a cost. That single 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.

5:34:46So there's a lot of different challenges associated with these different modalities. So also in terms of communication, your limited by the amount of data you can send. And also because you're currently using the Bluetooth protocol, you have to batch stuff together. But you have to also do this keeping the 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.

5:35:23And I really do think it's quite possible that within, you know, five to 10 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 or eSport competitors. Unless people without paralysis are also allowed to implant you, right? Which is, it is another way to interact with a digital device. And there's something to that. 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.

5:36:14If I can achieve a bits per second that 10x what I can do with the mouse, that's a really interesting possibility of 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, 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 millisecond 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.

5:36:45But for sort of like reaction time style games where you just want to, someone's over here, sniping, you know, that kind of thing. You actually do have just an inherent advantage because you don't need to go through muscle. So the question is just how much faster can you make it? And we're already faster than what you would do if you're going through muscle from a latency point of view. And we're in the early stage of that. I think we can push it. So our end -to -end latency right now from brain spike to cursor movement is about 22 milliseconds. If you think about the best mice in the world, the best gaming mice, that's about 5 milliseconds of latency, depending on how you measure, depending how fast your screen refreshes, there's a lot of characteristics that matter there.

5:37:19But 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 competitive and slightly faster than what you'd get by actually 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 I was 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?

5:37:46He 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 does that like have the thing just be so immediate so fluid that it feels like it's happening before you're actually intending to move? Yeah, I suppose we've gotten used to that latency, that natural latency that happens. So is the currently the bottleneck of 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 of things.

5:38:16So 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 are on the order of 7 .5 milliseconds. seconds. 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.

5:38:55You need your whole system to be able to be as reactive as the limits of what the technology can offer. You need 120 hertz just doesn't work anymore if you're trying to have something respond at something that's at the level of one millisecond. That's a really cool challenge. I also like that for a t -shirt, the best miles in the world. Tell me on the receiving end, so the decoding step. Now we figured out what the spikes are. We got them all together and I was 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 have no clue what it means to decode brand activity.

5:39:33Actually, even if we zoom out beyond that, what is the app? So there's an implant that's wirelessly communicating with any digital device that has an app installed. So maybe can you tell me how level what the app is? What the software is outside of the brain? Yeah, so maybe working back or something 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 UX is 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, et cetera.

5:40:24And 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. We spend 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.

5:40:58So 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 split connection to the application, and turning it into, for example, a mouse movement. And at decoding step, you can think of it in a couple of 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 there will be asked to push that cursor to the right.

5:41:30Then 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, a mapping of given this brain data and that imagined behavior map one to the other. And then at 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 the live streamer brain data coming off the rim plant, you decoded 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.

5:42:01One 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.

5:42:36So 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 users intending to do. If you want to build the world's best mouse, you really want it to be as responsive as possible.

5:43:06You want it to be able to do exactly what the user is intending at every step along the way, not just on average, be correct when you're trying to move it from left to right. Building a behavioral calibration game or software experience that gives you that level of resolution is what we spend a lot of time working on. The calibration process, the interface, has to encourage precision. being like, whatever it does, it should be super intuitive. The next thing the human is going to likely do is exactly that intention that you need and only that intention. And you don't have any feedback except that may be speaking to you afterwards.

5:43:45What they actually did, you can't, oh yeah. Right. So that's it. 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. It's how it works. Yeah. For the calibration and calibration, at least at this stage of neural link, it's like fundamental to the operation of the thing and not just calibration, but continued calibration essentially. Yeah. And maybe that you said something that I think is worth exploring there a little bit. You said it's primarily a UX challenge.

5:44:22I think a large component of it is, but there is also a very interesting machine learning challenge here, which is given some dataset, including some on average correct behavior of asking the user to move up or move down, move right, left. And given a dataset of neural spikes, is there a way to infer in some kind of semi -supervised or entirely unsupervised way what that high resolution version of their intention is? And if you think about it, there probably is, because there are enough data points in the dataset, enough constraints on your model that there should be a way with the right sort of formulation to let the model figure out itself.

5:44:57For 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 if 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.

5:45:27Those 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 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.

5:45:57Another 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 than these heuristics that are trying to guesstimate at each millisecond what the user is trying to do.

5:46:27So 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 do we supposed to be visualizing? There's a cursor, and you want to move that cursor to the right of the left, up and down, or maybe you move them by a certain offset. So that's one way. Is that the best way to do calibration? So for example, an alternative crazy way that probably is playing a role here is 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.

5:47:11Is that not an effective way for initial calibration? Yeah, great question. There's a lot to unpack there. So the first thing I would draw distinction between a sort of open loop, first closed 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 of 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 its mapping again from brain data 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 in that data to give you a boost in performance.

5:47:51There's a lot of challenges associated with both of these techniques and we can sort of rabbit hole into both of 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 necessarily perceive themselves or feel the mouse under their hand when they're using an open, when they're trying to do an open -to -calibration. They're being asked to perform something like, imagine if you sort of had your whole right arm numbed and you stuck it in a box and you couldn't see it. So you had no visual feedback and you had no purpose of the feedback about what the position or activity of your arm was.

5:48:23Now 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 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 in 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. 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 of global minimum.

5:49:02Maybe that your first model was noisy in some ways, or maybe just had some like work. There's some part of the data distribution that didn't cover super well. The user now figures out because their user like no one, they figured out the right sequence of imagined motions, or the right angle they have to hold their hand at 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 in 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 Yeah, actually just to stay on the on the closed loop I have So, I've seen situations, this actually happened watching psychology grad students, they used pieces of software when they don't know how to program themselves, they used pieces software as somebody else's, and it has a bunch of bugs.

5:49:56And they figured out, like, and they've been using it for years. They figured out ways to walk around. Oh, that just happens. Like, nobody had, nobody like considers maybe we should fix this. They just adapt. And that's a really interesting notion that we just said we're really good at adapting But you need to still, that might not be the optimal. 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. First and foremost, I'd 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.

5:50:32So 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're interested in problems that aren't going to be solved inherently by scaling channel account, 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 to tackle is that you want to choose the one that's going to be the easiest to debug.

5:51:02Because if you can do that, 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 around the screen, they may be attempting something different than what your model is outputting.

5:51:33So 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 guesstimation 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. Another thing 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. Even today with the solutions we have now, and the academia has built up over decades, the level of control that can be given to a user today is quite useful.

5:52:12It 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 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 nail that problem. In 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 users are 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.

5:52:47It 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 building a dataset 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 Neurospikes to predict exactly what the mouse is doing, that model will perform worse than a model that is trained to predict sort of higher 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 handbook.

5:53:21So the intention, not 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'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 probably in terms of the control of the mouth.

5:53:59So for open loop, just to clarify, so whenever the person is tasked to like move the mouth 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. So you could imagine giving the user a 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 very specific example. Like maybe your calibration task looks like you're trying to move the cursor, a certain position offset.

5:54:32So 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 trend 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 imagined. And I could give the user some sort of feedback of how consistent are they across different trials.

5:55:04You 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 there may be 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 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.

5:55:38How often do you have to recalibrate because of the signal drift? Yeah. So this is a problem we've worked on both with NHP, non -human primates before our clinical trial, and then also with Nolan during the clinical trial. Maybe the first thing that's worth stating 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 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.

5:56:14So maybe the first solution here that's important is that they can recalibrate whenever they want. This is something that no one has the ability to do today. So you can recalibrate this system at 2 a .m. in the middle of the night without his caretaker to our 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 recalibration state depends really on his appetite for performance. There are, we observe a degradation through time of how well any individual model works.

5:56:47But this can be mitigated behaviorally by the user adapting their control strategy. It can also be mitigated through a combination 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 is 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.

5:57:18By the way, all of 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. So, I mean, it's a really well done interface. It's really, 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 constantly improving. So that could have been just a snapshot of that particular moment in a particular day. Well, 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 and the left side of the screen to kind of adjust the bias.

5:58:01Yeah, that's one interface action, I guess, to adjust the bias. Yeah, so this is actually an idea that comes out of academia. There is 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.

5:58:36And it turns out that that's one of the first sort of qualia of the cursor control experience that's impacted by neural on C. Schneider. Quality of the cursor experience. I don't know how else to describe it. I'm not the guy moving. Very poetic guy. 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.

5:59:16At the end of the day, it really is truly the case that UX is how the thing works. It's not just what's showing on the screen. It's also what control surfaces does a decoder provide the user. We want them to feel like they're in the F1 card, not some like minivan, right? That's really truly is how we think about it. No one himself is an F1 fan. We refer to ourselves as a pick -room. he really is truly the F1 driver. And there's different 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.

5:59:48And maybe one nuance of this is, 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 it on the trackpad, there's a different response function, in a different curve to how much a movement translates to input to the computer, then when you do it physically with the mouse. And that's because somebody sat down a long time ago when they're designing the initial input systems to any computer, and they thought through exactly how it feels to use these different systems.

6:00:19And 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 a tutor 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 UX is completely fades into the background and it becomes something that's so natural and intuitive that it's subconscious to the user. And they just should feel like they have basically direct control over the cursor and just does what they want it to do.

6:00:50They're not thinking about the implementation of how to make it do what they want it to do. It's just doing what they want it to do. Is there some kind of things along the lines of like Fitzlaw where you should move the 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. That's different than actual with a mouse. I think we're in the early stages of discovering those laws.

6:01:34So 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 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 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.

6:02:15In a different scenario where you're trying to detect insurance far or 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 is true in 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 different trade -offs of how precise you need to be before it becomes useful to the end user.

6:02:45For 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 that position A and the currently position B, they're trying to navigate over time to get between those two points. And as long as the output of the model is on average correct, they can sort of steer through time with the user control loop in the mix that can get to the point they want to get to. The same is 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.

6:03:40Assigning costs 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, realize there's a cost to like sending the text early. It's like a very expensive cost. It's super annoying. If you're a cursor, imagine if your cursor and misclicked every once in a while. That's 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 low speeds or desire to hold still is correlated with when the user is attempting to click.

6:04:31Wow, that is really fascinating. It's also not the case, 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.

6:04:59And 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 bit per second. What can you 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. And that means that they can do it at the same speed as what I can do.

6:05:33It means that they have access to all the same functionality that I have, including all those little details like command tab, command space, all this stuff, and you'd 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 creative target. And basically we compute a score, which is dependent on how fast and accurately they can select and then how small are the targets.

6:06:01And the more targets that are on the screen, the smaller they are, the more information 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 could 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.

6:06:28But 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 its BCI It's very important for progress that you have standardized metrics so people can compare across different techniques and approaches.

6:07:01How old does this do? So yeah, big kudos to him and to all the team that's 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 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 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.

6:07:30That's the simplest form of the game. And the prior records here in academic work and at NERLINK internally with sort of NHPs have all been matched or beaten by by Nolan with his NERLINK device. So 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 neural linker performance is 10 BPS. You can think of it roughly as he's 85 % the level of control of a median neural linker using their cursor to slot blue targets on the screen.

6:08:10And 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 fork to six bps and then six to a bps Are going to be the ones that get us from eight to ten 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 web grid in March you said that he selected 89 ,285 targets in Webgrid.

6:08:49So he loves this game. He's really serious about improving his performance in this game. So what is that 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 no one side of 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 no one's performance is so good It's because of 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.

6:09:28to 6 a .m. He'll be playing Webgrid just because he wants to push it to the limits of what you can do and You know, this is not us like asking him to do that. I want to be clear like we're not saying hit you should play Webgrid tonight We just gave him the game as part of our research, and he is able to play independently and practice whenever he wants, and he really pushes hard to push it, to technology to the absolute limit. And he views this, his job really, to make us be the bottleneck. And boy, has he done that well? And so the first thing to acknowledge is that, he was extremely motivated to make this work.

6:09:58I've also had the privilege to meet other clinical trial participants from BrainGain, other trials, and they very much share the same attitude. They view this as their life's work to advanced technology as much as they can. And if that means selecting 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. OK, so now how do you sort of get from where he started, which is no cursor control to APPS? 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.

6:10:32And 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 simulation 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 that we're able to record for his pinkiness dump and his index finger.

6:11:01So 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 controlling the cursor by rolling his wrist side to side, or by moving his entire arm, by hitting 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 Just to clarify, it's through the body mapping procedure that you're able to figure out which finger he can move.

6:11:39Yes, that's one way to do it. Maybe one nuance of when he's doing it, he can imagine many more things that 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 will work best from that body mapping procedure. We know that this particular action 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.

6:12:10How 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 day, it looked like he wasn't doing super well. It looked like the model wasn't performing super well and he was not 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 abstract intention to move the cursor on the screen. And I cannot tell you where the difference between those two things are.

6:12:42I really truly cannot. He's trying to explain it to me before. I cannot give a first person the count of what that's like. But the expletives that he uttered in that moment were, 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, trying to move the cursor with different and kinds of intentions.

6:13:21But 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 for your mind. UX is how it works. And the ideal UX is one that 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. But I wonder 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, the truth is I don't know.

6:14:04I'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 figure it out himself. But now that we know that that's a possibility, that maybe there's a way to, for example, hint the user, don't try super hard during calibration. Just do something that feels natural or just directly control the cursor.

6:14:32You 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 to acknowledge 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, this is the cool thing about humans.

6:15:04Once 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 unlocked for everybody. Because just the knowledge sometimes is the thing that they're unable to do it. Yeah, I mean, 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 subspaces to continue exploring further. Again, thanks to Nolan and the many hours he's put into this.

6:15:36And so even just that help, like help constrain sort of the beam search of different approaches that we could explore really helps us have 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 Nolan, and all the participants that came before him to make this technology a reality. So how often are the updates to the Dakota? 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.

6:16:08because 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 on the jacoder side? Yeah, a couple of 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 no ability to just go use device, how anybody would want to use their MacBook.

6:16:39So what he's referring to is, I think, usually in the contestive research session where we're trying many, many different approaches to even unsupervised approaches that we talked about earlier to try to come up with better -waste S -minis true intention and more accurately decoded. And 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 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 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.

6:17:15So he's been able to, he's a very articulate person who 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 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 solve it. And it often happens that those things are addressed within a couple of hours of him giving us his feedback. That's a kind of iteration cycle we'll have. So sometimes at the beginning of the session, we'll give us feedback. At the end of the session, he's giving us feedback on the next iteration of that process or that setup.

6:17:42That's fascinating, because one of the things you mentioned, there was 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, continuous feedback. 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 commitment of okay this is what the user feedback was.

6:18:19I've all these meetings we're going to skip that today and we're going to do this. You know, So that level of focus commitment is, I would say, 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 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. It's also, you know, UX is not something that you can always solve by just constant iterating on different things.

6:19:02Like 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 iteration cycle is 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. I 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.

6:19:40Yeah, that's the old 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, it also is deeply about function. It's not just aesthetic. And that you have to empathize with a human being before you while not always listening to them directly.

6:20:32They 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 the early days, the UX sucked, 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, it sounds like a simple thing, but it's actually a really big deal for him. And he couldn't do it with this mouth stick. It just wasn't accessible. You can't scroll with a mouth stick on it.

6:21:08I pad in the website that you want. Two people used to read the newest main guide. It might be a good quick pause to say the mouth stick 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 as a stylist that you hold between your teeth. Yeah. It's basically a very long stylist. It's a exhausting. It hurts and it's inefficient. Yeah, and maybe it's also worth calling out there are other alternative assistive technologies, but 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 Druckly 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 them in the face, you know, if these basems too hard.

6:22:00So 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's 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 user's life. So one of these very fun examples is scroll. So again, and main guy is something he wanted to be able to read. And there's many ways to do scroll with the BCI.

6:22:32You can imagine different gestures, for example, the user could do that would 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 an earthquake on the screen. Like you really don't want to have your main page. So you're trying to read, be shifted up a down a few pixels just because 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 a curve, and we'll do our best to minimize them, whenever those errors do occur, that it doesn't interrupt the qualia, again, of the experience that the user is having.

6:23:11It doesn't interrupt their flow of reading their book. And so what we ended up building is this really brilliant feature. This is teammate named Ruse 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 Mac OS to understand where are the scroll bars actively present on the screen using the sort of accessibility tree that's available to Mac OS 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.

6:23:49It sort of attaches your latches onto it. And then once you push up or down in the same way that you would 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 and intuitive is that when you move or 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 imagined movement. You sort of snap onto it and then you're good to go. You just immediately can start pulling the page down or pushing it up.

6:24:17And if you want to get that right, there's so many little nuance. of how this crawl behavior works to make it natural intuitive. So one example is momentum. When you scroll a page with your fingers on the screen, you actually have some flow. It doesn't just stop 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 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.

6:24:51And there's a million, I mean, I could tell you, like there's so many little minutiae 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 navigate. I mean, even the scroll on a smartphone 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.

6:25:30Yeah, yeah. By the way, it just makes me think that scroll bars on the desktop probably have stagnated and never taken that like because of the snap, same as the like snapped a grid, snapped to scroll bar action you're talking about is something that could potentially be extremely useful in the desktop setting, even just for users to just improve the experience. Because the current scroll bar experience in the desktop is horrible. It's hard to find, hard to control. There's not a momentum. The intention should be clear when I start moving towards the scroll bar, there should be a snapping to the scroll bar action.

6:26:08But 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 phase shift between the two. like when you're scrolling, you're scrolling. Right. So that is one drawback of the 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 is being used by the user.

6:26:51So another good example in 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 when you're trying to close a tab, that very small, stupid little X, it's extremely tiny, which is hard to get precisely hit. If you're dealing with sort of a 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 you're used to the iOS keyboard, for example, it actually adapts the target size of individual keys based on an underlying language model.

6:27:27So it'll actually understand if I'm typing, Hey, I'm going to see L. It'll make the eKey bigger because in those locks it's a person I'm going to go see. And so that kind of predictiveness can make the experience much more smooth, even without improvements to the underlying decoder or a feature 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 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.

6:27:56Let'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 the decoder is generalizable to P2, P3, P4, P5, Pn? 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 P2, N and P1. For example, channel number 345 is going to mean something different in user 1 and it will in user 2. Just because that electrode corresponds with channel 345 is going to be in next to a different neuron in user 1, the first user 2.

6:28:34But the approach is the methods to 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 -lands 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, then make it more intuitive for 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.

6:29:07But 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 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 WebGrid, which is like closed loop, it's like fun.

6:29:42I love it when there's like, they used to be actions a human would want to do anyway to get a lot of signal from. Yeah. And like, what grid is that? Like a nice video game that also serves as great calibration. It's so funny. I've heard this reaction so many times before the 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 more interesting for the user so we can get this kind of data and help facilitate research that's for long duration stuff like this.

6:30:17Turns out that like people love this game. I always loved it, but I didn't know that that was a shared perception. Yeah, and just in case it's not clear, WebGrid is, there's a grade 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, it's red and... I've been playing for so many hours. So many hours. And what's your record, you said? My, I think I have the highest at Nuralink right now. My record's 17 BPS. 17 BPS. which is about, if you imagine that 35 by 35 grade, you're hitting about 100 trials per minute.

6:30:52So 100 correct selections in that one minute window. So you're averaging about 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 your keyboard. If I can avoid touching the mouse, it's great. So how can you explain your high performance? I have a whole ritual I go through, and I play WebGrid. It's actually like a diet plan to associate with this like this whole thing. So the first thing has to fast for five days, they have to go up to the mountain. Actually, it kind of, I mean, the fast thing is important.

6:31:25So this is like, you know, this is the mine, 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 eat like a ton of peanut butter for a before I come. 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. And this is like in a night out of, I think we share, but it has to be like, you know, midnight to a I'm kind of time window and I have a very specific like physical position. I'll sit in which is I used to be I was homeschooled growing up and so I did most of my work like on the floor Mm -hmm.

6:31:51I just like in my bedroom or whatever and so I have a very specific situation on the floor on the floor I said and play and then you have to make sure like there's not a lot of weight on your elbow Mm -hmm playing so you can move quickly and then I turn the gain of the cursor So this be the cursor way way up. So it's like small motions. I actually move the cursor Hey, Moe with your wrist or you're never moving 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.

6:32:25There's a there's a way to do you see this? I see like all fingers are moving. Yeah, 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 we do realize there'll be like a few programmers right now Listen to this 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 the The number that we aim for should not be like the median performance It should be like it should be able to beat all of us at least like that should be the minimum bar What do you think is possible like 20?

6:32:59Yeah, 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 jump into the next target it, 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. I'd 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.

6:33:27So there's some like task optimizations you could do to try to boost your performance as well. So what do you think it takes for Nolan to be able to do above 8 .5 to keep increasing that number? You said like every increase in the number might require different improvements in the system. Yeah, I think the nature of this work is, first answer to this point is I don't know. This is edge of the research. So again, nobody's gotten to that number before. So what's next is gonna be a heuristic a guess from my part? What we've seen historically is that different parts of the stack would come bottlenecks at different time points So you know when I first joined Irlink like three years ago or so one of the major problems was just a latency of the Bluetooth connection It wasn't just like the radio device wasn't super good.

6:34:13It was an earlier vision 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 because it's just going to be choppy. And no matter how good you are, that's going to be frustrating and lead to challenges. So at that point, it was very clear that the main challenges just get the data off the device in a very liable way such that you can enable the next challenge to be tackled. And then at some point, it was 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 neural decoder architecture and hyper parameters to optimize that.

6:34:52That was a problem for a bit. Once you solve that, it became a different bottleneck. I think the next bottleneck after that was actually just software stability and reliability. If you have widely varying inference latency in your system or your app just lags out 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.

6:35:26So 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. It sort of touches all those different domains.

6:35:57The second thing you can think about to improve a PPS further is either completely changing the thing you're decoding, or just extending the number of things that you're decoding. So this is serving 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 process this if you're trying to Allow the user to express themselves through any given communication channel You can measure that with this for second But what actually matters the day is how effective are they and navigate their computer?

6:36:27And so from the perspective of the downstream task that you care about Functionally and sending functionality is something we're very interested in because not only can it improve the sort of number of PPS but it can also improve the downstream sort of independence that the user has and the skill inefficiency 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 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, verse either the offline metric of how good you are at decoding, or the online metric of sort of in practice how good is the user using this device.

6:37:11You see roughly a log curve. So as you move further out in a number of channels, you get a corresponding sort of 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 along with moving to the right channel, 2nd to 56 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.

6:37:45You could think of it like, kind of like Mr. Potato might 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 could imagine 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 could imagine and wiggling your big nose for opening some menu or wiggling your big toe to have like, commands have a curve 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.

6:38:18All 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 is 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. And that last point is very related to channel count 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 neural non -stationarity effect is per channel or if the noise is independent, such that more channels means on average less output effect.

6:39:02then your reliability system will improve. So one sort of core thesis that at least I have is that scaling channel 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 might fire more or less. And their frequency content of that single, at least in the motor cortex, it's very correlated with the output intention of the behavioral task with the users doing.

6:39:40You could imagine actually, this is not obvious at rate coding, which is the name of that phenomenon, it's like the only way to bring in represent information. 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's 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.

6:40:20And 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 weighs 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 are 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.

6:40:49There can be other effects, not linear effects on top of that, but at least at a very first order description of the problem, that's what we observed 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 would 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.

6:41:25works super well. For whatever reason, that doesn't work super well with Nolan. I actually don't know the full reason why, but I can imagine several explanations. One such explanation could be that the context effect difference between some open loop task, some closed loop task is much more significant with Nolan than it is with Monkey. Maybe in this open loop task he's 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 may be 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 a close loop time.

6:42:06That'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 for I'm kicking my ass in chest too. It's kicking your ass and now we're and 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. Boy is 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 or helping somebody move a mouse on the screen.

6:42:46And it's a really a fair question and one that I actually was not confident before, Stirlend, that this was gonna 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 tick. 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.

6:43:14You 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 open up and browse the internet at 2 a .m. when nobody's around to set their iPad up for them. This is profoundly game -changing thing for folks in that situation. This is even before we start talking about folks that 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.

6:43:43And 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. So the zoomed out view is that building the decoder is really the process of building the dataset plus compiling it into the weights. And each of those steps is important.

6:44:21The direction I think of further improvement is primarily going to be in the dataset. So I do 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 a 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 the ability to control.

6:44:55So 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. It might be as simple as saying, oh, you could just add auxiliary loss terms that help you capture the thing that actually matters, but this is a very complex nuanced process. How you turn the labels into the model is more of a nuanced process than just a standard to revise learning problem. One very fascinating anecdote here, we've tried many different neural network architectures that translate brain data to velocity outputs, for example.

6:45:31And one example that's stuck in my brain from a couple of years ago now, is we, at one point, we are using just FOI Connected Networks to decode the brain activity. We tried ABTEST where we were measuring the relative performance in online control session of sort of 1D convolution over the input signal. So if you imagine per channel, you have a sliding window that's producing some convolved feature for each of those input sequences for every single channel simultaneously, you can actually get better validation metrics, meaning you're fitting the data better, and it's generalizing better on offline data if you use this convolutional architecture.

6:46:06You're reducing parameters, it's sort of a standard procedure when you do them with time series data. Now it turns out that when using that model online, the controllability was worse, was far worse, even though the offline metrics were bad. 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 computers this problem and you were trying to sort of hyper -remotor optimize or, you know, let some GPD model hard code or come up with other invent many different solutions, if you were just optimizing for loss, it would not be sufficient.

6:46:37Which 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 a data constraint at this time, which is what it sounds 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 just the quantity, because it has to be trained on the interactions, I guess there's not that many interactions. Yeah, so it depends what version of this you're talking about.

6:47:16So if you're talking about, like, let's say, the simplest example of just 2D velocity, then I think you have data quality as the main thing. If you're talking about how to build a sort of multi -function output that lets you do all the inputs to the computer that you and I can do, then it's actually a much more sophisticated and 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.

6:47:39So one example of an interesting bug from, like, sort of week one of a PCI with no one was when he moved the mouse, the click signal sort of dropped off a cliff and when he stopped, the click signal 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 dataset or in the model, build robustness against this kind of, you think of it like overfitting, but really it's just that that model has not seen this kind of variability before.

6:48:16So 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 an important emphasize. And it's also important emphasize that it may not need fundamentally new techniques, which means that 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.

6:48:48So 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 cannot speak at all, that have no ability to bootstrap themselves into useful control by voice command, for example, and are extremely limited in their current capabilities.

6:49:17I think that will be an 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 there are gaps, how do we solve them most efficiently? So that's what I'm very excited about for the next year, so 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 a channel account.

6:49:47So right now we have a thousand channel device. The next version we'll 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 experiences that we choose to focus our time and resources on. and also in terms of the, you know, even things are simple as not stationary. Like does that problem just completely go away at that scale?

6:50:13Or do we need to come up with new creative UX that's 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 field 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 proprioceptive feedback, who made that intuitive for a user to control a high dimensional control surface without feeling the thing physically.

6:50:41I think that's going to be a 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 truly head? 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 range of interesting 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.

6:51:11And so I'm excited about that fundamental neuroscience learning, which is also important for figuring out how to most efficiently insert electrodes in the future. So yeah, I think all those dimensions, I'm really, really excited about. That doesn't 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 the true breakthroughs happen.

6:51:48You tweeted, 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 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 actual true underlying, meaning and beauty of the thing that you're trying to get across. that the generator function in their brains more powerful than what language can express. And so the mechanism poetry is really just to feed or seat that generator function.

6:52:33So 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 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 thing within you that the artist also experienced that was able to convey that through the pixels.

6:53:06And 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 if anything interesting. It requires a human to interpret it. So it's the combination of the human mind and all the experiences that human being has within the context of the collective intelligence of the human species that makes that poem make 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.

6:53:48Because of the complexity of the human mind and the receiving end. Yeah, that's interesting. I post it still doesn't. Who was it? I think Yosha Bach of First Marshall, I said something about all the people that think we've achieved AGI explain why humans like music. Oh yeah. And until the GI likes music, you have an achieved AGI or something like that. 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.

6:54:36Yeah, maybe. Because I mean, like a lot of the tricks in both poetry and music are like basically you have some repeated structure and then you do like a twist. Like it's like, okay, like clause one, two, three is one thing and then clause four is like, okay, now we're onto the next theme. Yeah. And 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 no one's structure that people are familiar with, and they just tweak it a little bit. Like they tweak it and add a surprising element.

6:55:02Like it's especially true in like, in classical music heritage. But that's one of them. Like is it all just entropy? Like the... So breaking structure or breaking symmetry is something that humans seem to like. Maybe it's 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 audience member perceiving that as interesting. What do you think is the meaning of human existence?

6:55:36There'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 having a discussion about the Bible with one of their colleagues. And the colleagues says something about, you know, the Bible says X, Y, and Z. and the president says, yeah, but it also says ABC. And the person says, well, do you believe the Bible will be literally true? And the president says, yes, but I also think that neither of us are smart enough to understand it. I think the analogy here for the meaning of life is that largely we don't know the right question to ask.

6:56:14And so I think I'm very aligned with the hitchhikers, 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 the short term as a heuristic in the sort of search policy space, we should try to increase the diversity of people asking such questions or generally of consciousness and conscious beings asking such questions. So again, I think I will take the eye to 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.

6:56:56That's the main thing is not the answers to the questions. This point, by the way, is driven home 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 wiggle a lip or move something that allows them to say yes or know. 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 to? Wow, that's powerful. Well, bliss, thank you for everything you do. And thank you for being you. And thank you for talking today. Thank you.

6:57:32Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bliss Chapman. And now dear friends, here's Nolan Arbaugh, the first human being to have a neural ink 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 a freak thing that happened. Imagine you're running into the ocean. All of this doesn'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.

6:58:13And then I just never came back up. 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 must have taken a pretty big knock and then they both came up and I didn't. And so I was faced down in the water for a while. I was conscious and then eventually just, you know, realized 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.

6:59:00It seems like I'm making light of it all, but just 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 on a day -to -day basis at first, just trying to find some way to heal as much my body as possible, 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. And then thank God I had like my family around me. If I didn't have my parents, my siblings and I would have never made it this far.

7:00:00They'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. 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 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.

7:00:41I have about 10 or 12 from high school that have all stuck around and we still get together all of us twice a year. We call it the spring series and the fall series. This last one we all did. 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 all the time. People bring me food and drinks, and I get to sit around and watch as much TV and movie. and anime as I want, I get to read as much as I want. I mean, it's great. It's beautiful to see that you see the silver lining in all of this.

7:01:33I was just going back. Do you remember the moment when you first realized you were paralyzed from the neck down? Yep. I was faced down in the water. Right when I, whatever, something had my head, I 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? If I can't get up, I can't flip over, can't do anything, then I'm going to drown eventually. 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. I've heard from other people that like onlookers, I guess the two girls that pulled me out of the water were two of my best friends.

7:02:22They are lifeguards. And one of them said that it looked like my body was sort of shaking in the water like I was trying to flip over and stuff. 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 one of my friends down. I had like brought her with me from college to camp and she was just bawling over me and And I was like, hey, it's going to be fine. Like, don't worry. I was cracking some jokes to try to lighten the mood.

7:03:05The nurse had called my mom. And I was like, don't tell my mom. She's just going to 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. 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, I was super drugged up. They had me on fentanyl like three ways, which was awesome. I don't recommend it, but I saw some crazy stuff on that fentanyl. And it was still the best I've ever felt on drugs. I'm medication, sorry, on medication. And I remember the first time I saw my mom in the hospital, I was just bawling.

7:03:53I had like ventilator in like I couldn't talk or anything and 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 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 along the way? Yeah, yeah, sure. 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.

7:04:51I've more so just wanted to try to do anything possible to make my life better at this point. But at the beginning there were some ups and downs. There were some really hard things to adjust to. First off, just like the first couple of months, the amount of pain I was in was really, really hard. I mean, I remember screaming at the top my lungs in the hospital because I thought my legs were on fire. Obviously I can't feel anything, but it's all nerve pain. That was a really hard night. I asked them to give me as much pain meds as possible. You've had as much as you can have, so just deal with it.

7:05:31Go to a happy place, sort of thing. That was a pretty low point. Every now and again, it's hard realizing things that I wanted to do in my life that I won't be able to do anymore. I was wanting 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 put someone I love through that, like having to take care of me and stuff. Not being able to go out and play sports. I was a huge athlete growing up, so that was pretty hard. little things too when I realize I can't do them anymore. Like there's something really special about being able to hold a book and smell a book.

7:06:21Like the feel, the texture, the smell, like as you turn the page, it's like I just love it. I can't do it anymore. And it's little things like that. The two -year mark was pretty rough. Two years is when they say you will 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 June 30th, 2018, I was really sad that that's kind of where I was.

7:07:10And 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 was a big one. My understanding that it was all for purpose. And even if that purpose wasn't anything involving nearly, even if that purpose was, you know, 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.

7:08:04At 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 happened 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 she's the one that's really going through this massive trial. And that gave me a lot of strength and obviously my family, my family and my friends. They give me all the strength that I need on a day -to -day basis.

7:08:52So, 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 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. 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 this dream of traveling around Europe and being like, I don't know, a shepherd in like Wales or Ireland and then going and being a fisherman in Italy doing all of these things for like a year.

7:09:47Like 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 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 I just get along great with people. I really enjoy meeting new people. and so I just wanted to do everything. 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.

7:10:32Yeah. It's a deliberate choice you made that you're not going to let this keep you down. Yeah, a bit. Also, I just kind of how I am. Like I said, I roll with the punches and everything. I always used to tell people like I don't stress about things much and whenever I'd see people getting stressed I just say you know like it's not hard just don't stress about it and Like that's all you need to do And they're like that's not how that works like it works for me I 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 had any place in my life since I was a kid.

7:11:20What was the experience like of you being selected to be the first human being to have on your like device and plant thing your brain? Are you scared? No, no, it was cool. Like I was, I was never afraid of it. I had to think through a lot. But should I do this, like be the first person I could wait until number two or three and get a better version of the NERLINK, like the first one might not work, maybe it's actually going to kind of suck. It's going to 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.

7:12:08I'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, this seemed like a pretty good opportunity. And I was, I was never scared. I think my like faith had a huge part in that. I always felt like God was preparing me for something. 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 him, you know, I'll go out and talk to people.

7:12:52I'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. 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 how the star sort of aligned with all of this. It just told me, like as the surgery was getting closer, it just told me that, you know, it was all meant to happen. It was all meant to be.

7:13:40And 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, my 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.

7:14:16And I was about to let people go like root around in there. They're like, hey, we're gonna go, like, put some stuff in your brain, like, hopefully it works out. 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.

7:15:03Like 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 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 day of surgery like? What's when you wake up, what'd you feel? Yeah, by minute. Yeah, we were freaking out. No, I thought I was going to but a surgery approach the night before the morning of, I was just excited. I was like, let's make this happen. I think I said that something like that to Elon on the phone.

7:15:44Beforehand we were like face timing and I was like let's rock and roll and he's like let's do it 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 Got to the hospital 5 .30 went through like all the pre -op stuff. Everyone was super nice. Elon was supposed to be there in the morning, but something went wrong with his plane. So we ended up facetiming. That was cool. Had one of the greatest one -liners of my life after that phone call. Hung up with him.

7:16:26There were like 20 people around me. And I was like, I just hope he wasn't too star -struck talking to me. Nice. Yeah, it was good. Well done. Yeah. Yeah. Do you write that ahead of time? No, I'm just came to you. It just came to me. I was like, this is, this seems right. You know? Went into surgery. I asked if I could pray right beforehand. So I like prayed over the room. I asked God if you would like be with my mom in case anything happened to me and just like calm her nerves out there. Woke up, played a bit of a prank on my mom. I don't know if you've heard about it. Yeah, I read about it. Yeah, she was not happy.

7:17:04Can you take me to the prank? Yeah, this is something you regret doing that now. No, no, no, 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 Very specifically my mom. She's very gullible. I think she had knee surgery once even and After she came out of knee surgery She was super groggy. She was like, I can't feel my legs and my dad looked at her. He was like, you don't have any legs. They had to amputate both your legs. We just do very mean things to her all the time. I'm so surprised that she still loves us.

7:17:52But right after surgery, I was really worried that I was going to be too like groggy like not all there. I've had anesthesia once before and it messed me up like I could not function for a while afterwards and 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 dropping some bombs and I wouldn't even know I wouldn't remember 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. And so she walked in after surgery. It was like the first time they had been able to see me after surgery. And she just looked at me.

7:18:40She 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 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. And so I was like, mom, mom, I'm fine. Like, it's all right. And still she was not happy about it. She still says she's gonna get me back some day but I mean I don't know I don't know what that's gonna look like.

7:19:21It's a lifelong battle. Yeah yeah it was good. In some sense it was a demonstration that you still got. That's all I wanted to be. That's all I wanted it to be and I knew that doing something super mean to her like that and show her. Yeah to show that you're still there that you love her. Yeah exactly exactly. It's a dark way to do it, but I love it. Yeah. What was the first time you were able to feel that you can use the New Relink device to affect the world around you? Yeah. The first little taste I got of it was actually not too long after surgery. Some of the New Relink team had brought in like a little iPad, a little tablet screen, and they had put up eight different channels that were recording some of my neurons spikes.

7:20:15They put it in front of me, they're like, this is like real time, your brain firing. It's like that's super cool. 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 wiggle my fingers and I just started 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 me was just like, what are you seeing?

7:20:49I 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 and then seeing like, they can notice something and then when you did the index finger you're like, oh, yeah, 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.

7:21:27Like, 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 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. 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 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 to hopefully regain some movement someday.

7:22:16That's fascinating. Yeah, I know it's bizarre, but... It's part of the recovery process is to keep trying to move your body. Yep. And that's... And the nervous system does this thing. it starts reconnecting. It'll start reconnecting for some people. Some people it never works. Some people they'll do it like for me. I got some bicep control back and that's about it. I can, if I 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 at a wiggle. So I know there's stuff there like I know like and that happens with you know a few different of my fingers and stuff But yeah, that's this what they tell you to do One of the people at the time when I was in the hospital came in and told me for one guy who had recovered Most of his control what he thought about every day was actually walking like the act of walking just over and over again.

7:23:23So 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 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. 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 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 of your like, it's not like you're imagining yourself walking.

7:24:21You're like literally doing this, everything, all the same stuff that you're walking. Which, which was hard. It was hard at the beginning. Like frustrating hard or like actually cognitively hard. Like, which way? Uh, it was both.

7:24:38There'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 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 Sometimes vocalizing it like out loud, but sometimes just thinking it, I tried every different way to do this to try to get some movement back.

7:25:26And it's hard because 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 buildup of, I don't know, the only way I can describe it is, They're like signals that are getting through from my brain 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 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. 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.

7:26:19It'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. 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 unable to control any of my environment. So for the first few years, a lot of what I was doing was staring at walls. And so obviously I did a lot of thinking and I tried to move a lot just over and over and over again.

7:27:09Do you never give up sort of hope there? No. Training hard essentially. Yep. And I still do it. I do it like subconsciously. And I think that that helped a lot with things with Nurling, honestly. It's something that I talked about the other day at the all -hands that I did at Nurling's Austin facility. Welcome to Austin, mother. Yeah, hey, thanks, man. I would just say, hey, thanks, thanks, man. The gig of actually was super cool. I went to school at Texas A &M, so I've been around for, um... So you should be saying, welcome to me. Welcome to Texas Likes. Yeah. I ate you. But yeah, I was talking about how a lot of what they've had me do, especially at the beginning, well, I still do it now, is body mapping.

7:27:54So, like, there will be a visualization of a hand or an arm on the screen, and I have to do that motion, and the tell they sort of train the algorithm to understand what I'm trying to do. And so it made things very seamless for me, I think. That's really, really cool. So it's amazing to know, because I've learned a lot about the body mapping procedure. And with the interface and everything like that, it's cool to know that you've been a century like training to be like 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.

7:28:39I hope they keep trying because I've heard other paralyzed people say, like, don't ever stop. They tell you two years, but you just never know. The human body's capable of amazing things. So I've heard other people say, don't give up. Like I think one girl had 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 a bat 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.

7:29:21I'll find myself doing it kind of just almost like on its own. It's just something I've gotten so used to doing that. I don't know. 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 they it is training you're not visibly seeing there's also that training at the moment but like there's that like a Olympic level nervous system getting getting ready for some. Honestly was like something that I think Nurlink gave me that I can't I can't think them enough for like I can't show my appreciation for it enough was being Being able to visually see that what I'm doing is actually having some effect.

7:30:08It's a huge part of the reason why I know now that I'm going to keep doing it forever. Because before Nureling, 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 Sensation or anything so I could have been running up against a brick wall for all I knew and With Nirlink 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 calibration and stuff when I go to click my index finger for a left click that that it actually recognizes that.

7:30:53Like it changed how I think about what's possible with like retraining my body to move. And so yeah, 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. And as the technology develops, that brain is, I mean, that's the most important thing about the human body is the brain. And you 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 that. Yeah. I think 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 these people, it made sense to me.

7:31:34Like it made sense that, you know, like there are signals still happening in my brain. And 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. I was just like, oh cool. Like we found one. Like we found something that works. It was cool to see that their technology worked and that everything that they'd worked so hard for was like going to pay off. But I like moved a cursor or anything at that point. I had like interacted with a computer or anything at that point.

7:32:14So it just made sense. It was cool. I didn't really know much about BCI at that point either. So I didn't know what sort of step this was actually making. I didn't know if this was a huge deal or if this was just like, okay, it's cool that we got this far, but we're actually hoping for something 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, I do all of that, but it's all like, so Greek to me. I was like, okay, threads, 64 threads, 16 electrodes, 1024 channels.

7:33:01Okay. Like that, that math checks out. Well, it sounds right. 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 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 easy to say, okay, I did something cool. That was impressive in some way. What exactly that meant, what it was, hadn't really set in for me.

7:33:51So 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 ins and outs of it. But I was like, there are 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 moved the cursor for the first time, I was like, that's cool, but I expected that that should happen.

7:34:36Like 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 think we'll 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.

7:35:16I'm physically trying to do all of those things even if you can't see it. Like, 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.

7:36:06Like, 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.

7:36:47Like 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 the 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.

7:37:25Like 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. 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 worse. God, attempting to sort of fatigue of that over time.

7:37:57And 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. A tempted moment 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 and tempted I would actually start trying to like yeah, there's a I mean I you know I did like comment was my whole life at 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.

7:38:38Yeah, 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... Just think like... Yeah. It's hard. It was very hard at the beginning. But attempted worked. Attempted worked. It worked just like it should work like a charm. I remember there was like one Tuesday we were messing around and I think I forget what's where we're doing 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.

7:39:14It blew my mind like no pun intended blew my mind when I first moved the cursor just with my thoughts and not attempting to move. It's something that I found like over the couple of weeks like building up to that that as Because I get better, cursor control is like the model gets better, then it gets easier for me to like, 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 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 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.

7:40:28So there's a delay there and I Notice that there was something going on in my brain before I was actually attempting to move that my brain was like anticipating what I wanted to do and that all started sort of 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 as far as like using the neural link. And, 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 and what I wanted it to do, like cursor movements, what I wanted to do, a bit better and a bit better.

7:41:25And then one day I just randomly, as I was playing Webgrid, I looked at a target before I had started attempting to move. I was just trying to get over, train my eyes to start looking ahead. This is the target I'm on, but if I look over here to this target, I know I can maybe be a bit quicker getting there. I looked over and the cursor just shot over. It was a while. 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 that this technology that what I'm doing is actually way more impressive than I ever thought.

7:42:33It 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. Yep. 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 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've found that there is some interplay with it that that maximizes efficiency with the cursor.

7:43:47So 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 and like, hmm, 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 thought of something and I wanted to try it.

7:44:24And 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 the 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 just to show that it's possible, that paves the way to like anyone can not do it.

7:44:57That's the thing that's actually possible. You don't need to do the attempt to move it. You can 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 NERLINC 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.

7:45:42Calibration 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 five minutes in 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. So the longer I'm in it, generally, the better the models will get. That's really cool, because you often refer to the models. The models are the thing that's constructed once you go through the calibration step. And then you also talk about sometimes you'll play a really difficult game like Snake just to see how good the model is.

7:46:33Yeah, 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 of 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 to 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.

7:47:20I think there's a setting to wake it up every, so long so we could set it to half an hour or five hours or something if I just wanted to wake up periodically. So yeah, I'll connect to the link app and then go through all sorts of things. Calibration for the day, maybe body mapping. I made them give me a little homework tab because I am very forgetful and I forget to do things a lot. So I have 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 I've been super famous.

7:48:08Yeah, 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 Nurling is performing over time and have something to give. I imagine to give to the FDA to create all sorts of fancy charts and stuff and show like, hey, this is what the Nurling, 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 like move left, move right? It's a bubble game. So there will be like yellow bubbles that pop up on the screen.

7:48:48At first, it is open loop. So open loop, this is something that I still don't fully understand. Open loop and closed loop thing. I mean, let's talk for a long time about the difference between the two from the technical side. So be great to hear 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 of different ways that they've done it.

7:49:29They 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.

7:50:10I think the better models as I progress through calibration make it easier to use imagined movements. Wait, wait, wait. 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 a random target will pop up on the screen and it's the same. I just like move, I follow along 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.

7:51:11I 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 found is there will be a point in calibration where I can use a Imagine 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 Imagine Movement. It just like doesn't work for some reason. And after a certain point, I can just sort of feel it. I can tell it moves different. That's the best way I can describe it. It's almost as if it is anticipating what I am going to do again before I go to do it.

7:52:01And 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 of 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, feeling to the experience when it's calibrated in different ways.

7:52:44Like 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, whether it's snake or webgrid, 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. Is that frustrating? No, no, it makes sense to me.

7:53:22Like, 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, 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 pushed towards that bubble for say three seconds, a bubble will 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. You're full of great references.

7:54:01Is there 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 I'm like all right, but 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.

7:54:40Like it's not bad at all. I don't want to score that you get. Can you do better on the bubble game? No, I would love that. I would love writing down suggestions from Nolan. And that's making more fun. Yeah, that's one thing that I really, really enjoy about Webgrid is because I'm so competitive. 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.

7:55:25And 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 100 % 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 like the end result, that's at least what I got from it. One thing I do, I have asked them in something that I really enjoy striving for is towards the end of calibration.

7:56:04There is like a time between targets. And so I like to keep like at the end 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 really nicely to something like web grid where I know if I can hit a target 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, how quickly can you get from bubble to bubble?

7:56:40Yeah. So there's the open loop and then it goes to the closed loop. Closed 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 first get cursor control and how they've 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. That's humility, I forget. Is that I am closing the loop? So I am actually now 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.

7:57:23So I'm finishing the loop. So how long the calibration needs you to take? You say like 10, 15 minutes? Well, yeah, they're trying to get that number down pretty low. That's what we've been working on a lot. Recently, it's 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 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, at least where we're at right now. It'd be nice if they, you never had a good calibration.

7:58:00So we'll get there at some point. I'm sure the more we learn about the brain and like I think that's, you know, the dream I think right now for me to get really, really good models, I'm in calibration 40 or 45 minutes. I don't mind, like I said, they always feel really bad, but if it's going to get me a model that can break these records on Webgrid, I'll stay in it for a few hours. Let's talk business. Webgrid, I saw a presentation that were blitzed by March, you selected 89 ,000 targets in Webgrid. Can you explain this game? What is WebGrid and what does it take to be a world -class performer in WebGrid as you continue to break world records?

7:58:46Yeah.

7:58:50It's like a gold medalist like, well, you know, I'd like to think, I'd like to think everyone who helped me get here, my coaches, my parents, for drop me to practice every day at five in the morning, like thank God, and just overall my dedication to my craft. The interviews with athletes are always like that exact. It's like that template. Yeah, so... So, um... So, Webgrid is a... Webgrid is a grid, yeah. It's literally just a grid. They can make it as big or 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.

7:59:33So 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 that you get every time you click one so I'll say I'll play out like a 35 by 35 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 forever And you've been able to achieve at first eight bits per second and you recently broke that yeah I'm at 8 .5 right now.

8:00:19I would have beaten that literally the day before I came to Austin, but I had like a, I don't know, like a five -second lag right at the end. And I just had to wait until the latency calm down and then I kept clicking, but I was at like 8 .01 and then five seconds of lag and then the next like three targets I clicked all stayed at 8 .01. one. So if I would have been able to click 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.

8:00:58Yeah. So that's all you think about right now. Yeah, I know. I just, I just want I want to do better. I want to do better. I want to hit nine. I think why no nine is very, very achievable. I'm right there. 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. And I could just tell there's some percentage of brain the entire time was thinking like I wish I was right now.

8:01:37I think you did it. You did it that night. He stayed up and did it that night. It's just crazy to me. I mean, 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 Webgrid, you're helping everybody figure out how to create the system all along, 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 is making it fun.

8:02:19Yeah, it's a dig thing. I've joked about 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 more susceptible to these kinds of games to make me a dip did to like Webgrid or something. Do you know Bliss's high score? Yeah, he said like 14 or something. 17 .1 or something? 17 .01. 17 .01. Yeah, he told me he like doesn't on the floor with peanut butter and he's like fast, it's weird. It sounds like cheating. Sounds like performance enhancing. No, it's like the first time Nolan played this game he asked, how could we get this game?

8:02:58And I think you told me right then, you're going to try to beat me. I'm going to get there someday. Yeah, I think I can. I'm excited 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 click by Dwight. You said 0 .3. 0 .3 seconds, 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, because I'm able to like, 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.

8:03:49So 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 targets a little to try to tie that just right. So 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 sucks that there's a ceiling of the point three. Well, I can get down to point two and point one. Point one's good. Yeah, and I've played with that a little bit too. I have to adjust a ton of different parameters in order to play with point one, and I don't have control over all that on my end yet.

8:04:32It also changes like how the models are trained. Like if I train a model, like in Webgrid, I like a boot strap on a model, which basically is them training models as I'm playing Webgrid based off of like the Webgrid data that I'm So like if I play WebGrid for 10 minutes, they can train off that data specifically in order to get me a better model. If I do that with 0 .3 versus 0 .1, the models come out different. The way that they interact is just much, much different. So I have to be really careful. I found that doing it with 0 .3 is actually better in some ways, unless I can do it with 0 .1 and change all of the different parameters.

8:05:10Then that's more ideal because obviously 0 .3 is faster than 0 .1. And so I could get there. I can get there. Can you click using your brain? For right now, it's the hover clicking with the dual cursor. We, before all the thread retraction stuff happened, we were calibrating clicks, left click, right click. That was my previous ceiling before I broke the record again with the dual cursor was I think on a 35 by 35 grid with left and right click. And you get more BPS, more bits per second using multiple clicks because it's more difficult. Oh, because what is it? You're supposed to do either a left click or like right click.

8:05:54Yes, different color. Yeah, blue targets for left click, orange targets for right click is what they had done. So my previous record of 7 .5 was with the blue and the orange targets, yeah. which I think if I went back to that now, 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'll start making Bliss nervous about it 17%. Why do you think we haven't given him the... Exactly. So what did feel like with the retractions that there is some of the threads are attracted? It sucked.

8:06:35It 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 in, take it out and fix it. The first surgery was so easy. Like, I went to sleep. A couple later I woke up and here we are. I didn't feel any pain, didn't take like any 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.

8:07:22I had so much fun playing with it for a few weeks for a month. I had, like, it had opened 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 was possible. And so to have all of that be taken away was really, really hard.

8:08:05But then on the drive over to the facility, I don't know, like five minute drive, whatever it is, I talked with my parents about it, I prayed about it, I was like, you know, I'm not going to let this ruin my day. I'm not going to let this ruin this amazing tour that they have set up for me. I want to go show everyone how much I appreciate all the work they're doing. I want to go meet all of the people who have made this possible and I want to go have one of the best days of my life. I did. It was amazing. 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.

8:08:51But for like the first few days afterwards, I was just like, I didn't know if it was 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, even if I like lost out on everything to come, if I I could keep giving them data in any way, then I would do that if I needed to just do like some of the data collection every day or body mapping every day for a year, then I would do it. Because I know that everything I'm doing helps everyone to come after me, and that's all I wanted. My guess 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, And then, you know, I was just happy to be a part of it.

8:09:46And everything that I had 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 Yeah, it was within a couple weeks like again. This feels like I'm interviewing an athlete

8:10:26Road the road back was long time from many difficulties. There were dark days 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. Yeah, the way in which you were measuring the behavior of individual neurons. Yeah. So we're switching from sort of individual spike detection to something called spike band power, which if you watch the previous segments with either me or DJ, you probably have some Yeah, okay. So when they did that it was kind of like a You know light over the head like light bulb moment like oh this works and This seems like like we can run with this and I saw the Up -taken 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.

8:11:33Like, 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 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 rolled the punches anyway. So what was the process?

8:12:16What was the feedback loop on the feeding out how to do the spike detection in a way that would actually work well for Nellie? 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 -year software update to his implants and we'll get you to your test slow your iPhone. And that firmware change enabled us to record sort of averages of populations of neurons nearby individual electrodes. So we have 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.

8:12:47And that feedback, I mean basically I was not described it was immediate when we flipped that switch. I think the first day we did that you hit 304 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 usual for independent use. So what we care about ultimately is that you can use it independently to do whatever you want. And to get to that point and require us to re -engineer the UX as you talked about at the dwell cursor, to make it something that you can use independently without us need to be involved all the time.

8:13:16And yeah, this is obviously the start of this journey. Still, hopefully we get back to the places where you're doing multiple clicks and using that to control much more fluidly everything and much more naturally the applications that trying to interface with. And most importantly, get that web grid number out. Yes. Yes. So how is the, on the hover click, do you accidentally click stuff sometimes? Yep. 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 drop below that, it'll start.

8:13:53and I have 0 .3 seconds to move it before it clicks anything. And if I don't want it to ever get there, I just keep it moving at a certain speed and like constantly like doing circles on screen, moving it back and forth to keep it from clicking stuff. I actually noticed a couple of weeks back that 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. I don't think that's a way of clicking. I guess does that create problems like when you're gaming accidentally click a thing?

8:14:34Like, yeah, yeah, it happens in chess. 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 an X -Clink. It's a nice excuse, right? Yeah, it was any time you 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 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.

8:15:12It'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. I need this. 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 they just never would have thought of. or 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, maybe they will want things much different than how I set it up or what the advice I've given the team. And they're going to look at some of the things they've added for me.

8:16:03Like, that's a dumb idea. Like, why would he ask for that? 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. And then they're also going to give me some pushback about like, yeah, what you are asking them to do here, that's a bad idea. Let's do it this way. And I'm more than happy to have that happen. But it's just a lot of like, you know, different interactions with different games or applications.

8:16:39The internet, just with the computer in general. There's tons of bugs that end up popping up left -right center. 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 then they take that feedback and they usually create amazing things for me. They solve these problems in ways I would have never imagined. 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 done. It's just like, I want this.

8:17:18Please do something about it and it'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 New Orleans? Like what relationship if any, would you want to have with them? Because you said they might have a different set of ideas of how to use the thing. Would you be intimidated by their web grid performance? No, no, I hope compete. I hope day one, they like wipe the floor with me. I hope they beat it and they crush it.

8:18:00You know, the double it if they can just because on one hand it's only gonna push me to be better because I'm super competitive. I want other people to push me. I think that is important for anyone trying to achieve greatness is they need other people around them who are going to push them to be better and 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.

8:18:38I 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 the next participant in clinical trial? They should have fun with this, because it is a lot of fun and that I hope they work really, really hard because it's not just for us. It's for everyone that comes after us and you know come to me if they need anything and to go to the NERLINK if they need anything. Man, NERLINK moves mountains. Like they do absolutely anything for me that they can. And it's an amazing support system to have. It puts my mind at ease for like so many things that I've had like questions about or so many things I want to do.

8:19:27And they're always there and that's really, really nice. And so I just, I would tell them not to be afraid to go to NERLINK with any questions that they have, any concerns, anything that, you know, they're looking to do with this and any help that Nurling is capable of providing, I know they will. And I don't know, I don't know, just work your ass off because it's really important that we try to give our all to this. So have fun and work hard. 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.

8:20:08Maybe it's good to talk about what you've been able to do now that you have a neural link implant like the freedom you gain from this wave 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, like needing them to help me with things, the better.

8:20:52If I'm able to sit up on my computer all night and not need someone to like sit me up, 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. Like that, it takes a load off of all of us and it's really like all I can ask for. It's something that, you know, I could never think nurling enough for. I don't know, my family feels the same way. You know, just being able to have the freedom to do things on my own at any hour of the day or night, it means the world to me and I don't know. When you're up at 2 a .m.

8:21:41playing WebGrid by yourself, 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?

8:21:54Are 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've 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, where else is not happening tonight. And so it's a little stressful when that happens.

8:22:33When it's like, when it's above 50%, I'm like, okay, like I got time, it starts getting down to 30 and then 20, it's like, all right, 10 % a little pop -ups gonna pop up right here. and it's gonna really screw my web grid flow. It's gonna 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 gonna screw me over. So if I have to, if I'm gonna break this record, I have to do it in the next like 30 seconds or else that pop -up's gonna get in the way. I cover my web grid. 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.

8:23:10That's what's going on in my head, generally that and whatever song is playing. And I just want to break those records so bad. Like it's all I want when I'm playing WebGrid. 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 WebGrid, you better break this record or you're gonna waste like five hours of your life right now. And I don't know, it's just fun, it's fun, man. Have you ever tried WebGrid with like two targets and three targets? Can you get higher BPS with that? Can you do that?

8:23:48You mean like different color targets or you being... Oh, good 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, the more difficult to task. And there's also like Zen mode you've played in before, which is infinite. it covers the whole screen with a grid and I don't know what. And so you can go like, that's the same. Yeah. He doesn't like it because it didn't show BPS.

8:24:23So like, you know, oh yeah. I had them put in a giant BPS in the background. So now it's like the opposite of Zen mode. It's like super hard mode. Like just metal mode if it's just like a giant number in the back counter. We should be named that metal mode is a much better way. So you also play Civilization 6. I love Civil 6, yeah. Usually go with Korea. I do. So the great part about Korea is they focus on science, tech victories, which was not planned. I've been playing Korea for years and then all of the knurling stuff happened. So it kind of aligns. But what I've noticed with tech victories is, If you can just rush tech rush science 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 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.

8:25:49I've accidentally won in different ways just by focusing on science. I was, yeah, 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. It's because it just like ends the game one turn and 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. It was terrible. But you don't need like giant civilizations with tech, especially with Korea.

8:26:29You 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. Nice. Yeah, just work on the science of the fact. 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, I'm so pumped. And that's probably coming up. Come on, Sim Seven, hit me up. All alpha beta tests, whatever. That piece of shit. Wait, when is it coming out? In next 25. Yeah, yeah, next year, yeah. What other stuff would you like to see improved about the Newerlin cap and just the entire experience.

8:27:06I would like to, like I said, get back to the, like, click on demand, like the regular clicks. That would be great. I would like to be able to connect to more devices 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 platforms. I'd like to be able to control as much stuff as possible, honestly. Like an Optimus Robot would be pretty cool. That would be sick if I could control an Optimus Robot. The link app itself, it seems like we are getting pretty dialed in to what it might look like down the road. It seems like we've gotten through a lot of what I want from it at least.

8:27:58The only other thing I would say is like more control over all the parameters that I can tweak with my cursor and stuff. There's a lot of things that go into how the cursor moves in certain ways. And I have, I don't know, like three or four of those parameters. And they're my gain and friction and a lot. friction, yeah, and there's maybe double the amount of those with just like velocity and then with the actual dwell cursor. So I would like all of it. I want as much control over my environment as possible. You want 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.

8:28:42Yeah, that's that's what I want. I want as much control over this as possible. So yeah, that's really all I can ask for. Just give me everything. It 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. Or do you type or look because there's also keyboard. Yeah, there's a virtual keyboard. That's another thing I would like to work more on is finding some way to type or text in a different way. Right now it is like a dictation basically and a virtual keyboard that I can use with the cursor.

8:29:23But we've played around with like finger spelling, like sign language finger spelling, 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 the cursor where I went from attempted movement to I imagine movement at one point. I have a feeling, 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 letter that I want and it'll pop up. That would be epic. That's challenging. That's hard. There's a lot of work for you to kind of take that leap without be awesome.

8:30:07And then going from letters to words is another step. You would go from, 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. And so then if I could do something along those lines or just the sign language 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 With the cursor control. I don't see why it wouldn't work But we'd have to play around with it more.

8:30:47What 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 they'll let me. So you don't have any concerns for you with the Surge experience. All of it was like no regrets. No. So everything's been good so far.

8:31:24Yep. You just keep getting upgrades. Yeah. I mean, why not? I've seen how much it's impacted my life already. And I know that everything from here on out is going to get better and better. So 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, are 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.

8:32:04The Vision One is fascinating to me. I think that is going to be very, very cool to give someone the ability to see for the first time in their life. Would just be, I mean, it might be more amazing than even helping someone like me. Like, that just sounds incredible. The speech thing is really interesting, being able to have some sort of like real -time translation in cutaway that language barrier would be really cool. Any sort of like actual impairments 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.

8:32:43And you would be able to hopefully be able to solve a lot of those. I know there's already stuff to help people with seizures 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 even someone like Joe Rogan has talked about the possibilities with being able to stimulate the brain in different ways. 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 I Think a lot of this can be implemented within my lifetime Assuming that I live a long life.

8:33:44Well, you're referring to these things like people suffering from depression or things of that nature potentially getting help. Yeah. Flip a switch like that, make someone happy. I know, I think Joe is talking 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. Yeah, mushrooms or 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 re -fall in love with Harry Potter or something.

8:34:26I told him I was like I don't know how I feel about like people being able to just wipe parts of your memory. That seems a little sketching to me like they're already doing it. So sounds legit. that I would love memory replay. Just like actually like high resolution replayable memories. I saw an episode of Black Mirror about that one, so 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 or the average case enough. I don't know what it is about us humans. We want to think about the worst possible thing.

8:35:01We love drama. Yeah. It's like, how is this new technology going to kill everybody? We just love that. We can like, yes, let's watch. Hopefully people don't think about that too much with me. It'll ruin a lot of my plans. Yeah, assuming you're gonna have to take over the world. I mean, you're I love your Twitter. You you tweet I'd like to make jokes about hearing voices in my head since getting the neural link But I feel like people would take it the wrong way plus the voices in my head told me not to Yeah, yeah, please never stop So you were talking about Optimus Is that something you would love to be able to do to control the robotic arm or the entirety of Optimus?

8:35:42Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure, absolutely. You think there's something like fundamentally different, but just being able to physically interact with the world? Yeah, 100%. This, I know another thing with being able to give people the ability to feel sensation and stuff to you by going in with the brain and having a nerve like maybe do that. That could be something that could be translated through, transferred through the optimist as well. Like there's all sorts of really cool interplay between that and then also like such as physically interacting. I mean 99 % of the things that I can't do myself obviously need, I need a caretaker for someone to physically do things for me.

8:36:29If an optimist robot could do that, like I could live an incredibly independent life and not be such a burden on those around me. And that would, it would change the way people like me live, at least until whatever this is gets cured. But being able to interact with the world physically like that would just be amazing. And they're not just like for having it be a caretaker or something, but something like I talked about just being able to read a book. Imagine an optimist were about 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 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.

8:37:20I actually don't like audiobooks. I've listened to a ton of them at this point, but I don't really like them. I would much rather like read a physical coffee. So one of the things you would love to be able to experience is opening the book, bringing it up to you 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 replicated, you know, that page color on like the gimbal 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.

8:37:57I 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 me 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 and something I would love to do again. But we'll see. What would be the first thing you do with the hand that can touch? You hear mom a hug after that, right?

8:38:39Yeah, I know. So that's, it's one thing that I've asked, 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. Something along those lines, being able to just interact with the people around me, handshake, give someone a hug. I don't know anything like that. Being able to help me eat like I'd probably get really fat which would be a terrible terrible thing. Also beat bliss and chess on a physical chessboard.

8:39:24Yeah yeah I mean there are just so many upsides. Any way to find some way to feel like I'm bringing bliss down to my level. Yeah, because yeah, he's just such an amazing guy and everything about him is just so above and beyond 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 Did you ever make sense of why God puts good people through such hardship? Oh man

8:40:05I 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, there would be 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.

8:40:55I 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, like my interactions with him have all been, 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. But I believe that it is a way for God to test us, to build our character, to send us through trials and tribulations, to make sure that we understand how precious he is and the things that he's given us and the time that he's given us.

8:41:38And then to hopefully grow from all of that, I think that's a huge part of being here is to 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 Because I think that's how we grow Well gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on human civilization. Oh, man I I think people are my biggest inspiration, even just being at NERLINK for a few months, looking people in the eyes and hearing their motivations for why they're doing this. It's so inspiring and I know that they could be other places. It's because of your jobs, working somewhere else, doing X, Y, or Z that doesn't really mean that much.

8:42:35But 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'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.

8:43:16It 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. And I think that that is, it shows human resiliency, and it shows what we're able to endure, and 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 I don't know, that always gives me hope, is just realizing that there are people out there who still care and who want to help.

8:44:08And thank you for being one such human being and continuing to be a great human being through everything you've been through. I'm 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 catch you up. And I believe in you that you can once you come back so sorry to interrupt with the Austin trip once you come back eventually beat bliss. Yeah yeah for sure absolutely. I'm rooting for you though. The whole world is rooting for you. Thank you for everything you've done man. Thanks thanks man.

8:44:45Thanks 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 all this 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 lovers desperately tried to fuse their insulated ecstasy into a single self -transcendence in vain. But it's very nature.

8:45:30Every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy its solitude. Sensation, feelings, insights, fancies, all these are private and except through symbols and a second hand, incomunicable. We can pour 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.