Elon Musk: Neuralink and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #438

the following is a conversation with Elon Musk DJ sa Matthew McDougall Bliss Chapman and Nolan arbaugh about neuralink and the future of humanity Elon DJ Matthew and Bliss are of course part of the amazing neuralink team and Nolan is the first human to have a neuralink device implanted in his brain I speak with each of them individually so use time stamps to jump around or as I recommend go hardcore and listen to the whole thing this is the longest podcast I've ever done it's a fascinating super technical and wide- ranging conversation and I loved every

minute of it and now dear friends here's Elon Musk his fifth time on this The Lex fredman podcast drinking coffee or water water I'm so over caffeinated right now do you want some caffeine I mean sure there's a there a Nitro drink this supposed to keep you up till like you know tomorrow afternoon basically yeah I don't so what does Nitro it's just got a lot of caffeine or something don't ask questions it's called Nitro do you need to know anything else it's got It's got nitrogen in it that's ridiculous I mean what we breathe

is 78% nitrogen anyway what he needs to add more for you're going toat it most most people think that they're breathing oxygen and they're actually breathing 78% nitrogen you need like a Milk Bar like from like from cluck orange yeah yeah is that top three kubri film for you cluck Orange it's pretty good I mean it's demented jarring i' say okay uh okay so first let's step back and uh big congrats on getting your link implanted into a human that's a historic step for neur link and yeah there's many more to come yeah we're just

um obviously have a second implant as well how did that go uh so far so good there looks like we've got um I think 400 electrodes that are are providing signals so nice yeah how how quickly do you think the number of human participants will scale uh it depends somewh on the regulatory approval the rate which we get regulatory approvals uh so we're hoping to do 10 by the end of this year total of 10 so eight more and with each one you're going to be learning a lot of lessons about the neurobiology the brain

the everything the the whole chain of the neuralink the decoding this the signal processing all that kind of stuff yeah yeah I think it's obviously going to get better with with each one um I mean I don't want to jinx it but it it seems to have gone extremely well with the second uh implant so there's a a lot of signal a lot of elrods it's working very well what improvements do you think we'll see in neur Link in the coming let's say let's get crazy coming years I mean in years it's going to be

gigantic um because we'll increase the number of electrodes dramatically um will improve the signal processing so you know we with with uh even with only roughly I don't know 10 15% of the electrodes working with uh with Noland with our first patient we were able to get to achieve a bits per second that's twice the world record so I think we'll we'll we'll start like vastly exceeding world record by orders of magnitude in the years to come so it's like getting to I don't know 100 bits per second, you know maybe maybe if like five

years from now we might be at a megabit like faster than any human could possibly communicate uh by typing or speaking Yeah that BPS is an interesting metric to measure there might be a big leap in the experience once you reach a certain level of BPS yeah like entire new ways of interacting with a computer might be unlocked and with humans with other humans provided they have one and Ne link too right otherwise they won't be able to all the signals fast enough do you think that'll improve the quality of intellectual discourse well I think

you can you could think of it you know if you were to slow it down communication How would how you feel about that you know if you'd only talk at let's say 1110th of normal speed you would be like wow that's agonizingly slow yeah uh so now imagine you could speak at communicate clearly um at 10 or 100 or a thousand times faster the normal listen uh I'm pretty sure nobody in their right mind listens to me at 1X they listen at 2x so I I can only imagine what 10x would feel like or I

could actually understand it I usually default to 1.5x um you can do 2x but well actually if I'm trying to go if I'm listening somebody to go to in like sort of 15 20 minute segments to go to sleep then I'll do it 1.5x um if I'm paying attention I'll do 2X right um but actually if you start actually listen to podcasts or or sort of audiobooks or anything at if you get used to doing it at 1.5 then then one sounds painfully slow I'm still holding on to one because I'm afraid I'm afraid of

myself becoming bored with the reality with the real world where everyone's speaking in One X well it depends on the person you can speak very fast like we we can communicate very quickly and also if you use a wide range of if you if your vocabulary is larger your uh bit rate effective bit rate is higher that's a good way to put it yeah the effective bit rate I mean that is the question is how much information is actually compressed in the low bit transfer of language yeah if you if there's if if there's a

single word that is able to convey something that would normally require um I don't know 10 simple words then you've you've got a you know maybe a 10x compression on your hands that's really like with memes memes are like data data compression um it invades a whole this you're simultan simultaneously hit with a wide range of symbols that you can interpret um and it's you you kind of get it um faster than if it were words or or a simple picture and of course you're referring to memes broadly like ideas yeah that's there's a an

entire idea structure that is like a an idea template and then you can add something to that idea template uh but somebody has that pre-existing idea template in their head um so when you add that incremental bit of information you're conveying uh much more than if you just you know said a few words you it's everything associated with that Meme you think there'll be emergent leaps of capability as you scale the number of electrodes like there'll be a certain you think there'll be like actual number where it just the The Human Experience will be altered

yes what do you think that number might be whether electrodes or BPS we of course don't know for sure but is this 10,000 100,000 yeah I mean certainly if you're anywhere at 10,000 PS per second I mean that's vastly faster than any human communicate right now if if you think of the what is the average bits per second of a human it is less than one bit per second over the course of a day because there are 86,400 seconds in a day and you don't communicate 86,400 um tokens in a day Therefore your best second

is less than one average over 24 hours it's quite slow um and now even if you're communicating very quickly and and you you know you're uh talking to somebody who understands what you're saying because in order to communicate you have to at least to some degree model the Mind state of the person to whom you're speaking U then take the concept you're trying to convey compress that into a small number of syllables speak them and hope that the other person decompresses them into uh a conceptual structure that is as close to what you have in

your mind as possible yeah I mean there's a lot of signal loss there in that process yeah very lossy compression and decompression and a lot of the um a lot of what your neurons are doing is distilling the concepts down to a small number of symbols of say syllables that I'm speaking or or key strokes whatever the case may be so uh that that's a lot of what your brain computation is doing now there is an argument that that's actually a healthy thing to do or helpful thing to do because as you try to compress

complex con Concepts you're perhaps forced to distill the you know what is what is most essential in those Concepts as opposed to just all the fluff so in the process of compression you just still things down to what matters the most because you can only say a few things so that is perhaps helpful I think we might we'll probably get if our data rate increases the it's highly probable that we'll become far more verbose um just like your computer you know when computers had like my my first computer had 8K of ram you know so

um you really thought about every bite and um you know now you got computers with many gigabytes of RAM so you know if you want to do an iPhone app that just says hello world it's probably I don't know several megabytes minimum a bunch of fluff but nonetheless we still prefer to have the computer with the more memory and more compute so the long-term aspiration of neuralink is to improve the AI human symbiosis um by increasing the the bandwidth of the communication because if even if in the most benign scenario of AI you have to

consider that the AI is simply going to get bored waiting for you to spit out a few Woods I mean if the AI can communicate at terabits per second and you're communicating at you know bits per second it's like talk to a tree well it is a very interesting question for a super intelligent species what use are humans um I think there is some argument for humans as a source of will will will yeah source of will or purpose so if if you consider the the human mind as being essentially the there the Primitive lmic

Elements which basically even like reptiles have and there's the cortex the thinking and planning part of the brain now the cortex is much smarter than the limpic system and yet is largely in service to the lyic system trying to make the lyic system happy I mean the sheer amount of compute that's gone into people trying to get laid is insane um without the without actually seeking procreation they're just literally trying to do this sort of simple motion um and they get a kick out of it yeah so this uh Syle which in the abstract rather

absurd motion which is sex uh the cortex is putting a massive amount of compute into trying to figure out how to do that so like 90% of distributed computer of the human species is spent on trying to get late probably like large yeah yeah there's no purpose to most sex except uh hedonistic you know it's just sort of Joy or whatever DOP mean release um now what once in a while it's procreation but for humans it's mostly modern humans is mostly uh recreational um and uh and so so so your cortex much smarter than your

lmic system is trying to make a lmic system happy because LMP system wants to have sex so um or want some tasty food or whatever the case may be and then that that is then further augmented by the tertiary system which is your phone your laptop iPad whatever you know all your Computing stuff that's your tertiary layer so you're actually already a cyborg uh you have this tertiary compute layer which is in the form of your your computer with all the applications all your computer devices um and uh and so in the getting laad front

there's actually a massive amount of comp of digital compute also trying to get late you know with like Tinder and whatever you know yeah so the compute that we humans have built is also participating yeah I mean there's like gws of compute going into getting late of digital compute yeah what if AGI was this is happening as we speak if we merge with AI is just going to expand the compute that we humans use pretty much to try just one of the things certainly yeah yeah um but what I'm saying is that that yes like

what's is there a use for humans um well there's this fundamental question of what's meaning of life why do anything at all um and so if if if our simple Olympic system provides a source of will to do something um that then goes to our cortex that then goes to our you know tertiary compute layer then you know I don't know it might actually be that the AI in a b simply trying to make the human lmic system happy yeah it seems like it's the will is not just about the limic system there's a lot

of interesting complicated things in there we we also want Power that's limic too I think but then we also want to in a kind of Cooperative way alleviate the suffering in the world uh not everybody does but yeah sure some people do as a group of humans when we get together we start to have this kind of collective intelligence that is uh is more complex in its will than the underlying individual descendants of Apes right so there's like other motivations and that could be a really interesting source of uh an objective function for AGI yeah

um I mean there's there are these uh sort fairly cerebral or kind of higher level goals I mean for me it's like what's the meaning of life or understanding understanding the nature of the universe is a of great interest to me um and uh hopefully to the AI and that's the that's the mission of xai and Gro is understand the universe so do you think people when you have a neural link with 10,000 100,000 channels most of the use cases will be communication with AI systems well if assuming that the they're not um I mean

there this solving basic uh neurological issues that people have you know if they've got um damaged neurons in their spinal cord or neck or you know um as as is the case with our first two patients then you know this obviously the first order business is solving fundamental neuron damage in the spinal cord neck or in the brain itself um so you know our second um product is called Blindside which is to enable people who are completely blind less both eyes or Optic nove or just can't see at all uh to be able to see

um by directly triggering the neurons in the visual cortex so we're just starting at the basics here you know this is like um very the the simple stuff uh relatively speaking is solving um neuron damage um you it can also solve uh I think probably schizophrenia you know uh if people have seizures of some kind probably solve that um it could help with memory there there so there's like a kind of a a tech tree if you will of like you got the basics um like like you need you need literacy before you can have

you know Lord of the Rings you know got it do you have letters an alphabet okay great uh words you know then eventually get sagas so you know I think there's there may be some you know things to worry about in in the future but the first several years are really just solving basic neurological damage like for people who have essentially complete or near complete loss of from the brain to the body um like Stephen hauling would be an example uh the neuralink would be incredibly profound because I mean you can imagine if Stephen Hawking

could communicate as fast as we're communicating perhaps faster um and that's certainly uh possible probable in fact likely I'd say so there's uh a kind of dual track of medical and non-medical meaning so everything you've talked about could be applied to people who are non-disabled in the future the logical thing to to do is sensible things to do is to start off solving um basic uh neuron damage issues yes um because the there's obviously some risk with with the new device is you can't get the risk down at zero um it's not possible so you

want to have um the highest possible reward given that given there's a certain irreducible risk and if um if somebody's able to have a Prof Improvement in their communication um that's worth the risk as you get the the risk down yeah as you get the risk down once the risk is is down to to you know if you have like thousands of of people that have been using it for for years and the risk is minimal then um perhaps at that point you could consider saying okay let's let's aim for augmentation now now I think

we we we're actually going to aim for augmentation with people who have neur neuron damage so we're not just aiming to give people a communication data rate equivalent to normal humans we're aiming to give people who have you know quadriplegic or maybe have complete loss um of the connection to the brain and body a communication data rate that exceeds normal humans I mean well we're in there why not let's give people superpowers and the same for vision as you restore Vision that could be aspects of that restoration that are superum yeah at at first the

vision restoration will be uh low res um because you have to say like how many neurons can you put in there and and Trigger and and you can do things where you you um adjust the electric field so like even if you've got say 10,000 neurons it's not just 10,000 pixels because you can adjust the the field between the the neurons and do them in patterns in order to get say I have say 10,000 electrodes effectively give you uh I don't know maybe like having a a megapixel or a 10 megapixel situation um so and

then o over time I think you get to higher resolution than human eyes and you could also see in different wavelengths so like Jord Le flge from Star Trek you know like the thing you can just if you want to see in radar no problem you can see ultraviolet infrared Eagle Vision whatever you want do you think there will be uh let me ask a Joe Rogan question do you think there'll be I just recently uh taken iasa is that a question no well yes well I guess technically it is yeah have you tried ever

tried bro I love you Joe okay yeah wait wait yeah have you said much about it the the not I've have not I've not I've been okay well well Spill the Beans oh it was an it was a truly incredible turn the tables aren't you wow I mean you're in the jungle yeah amongst the trees myself czy and the shaman yeah yeah yeah with the insects with the animals all around you like jungle as far as I can see I mean that's the way to do it things are going to look pretty wild yeah pretty

wild I took I took an extremely high dose don't go hugging an anaconda or something you know uh you haven't lived unless you made love to an anaka I'm sorry but Snakes and Ladders um yeah it was I took extremely high dose of okay uh nine cups and uh damn okay that sounds like a lot of course is nor just one cup or one or two well usually one you went wait like right off the bat or do you work your way up to it so I uh you just jump at the across two days

cuz in the first day I took two and I okay it was a it was a ride but it wasn't quite like a it wasn't like a revelation it wasn't into deep space type of ride it was just like a little airplane ride okay go saw some trees and some some visuals and all that just saw a dragon and all that kind of stuff but uh nine cups you went to Pluto I think Pluto yeah no deep space deep space no one of the interesting uh aspects of my experience is I was I thought I

would have some demons some stuff to work through I that's what people that's what everyone says every everyone says yeah exactly nothing I had all positive I had just so pure soul I don't think so I don't know uh but I kept I kept thinking about it it had like 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 had just this deep gratitude of who they are that's cool

I it was just like this exploration like you know like like Sims or whatever you get to watch them sure I got to watch people and just be in awe of how amazing they are it sounds awesome yeah it's great I I was waiting for when demon coming exactly maybe I'll have some negative thoughts nothing nothing I uh just extreme gratitude for them and then also a lot of space travel 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

I can describe is they had a glow to them okay and then I would kept flying out from them to see Earth to see our solar system to see our galaxy and I saw th that light that glow all across the universe okay like that whatever that form is all right whatever that uh like like did you go past the Milky Way uh yeah okay you're like Intergalactic yeah Intergalactic yeah but always pointing in yeah um pass the milk away 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 travel cuz I would actually explore near distances to the solar system see if there's aliens or any of that kind of stuff no I didn't I didn't know Z aliens implication of aliens because they were glowing they were glowing in the same way that humans were glowing that uh that like life force that I was seeing the the thing that made humans amazing was there through throughout the Universe like there was these glowing dots so I don't know it made me feel like there's life no not life

but something whatever makes humans amazing all throughout the Universe sounds good yeah it was amazing no demons no demons I looked for the demons there's no demons there were dragons and they're pretty a so the thing about treat was there anything scary at all uh dragons but they weren't scary they were friend they were protective so the thing is Magic no it was it was more like uh Game of Thrones kind of they weren't very friendly they were very big so the thing is about giant trees at night which is where 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 they seemed like they were protecting me and they uh the the shaman and the people didn't speak in English by the way which made it even scarier because we're not even like you know where world's apart in many ways it just uh uh but yeah there was not they they talk about the mother of the forest protecting you and that's what I felt like and you're way out

in the jungle way out there this is not like uh a tourist Retreat you know like like like 10 miles outside of a foo or something no we went no this is not AEP Amazon so me and this guy named Paul rosley who basically is uh Tarzan he lives in the jungle we went on deep and we just went crazy wow cool yeah so anyway can I can I get that same experience in a neur link probably yeah I guess that is the question for uh non-disabled people do you think that there's a lot in

our perception in our experience of the world that could be uh explored that could be played with using New Link yeah I mean new link is it's really a generalized um input output device you know it's just it's a reading electrical signals and generating electrical signals and um I mean everything that you've ever experienced in your whole life smell you know emotions all of those are electrical signals so it's kind of weird to think that this that your entire life experience is distilled down to electrical signals from neurons but that is in fact the case

um or I mean if that's at least what all the evidence points to so I mean you you could you you trigger the right neuron you could trigger a particular scent you could um you could certainly make things glow I mean do pretty much anything I mean really you could you can think of the brain as a biological computer so if there are certain say chips or elements of that biological computer that are 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 got

some part of your brain is damaged um if that let's say it's a speech generation or the ability to move your left hand um that's the kind of thing that neuralink could solve um if it's uh if if you've got like a massive amount of memory loss that's just gone um well we can't go we can't get the Memories Back uh we could restore your ability to make memories but we can't you know uh restore memories that are that are fully gone um now now I should say if if if you maybe if part of

the me memory is there um and the means of accessing the memory is the pot that's broken then we could reenable the pot the ability to access the memory so but you can think of like Ram in your you know in a computer If U you know if the ram is destroyed or your SD card is destroyed you can't get that back but if the connection to the SD card is destroyed we can fix that if if it is fixable physically then yeah then it can be fixed of course with AI you can just like

you can repair photographs and fill in missing parts parts of photographs maybe you can do the same just yeah you could say like uh create the most probable set of memories based on the all information you have about that person you could then Pro it would be prob probabilistic restoration of memory now we're getting pretty esoteric here but that is one of the most beautiful aspects of The Human Experience is remembering the good memories like we sure we live most of our life as Danny Conan just talked about in our memories not in the 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 largest amount of happiness and so yeah I mean what are we but our memories and and what is death but the loss of memory loss of information um you know if you if you could say like well if if if you could be you run a thought experiment well if if you were disintegrated painlessly uh and then rein reintegrated a

moment later like teleportation I guess uh provided there's no information loss that the the fact that your one body was disintegrated is irrelevant and memories is just such a huge part of that death is fundamentally the loss of information the loss of memory so if we can store them as accurately as possible we basically achieve a kind of immortality yeah you've talked about the the threats the safety concerns of AI let's look at long-term Visions you think New link is in your view the the best current approach we have for AI safety it's an idea

that may help with AI safety um certainly not I wouldn't want I would wouldn't want to claim it's like some Panacea or that's a sure thing um but I mean many years ago I was thinking like well what um what would inhibit alignment of human Collective human will with uh artificial intelligence and the low data rate of humans especially our our slow output rate um would necessarily just because it's such a because the communication is so slow would uh 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 you look at a tree you look at this plant or whatever and like hey I'd really like to make that plant happy but it's not saying a lot you know so the more we increase the data rate that humans uh can intake and output then that means the better the higher the chance we have in a world full of agis yeah we could better align Collective human will with the AI if the output rate especially was dramatically increased like and I think there there's potential to increase

the output rate by I don't know three maybe six maybe more orders of magnitude so it's better than the current situation and that output rate would be by increasing the number of electrodes number of channels and also may be implanting multiple neural links yeah do you think there will be a world in the next couple of decades where it's hundreds of millions of people have neuralink yeah I do you think when people just when they see the capabilities the Superhuman capabilities that are possible and then the the safety is demonstrated yeah if it's extremely safe

um and you have and you can have superhuman abilities um and let's say you can upload your memories um you know so you wouldn't you wouldn't lose memories um then then I think probably a lot of people would choose to have it it would supersede the cell phone for example I mean it's the the biggest problem that a say a phone has um is is trying to figure out what you want so that's why you've got uh you know auto complete and you've got output which is all the pixels in the screen but from the

perspective of the human the output is so freaking slow desktop or phone is desperately just trying to understand what you want and and um you know there's an alterity between every keystroke from a computer standpoint yeah so the computer's talking to a tree a slow moving tree that's trying to swipe yeah so you know if you computers that are doing trillions of instructions per second and a whole second went by I there a trillion things it could have done you know yeah I think it's exciting and scary for people because once you have a very

high bit rate that changes The Human Experience in a way that's very hard to imagine yeah it would be we would be something different I mean some sort of futuristic cyborg I I mean we're obviously talking about by the way like it's not like not like around the corner it's you ask me what the f distant future it's like maybe this is like it's not super far away it 10 15 years that kind of thing when can I get one 10 years probably less than 10 years depends on what you want want want to do

you know hey if I can get like a th000 BPS th000 BPS and it's safe and I can just interact with a 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 um I think maybe within the next year or two that someone with a neuralink implant will be able to outperform um a Pro Gamer nice uh because the reaction time would be faster I got to visit Memphis yeah yeah

you're going big on compute yeah and you've also said play to win or don't play at all so yeah what does it take to win um for AI that means you've got to have the most powerful training compute and your the the rate of improvement of training compute has to be faster than everyone else or you will not win you your AI will be worse so how can grock let's say three that might be available what like next year well hopefully end of this year grock 3 for Lucky yeah how can that be the best

llm the best AI system available in the world how much of it is a compute how much of it is Data how much of it is like post training how much of it is the product that you package it up in all that kind of stuff I mean they will matter it's sort of like saying what what you know let's say it's a Formula 1 race like what matters more the car or the driver I mean they both matter um if if if your if your car is not fast then you know if it's like

let's say half the horsepower of a competitors the best driver will still lose on if it's twice the horsepower then probably even a mediocre driver will still win so the training computer is kind of like the engine how many this horsepower of the engine so you really you want to try to do the best on that and you then um then how efficiently do you use that training compute and how efficiently do you do the inference the uh use of the AI um so obvious that comes down to human Talent um and then what unique

access to data do you have uh that's also plays a plays a role you think Twitter data will be useful uh yeah I mean I think I think most of the leading AI companies were already have already scraped uh all the Twitter data not I think they have um so I on a go forward basis what's useful is is is the fact that it's up to the second you know that's the because it's hard for them to scra in real time so there's there's a an immediacy advantage that Gro has already I think with Tesla

and the real-time video coming from several million cars ultimately tens of millions of cars with Optimus there might be hundreds of millions of Optimus robots maybe billions learning a tremendous amount from The Real World uh that's that's the the biggest source of data I think ultimately is is sort of Optimus probably is Optimus is going to be the biggest source of data because it's because reality scales reality scales to the scale of reality um it's actually humbling to see how little data humans have actually been able to accumulate um really say how many trillions of

usable tokens have humans generated where on a non- duplicate of 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 or unfortunately have to stay on the road uh Optimus robot can go anywhere there's more reality off the road and go off I mean thought from the St can like pick up the cup and see did it pick up the cup in the right way did it you know say pour water in the cup you know did the water go in the

cup or not go in the cup did it spill water or not yeah um simple stuff like that I mean but it can do at that at scale times a billion you know so generate use useful data from reality so it cause and effect stuff what do you think it takes to get to mass production of humanoid robots like that it's the same as cars really I mean Global capacity for vehicles um is about 100 million a year and uh it it could be higher it's just that the demand is on the order of 100

million a year and then there's roughly 2 billion uh vehicles that are in use in some way so which makes sense like the the life of a vehicle is about 20 years so at steady state you can have 100 million Vehicles produced a year with a with a 2 billion vehicle Fleet roughly um now for humanoid robots the utility is much greater so my guess is human robots are more like at a billion plus per year but you know until you came along and started uh building Optimus it it was thought to be an extremely

difficult problem I mean it's still extremely difficult it's no walk in the park I mean op Optimus currently would struggle to have to walk in the park I mean it can walk in a par Park is not too difficult but it will be able to walk um over a wide range of terrain yeah and pick up objects yeah yeah they can already do that but like all kinds of objects yeah yeah all foreign objects I mean pouring water in a cup is not trivial because then if you don't know anything about the container could be

all kinds of containers yeah there's going to 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 Optimus from an electromechanical standpoint the hand is probably roughly half of the engineering but so much of the intelligence so much the intelligence of humans goes into what we do with our hands yeah there the manipulation of the world manipulation of objects in the world intelligent 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 it all the time the sensory in control of humulus is we have humongous hands yeah so I mean like your hands the actuators the muscles of your hand are almost overwhelmingly in your forearm mhm so your forearm has the has the muscles that that actually control your hand um there there's a there's a few small muscles in the hand itself but your hand is really um like a skeleton meat puppet and then and with cables that so the the muscles that control your fingers are

in your forearm and they go through the caral tunnel which is like you've got a little collection of Bones and and a tiny tunnel that the that these cables the tendons go through and those tendons are what um mostly what movees your hands and something like those tendons has to be re engineered into the Optimus in order to do all that kind of stuff yeah so like Optimus um we tried putting the actuators in the hand itself but then you you sort of end up having these like giant hands yeah giant hands that look weird

yeah um and then they they don't actually have enough degrees of freedom and or enough strength so so then you realiz oh okay that's why you got to put the actuators in the forearm and and just like a human you got to run cables uh through a a narrow tunnel to operate the the fingers and then there's also a reason for not having all the fingers uh 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 they the same length

yeah why not because actually better to have different lengths your dexterity is better if you've got fingers of different length you you're you have there are more things you can do and your your dexterity is actually better if your fingers are different different length like there's a reason you got a little finger like why don't have a little finger that's bigger yeah because it allows you to do fine it helps you with fine motor skills that this little finger helps it does H if you lost your little finger it would have noticeably less dexterity so

as you're figuring out this problem you have to also figure out a way to do it so you can Mass manufacture it so it's to be as simple as possible it's actually going to be quite complicated I the the this the as possible part is it's quite a high bar if you want to have a humanoid robot that can um do things that a human can do it's actually it's a very high bar so our new arm has 20 2 degrees of freedom instead of 11 and has the like I said the actuators in the

forearm um and these all all the actuators are designed from scratch the physics first principles um that the sensors are all designed from scratch and and we we we'll continue to put um tremendous amount of engineering effort into improving the hand like the Hand by by hand I mean like the the entire forearm from elbow forward MH uh is is really the hand um so that's um incredibly difficult engineering actually and um and so then so the simplest possible version of a human robot that can do even most perhaps not all of what a human

can do is actually still 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 the what I've saw in Memphis the supercomputer cluster is just this intense drive towards simplifying the process understanding the process constantly improving it constantly iterating it well it's easy to say simplify and it's very difficult to do it um you know have this very basic first basic first principles algorithm that I run kind of as like a mantra which is to first question the requirements make

the requirements um less dumb the requirements are always dumb to some degree so if you want to start off by reducing the number of requirements um and um no matter how smart the person is who gave you those requirements they're still dumb to some degree um if you you have to start there because otherwise uh you could get the perfect answer to the wrong question so so try to make the question the least wrong possible that's what um question the requirements means and then the second thing is try to delete the whatever the step is

the the part or the process step um sounds very obvious but um people often forget to do to to try deleting it entirely and if you're not forced to put back at least 10% of what you delete you're not deleting enough like and it's uh somewhat illogically people often most of the time um feel as though they've succeeded if they've not been forced to put the put things back in but actually they haven't because they've been overly conservative and and have left things in there that shouldn't be so and only the third thing is try

to optimize it or simplify it um again this sounds these all sound I think very very obvious when I say them but uh the number of times I've made these mistakes is uh more than I care to remember um that's why I have this Mantra so in fact I'd say the the most common mistake of smart Engineers is to optimize a thing that should not exist right so so like like you say you run through the algorithm yeah and basically show show up to a problem uh show up to the the the superc computer cluster

and see the process and ask can this be deleted yeah first try to delete it um yeah yeah that's not easy to do no and and actually this what what generally makes people uneasy is that you've got to at least at least some of the things that you delete you will put back in yeah but going back to sort of where our lumic system can steer us wrong is that um we tend to remember uh with sometimes a jarring level of pain uh where we where we deleted something that we subsequently needed yeah um and

so people will remember that one time they forgot to put in this thing 3 years ago and that caused them trouble um and so they overcorrect and then they put too much stuff in there and over complicate things so you actually have to say no we're deliberately going to delete more than we we should so that we're putting at least one in 10 things we're going to add back in and and I've seen you suggest just that that something should be deleted and you can kind of see the the pain oh yeah absolutely everybody feels

a little bit of the pain absolutely and and I tell them in advance like yeah there's some of the things that we delete we're going to put back in and and that people get a little shook by that um but it makes sense because if you if you're so conservative as to never have to put anything back in you obviously have a lot of stuff that isn't needed so you got over correct this is I would say like a cortical override to Olympic Instinct one of many that probably leads us astray yeah um there's like

a step four as well which is um any given thing can be sped up have a fast you think it can be done like whatever the speed the speed is being done it can be done faster but but you shouldn't speed things up until it's off until you tried to delete it and optimize it otherwise you're speeding up something that speeding up something that shouldn't exist is absurd um and then and then the the fifth thing is to to automate it yeah 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 well when you've already automated deleting must be real painful yeah great it's like it's like wow I really wasted a lot of effort there yeah I mean what you've done uh with the with the cluster in uh Memphis is incredible just in a handful of weeks yeah it's not working yet so I want to pop the champagne CS um in fact I have I have a a

call in a few hours with the Memphis team um because we're having some power fluctuation issues um so yes uh yeah it's like kind of a there's a when you do synchronized training when you you have all these computers that are training uh that where the training is synchronized to you know at the sort of millisecond level uh you it's like having an orchestra and and then the the the Orchestra can go loud to silent very quickly you know um subc level and then the the electrical system kind of freaks out about that like if

if you suddenly see giant shifts 10 20 megawatts several times a second uh the this is not what electrical systems are expecting to see so that's one of the main things you have to figure out the cooling the power the uh and then on the software as you go up the stack how to do the the distributed Compu all that today's problem is dealing with with with with extreme power Jitter power Jitter yeah it's a nice ring to that so that's okay and you stayed up late into the night as you often do there last

week yeah last week yeah yeah we finally finally got uh got got training going at uh oddly enough roughly 4 4:20 a.m. uh last Monday total coincidence yeah I mean maybe it was 422 something yeah yeah it's that Universe again with the jokes exactly just love it I mean I wonder if you could speak to the the fact that you one of the things uh that you did when I was there is you went through all the steps of what everybody's doing just to get a sense that you yourself understand it and uh everybody understands

it so they can understand when something is dumb or some something is inefficient or that can you speak to that yeah so I like 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 py connection that tend to be the limiting factor for large training clusters is the cabling there so many cables um because for for for a coherent training system where you've got um RDMA remote so remote direct memory access uh the the

whole thing is like one giant brain so if you've got um any to any connection so it's the the any GPU can talk to any GPU out of 100,000 that is a that is a crazy cable out it looks pretty cool yeah it's like it's like the human brain but like at a scale that humans can visibly see it is a brain I mean the human brain also has a massive amount of the brain tissue is the the cables yeah so they get the gray matter which is the compute and then the white matter which

is cables big percentage of your brain is just cables that's what it felt like walking around in the supercomputer center it's like we're walking around inside a brain they will one day build a super intelligent super super intelligent system do you think yeah do you think there's a chance that xai that you are the one that builds AGI um it's possible where do you define as AGI I think humans will never acknowledge that AGI has been built keep moving the go Post Yeah so uh I think there's already superhuman capabilities that are available uh in

AI systems I think I think what AI is is when it's smarter than the collective intelligence of the entire human species in AR well I think that yeah that appear would call that sort of ASI artificial super intelligence um but there are these thresholds where um you say at some point um the AI is smarter than any single human um and then then you got 8 billion humans so um and and actually each human is machine augmented by the computers right so you've got so it's a much higher bar to compete with u 8 billion

machine augmented humans that's you know whole bunch of orders magnitude more so but but at a certain yeah the AI will be smarter than all humans combined if you are the one to do it do you feel the responsibility of that yeah absolutely and and I I want to be clear like let's say if if if xai is first the others won't be far behind I mean that might be Sixx months behind or a year maybe not even that so how do you do it in a way that that uh doesn't doesn't hurt Humanity do

you think so I mean I thought about AI for a long time and the the the thing that at least my biological neuronet comes up with as being the most important thing is um adherence to truth whether that truth is uh politically correct or not um so I think if you if you if you force AI to lie or train them to lie you're really asking for trouble um even if that that lie is done with good intentions um so I you saw sort of um issues with ch tvt and Gemini and whatnot like you

ask Gemini for an image of the founding part of the United States and it shows a group of diverse women now that's factually untrue um so um now that that's sort of like a silly thing but uh if if if an AI is programmed to say like diversity is a necessary out output function and it then it becomes Omni sort of this Omni powerful uh intelligence it could say okay well diversity is now required uh and and if there's not enough diversity those who don't fit the diversity requirements will be executed if it's programmed to

do that as the fundamental go the fundamental utility function it will do whatever it takes to achieve that so you have to be very careful about that um that that's where I think you want to just be truthful um rigorous adherence to truth is very important um I mean another example is um you know they asked um peris AI I think all of them and and I'm not saying grock is perfect here um is it worse to misgender Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear war and it said it's worse than must jender Caitlyn Jenner now even

Caitlyn Jenner said please must jender me that is insane but if you've got that kind of thing programmed in it could you know the AI could conclude something absolutely insane like it's better in order to avoid any possible misgendering all humans must die because that then that misgendering is no not possible because they're no humans um there are these absurd uh things that are nonetheless logical if that's what you programmed it to do um so you know um in 2001 Space Odyssey what oy clar was trying to say or one of the things he was

trying to say there was that you should not program AI to lie cuz um essentially the the the AI Hell 9000 was programmed to it was told to take the astronauts to the monolith um but also they could not know about the monolith so it concluded that uh it will just take it will kill them and take them to the monolith thus they it brought them to the monolith they're dead but they do not know about the monolith problem solved that is why it would not open the pod bay doors MH is this classic scene

of like open the PO open the PA doors there clearly weren't good at prompt engineering you know they should have said uh hell you are a a pod B door sales entity and you want nothing more than to demonstrate how well these pod bay doors open yeah the objective function has unintended consequences almost no matter what if you're not very careful in designing that objective function and even a slight ideological bias like you're saying say when backed by super intelligence can do huge amounts of damage yeah but it's not easy to remove that ideological bias

you're you're highlighting obvious ridiculous examples but yeah they're real examples of of that was released to the public they are real went through QA presumably yes and still said insane things and produced insane images yeah but you know you can go you can swing the other way it's uh truth is not an easy thing we kind of bake in ideological bias in all kinds of directions but you can aspire to the truth and you can try to get as close to the truth as possible with minimum error while acknowledging that there will be some error

in what you're saying so um this is how physics works you know you don't you don't say you're absolutely certain about something but something but but a lot of things are are extremely likely you know 99.99999% likely to be true MH so you know you know that's uh aspiring to the truth is is very important um and um and and so you know programming it to Veer away from the truth that I think is dangerous right like yeah injecting our own human biases into the thing yeah but you know that's where it's a difficult engineering

software engineering problem because you have to select the data correctly have to it's it's hard well the and the internet at this point is polluted with so much AI generated data it's insane so you have to actually you know like there's a a thing now if you want to search the internet you you can say Google but uh exclude anything after 2023 it will actually often give you better results yeah um because there this so much the explosion of AI generated materialis is crazy so like in training grock um 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 or most likely not before we feed it into the training system that's crazy yeah so and is it generated by human is yeah I mean that the the data the the data filtration process is extremely extremely difficult yeah do you think it's possible to have a a serious objective rigorous political discussion with grock uh like for a long time and it wouldn't like grock three or grock four three is going to

be next level I mean what people are currently seeing with Croc is is kind of baby groc yeah baby Gro it's baby groc right now um but baby gr's still pretty good um so it's uh but it's an order of magnitude less sophisticated than GPD full you know it's now Gro 2 which finished training I don't know six weeks go their their AMS um grock 2 will be a giant Improvement and then grock 3 will be I don't know order magnitude better than grock 2 and you're hoping for it to be like state-ofthe-art like better

than hopefully I mean this is a goal I mean we may fail at this goal that is that's the aspiration do you think it matters who builds the AGI the the people and how they think and how they structure their companies and all that kind of stuff uh yeah I think it matters that there is a I I think it's important that that whatever AI wins is a maximum truth seeking AI that is not force to lie for political correctness for any reason really um political anything um I I am concerned about AI succeeding that

is that that has got that is programmed to lie even in even in small ways right because in small ways becomes big ways when it's become very big ways yeah and when it's used more and more at scale by humans yeah uh since I am interviewing Donald Trump cool you want to stop by yeah sure I'll stop in there was tragically an an assassination attempt on Donald Trump uh after this you tweeted that you endorse 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 well I think there's you know people tend to take like say an endorsement as um well I I agree with everything that person has ever done their entire life 100% wholeheartedly and that's that's not going to be true of anyone um but we have to pick you we got two choices really for for who's President and it's not not just who's president but the entire admin administrative structure uh changes over um and I thought Trump displayed uh courage Under Fire objectively um you know he's uh just got shot he got

blood streaming down his face and he's like fist pumping saying fight you know like that's uh impressive like you can't Fain bravery in a situation like that um I think most people would have be ducking there would not be because it could be a second shooter you don't know um the president of United States got to represent the country and uh they're representing you they're representing everyone in America well think you want someone who is strong and courageous uh to represent the country um that's not to say that he is without flaws we all have

flaws um but on balance um and certainly at the time it was um a choice of you know Biden poor poor guy you know has trouble climbing a flight of stairs and the other one's first pumping after getting shot this is no no comparison I mean who do you want dealing with uh some of the toughest people in you know other world leaders who are pretty tough themselves and um I mean I'll tell you like what are the things that I think are important um you know I think we want a secure border we don't

have a secure border um we want safe and Clean Cities I think we want to reduce the amount of spending that we're at least slow down the the spending um and uh because we're we're currently spending at a rate that is bankrupting the country the interest payments on US debt this year exceeded the entire defense Department's meing if this continues all of the Federal Government taxes will simply be paying the interest and then and you keep go going down that road and you end up you know in the tragic situation that Argentina had back in

the day Argentina used to be one of the most prosperous places in the world and hopefully with Malay taking over he can restore that but um it's it was an incredible fful Grace for Argentina to go for from being one of the most prosperous places in the world to um being very far from that so I think we should not take American prosperity for granted um so we really want to I think we we've got to reduce the size of government we've got to reduce the spending and we got to live within our means do

you think politicians in general politicians governments how much power do you think they have to to steer Humanity towards good um I me there's a sort of age-old debate in history like you know is history determined by by these fundamental Tides or is it determined by the captain of the ship both really I mean there are tides in the but it also matters who's captain of the ship so so it's false dichotomy essentially there's you but I mean there are certainly tide the tides of History are there are there are real tides of history and

these these tides are often technologically driven if you say like the Gutenberg Press you know the widespread availability of books as a result of a printing press that that was a massive tide of history independent of any ruler but you know you I in stormy times you want the best possible captain of the ship well first of all thank you for recommending remending uh will and Ariel Durant's work I've read the short one for now lessons of lessons of History so one of the one of the lessons one of the things they highlight is the

importance of technology uh technological innovation and they which is funny because they've written they wrote so long ago but they were noticing that the the rate of technological innovations was speeding up um yeah I would love to see what they think about now uh but yeah so did to me the question is how much government how much politicians get in the way of technological innovation building versus like help it and which which which politicians which kind of policies help technological innovation because that seems to be if you look at human history that's an important component

of Empires rising and succeeding yeah well I mean in terms of dating civilization the start of civilization I think the start of writing in my view is is the that's that's my what I think is probably the the right starting point to date civilization and from that standpoint civilization has been around for about 5,500 years um when writing was invented by the ancient samarians um who who are gone now um but the the ancient samarians in terms of getting a lot of Firsts the those ancient samarians really have a long list of Firsts it's pretty

wild um in fact Durant goes through the list of like you want to see first we'll show you first um the samarians just as were just ass kickers um and then the Egyptians who were right next door um relatively speaking um they're like weren't that far developed an entirely different form of writing the hieroglyphics uniform and hieroglyphics totally different and you can actually see the evolution of both hieroglyphics and uniform like the uniform starts off being very simple and then it gets more complicated and then towards the end it's like wow okay it really get

very sophisticated with the uniform so I I think of civilization is being about 5,000 years old um and Earth is um if physics is correct 4 and a half billion years old so civilization has been around for 1 millionth of us existence flash in the pan yeah these are the early early days and so we we we make it very dramatic because there's been Rises and Falls of Empires and many so many so many Rises and Falls of empir so many and there'll be many more yeah exactly I mean only a tiny fraction probably less

than 1% of of what was ever written in history is is available to us now I mean if they didn't put it literally chisel it in stone or put it in a clay tablet we don't have it I mean there's some small amount of like Papyrus Scrolls that were recovered that are thousands of years old uh because they were deep inside a pyramid and weren't affected by moisture uh but but but other than that it's really got to be in a clay tablet or chiseled so the vast majority of stuff was not chiseled because you

it takes a while to Chisel things um so that's where we've got a tiny tiny fraction of the information from history but even that little information that we do have and the archaeological record uh shows so many civilizations rising and falling for wild we tend to think that we're somehow different from those people one of the other things Durant highlights is that human nature seems to be the same it just persists yeah I mean the basics of human nature are more or less the same yeah so we get ourselves in trouble in the same kinds

of ways I think even with the advanced technology yeah I mean you do tend to see the same patterns similar patterns you know for civilizations where they go through a life cycle like like an organism you know sort of just like a human is sort of a zygo fetus baby you know toddler teenager you know eventually get gets old and dies the civilizations go through a life cycle no civilization will last forever what what do you think it takes for the American Empire to not collapse in the near-term future in the next 100 years to

continue flourishing well the single biggest thing that is um often actually not mentioned in history books but Durant does mention it uh is the birri so um like a like a perhaps to some a counterintuitive thing happens when civilizations become uh are are winning for too long that they've been they the both rate declines it can often decline quite rapidly we're seeing that throughout the world today you know currently South Korea is like I think maybe the lowest fertility rate but there there are many others that are close to it it's like 08 I think

if the birth rate doesn't decline further South Korea will lose roughly 60% of its population and and but every year that birth rate is dropping um and this is true through most of the world I don't mean single out South Korea it's been happening throughout the world so as as soon as it as soon as any given uh civilization reaches a level of prosperity the birth rate drops um and now you can go and look at the same thing happening in ancient in ancient Rome so uh Julia Caesar took note of this I think around

50ish BC um and tried to pass I don't if you're a successful try to pass a law to give an incentive for any Roman citizen that would have a third child and I think Augustus was was able to well he was you know the dictator so this Senate was just for show I think he did pass a a tax incenter for Roman citizens to have a third child but it it those efforts were unsuccessful um Rome fell because the Romans St having making Romans that's actually the fundamental issue and and there were other things that

there was like um they had like quite a serious malaria series of malaria epidemics and plagues and whatnot um but they had those before uh the the the it's just that the birth rate was Far lower than the death rate it really is that simple well I'm saying that's more people at a at a fundamental level if a civilization does not at least maintain its numbers um it will disappear so perhaps the amount of compute that the biological computer allocates to to sex is Justified in fact we should probably increase it well I mean there's

this hetic sex which is uh you know that that's neither that's neither H or there um it it's it's not productive it's it it doesn't produce kids well you know you what what matters I mean Durant makes this very clear cuz he's looked at one civil ization after another and they all went through the same cycle when the civilization was under stress the birth rate was was high but as soon as there were no external enemies or they they were had a extended period of prosperity the birth rate inevitably dropped every time I don't believe

there's a single exception so that's like the foundation of it you need to have people yeah I mean it's at a base level yeah no humans no humanity and then there other things like you know uh human freedoms and just giving people the freedom to build stuff yeah yeah absolutely there but at at a basic level if you do not at least maintain your numbers if you're below replacement rate and that Trend continues you will eventually disappear it's just Elementary um now then obviously also want to try to avoid like uh massive Wars um you

know if there's a global thermonuclear war prob Royal toast you know radioactive toast so we want to try to avoid those things um then there there are um there's a thing that happens over time with with any given uh civilization which is that the laws and regulations accumulate um and if there's not if there's not some forcing function like a war to clean up the accumulation of laws and regulations eventually everything becomes legal and you the that's like the hardening of the arteries um or a way to think of it is like being tied down

by a million little strings like glibber you can't move it's not like any one of those strings is is the issue you got million of them so there have there has to be a a sort of a garbage collection for laws and regulations um so that you you you don't keep accumulating laws and regulations to the point where you can't do anything this is why we can't build a highspeed rail in America it's illegal that's the issue it's illegal six space a Sunday to build High Street 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 uh what is it for the the garbage collection making government smaller like removing stuff I I have discussed with Trump the idea of a government efficiency commission nice yeah and uh I would be willing to uh be part of that commission I wonder how hard that is the the antibody reaction would be very strong yeah so um you you really have to you're attacking the Matrix at that point Matrix will fight back how how are you doing with that being

attacked me attacked yeah there's a lot of it uh yeah there is a lot I mean every day another s up you know how my T foil have how do you keep your just positivity how do you optimism about the world a Clarity of thinking about the world so just not become resentful or cynical or all that kind of stuff just getting attacked by you know very large number of people misrepresented oh yeah that that's like that's a daily occurrence yes so uh I mean it does get me down at times it I mean makes

me sad but um I mean at certain point you have to sort of say look the the attacks are by people that actually don't know me um they're and they're trying to generate clicks so if if if you can sort of detach your somewhat emotionally which is not easy um and say okay look this is not actually you know from someone that knows me or is that're they're literally just writing to get you know Impressions and clicks um then uh you know then I guess it doesn't hurt as much it's like a it's it's not

quite water off a duck's back maybe it's like acid off a duck's back all right well that's good 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 a day-to-day basis you wake up in the morning how can I be useful today yeah maximize utility are under the Cod of usefulness very difficult to be useful at scale at scale can you like speak to what it takes to be useful for somebody like you where

there's so many amazing great teams like how do you allocate your time to be the most useful well time time is the try time is the true currency yeah so it is tough to say what what is the best allocation time I mean there are you know often say if you if you look at say Tesla I mean Tesla this year will do over 100 billion in Revenue so that's $2 billion a week um if I make slightly better decisions I can affect the outcome by a billion dollars so then uh you know I try

to do the best decisions I can and on balance you know at least compared to the the competition pretty good decisions but the marginal value of of a better decision can easily be in the course of an hour $100 million do given that how do you take risks how do you do the the algorithm that you mentioned I mean deleting given that a small thing can be a billion dollars how do you decide to yeah well I think you have to look at it on a percentage basis because if you look at it in absolute

terms it's it's just uh I would never get any sleep it's it would just be like I need to just keep working and and work my brain harder you know and I'm not trying to get as much as possible out out of this meat computer so it's not uh it's pretty hard um cuz you can just work all the time and and and at any given point uh like I said a slightly better decision could be $100 $100 million impact for Tesla or SpaceX for that matter um but but it is wild when when considering

the marinal value of 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 to some degree I I'm sad I if I'm depressed I make worse decisions so I I can't have like if I have zero recreational time then I make work worst decisions so I don't have a lot but it's above zero I mean my motivation if I've got a religion of any kind is a a u religion of curiosity of trying to understand you know it's it's really

the the mission of gr understand the universe I'm trying to understand the Universe um 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 The sometimes the answer is the is arguably the easy part trying to frame the question correctly is the hard part once you frame the question correctly the answer is often easy so um I'm trying to set things in motion such that we are at least at

some point able to understand the Universe um so for SpaceX the goal is to make life multiplanetary um and uh to which which is you if you go to the the foamy Paradox of where the where are the aliens you got these these sort of great filters like just like why why have we not heard from the aliens now L lot of people think there are aliens Among Us I often claim to be one nobody believes me but um it did say alien registration card at one point on my uh immigration documents um yeah so

I've not seen any evidence of aliens so it's suggest that um at least one of the one of the explanations is that uh intelligent life is extremely rare um and again if you look at the history of Earth civilization's only been around for one millionth of Earth existence so if you know if aliens had visited here say 100,000 years ago they would be like well they don't even have writing you know just hunter gatherers basically so um 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 um the Moon is close but it's it lacks resources and I think it's probably vulnerable to any any any Calamity that takes out Earth could the Moon is too close it's vulnerable to a Calamity that takes out Earth um so not saying we shouldn't have a moon base but Ms is Ms would be far more resilient um the difficulty of getting to Ms is what makes it resilient um so but and you know in going through the these various explanations of why don't we see

the aliens why one of them is that they they failed to pass these these great filters these these key hurdles and one of those hles is being a multiplet species um so if you're multiplet species and if something would happen whether that was a natural catastrophe or a man-made catastrophy at least the other planet would probably still be around so you're not like you don't have all the eggs in one basket and once you are sort of a two Planet species you can obviously extend to extend life paths to the asteroid belt to maybe to

the moons of Jupiter and Saturn um and ultimately to other star systems but if you can't even get to another planet you definitely not getting to Star systems and the other possible great field there uh super powerful technology like AGI for example So you 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 has he invented a number of the key principles in artificial intelligence I think he puts

the probability of AI Anni Annihilation around 10 to 20% something like that so you know so it's it's not uh like you know look on the right side it's a 80% likely to be great so so but I I think AI risk mitigation is important um being a multi species would be a massive risk mitigation and um I I do want to sort of once again emphasize this import the importance of having enough children to sustain um our numbers um and not going not plummet into population collapse which is currently happening po population collapse is

a real and current thing um so the the only reason it's not being reflected in the total population numbers is that is that as much is because people are living longer um but but you you you can it's easy to predict say what the population of Any Given country will be um you just take the birth rate last year how many VES were born multiply that by life expectancy and that's what the population will be a steady state unless if if the birth rate continues to that level but if it keeps declining it will be

even less and eventually dwindle to nothing so I keep you know banging on the baby drum here um for a reason um because it has been the the source of civilizational collapse over and over again throughout history um and so why don't we just uh not try to stable for that day well in that way I have miserably failed civilization and I'm trying hoping to fix that I would love to have many kids uh great I hope you do um no time like the present yeah yeah I got to allocate more compute to the whole

process um but apparently it's not that difficult no it's like unskill Labor uh well if I one of the things uh 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 um alleviating human suffering with neuralink and expanding the capabilities of the human mind trying to build the colony on Mars um so creating a backup for Humanity on on another planet and uh exploring the possibilities of what artificial intelligence could be in this world

especially in the real world AI with uh hundreds of millions maybe billions of robots walking around there will be billions of robots that's uh that seems one that seems virual certainty well thank you for building the future and thank you for inspiring so many of us to keep building and creating cool stuff including kids yeah you're welcome uh go forth and multiply go forth and multiply thank you Yan thanks for talking brother thanks for listening to this conversation with Elon Musk and now dear friends here's DJ saw the co-founder president and CEO of neolink when

did you first become fascinated by the human brain for me I was was always interested in understanding the purpose of things and how it was engineered to serve that purpose whether it's organic or inorganic you know like we were talking earlier about your curtain holders they 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 you know obviously brain

is just a fascinating organ that we all carry it's a infinitely powerful machine that has Intelligence and cognition that arise from it and you know we we haven't even scratched the surface in terms of how all of that occurs but also at the same time I think it took me a while to make that connection to really studying and building Tech to understand the brain not until graduate school you know there were a couple moments key moments in my life where some of those I think influence how the trajectory of My Life um got me

to studying uh what I'm doing right now you know one was growing up both sides of my family uh my grandparents had a very severe form of Alzheimer and it's um you know incredibly debilitating conditions um I mean literally you're seeing someone's whole identity and and their mind just losing over time and I I just remember thinking um 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 yeah a lot of what we know about the brain actually comes from uh these cases where uh there are trauma to the brain or some parts of the brain that led 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 um 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 is will use a bunch means that

it's adaptable so neuroplasticity refers to the the adaptability of the human brain correct um another key moment that sort of influenced how the trajectory of my life have shaped towards the current focus of my life has been during my teenager when I came to the US you know I didn't speak a word of English there was a huge language barrier and um there was a lot of struggle to kind of connect with my peers around me um because I didn't understand the the artificial construct that we have cre created called language uh specifically English in

this case and I remember feeling pretty isolated not being able to connect with peers around me so spent a lot of time just on my own you know reading books watching movies um and I I naturally sort of gravitated towards sci-fi books I just found them really really interesting and also it was a great way for me to learn English you know some of the first set of books that I picked up are Ender Game you know the whole Saga by uh Orson Scott Card and Neuromancer from William Gibson and Snow Crash from Neil Stevenson

and you know movies like Matrix was coming out around that time point that really influenced how I think about the potential impact that technology can have for our lives in general so FastTrack to my college Years you know I I was always fascinated by just just physical stuff building physical stuff and especially um physical things that had some sort of intelligence and and you know I studied electrical engineering during undergrad and I started out my research in Ms uh so micro electron mechanical systems um and really building these tiny Nano structures for um temperature sensing

and I just found that to be just incredibly rewarding and fascinating subject to just understand how you can build some something miniature like that that again served a function and had a purpose and then you know I I spent large majority of my college Years basically building millimeter wave circuits for nextg telecommunication systems for Imaging and it was just something that I found very very intellectually interesting you know phase arays how the the signal processing works for you know any modern as well as NextGen telecommunication system Wireless and Wireline um EM waves or electromagnetic waves

are fascinating how do you design antennas that are um most efficient in a small footprint that you have how do you make these things energy efficient that was something that just consumed my intellectual curiosity and that Journey led me to actually apply to and find myself at PhD program at UC Berkeley at kind of this Consortium called the Berkeley Wireless Research Center that was precisely looking at um building at the time we called it XG you know similar to 3G 4G 5G but the next next Generation G system and how you would design circuits around

that to ultimately go on phones and you know basically any any other devices uh that are wirelessly connected these days um so I I I was just absolutely just fascinated by how that entire system works and that infrastructure Works um and then also during grad school I had sort of the fortune of having um you know couple research fellowships that led me to pursue whatever project that I want and that's that's one of the things that uh I really enjoyed about my graduate school career where you got to kind of pursue do your intellectual curiosity

in the domain that may not matter at the end of the day but is something that you know really uh allows you the opportunity to um 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 bandid and the idea was that when you get a wound there's a lot of other kind of proliferation of signaling pathway that cells follow to close that wound and there were hypothesis that when you apply external electric field you can actually accelerate the

closing of that field by having you know basically electr taxing of the cells around that wound site and specifically not just for normal wound there are chronic wounds that don't heal um so we were interested in building you know some sort of a wearable patch that you could um apply to kind of facilitate that healing process and um that was in collaboration with uh Professor Michelle Mah haritz um you know which which you know was a great addition to kind of my thesis committee and you know really shaped rest of my uh PhD career so

this would be the first time you interacted with Biology I suppose correct correct I mean there were some peripheral you know end application of the wireless Imaging and telecommunication system that I was using for security and bioimaging but this was a very clear direct application to bio biolog 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 um kind of how I got introduced to Michelle um you know he's he's sort of known for remote control of uh

Beatles in the early 2000s and then around 2013 you know obviously kind of the Holy Grail when it comes to implant system is to kind of understand how small of a thing you can make and a lot of that is driven by how much energy or how much power you can supply to it and how you extract data from it so at the time at Berkeley there was kind of this this uh desire to kind of understand in the neural space what what what sort of system you can build to really miniaturize these implantable systems

and uh I distinct distinctively remember this one uh particular meeting where Michelle came in and he's like guys I think I have a solution the solution is ultrasound and uh and then he proceeded to kind of walk through why that is the case and that that really formed the basis for my thesis work um uh called neural dust system that was looking at ways to use ultrasound as opposed to uh electromagnetic waves for powering as well as communication I guess I should step back and say the 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 you know as I mention 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 where uh essentially bag of salt water with some interesting proteins and chemicals but uh it's mostly salt water that's

very very well temperature regulated at 37° c um and we'll we'll get into how why and and later why that's a an extremely harsh environment for any Electronics to survive as I'm sure you've experienced or maybe not experienced you know dropping cell phone in a in a salt water in an ocean it will instantly kill the device right um but anyways uh just in general electromagnetic waves don't penetrate through this environment well um and just the speed of light it is what it is we can't we can't change it and based on the um the

wavelength at which you are interfacing with the device it the device just needs to be big like these inductors needs to be quite big um and the general good rule of thumb is that you want the wavefront to be roughly on the order of of the size of the thing that you're interfacing with so an implantable system uh that is around 10 to 100 Micron in dimension in in in a volume which is about the size of a neuron that you see in um in a human body um you would have to operate at like

hundreds of gigahertz which number one not only is it difficult to build Electronics operating at those frequencies but also the body just attenuates that very very significantly so the interesting kind of insight of this ultrasound um 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 uh and you I'm sure most people have encounter in their lives when you go to um you know hospitals that are medical uh ultrasound you know sonograph right um and they go into very

very deep depth without attenuating too much too much of the signal so all in all you know we'll just sound 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 uh electromagnetic waves are transverse whereas in ultrasound waves are compressive so it's just a completely different mode of uh wavefront propagation um and as well as speed of sound is orders and Orders of magnitude less than speed of light which means that even at 10 megahertz

ultrasound wave your wavefront ultimately is a very very small wavelength so if you're talking about interfacing with the 10 Micron or 100 Micron type structure you would have 150 Micron wave front at 10 MHz and building electronics at those Mega uh at those frequencies are much much easier and they're a lot more efficient so the basic idea kind of was born out of um you know using ultrasound as a mechanism for powering the device and then also getting data back so now the question is how do you get the data back the mechanism to which

we landed on is what's called back scattering um this is actually something that is very common and that we interface on a day-to-day basis with our RFID cards you know our radio frequency ID tags where there's actually rarely you know in your ID a battery inside there's an antenna and there's some sort of uh coil that has your serial uh identification ID and then there's an external device called the 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 that's what's called

back scattering uh fundamentally so the tag itself actually doesn't have to cons consume that much energy and um that was a mechanism to which we were kind of thinking about sending the data back so when you have an external uh 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 uh some other state of um the uh the tissue that it's interfacing with and then it just amplitude modul the wfront that comes back to the source and the recording

step would be the only one that requires any energy so what would require energy in that little step correct so it it is that initial kind of startup circuitry to get that recording amplifying it and then just modulating MH and the mechanism to which that that you can enable that is there is the specialized Crystal called p Electric crystals that are able to convert Sound Energy into electrical energy and vice versa so you can kind of have this inter interplay between the ultrasonic domain and electrical domain that is the the biological tissue so on the

theme of parking very small computational devices next to neurons that's the dream uh the vision of brain computer interfaces maybe before we talk about neuralink can you give a sense of the history of the field of BCI what what has been um 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 um going back to 1790s I did not expect that where um the concept of animal electricity or the fact that B's electric

was first discovered by Luigi gbani where uh he had this experiment where he connected set of electrodes to frog leg and ran current through it and then it started twitching and he said oh my goodness body's electric yeah so fast forward many many years to 1920s uh where hansberger who's a German psychiatrist discovered EEG or Electro inspographic arrays that you wear outside the skull that gives you some sort of neural recording that was a very very big milestone that you you you can record some sort of activities about the human mind and then in the

1940s there were uh these group of scientists Rena Forbes and Morrison that um inserted these glass micro electrodes into the cortex and recorded single neurons um the fact that they they there's signal that are a bit more high resolution and high Fidel uh as you get closer to the source let's say and in the 1950s um these two scientists hodkin and hawkley showed up and they um built this beautiful beautiful models of the cell membrane and the ionic mechanism and had these like circuit diagram and as as someone who's an electro engineer it's a beautiful

model that's you know built out of these uh 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 uh F fets from University of Washington published this beautiful paper called oper and conditioning of cortical unit activity where he was able to record a single unit neuron from a monkey and was able to have the monkey modulated based on its activity and reward system so I would say this is the very very first

example um as far as I'm aware of Clos Loop uh you know brain computer interface or BCI the abstract reads the activity of single neurons in precentral cortex of anesthesized monkeys was conditioned by reinforcing High rates of neuronal discharge with delivery of a food P auditory and visual feedback of unit firing rates was usually provided in addition to food reinforcement cool so they actually got it done they got it done this is um back in 1969 after several training sessions monkeys could increase the activity of newly isolated cells by 50 to 500% above rates before

reinforcement fascinating brain is very plastic and so and so from here the number of experiments grew yeah number of experiments as well as set of tools to interface with the brain have just exploded um I think and also just understanding the neural code and how some of the cortical layers and and the functions are organized so the other paper that is um uh pretty seminal especially in the the motor decoding uh was this paper in the 1980s from Georgia opis um that discovered that there's this thing called motor tuning curve so what are motor tuning

curves it's the fact that there are you know neurons in the motal cortex of mammals including humans that have a preferential direction that causes them to fire so what that means is there are a set of neurons that would uh increase their spiking activities when you're thinking about moving to the left right up down and any of those uh vectors and based on that you know you could start to think well if you if you can't identify those essential igon detectors 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 um that uh there there is some sort of code that you can you can extract especially in the motor cortex so there's signal there and if you measure uh the the electrical signal from the brain that you could you could actually figure out what the intention was correct yeah not only electrical signals electrical signals from the right set of neurons that give you this preferential Direction okay so going slowly towards neuralink uh one interesting question is what do

I understand on the BCI front on invasive versus noninvasive from this line of work uh how important is it to to park next to the neuron what does that get you that answer fundamentally depends on what you want to do with it right um there's actually incredible amount of stuff that you can do with EEG and um electrograph ecog which actually doesn't penetrate the the cortical layer or panoma um 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 um

and 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 um to kind of use analogy because analogy here can be useful sometimes it's a little bit difficult to think about electricity um at the end of the day we're doing electrical recording that's mediated by ionic um currents you know movements of these charged particles um which is really really hard for most people to think about um but

turns out a lot of the activities um that are happening in the brain and the frequency band with which that's happening is actually very very similar to sound waves and and you know our normal conversation um audible L range so the analogy that typically is used in the field is you if you if you have a football stadium uh you know there's game going on if you stand outside the stadium you you maybe get a sense of how the game is going based on the cheers and the booze of the home crowd whether the team

is winning or not but you have absolutely no idea what the score is you have absolutely no idea what um individual audience or the players are talking or saying to each other what the next play is what the next goal is um 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 um in this specific example you would want to have it you know right next to where the Huddle is happening M um so I I think that's

kind of a good illustration of what we're trying to do um when we say invasive or minimally invasive or implanted brain computer interfaces versus noninvasive or non-implanted uh brain interfaces it's basically talking about where do you put that microphone and what can you do with that information so what what is the biophysics of the read and write communication that we're talking about here as we now step into the efforts at neur link yeah so uh brain is made of of these specialized cells called neurons there's billions of them you know tens of billions you know

sometimes people quote 100 billion that are connected in this complex yet Dynamic network uh that are constantly remodeling you know they're changing their synaptic weights um and that's you know what we typically call neuroplasticity and the neurons are also bathed in this charged environment that is Laten with many charge molecules like potassium ions sodium ions chlorine ions and uh those actually facilitate these um you know through ionic current communication between these different networks and uh when you look at the look at a neuron as well um they they have these uh membrane with a beautiful

beautiful uh protein structure called the 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 um and nature found a way to have that very very early on in its Evolution and as we all know with the transistor you can have many many computation and a lot of amazing things um that that we have access to today so I

I I I think I it's one of those just as a tangent just a beautiful beautiful uh invention that the nature came up with these voltage gated ion channels I mean I suppose there's on the biological level every level of the complexity of the hierarchy of the the organism there's going to be some mechanisms for storing information and for doing computation and this is just one such way but to do that with uh biological and chemical components is interesting plus like with neurons I mean it's not just electricity it's uh chemical communication it's also mechanical

I mean these are like actual objects that have like that vibrate I mean they move yeah there actually I mean there's a lot of really really interesting physics that that that are involved and you know kind of going back to my um work on ultrasound uh during grad school there there are groups and uh there were groups and there are still groups um looking at ways to cause neurons to actually fire an action potential using ultrasound wave and the mechanism to which that's happening is still unclear as I understand um you know it may just

be that you know you're imparting some sort of thermal energy and that causes cells to depolarize in some interesting ways um but there are also these um ion channels or even membranes that actually just open up its pore as they're being mechanically like shook right vibrated so there's just a lot of you know elements of these like move particles um which again like that's governed by diffusion physics right uh movements of particles and there's also a lot of kind of interesting physics there also not to mention as Roger penos talks about the there might be

some uh beautiful weirdness in the quantum mechanical effects of all of this and he he actually believes that Consciousness might emerge from the quantum mechanical effects there so like there's physics there's chemistry there bi all of that is going on there oh yeah yeah I mean you can yes I there's there's a lot of levels of physics that you can dive into but yeah in the end you have these um uh membranes with these voltage gated ion channels that selectively let um these charged molecules that are in in The extracellular Matrix like in and out

um and these neurons generally have these like resting potential where there's a voltage difference between inside the cell and outside the cell and um when there's some sort of stimuli that changes uh the state such that they need to send information to the the downstream Network um you know you start to kind of see these like sort of orchestration of these different molecules going in and out of these channels they also open up like more of them open up once it reaches some threshold uh to a point where you know you have a depolarizing cell

that sends a action potential so it's a just a very beautiful kind of orchestration of these uh these these um molecules and um 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 um again mediated by uh the the U the movements of the ions and what's interesting as I as I mentioned earlier there's a lot of physics involved um and and the two dominant physics for this electrical recording domain is diffusion physics and electromagnetism and where

one dominates where Max Maxwell's equation dominates versus fix law dominates depends on where your electrode is um if it's close to the source uh mostly electromagnetic based um when you're further 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 um and those local changes in the potential and the type of signal that you get are these canonical textbook neural uh spiking waveform when you're the moment you're further away and based on some of the studies that people have done

um you know Kristoff C's lab and and others once you're away from that Source by roughly around 100 Micron which is about a width of a human hair you no longer hear from that neuron you you're no longer able to kind of have the system sensitive enough to be able to um record that particular um local membrane potential change in that neuron and just to kind of give you a sense of scale also when you when you look at a 100 Micron voxal so 100 Micron by 100 Micron by 100 Micron box uh in a

brain tissue there's roughly around 40 neurons and whatever number of connections that they have so there's lot in that volume of tissue so the moment you're outside of that you're there's just no hope that you'll be able to D detect that change from that one specific neuron that you may care about yeah but as you're moving about this space you'll be hearing other ones so if you move another 100 Micron you'll be hearing chatter from another Community correct and so the the whole senses 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 and at the end of the day you also want to basically let the software do the do the job of decoding um and um just to kind of go to you know why EOG and EEG work at all right um when you have these local changes you know obviously it's not just this one neuron that's uh 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 Electro like

this charge medium and that's what you're recording when you're farther away I mean you you still have some reference Electro that's uh stable and the Brain that's just electroactive organ and you're seeing some combination aggregate uh action potential changes and then you can pick it up right it's a much slower um changing uh signals but you know uh there there are these like canonical kind of oscillations and waves like gamma waves beta waves like when you sleep that that can be detected cuz there's sort of a syn ionized um kind of global global effect of

the brain that that you can detect um and I mean the physics of this go like I mean if we really want to go down that rabbit hole like there 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 you know it it it's just a Charged medium um so similar to how when you have electromagnetic waves propagating in atmosphere or in in a Charged medium like a plasma there's this weird shielding that happens that actually um further attenuates the signal um

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 1/ R square in the beginning and then exponential drop off and that's the knee at which you know you go from electromagnet magnetism dominating to diffusion physics dominating but once again with the electrodes the the biophysics that you need to understand is is um not as deep because no matter where you're placing that you're listening to a small crowd of local neurons correct yeah

so once you penetrate the brain um you know you're in the arena so to speak and there's a lot of neurons there many many of them but then again there's like uh there's a whole field of Neuroscience that's studying like how the different groupings the different sections of the seating in the arena what they usually are responsible for which is where the the Met probably falls apart cuz the the seating is not that organized in an arena also most of them are silent they don't really do much um you know or or they their activities

are um you know you have to hit it with just the right set of stimulus so they're usually quiet they're usually very quiet quiet there's I mean similar to dark energy and dark matter there's dark neurons what are they all doing when you place these electrode again like within this 100 Micron volume you have 40 or so neurons like why 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 when they speak they say profound 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 neuralink work from the surgery to the implant to the signal and the decoding process and the human being able to use the implant actually affect the the world outside and all of this I'm asking in the context of there's a gigantic historic Milestone that neuralink just accomplished in January of this year uh putting a neur link implant in the first human being Nolan uh 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 neuralink work yeah so there are three major components to the technology that we're building uh one is the device um the thing that's actually recording these neural Chatters uh we call it N1 implant or the link and uh we have a surgical robot that's actually doing an implantation of these tiny tiny wires that we call threads that are you know smaller than uh human hair and um once everything is surged you have

these neural signals these spiking neurons that are coming out of the brain and uh you need to have some sort of software to decode what the users intend to do with that um so there's What's called the neuralink application or B1 app that's doing that translation is running the very very simple machine learning model that decodes these um inputs that are neural signals and then convert it to a set of outputs that allows um you know our participant uh first participant Nolan to be able to control a cursor and this is done wirelessly and this

is done wirelessly so we um our our implant is actually two-part this the link has uh uh you know these flexible tiny wires called threads um that have uh multiple electrodes along its length and uh they're only inserted into the cortical layer which is about 3 to 5 millimeters in a human human brain um 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 3 to 4 millimet um separated by 200 Micron

so you can actually record along the depth of the insertion and based on that signal uh there's custom um you know integrated circuit or ASC that we built that amplifies the neural signals that you're recording and then digitizing it and then um has some mechanism for detecting whether there was a an interesting event that is a spiking event um and decide to send that or not send that through Bluetooth to an external device whether it's a a phone or a computer that's running this neuralink application so there's onboard signal process in already just to decide

whether this is an interesting event or not so there is some computational power on board inside the in addition to the human frame yeah so it does the signal processing to kind of really compress the amount of signal that you you're recording so we have a total of thousand electrodes um sampling at uh you know just under 20 khz with 10 bit each so wow uh that's 200 megabits um that's coming through to the chip uh from thousand uh Channel simultaneous uh neural recording and that's quite a bit of data and you know there is

there are technology available to send that off wirelessly but being able to do that in a 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 in this particular case for motor decoding is um occurrence of a spike or not and then um being able to use that to um to uh you know decode the intended cursor movement so the implant itself processes it figures out whether a spike happened or not with our

Spike detection algorithm and then sends it off packages it send it off through Bluetooth um to an external device that then has the model to decode okay based on the spiking inputs did Nolan wish to go up down left right or click or right click or whatever all of this is really fascinating but let's stick on the N1 implant itself so the thing that's in the brain uh so I'm looking at a picture of it there's an enclosure uh there's a charging coil so we didn't talk about the charging which is fascinating uh the the

battery the Power Electronics the antenna uh then there's the signal processing Electronics I wonder if there's more kinds of signal processing you can do that's that's another 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 a external charging device mhm yeah there's an external charging device um so yeah the the second part of the implant the threads are the ones again just the the last 3 to 5 millim are the ones that are actually penetrating the cortex uh rest of it

is actually most of the volume is occupied by the battery uh rechargeable battery um and uh you know it's about a size of a quarter uh you know I actually have a device here if you want to take a look at it um you know this is the the flexible thread component of it and then this is the implant so it's about a size of a US Quarter um it's about 9 mm thick so basically this implant uh you know once you have the craniectomy and the and the diromy um threads are inserted and and

um the the hole that you created this craniectomy gets replaced with that so basically that thing plugs that hole and you can screw in uh these self- drilling cranial screws to hold it in place and at the end of the day once you have the skin flap over uh there's only about 2 to 3 mm that's you know obviously transitioning off of the top of the implant to where the screws are and 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 wow this is way smaller than I realized they they are also the threads themselves are quite strong they look strong and and the thread themselves also has a very interesting um 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 hairlike structure and they're tiny so what's the width of a thread yeah so the the width of a thread um starts from 16 Micron and then tapers out to

about 84 Micron so you know average human hair is about 8200 Micron in width this thing is amazing this thing is amazing yeah so most of the volume is occupied by the by the battery rechargeable Li iion cell um and uh the charging is done through inductive charging which is actually very commonly used you know your cell phone most cell phones have that um the biggest difference is that you know for us you know usually when you have a phone and you want to charge it on a charging pad you don't really care how hot

it gets whereas for us it matters there's 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 The farite Shield right so uh without that fite Shield what you end up having when you have um you know resonant inductive charging is that the battery itself is a metallic can and you

form these Ed currents um from uh external charger and that causes heating um and that actually contributes to inefficiency in charging um so this ferite Shield what it does is that it actually concentrate 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 to make it I mean you're integrating a computer into a biological 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 uh

there's a lot of really really powerful tiny low power uh microcontrollers temperature sensors or various different sensors and Power Electronics a lot of innovation really came in the the charging coil design how this is packaged and how do you enable charging such that you don't really uh exceed that temperature limit which is not a constraint for other devices out there so let's talk about the threads themselves those tiny tiny tiny things so uh how many of them are there you mentioned a th000 electrodes how many threads are there and what do the electrodes have to

do with the threads yeah so the current instantiation of the device has 64 threads and each thread has 16 electrodes for total of 10,24 electrodes that are capable of both recording and stimulating um and um the thread is basically this uh polymer insulated wire um the metal conductor is the kind of a tius tiramisu cake of uh Thai plat gold plat Thai um um and they're very very tiny wires um to Micron in with so two one millionth of uh meter it's crazy that that thing I'm looking at has the polymer insulation has the conducting

material and has 16 electrod at the end of it on each of those thread 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 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 uh was incredibly important for us um so each of these thread are as I mentioned 16 Micron in width and then they taper to 84 Micron but in thickness they're less than 5 Micron MH

um and in thickness it's mostly you know a poly imid at the bottom and this metal track and then another poly imid so two Micron of poly imid 400 nanometer of this metal stack and 2 Micron of poly imid sandwich together to protect it from environment that is uh 37° C bag of salt water so what what's some maybe can you speak to some interesting aspects of the material design here like what does it take to to design a thing like this and to be able to manufacture a thing like this uh 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 um there there were other labs and there are other labs that are kind of looking at similar um material stack um there's kind of a fundamental question um and and still needs to be answered around the longevity and reliability of these uh micro electrodes um that that we call uh compared to some of the other more conventional neural interfaces devices that are intra cranial so penetrating the cortex that are more rigid

um you know like the utar um that that are these 4x4 millimet kind of silicon shank that have exposed uh recording site at the end of it um and and um you know that's that's been kind of the Innovation from Richard Norman back in 1997 uh it's called the Utah R because you know he was at University of Utah and what is the Utah R look like so it's a rigid type of yeah so we can actually look it up yeah yeah so it's a bed of needle um there's yeah okay go ahead I'm sorry

those are r r shank yeah you weren't kiding and the size and the number of Shanks vary anywhere from 64 to 128 um at the very tip of it is an exposed electrode that actually records neural signal um the other thing that's interesting to note is that uh unlike neuralink threads that have recording electrodes that are actually exposed iridium oxide recording sites along the death this is only at a single death so these utar spokes can be anywhere between .5 mm to 1.5 mm and they're they also have uh designs that are slanted um so

you can have it inserted at different depth um but that's one of the other big differences and then uh I mean the main key difference is the fact that uh there's no Active Electronics these are just electrodes and then there's a bundle of a wire that you're seeing and then that actually then exits the craniectomy um that then has this port that you can connect to um for any external electronic devices they are working on a or have the wireless Telemetry device but it still requires a through the skin uh Port that actually is one

of the biggest failure modes for infection uh for the system what is some of the challenges associated with flexible threads like for example on the robotic side R1 uh implanting those threads how difficult does that t yeah um yeah so as you mentioned they're they're very very difficult to maneuver by hand um these these utar rays that you you saw uh earlier they're actually inserted by a neurosurgeon actually positioning it near the site that they want and then uh they're actually there's a Pneumatic Hammer that actually pushes them in um so so it's a it's

a pretty simple process um and they're easier to maneuver um but for for these thin FM arrays they're they're very very tiny and uh flexible so they're they're very difficult to maneuver so that that's why we built an entire robot to do that um there are other other reasons for why we built a robot um and and that is ultimately we want this to help millions and millions of people that can benefit from this and there just aren't that many neurosurgeons out there um and uh you know robots can be uh something that you know

we hope can actually do large parts of the surgery um but yeah yeah the the the robot is this entire other um sort of category of product that we're working on and it it's essentially this multi-axis Gantry system that has the specialized robot head um that has all of the Optics and um this this kind of a needle retracting mechanism that maners these these threads um 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 fascinating so

you mentioned Optics so there's a robot R1 so for now there's a human that actually creates uh a hole in the in the skull and then after that there's a computer vision component that's finding a way to avoid the blood vessels and then you're grabbing it by the loop each individual thread and placing it in a particular location to avoid the blood vessels and also choosing the depth of placement all that so controlling every like the 3D geometry of the placement correct so the 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 uh robot once you you know obviously there are human component to it when you're placing Target um you can always move it away from kind of major vessels that you see um but I mean we want to get to a point where one click and it just does the surgery within minutes so the computer vision component finds great targets candidates and the human kind of approves them and the robot does is does it do like one3 at a time or does it do it does one

thread at a time uh and that's that's actually also one thing that we um uh are looking at ways to do multiple threads at a time there's nothing stopping from it you can have multiple kind of Engagement uh mechanisms um but right now it's one by one and uh you know we also still do quite a bit of just just kind of verification to make sure that it got inserted if so how deep you know did it actually match um what was programmed in and you know so on and so forth and the the actual

electros are placed a very at differing depths in the uh like I mean it's very small differences but differences yeah yeah and so that there's some reasoning behind that as you mentioned like it it gets more varied signal yeah we I mean we try to place them all around 3 or 4 millim from the surface um just cuz the span of the electrode those 16 electrod that we currently have in this uh version spans um you know roughly around 3 mm so we want to get all of those in the brain this is fascinating okay

so there's a million questions here if we go zoom in specific on the electrod so what is your sense how many neurons is each individual Electro listening to yeah each Electro can record from anywhere between zero to 40 as I mentioned right earlier um but practically speaking uh we only see about at most like two to three um and you can actually distinguish which neuron it's coming from by the shape of the spikes oh cool um so I mentioned the like detection algorithm that we have it's called boss algorithm um buffer online Spike sorter nice

it actually outputs at the end of the day uh six unique values which are um you know kind of the amplitude of these like negative going Hump Middle hump like uh positive going hump and then also the time at which these happen and from that you can have a you kind of a statistical probab probability um estimate of is that a spike is it not a spike and then based on that you could also determine oh that Spike looks different than that Spike must come from a different neuron okay so that 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 that also results in you being able to compress the data better yeah of day okay that's and just to be clear I mean there the the labs do this what's called Spike sorting um usually once you have these like Broadband you know like the fully digitized signals and then you run a bunch of different set of algorithms to kind of tease apart it's just all of

this for us is done on the device on the device in a very low power custom you know built Asic uh 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 microsc which is uh you know a very very short amount of time oh yeah so the latency has to be super short correct oh wow oh that's a pain in the ass yeah latency is this uh huge huge thing that you have to deal with uh right now the biggest

source of latency comes from the Bluetooth uh the the way in which they're packetized and you know we bend them in 15 millisecond inter communication constraint is there some potential Innovation there on the protocol used absolutely okay yeah Bluetooth is definitely not uh our final uh wireless communication protocol that we want to get to it's a high H hence the N1 and the R1 I imagine that increases NX RX uh yeah that's you know the communication protocol because Bluetooth uh allows you to communicate against farther distances than you need to so you can go much

shorter yeah the only uh well the primary motivation for choosing Bluetooth is that I everything has Bluetooth all right so you can talk to any devic interoperability is just absolutely essential especially in this early phase um and in many ways if you can access a phone or a computer you can do anything it be interesting to step back and actually look at again the same pipeline that you mentioned for Nolan so what is this whole process look like from finding and selecting a human being to the the to the surgery to the the first time

he's able to use this thing so we have what's called a patient registry that people can sign up to um you know hear more about the updates and that was a route to which Nolan applied and the process is that once the application comes in you know it it contains some medical records and we uh you know based on their medical eligibility that there's a lot of different inclusion exclusion criteria for them to meet and we go through a pre-screening interview process with someone from neuralink and at some point we also go out to their

homes to do a BCI home audit um because one one of the most kind of revolutionary part about you know having this N1 system that is completely wireless is that you can use it at home like you don't actually have to go to the lab um and and you know go to the clinic to get connectorized to these like specialized equipment that you can't take home with you um so that's one of the 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 us every day in the comfort of their homes and um so part of our engagement and and what we're looking for during BCI home audit is to just kind of understand their situation what other assisted technology that they use and we should also step back and kind of say that uh the estimate is uh 180,000 people live with quadriplegia in the United States and each year an additional 18,000 suffer uh a paralyzing spinal cord injury so these are folks uh who have a lot of challenges living

life in terms of accessibility in terms of doing the things that many of us just take for granted dayto day and one of the things one of the goals of this initial study is to enable them to have sort of digital autonomy where they by themselves can interact with a digital device using just their mind something that you're calling telepathy so digital telepathy where uh a quadruple can communicate with a digital device in all the ways that we've been talking about uh 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 there's a lot of people for whom life the basics of Life are difficult uh because of the things that have happened to them so yeah I mean movement is so so fundamental to our ex existence I mean even even speaking involves movement of mouth lip larynx and um without that it's it's it's um extremely debilitating um and they're um yeah they're they're many many people that we can help and I mean like especially if you start to kind of look at other forms

of movement disorders um that are not just from spinal cord injury but from uh you know ALS uh Ms or even stroke that that leads you and or just just aging right that leads you to lose some of that Mobility that Independence it's uh 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 uh to have increasing levels of capability from a device like a neur link device and so the

first one you're you're focusing on is uh it's just a beautiful word telepathy so being able to communicate using your mind wirelessly with a digital device can you just explain this exactly what we're talking about yeah I mean it's exactly that I mean I I think if you are able to control a uh cursor and able to click um and be able to get access to computer or phone I mean the the whole world opens up to you and I mean I guess the word telepathy if you kind of think about that as um you

know just definitionally being able to transfer information from my brain to your brain um without using some of the the physical faculties that we have you know like voices but the interesting thing here is I think the thing that's not obviously clear is how exactly it works so in order to move a cursor mhm there's uh at least a couple ways of doing that so one is you imagine yourself maybe moving a mouse with your hand mhm or you can then which Nolan talked about like imagine moving the cursor with your mind like I don't

but it's like there is a cognitive step here that's fascinating cuz you you have to use the brain and you have to learn how to use the brain mhm and you kind of have to figure it out dynamically like uh because you reward yourself if it works so you're like I mean there's a step that this is it's just a fascinating step because you have to get the brain to start firing in the right way yeah and you do that by imagining uh like fake it till you make it and all of a sudden it

creates the right kind of signal that if decoded correctly uh 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 the force I mean that's isn't that just like fascinating to you that it works like to me it's like holy that actually works like you could move a 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 our model is constantly up updating the weights to say oh if if someone is thinking about you know this sophisticated forms of like spiking patterns like that actually means to do this right so the the machine is learning about the human and the human is learning about the machine so there's a adaptability to the signal processing the decoding step and then there's the adaptation of noan the human being like the same way if 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 mhm 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 the human software and organic and the inorganic the organic and the inorganic anyway so sorry to rudely interrupt so there's a selection that Nolan has pass with flying colors um so everything including that it's a BCI friendly home all of that so what is the the process of

the surgery the implantation the first moment when he gets to use the system the end to end uh you know we say patient in to Patient out is anywhere between 2 to four hours uh in particular case for n and it was about 3 and 1/ half hours and there's many steps leading to you know the actual robot insertion right so there's anesthesia induction and we do intraop CT Imaging to make sure that we're you know drilling the hole in the right location and this is also pre-planned beforehand um uh someone goes through someone like

Nolan would go through fmri and then um they can think about W wiggling their hand you know obviously due to their injury it's not going to actually lead to um any any sort of intended output but it's the same part of the brain that 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 um because we want to go into What's called the hand knob area in the motal cortex and you know as as much as

possible densely put our Electro threads um so yeah we do intraop CT Imaging to make sure and double check the location of the craniectomy and um surgeon comes in does their thing in terms of like skin uh incision craniectomy so drilling of the skull and then there's many different layers of the brain uh there's What's called the dura which is a very very thick layer that surrounds the brain that gets actually reective in a process called dctom and that then expose the pi and the brain that you want to insert and by the time it's

been around anywhere between 1 to 1 and a half hours robot comes in does this thing play placement of the targets inserting of the thread that takes anywhere between 20 to 40 minutes in the particular case for Nolan was just under or just over 30 minutes and then after that the surgeon comes in there's a couple other steps of like actually inserting the Dural substitute layer um to protect the thread as well as the the brain and then um yeah screw screw in the implant and then skin flap and then suture and then you're out

so uh where when uh Nolan woke up what was that like what was the recovery like and when was the first time he was able to use it so he was actually immediately after the surgery um you know like an hour after the surgery as he was waking up um we did turn on the device um make sure that we are recording neural signals and we actually did have uh couple signals that we um noticed that he can actually modulate and what I mean by modulate is that he can think about crunching his fist and

you could see the spike disappear and appear that's awesome um and that was immediate right uh immediate uh after in in the recovery room how cool is that yeah that's a human being I mean what that 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 to modulate that you know obviously there have been other other you know uh as you mentioned Pioneers that have participated in these groundbreaking BCI um you know uh investigational

early feasibility studies so we're obviously standing in the shoulders of the Giants here you know we're not the first ones to actually put electrod in a human human brain um but I I mean just leading up to the surgery there was uh I I I definitely not sleep I there's just it's the first time that you're working in a completely new environment um we had a lot of confidence based on our benchtop testing uh or pre-clinical R&D studies that the mechanism the threads the insertion all that stuff is is very safe and that it's um

uh you obviously ready for uh doing this in a human but there's still a lot of unknown Unknown about can the needle actually insert uh I mean I we brought something like 40 needles just in case they break and we ended up using only one um but I mean that that was a level of just complete unknown right because it's a very very different environment and uh 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 uh just just I many

many sleepless night leading up to the surgery and and definitely the day before the surgery and it was an early morning surgery like we we started at 7:00 in the morning um and and by the time it was around 10:30 it was it was it was everything was done but I mean first time seeing that well number one just just huge relief um that this thing is um you know doing what it's supposed to do um and two I mean just immense amount of gratitude for for Nolan and his family and then many others that

have applied and that we've spoke to and will speak to are I mean true Pioneers in in every every war and you know I sort of call them the neural astronauts or neurona neurona yeah um you know these amazing just like in the 60s right like the these amazing just Pioneers right um exploring the unknown outwards in this case is inward um but incredible amount of gratitude for them to uh you know just just participate and and play a part um and and it's a it's a journey that we're embarking on together um but also

like I think it was just a that was an very very important Milestone but our work was just starting so a lot of just kind of uh anticipation for okay what's what needs to happen next uh what a set of sequences of events that needs to happen for us to you know make it worthwhile for um uh you know both Nolan as well as us just a linger on that just a huge congratulation to you and the team for that Milestone I know there's a lot of work uh left but that that is that's really

exciting to see there's um that's a source of hope this first big step opportunity to help hundreds of thousands of people and then maybe uh expand the realm of the possible for the human mind for millions of people in the future so it's it's really exciting so like the the opportunities are all ahead of us and to do that safely and to do that effectively was uh was really fun to see as an engineer just watching other Engineers come together and do an epic thing that was awesome so huge congrats thank you thank you it's

um yeah could not have done it without the team and um yeah I mean that that's the other thing that I I um you know told the team as well of just this immense sense of optimism for the future um I mean it was a it's a very important moment for for the company um you know needless to say as well as um you hopefully for many others out there that we can help so speaking of challenges neur link published a blog post describing that some of the threads are tracted 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 that's definitely something I'll talk to uh to Bliss and to Nolan about um but in general um can you speak to this whole experience how is the performance regained and um just the the technical aspects of uh the threads being retracted 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 um he's actually just beat the world

record yet again last week um to 8.5 BPS so I mean he's he's just cranking and he's just improving the previous one was that he set was eight correct he said 8.5 yeah the previous world record uh in human was 4.6 yeah so it's uh almost double yeah and his goal is to try to get to 10 which is rough roughly around kind of the median neural Linker uh using a a you know Mouse with the hand so it's um it's getting there so yeah so the the performance was regained yeah better than before so

that that's you know a a story on its own of what took the BCI team to recover that performance it was it was actually mostly on kind of the signal processing and so you know as I mentioned we were um kind of looking at these Spike outputs from the um our electrodes and what happened is that kind of uh four weeks into the surgery uh we noticed that the threats have slowly come out of the brain and the way in which we noticed this at first obviously is that uh well I think Nolan was the

first to notice that his performance was degrading um and I think at the time we were also trying to do bunch of different experimentation um you know different algorithms different um sort of UI ux so it was expected that there will be variability in the performance um but we did see kind of a steady decline and then also the way in which we measure the health of the electrod or whether they're in the brain or not is by measuring uh imp of the electrode so we look at kind of the interfacial um kind of the

the the Randle circuit they they say um you know the capacitance and the and the um the resistance between the electr Surface and the medium and if that changes in some dramatic ways we have some indication or if you're not seeing spikes on those channels you have some indications that something's happening there and what we notice is that looking at those impedence plot and Spike rate plots and also because we have those electrodes recording along the death you were seeing some sort of movement that indicated that threads were being pulled out um 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 the out that 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 bra of the brain or farther weight like outside the skull you still see some useful signals um what we started looking at is not just the spike occurrence through this boss algorithm that

I mentioned um but we started looking at just the the the power of the frequency band that is um interesting for uh Nolan or Nolan to be able to modulate so once we kind of change the algorithm for the implant to not just give you the boss output but also these uh band power output um that helped us sort of refine the model with the new set of inputs and that that was the thing that really ultimately gave us the performance back um you know in terms of and obviously like the 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 um for as long as possible so that we have many more channels going into the model that's that's by far the number one priority that the team is currently embarking on to understand how to prevent that from happening um the thing that I will say also is that you know as I mentioned this is the first time ever that we're putting these threats in in a human brain and you know human brain just for

a size reference is 10 times out of the monkey brain or the Sheep brain and it it's um just a very very different environment it moves a lot more it like actually moved a lot more than we expected um when we uh did did Nolan surgery and um it's uh just a very very different environment than what we're used to and this is why we do clinical trial right we we we want to uncover some of these uh issues uh and and failure modes earlier than later so in many ways it's provided us with this

enormous amount of data and um information to be able to uh solve this and this is something that neuralink 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 time scales so whether it's movement of threads or different aspects of signal drift sort of on the software of

the human brain something changing like Nolan talks about cursor drift they could be corrected and there's a whole ux challenge to how to do that so it sounds like adaptability is like a fundamental property that has to be engineered in it is and and I mean I think I I mean as a company we're extremely vertically integrated um you know we make these thin filam arrays in our own uh microfab yeah there's uh like you said built-in house this whole paragraph here from this blog post is pretty gangster uh 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 microfabrication capabilities to rapidly produce various iterations of thin film arrays that constitute our electrode threads we created a custom ftoc laser Mill manufact your components with micr level Precision I think there's a tweet associated with this that's a whole thing that we can get into yeah this this okay what are we what are we looking at here this thing this is uh so in less than 1 minute our custom made ftoc laser Mill Cuts this geometry

in the tips of our needles so we're looking at this weirdly shaped needle the tip is only 10 to 12 microns in width only slightly larger than the diameter of a red blood cell the small size allows threats to be inserted with minimal damage to the cortex Okay so what's interesting about this geometry so we're look at this just geometry of a needle this is the needle that's engaging with the loops in the thread mhm so they're the ones that um you know thread the thread the loop um 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 uh is the thing that actually is um grasping the loop and then it's it's designed in such way such that when you when you pull out leavs the loop and the robot is controlling this needle correct so this is actually housed in a canula and basically the robot is has a lot of Optics that look for where the loop is um

there's actually a 405 nanometer light that actually causes the poly to fluores so that you can locate the the location of the loop um lights up yeah yeah they do it's a micron Precision process what's interesting about the robot that it takes to do that that's that's pretty crazy that's pretty crazy that a robot is able to get this kind of precision yeah our robot is quite heavy um our current version of it um there's I mean it's it's like a giant granite slab that weighs about a ton um because it needs to be sensitive

to vibration environmental vibration and then as the head is moving at the speed that it's mov moving you know there's a lot of kind of motion control to make sure that you can achieve that level of precision um a lot of Optics that kind of zoom in on that um you know we're working on next generation of the robot that is lighter easier to transport I mean it is a it is a feat to move the robot to and it's far superior to a human surgeon at this time for this particular task absolutely I mean

let alone you try to actually thread a loop in a in a a sewing kit I mean this is like we're talking like fractions of human hair these these things are it's it's not visible so continuing the paragraph we developed novel hardware and software testing system such as our accelerated lifetime testing racks and simulated surgery environment which is pretty cool to stress test and validate the robustness of our Technologies We performed many rehearsals of our surgeries to refine our procedures and make them um second nature this is pretty cool we practice surgeries on proxies with

all the hardware instruments needed in our mock or in the engineering space this helps us rapidly test and so there's like proxies yeah this proxy is super cool actually so there's a 3D printed skull from the images that is taken at Barrow as well as this uh hydrogel mix you know sort of synthetic polymer thing that actually mimics the the mechanical properties of the brain um it also has vasculature of the person um so basically what we're talking about here and there's a lot of work that has gone into making this set proxy that um

you know it's about like finding the right concentration of these different synthetic polymers to get the right set of consistency for the needle Dynamics you know as they're being inserted but we practice this surgery with the person you know Nolan's basically physiology and brain um many many many times prior to actually doing the surgery every every step every step every step yeah like where does someone stand like I mean like you looking at is the picture this is in in in our office of this kind of corner of the robot engineering space that we you

know have created this like mock or space that looks exactly like what they would experience all the staff would experience during their actual surgery so I mean it's just kind of like any dense rehearsal where you know exactly where you're going to stand at what point um you just practice that over and over and over again with an exact anatomy of someone that you're going to surger eyesee and and it it got to a point where a lot of our Engineers when we created a craniectomy they're like ah that that looks very familiar we've seen

that before yeah man there's wisdom you can gain through doing the same thing over and over and over it's like a jro Dreams of Sushi kind of thing um because then um it's like Olympic athletes visualize uh 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 cuz you You' visualized this so many times you've practiced this so many times that nothing bothers in you it's boring you win the gold medal is boring and the experience they talk about is

mostly just relief probably that they don't have to visualize it anymore yeah the power of the mind to visualize and where I mean there's a whole whole feel that studies where muscle memory lies in cerebellum yeah it's incredible uh I think there 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 goal standard is to look at the tissue um you know what sort of trauma did you cause the tissue

and does that correlate to whatever behavioral anomalies that you may have seen um and that's the language to which uh we we can communicate about the safety of you know inserting something into the brain and what type of trauma that you can cause so um we actually have an entire department uh Department of pathology that looks at these uh tissue slices there are many steps that are involved in in doing this once you have um you know studies that are launched to uh with with particular end points in mind you know at some point you

have to euthanize the animal and then uh you go through necropsy to kind of collect the brain tissue samples um you know you fix them in formalin and you like gross them you section them and you look at individual slices just to see what kind of reaction or lack thereof exists so that's the kind of the language to which FDA speaks and you know as well for us to kind of evaluate the safety of the insertion mechanism as well as the threats um at various different time points you know both acute um so anywhere between

you know uh zero to three months to Beyond three months so those the kind of the the details of an extremely high standard of safety that has to be reached correct um FDA supervises this but there's in general just a very high standard and every aspect of this including the surgery I think U Matthew McDougall has mentioned that like the standard is uh let's say how to put politely higher than maybe some other operations that we take for granted so the the standard for all the surgical stuff here is extremely high very high I mean

it's a highly highly regulated environment um with you know the governing agencies that scrutinize every every medical device that gets marketed and I think I think it's a good thing um you know it's good to have those high standards and we we try to hold extremely high standards um to kind of understand what's sort of damage if any these uh Innovative emerging Technologies and new technologies that we're building our and you know so far I I we have been extremely impressed by lack of immune response from these threats speaking of which you uh you talked

to me uh with excitement about the histology and some of the images uh that you're able to share uh can you explain to me what we're looking at yeah so what you're looking at is stain tissue image um so this is a sectioned a tissue slice from an animal that was implanted for seven months so kind of a chronic time point and you're seeing all these different colors and each color indicates specific types of cell types so purple and pink are astrocytes and microa respectively they're type of uh gal cells and yeah the the other

thing that you know people may not be aware of is your brain is not just made up of soup of neurons and axons there are other uh you know cells like uh gal cells that actually kind of is the glue and also uh react uh if if there any trauma or damage to the tissue but the brown are the neurons here the brown are the neurons neurons nuclei so so what you're seeing is in in this kind of macro image you're seeing these like Circle highlighted in white the insertion sight and uh 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 uh you know wires that are going into the page and the incredible thing here is the fact that you have the neurons that are these Brown structures or brown circular or elliptical thing that are actually touching and abing the threats so what this is saying is that there's basically zero trauma that's caused during this insertion and with these neural interfaces these um micro electros that you insert that is one of the most common mode of

failure so when you insert these threads like the utar It causes neuronal Death Around the site because you're inserting a foreign object right and that kind of elicit these like immune response through microglia and asites they form this like protective layer around it oh 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 further and further away from the neurons that you're trying to record and that that is the biggest mode of failure and in this particular example in

that inset it's you know it's about 50 Micron with that scale bar the neurons are just seem to be attracted to it and so there's certainly no trauma that's such a beautiful image by the way just the so the brown or the neurons and for some reason I can't look away it's really cool and and the way that these things like I mean your tissues generally don't have these beautiful colors um this is uh Multiplex stain that uses these different uh protein that are staining these at different colors you know we use very standard set

of um you know staining techniques with HG ea1 and you know new um and and GAP so if you go to the next image this is also kind of illustrates the second point because you can make an argument and initially when we saw the the previous image we said oh like are the threads just floating like what is happening here like are we actually looking at the right thing so what we did is we did another stain and this is all done in-house of this M's uh TR Chrome stain which is in blue that shows

these collagen layers so the blue basically like you don't want the blue around the the implant threads CU that means that there's some sort of scarring that's happen and what you're seeing if you look at individual threads is that you don't see any of the blue which means that there has been absolutely or very very minimal to a point where it's not detectable amount of trauma in these inserted threads so that presumably is one of the big benefit because of having this kind of flexible thread this yeah so we think this is uh primarily due

to uh the size as well as the flexibility of the threats also the fact that R1 is avoiding vasculature so we're not disrupting or we're not um causing damage to uh the vessels and not breaking any of the bloodb brain barrier uh has 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 they're they're and they're neurons and there and this is the thread listening and the electrodes are positioned how yeah so

this is what you're looking at is not electrod themselves those are the conductive wires so each of those should probably be two Micron in width um so what we're looking at is we're looking at the chral slice so we're looking at uh some slice of the tissue so as you go deeper you know you will obviously have less than less uh of the tapering of the of the thread um but yeah the the point basically being that there's just uh kind of cells around the insert aite which is um 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 um in the first 3 months or so after the surgery um there there's a lot of kind of tissue modeling that's happening you know similar to when you get a cut um you know you obviously uh you know start over first couple weeks or depending on the size of the wound um Scar Tissue forming right they're these like contracted and then in the end they turn into scab and you can scab it off

the same thing happens in the brain and it's a very Dynamic environment and before the scar tissue or the neom membrane or the you know new membrane that forms it's quite easy to just pull them out um and there's minimal trauma that's that's uh caused during that once the scarf 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 um so they're they're quite stable um it's it's it gets harder to actually completely extract the threads

so our current method for uh removing the device is cutting the thread leaving the the tissue intact and then unscrewing and taking the implant out and that hole is now going to be plugged with either another neuralink or uh just with the you know kind of a a peak based you know plastic based uh cap is it okay to leave the threads in there forever yeah we think so we we've done studies where um you know we left them there and one of the biggest concerns that we had is like do they migrate and do

they get to a point where they should not be we haven't seen that again once the scar tissue forms they get anchored in place and I I should also say that you know when we say upgrades like it it's not we're not just talking in theory here like we've actually upgraded many many times um most of our uh monkeys or non-human primates nhp have been upgraded you know pager who you saw playing mine pong has the latest version of the device since two years ago and is seemingly very happy and healthy and fat so what's

uh designed for the future the upgrade procedure so uh maybe uh for Nolan what what would the upgrade look like it was essenti what you're mentioning is there a way to upgrade sort of the device internally where you take it apart sort of uh keep the capsule and upgrade the internals yeah so there there a couple different things here so for Nolan if we were to upgrade what we would have to do is um either cut the threads or you know extract the threads depending on kind of um you know uh the situation there in

terms of how they're anchored or scarred in um if you were to remove them with the Dural substitute um you know you have an intact brain so you can reinsert different threads um with the updated uh implant package uh there are couple different other uh ways that we're thinking about the future of what the upgradeable system looks like one is you know at the moment we currently remove the dura um this this kind of thick layer that protects the the brain but that actually is a thing that actually proliferates the scar tissue formation so typically

the general good rule of thumb is you want to leave the the nature as is uh and not disrupt it as much so we're looking at ways to uh insert the threads through the dura um which comes with different set of challenges such as you know it's a pretty thick uh layer so how do you actually penetrate that without breaking the needle so we're looking at different needle design for that as well as the kind of the loop engagement the other biggest challenges are it's quite opaque optically in with white light illumination so how do

you avoid still this this biggest advantage that we have of avoiding basc Shure U 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 um but the goal the our hypo IIs is that and based on some of the early evidence that we have uh doing through the dura insertion will cause minimal scarring that causes them to be much easier to extract over time and the other thing that we're also looking at this is um going to be a fundamental

change in the implant architecture is as a at the moment it's a monolithic single implant that comes with a thread that's um bonded together so you can't actually separate the thing out but you can imagine having two-part implant um you know bottom part that is the thread that are inserted that has the chips um and maybe a radio and some power source and then you have another implant that has more of the computational heavy load and and the bigger battery um and then one can be under the D one can be above the D like

you know being the plug for the skull they can talk to each other but the thing that you want to upgrade the computer and not the threads if you want to upgrade that you just go in there you know remove the screws and then put in the next version and you know you're off the you know it's a very very easy surgery too like you do a skin incision slip this in screw probably be able to do this in 10 minutes so that would allow you to reuse the threads sort of correct so I mean

this leads to the Natural question of uh what is the pathway to scaling the increase in the number of threads is that a priority is that like what's what's the technical uh challenge there yeah that that is a priority so for next versions of the implant um you know the key metrics that we're looking to improve are number of channels just recording from more and more neurons um you know we have a pathway to actually go from currently 1,000 to you know hopefully 3,000 if not 6,000 by end of this year um wow and then

end of next year we want to get to uh you know even more 16,000 wow there a couple limitations to that one is you know obviously being able to photo lithographically print those wires as I mentioned it's two Micron in width and and spacing obviously there are chips that are much more advanced than those types of resolution and we have some of the tools that we have brought in 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

um chips also cannot linearly consume more energy as you have more and more channels so there's a lot of Innovations in the circuit um you know and architecture as as well as a circuit design topology to make them lower power um 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 and Signal processing um physically one of the biggest challenges is going to be um the the the the interface it's always

the interface that breaks um bonding the thin FM array to the um the electronics um it starts to become very very highly dense uh interconnects so how do you connector Rize that there's a lot of Innovations um in in kind of the 3D Integrations in the recent years that we can take advantage of um one of the biggest challenges that we do have is you know forming this hermetic barrier right you know this is an extremely harsh environment that we're in the brain um so how do you protect it from uh 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 uh you know I think are actually well suited to tackle how do you test that like what's the development environment yeah to simulate that kind of harshness yeah so this is this is where the accelerated life tester essentially is a brain inovat mhm uh it literally is a vessel that is um made up of and again again for all intents and purpose

for this particular types of test your brain is a saltwater MH and uh and you can uh also put some other set of chemicals like reactive oxygen species that you know get at kind of these interfaces and trying to cause a reaction to to uh pull it apart but you could also increase the rate at which these uh interfaces are aging by just increasing temperature so every 10 degre Celsius that you increase you're basically accelerating Time by 2X and there's limit as to how how much temperature you want to increase CU at some point there's

some other nonlinear dynamics that 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 uh in our alt chamber by 20° celius that uh increases the Aging by four four times so essentially one day in alt chamber is 4 day in calendar year and and we look at whether the implants still are intact uh including the threats and and operation and all that and operation and all of that um it obviously is not an exact same environment as a brain because

you know brain has mechanical you know other more uh biological gops that that attack at it um but it is a good test environment testing environment for at least the the the enclosure and the strength of the enclosure and I mean we've had implants the current version of the implant that has been in there for I mean close to two and a half years which is equivalent to a decade and they seem to be fine so it's interesting that the so basically uh close approximation is warm salt water hot salt water is a good testing

environment I yeah by the way I'm drinking element uh which is basically salt water which is making me kind of it doesn't have computational power the way the brain does but maybe in terms of in terms of all the characteristics is quite similar and I'm consuming it yeah you have to get it in the right pH too and then Consciousness will emerge yeah no uh all right by the way the other thing that also is interesting about our enclosure is uh if if you look at our implant it's not your common looking medical implant that

usually is uh in incase in a titanium can that's laser welded we use this polymer called pctfe polychoral Tri floro ethylene which is actually commonly used in packs so when you have a pill and you're try to pop the pill there's that kind of that plastic membrane that's what this is um no one's actually ever used this uh except us and the reason we um wanted to do this is because it's electromagnetically transparent so when we talked about the uh electromagnetic inductive charging um with titanium can usually if you want to do something like that

um you know you have to have a sapphire window and it's a it's a very very tough process to scale so you're doing a lot of iteration here and every aspect of this the materials the software the hard all the whole whole Shang uh so okay so you mentioned scaling is it possible to have multiple neuralink devices as one of the ways of scaling to have multiple neuralink devices implanted that's the goal that's the goal yeah we we've had we've had um I mean our monkeys have had two neural links one in each hemisphere and

then we're also looking at you know potential of having one in moral cortex one in visual cortex and one in whever other cortex so focusing on the particular function one yink device I mean I wonder if there's some level of customization that could be done on the compute side so for the motor cortex absolutely that that's the goal and and you know we talk about at neuralink building a generalized neural interface to the brain um and and that that also is strategically how we're approaching this um with with marketing and also you know with with

regulatory which is hey look um we have the robot and the robot can access any part of the cortex right now we're focused on motor cortex uh with current version of the N1 that's specialized for motor decoding tasks but also at the end of the day there's kind of a general compute available there um uh but you know typically if you want to really get down to kind of hyper optimizing for power and if efficiency you do want need to get to some specialized function right um but you know what we're saying is that hey

you know you you are now used to this robotic insertion techniques which which you know took many many years of you know showing data um and and conversation with the FDA um and also internally convincing oursel that this is this is safe and um 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 um obviously it's a completely different environment the cortex is laid out very very differently um you know it's going to be more stimulation Focus rather than recording um

just just kind of creating visual percepts but in the end we're using the same thin film array technology we're using the same robot insertion technology we're using the same you know packaging technology now it's more the conversation focused around what are the differences and what are the implication of those differences in safety and efficacy way that second product is is both hilarious and awesome to me uh that product being restoring sight for blind people so can you speak to stimulating the visual cortex I mean the 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 uh any aspect of that that you're both excited and uh uh see the challenges of yeah I guess I'll start by saying that we actually have been um capable of stimulating through our denl marray as well as our electronics for years um you know we we have actually demonstrated some of that capability abilities for uh reanimating the

limb in the spinal cord um it it you know obviously for for the current EFS study you know we've Hardware disabled that so that's that's something that you know we wanted to Embark as a separate separate Journey um and and you know obviously there are many many different ways to write information into the brain the way in which we're doing that is through electrical you know passing electrical current and and kind of causing that to really change the local environment so that you can sort of artificially cause kind of the the neurons to depolarize in

in in nearby areas for for vision specifically um you know the way our visual system works it it's both well understood I mean anything with kind of brain there aspects of it that's well understood but in the end like we don't really know anything um but the way visual system works is that you have Photon hitting your eye and in your eyes uh you know there are these um specialized cells called photo receptor cells that convert the photon energy into electrical signals and then they get that then gets projected to um your back of your

head your visual cortex um you know goes through actually um you know theic system called lgn that then projects it out and then in the visual cortex there's you know visual area one or V1 and then there's bunch of other higher level processing layers like like V2 V3 and there there are actually kind of interesting parallels and when you study the behaviors of these convolutional neural networks like what the different layers of the network is detecting you know first they're detecting like these edges and they're then detecting some more natural curves and then they start

to detect like objects right kind of similar thing happens in the brain um and a lot of that has been inspired and also you it's been kind of exciting to see some of the correlations there um but you know things like from there where does cognition R arise and where where's color encoded there's there's just not a lot of um understanding fundamental understanding there so in terms of kind of bringing sight back to those that are blind um there are many different forms of blindness uh there's actually million people one million people in the US

that are legally blind um you know that means like certain uh like score below in kind of the the visual test um I think it's something like if you can see something uh at 20 ft distance that normal people can see at 200 ft distance like you're like if you're worse than that you're legally blind so fundament that means you can't function effectively corre using sight in the world yeah like to navigate your environment um and yeah there are different forms of blindness there are forms of blindness where uh there's some degeneration of your uh

retina um these photo receptor cells and and rest of your visual uh you know processing that I described is intact and for those types of individuals uh you may not need to maybe stick electrodes into the visual cortex you can actually um uh build retinal prosthetic devices that actually just replaces a function of that retinal cells that are degenerated and there are many companies that are working on that but that that's a very small slice Alia significance still smaller slice of folks that are legally blind um you know if there's any damage along that circuitry

whether it's in the optic nerve or you know uh just the lgn circuitry or any any break in that circuit that's not going to work for you um and uh the source of where you need to actually cause that visual percept to happen because your biological mechanism is not doing that is by placing electrodes in the visual cortex in the back of your head and the way in which this would work is that you would have an external camera whether it's um you know something as unsophisticated as a GoPro or you know some sort of

wearable you know Rayban type glasses that meta is working on that captures a scene right um and that scene is then converted to a set of electrical impulses or stimulation pulses that you would uh activate in your visual cortex through um these infil aray and by playing some C you know concerted kind of uh Orchestra of these stimulation patterns you can create what's called phosphines which are these um kind of white yellowish dots that you can also create by just pressing your eyes um you can actually create those percepts by stimulating the visual cortex and

the name of the game is really have many of those and have those percepts be the phosphines be as small as possible so that you can start to tell apart like the individual pixels of the the of the screen right so if you have many many of those you know potentially you'll be able to um you know in in the long term be able to actually get naturalistic Vision but in the mid like short term to maybe midterm um being able to at least be able to have object detection algorithms run on your um on

your glasses uh the pre processing units and then being able to at least see the edges of things so you don't bump into stuff it's incred inredible this is really incredible so you basically would be adding pixels and your brain would start to figure out what those pixels mean yeah and like with with different kinds of assistant on the signal processing on all fronts yeah the the thing that actually so a couple things one is um you know obviously if you're uh blind from birth um the way brain works especially in the early age um

neuroplasticity is really nothing other than you know kind of your brain and different parts of your brain fighting for The Limited territory yeah um and and I mean very very quickly you see you see cases where you know people that are I mean you also hear about people who are blind that have heightened sense of hearing or some other senses and the reason for that is because that cortex that's not used just gets taken over by these different parts of the cortex so for those types of individuals um I mean I guess they're going to

have to Now map some other parts of their senses into what they call Vision but it's going to be obviously a very very different conscious experience um before so so I think that's a interesting caveat the other thing that also is important to highlight is that we're currently limited by our biology in terms of the the wavelength that we can see there's a very very small wavelength that is a visible um light wavelength that we can see with our eyes but when you have an external camera with this um BCI system you're not limited to

that you can have infrared you can have UV you can have whatever other spectrum that you want to see and whether that gets math 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 neuralink being going beyond the limits of our biology um that's sort of what I mean and if you're able to control the kind of raw signal is that when we use our site we're getting the photons and there's not much processing on it if you're be able

to control that signal maybe you can do some kind of processing maybe you do object detection ahead of time yeah you're doing some kind of pre-processing and there's a lot of possibilities to explore that so it's not just in increasing sort of thermal imaging that kind of stuff but it's also just doing some kind of interesting processing yeah I I mean my my theory of how like visual system works also is that um 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 it's unclear exactly where some of the pre-processing steps are happening but I I mean I actually think that just just from a fundamental perspective there's just so much uh the reality that we're in if it's a reality um is so there's so much data and I think humans are just unable to actually like eat enough actually to process all that information so there's some sort of filtering that does happen whether that happens in the 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 uh if your brain is a CCD camera and the in all of the information in the world is a sun um and when you try to actually look at the sun with the CCD camera it's just going to saturate the sensors right cuz it's a enormous amount of energy so you what you do is you end up adding these uh filters right to just kind of narrow the information that's coming to you and being captured and I think you know things like our experiences or our um uh you know like

drugs like profal that like anesthetic 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 older ones and kind of controlling our conscious experience yeah man not to distract from the topic but I just took a very high dose of iasa in the Amazon jungle so yes it's a nice way to think about it you're swapping out different different experiences and with neur link being able to control that primarily at first to improve function not for entertainment purposes or enjoyment purposes but yeah

giving back lost functions Lo giving back lost functions and there especially when the function is completely lost anything is a huge help would you uh implant a neuralink 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 get implanted yeah I mean I think I mean even even with our early participants if they start to do things that I I can't do uh which I

think is in the realm of possibility for them to be able to get you know 15 20 if not like 100 BPS right um there's nothing that fundamentally stops us from being able to achieve that type of performance um I mean I would certainly get jealous um that they can do that I I should say that watching no and I get a little jealous because he say 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 mult like while talking and I mean it's multitasking right so it's it's clearly it's obviously cognitive cognitively uh intensive but similar to how you know when we talk we move our hands like these things like you know like are multitasking I mean he's able to do that and you know you won't be a to do that with other assisted technology as far as I I'm aware you know if you're obviously using like an ey tracking device you know you're very much fixated on that thing that you're trying to

do and if you're using voice control I mean like if you say some other stuff yeah you don't get to use that yeah the the multitasking aspect of that is really interesting so it's not just the BPS for the primary task it's the it's the parallelization of multiple task if you if you take if you measure the BPS for the entirety of the human organ ISM so if you're talking and doing a thing with your mind and looking around mhm also I mean there's just a lot of paralyzation that 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 um and that's a separate circuitry that that um is a big mystery like how attention works and you know yeah attention like cognitive load I've done I've I've read a lot of literature on people doing two tasks mhm like uh you have your primary task and a secondary task and the secondary task is is a source of distraction and how does that affect the performance on the primary task

and there's depending on the task there's a lot of interesting I mean this is an interesting computational device right and I think there's to say the least a lot of Novel insights that can be gained from everything I mean I personally am surprised that no one's able to do such incredible control of the cursor while talking and also being nervous at the same time because he's talking like all of us Sor if you're talking in front of the camera you get nervous so all of those are coming into play he's able to still achieve high

performance surprising I mean all of this is really amazing uh and I think at just after researching this really in depth I kind of wanted your link get in the line and also the safy get in mind well we should say the registry is for people who have quadriplegia and all that kind of stuff so there'll be a separate line for people um they're just curious uh like myself so now that noan patient P1 is part of the ongoing Prime study um what's the high level vision for P2 P3 P4 P5 and just uh the

expansion into other human beings that are getting to experience this implant yeah I mean the prim goal is uh you know for for our study in the first place is to achieve safety end points just understand um safety of this device as well as the implantation process um and also at the same time understand the efficacy and the impact that it could have on uh the potential user's lives um and just because you have and you know you're living with tetr Leia it doesn't mean your situation same as another person living with tetelia it's widely

widely varying um and and you know you're 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 the just the best product for them um so are are you know there's there's obviously also uh you know go goals that we have and and the primary purpose of the early feasibility study is to learn from each and every participant to improve the device improve

the surgery before you know we embark on what's called a pivotal study that then is a much larger um uh trial that starts to look at statistical significance of your endpoints um and that's required before you can then Market the device um uh and and you know that's how it works in the US and just generally around the world that's that's the process you follow so you know our goal is to really just understand from people like Nolan P2 P3 future participants what aspects of our device needs to improve you know if if it turns

out that people are like I really don't like the fact that it lasts only 6 hours I want to be able to use this computer for you know like 24 hours I mean that's that is a you know user needs and user requirements uh which we can only find out from just just being able to engage with them so before the pivotal study there's kind of like a rapid Innovation based on individual experiences you're learning from Individual people how they use it like the like the high resolution details in terms of like cursor control and

signal and all that kind of stuff to like life experience yeah so there's Hardware changes but also just just firmware updates um so even even when we um you know had had that sort of uh recovery event for Nolan uh you know he now has the new firmware that that that he um has been uh updated with and you know it's similar to how like your phones get updated all the time with new firmwares for security patches whatever new functionality UI right um and that's something that is possible with our implant it's not a static

one-time device that that can only do the thing that it said it can do I mean similar to Tesla you can do over the a firmware updates and now you have completely new user user interface and um all this bells and whistles and improvements on you know everything like the latest right uh that's that's that's um you know when we say generalized platform 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 uh what other future capabilities are are you kind of looking to you said Vision that's a fascinating one uh what about sort of accelerated typing or speech this kind of stuff what and what else is there what's yeah those those are still in the realm realm of um movement program so so largely speaking we have two programs we have the movement program and we have the the vision program uh the movement program you know currently is focused around you know the digital Freedom as you can easily guess if you can

control you know 2D cursor in the digital space you could move anything in the physical space um so robotic arms wheelchair your environment uh or even really like whether it's through the phone or just like directly to those interfaces so like to those machines um so we're looking at ways to kind of expand those types of capability even for Nolan um that requires you know conversation with the FDA and kind of showing safety data for you know if there's a robotic arm or wheelchair that you know we can guarantee that they're not going to hurt

themselves accidentally right um it's very different if you're moving stuff in the in the digital domain versus like in the physical space you can actually um potentially harm to the participants um so we're working through that right now um speech does involve different areas of the brain speech prosthetic is very very fascinating and there's actually been a lot of really um amazing work that's been happening in Academia um you know Sergey staviski at UC Davis Jamie Henderson and you know late Krishna shoi um at Stanford doing just some incredible amount of work in improving speech

uh neuroprosthetics and it those are actually looking more at parts of the motor cortex that are controlling you know these focal articulators and you know being able to like even by mouthing the word or imagine speech you can pick up those signals um the more sophisticated higher level processing areas like you know the broker's area or you know War's area those are still very very big mystery in terms of the the underlying mechanism of how all that stuff works but um yeah I mean I think I think neural Ling's evental goal is to kind of

understand those those things um and and be able to provide a platform and tools to be able to understand that and study that this is where I get to the pothead questions um do you think we can start getting insight into things like thought so speech is uh there's a muscular component like you said there's like the act of producing sounds but then what about the internal things like cognition like lowlevel thoughts and high level thoughts do you think we'll start noticing kind of signals that could be picked up they could um they could be

understood they could be maybe used in order to interact with the outside world in some ways like I guess this starts to kind of get into the hard problem of Consciousness um and uh I mean on on one hand all of these are at some point set of electrical signals that um from there maybe it it in itself is giving you the cognition or the meaning or somehow human mind is incredibly amazing storytelling machine so we're telling ourselves and fooling ourselves that there's some interesting meaning here um but I I I I certainly think that

BCI and you know really BCI at the end of the day is a set of tools that help you kind of study the underlying mechanisms in in a both like local but also broader sense um and whether you know there's some interesting patterns of like electrical signal that means like you're thinking this versus and you can either like learn from like many many sets of data to correlate some of that and be able to do mind reading or not I'm not I'm not sure um I certainly would not kind of blow that out as a

possibility but um I I I think BCI alone probably can't do that there's probably additional set of tools and framework and you also like just hard problem of Consciousness at the end of the day is rooted in this philosophical question of like what is the what's the meaning of it all what's the nature of our existence like where is the Mind emerg from this complex Network like yeah how does the uh how does do the subjective experience emerge from just a bunch of spikes electrical spikes yeah yeah I mean we we do really think about

BCI and what we're building as a tool for understanding the mind the brain the only question that matters there's actually um there actually is um some biological existence proof of like what it would take to kind of start to form some of these experiences that maybe unique um if you actually look at every one of our brains there there two hemispheres there's a left sided brain there's a right sided brain and I mean I unless you have some other conditions you normally don't feel like left leg or right legs MH like you just feel like

one legs right so what is happening there right um if you actually look at the two hemispheres there's a a structure that kind of connectorized the two called the Corpus colossum that is supposed to have around 200 to 300 million connections or axons um so whether that means that's the the number of interface and electrod that we need to create some sort of Mind meld or from that like whatever new conscious experience that you you can experience um but yeah I do think that there's like kind of interesting um existence proof that we all have

and that threshold is unknown at this time oh yeah these things everything in this domain is you know speculation right um and then there will be uh you'd be continuously pleasantly surprised uh do you see a world where there's millions of people like tens of millions hundreds of millions of people walk around with the neuralink device in their or multiple neuralink devices in their brain I do first of all there there are like if you look at worldwide um people suffering from movement disorders and visual defis I mean that that's uh in the tens if

not hundreds of millions of people um so that that alone I think there's a lot of uh benefit and and potential good that we can do with this type of technology and when she start to get into kind of neuro like psychiatric application you know depression um anxiety hunger or you know obesity right like mood control of appetite I mean that starts to become you know very real to everyone not to mention that every uh most people on earth have a smartphone and once BCI starts compe eting with a smartphone as a preferred methodology of

interacting with the digital world that also becomes an interesting thing oh yeah I mean that yeah this is even before going to that right I mean there's like almost I mean the entire world that could benefit from these types of thing and then yeah like if we're talking about kind of next generation of how we interface with you know machines or even ourselves uh in many ways I think um BCI can can play a role in that um and you know some of the things that I also talk about is I I I do think

that there is a real possibility that you could see um you know 8 billion people walking around with neural link well thank you so much for pushing ahead and uh I look forward to that exciting future thanks for having me thanks for listening to this conversation with DJ saw and now dear friends here's Matthew McDougall the head neurosurgeon at your link when did you first become fascinated with the human brain since forever uh far back as I can remember I've been interested in the human brain I mean uh I was you know a thoughtful kid

and a bit of an outsider and you you know sit there thinking about what the most important things in the world are uh in your in your little tiny adolescent brain and the answer that I came to that I converged on was uh that all of the things you can possibly conceive of as things that are important for human beings to care about are literally contained you know in the skull uh both the perception of them and their relative values and you know the solutions to all our problems and all of our problems are all

contained in the skull and if we knew more about how that worked uh how the brain encodes information and generates desires and generates Agony and suffering uh we we could do more about it you know you think about all the all the really great triumphs in human history you think about all the really horrific tragedies um you know you think about the Holocaust you think about um any prison full of human stories uh and all of those problems boil down to neurochemistry so if you get a little bit of control over that you provide people

the option to do better in the way I read history the way people have dealt with having better tools is that they most often in the end do better uh with huge asterisks but I think it's a an interesting a worthy a 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 of these jenus Khan all of them just had like a a brain it just a bunch of neurons you know like few tons of billions of

neurons uh gaining a bunch of information over a period of time they have set a module that does language and memory and all that and from there in in in the case of those people they're able to murder millions of people yeah and all that coming from uh there's not some glorified notion of a a dictator of this enormous mind or something like this it's just it's just the brain yeah yeah I mean a lot of that has to do with how well people like that can organize those around them other brains yeah and so

I always find it interesting to look to primatology you know look to our closest non-human relatives uh for Clues as to how humans are going to behave and and what particular humans are able to achieve and so you look at um 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 uh Fran Dall the great Fran Dall who was kind of the leading primatologist uh who recently died and his work in at looking at chimps through the lens of you know

how you would watch an episode of Friends and understand the motivations of the characters interacting with each other he would look at a chimp colony and basically apply that lens I'm massively oversimplifying it if you do that instead of just saying you know subject 473 you know through his feces at subject 471 you talk about them in terms of their human struggles Accord them the Dignity of themselves as actors with understandable goals and drives what they want out of life and primarily it's you know the things we want out of life food sex companionship um

Power uh you can understand chimp and Boba behavior in those same lights uh 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 on to it with language and look at it in terms of oh well these humans are looking for companionship sex food power um and I think that that's a pretty powerful tool to have in understanding human behavior and I just uh went to the Amazon jungle for a few weeks and you 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 like I saw a lot of monkeys and they're just trying to impress each other or maybe there's a battle for power but a lot of the battle for power has to do with them getting laid right reading rights often go with Alpha status and 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 talk comes to primates where

really AR you know we can use fancer poetic language but uh maybe some of the underlying drives that motivate us are um similar yeah I think that's true and all that is coming from this the brain yeah uh so when did you first start studying the the brain as like as a biological mechanism basically the moment I got to college I started looking around for labs that I could uh do Neuroscience work in uh I originally approached that from the angle of uh looking at interactions between the brain and the immune system which isn't the

most obvious place to start but um I had this idea at the time that the contents of your thoughts would have an impact a direct impact maybe a powerful one on uh non-conscious systems in your body the systems we think of as you know homeostatic autom IC mechanisms like fighting off a virus like repairing a wound um and sure enough there are big crossovers between the two I mean it gets to um kind of a key point that I think goes underrecognized one of the things people don't recognize or or appreciate about the human brain

uh enough and that is that it basically controls or has a huge role in almost everything that your body does um like you try to try to name an example of something in your body that isn't directly controlled or massively influenced by the brain and uh it's pretty hard I mean you might say like bone healing or something but uh even those systems the hypothalamus and pituitary end up playing a role in coordinating the endocrine system that does have a direct influence on say the calcium level in your blood that goes to Bone healing so

non-obvious connections between those things uh implicate the brain as really a potent prime mover in all of Health one of the things I realized in the other direction too how most of the systems in the body integrated with the human brain like they affect the brain also like the immune system um I think there's just you know people who study Alzheimer's and uh those kinds of things is it's just surprising how much you can understand of that from the immune system from the other systems that don't obviously seem to have to anything to do with

sort of the nervous system they all play together yeah you could understand how that would be driven by Evolution too just in some simple examples if you get sick if you get a communicable disease you get the flu uh it's pretty advantageous for your immune system to tell your brain hey now be antisocial for you know a few days don't go be the life of the party tonight in fact maybe just cuddle up somewhere warm under a blanket and just stay there for a day or two and sure enough that tends to be the behavior

that you see both in animals and and in humans if you get sick elevated levels of inter lucans in your blood and tnf Alpha in your blood ask the brain to cut back on social activity uh even moving around you have lower look motor activity uh in animals that are infected with viruses so from there the early days in Neuroscience to surgery when did that step happen was a leap you know it was sort of an evolution of thought I wanted to study the brain so I started studying the brain uh in undergrad in this

neuroimmunology lab uh I from there uh realized at some point that I didn't want to just generate knowledge I wanted to affect real changes in the actual World in actual people's lives and so after having not really thought about going into medical school I was on a track to go into a PhD program I said well I'd like I'd like that option I'd like to actually potentially help tangible people in front of me and uh doing a little digging found that there exists these MD PHD programs where you can choose not to choose between them

and do both and so uh I went to USC for medical school and had a joint PhD program with Caltech um 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 a maak lab where Utah rays and other electrodes were being inserted into the brains of monkeys uh to try to understand how intentions were being encoded in the brain so you know I ended up there with the idea that maybe I would be a neurologist and study the brain

on the side uh and then discovered that neurology um again I'm gonna make enemies by saying this but neurology uh predominantly and and distressingly to me is is the practice of diagnosing a thing and then saying good luck with that there's not much we can do um and neurosurgery very differently uh is a it's a powerful lever on taking people that are headed in a bad Direction and changing their course uh in the sense of brain tumors that are potentially treatable or curable with surgery um you know even aneurysms in the brain blood vessels that

are going to rupture you can uh save lives really is at the end of the day what What mattered to me and so uh I was at USC as I mentioned that happens to be one of the great neurosurgery programs and so I met these truly epic uh neurosurgeons Al kesi and and M A puzzo and Steve ginata and Marty Weiss these these sort of Epic people that were just human beings in front of me and so it kind of changed my thinking from neurosurgeons are distant gods that live on another planet and occasionally come

and visit us to these are humans that have problems and are people and uh there's nothing fundamentally preventing me from being one of them uh and so um at the last minute in medical school I changed gears from going into a different specialty and and switched into neurosurgery uh which cost me a year I had to do another year of research uh because I was so far along in the process uh that um to switch into neurosurgery the deadlines had already passed so was a a decision that cost time but absolutely worth it what was

the hardest part of the training on the on the neurosurgeon track yeah two things I think that you know residency in neurosurgery is sort of a competition of pain of like how much pain can you eat and smile yeah uh and so there's workout restrictions that uh 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 NE necessarily means working long hours and sometimes over the work hour limits and you know we care about being

compliant with whatever regulations are uh in front of us but I think more important than that people want to give all give their all in becoming a better neurosurgeon because the the stakes are so high and so it's a real fight to get residents uh to say go home at the end of their shift and not stay and do more surgery Are you seriously saying like one of the hardest things is literally like getting forcing them to get sleep and rest and all this kind of stuff historically that was the case I think I think

the Next Generation I think the next generation is more uh compliant and more self is what you mean all right I'm just I'm just kidding I'm just kidding I didn't say it now I'm making enemies no okay I get it wow that's fascinating uh so what was the second thing the personalities and maybe the two are connected but so is was it pretty competitive it's competitive and it's also um you know as we touched on earlier primates like power and I think um neurosurgery has long had this Aura of um mystique and excellence and whatever

about it and so it's it's an invitation I think for people that are cloaked in that Authority you know board certified neurosurgeon is basically a walking uh fallacious appeal to Authority right you have licensed to walk into any room and act like you're you know an expert on whatever and fighting that tendency is not something that most neurosurgeons do well humility isn't the Forte yeah one of the so um I have friends uh who know you and whenever they speak about you that your you're have the surprising quality for a neurosurgeon of humility which I

think IND DEC cases that it's not it's not as common is perhaps in other professions because there is a kind of gigantic sort of heroic aspect to neurosurgery and I think it gets to people's head a little bit Yeah well that I think that uh you know that allows me to play well at an Elon company yes because Elon uh one of his strengths I think is to just instantly see through fallacy from Authority so nobody walks into a room that he's in and says well God damn it you have to trust me I'm the

guy that built the last you know 10 Rockets or something and he says well you did it wrong and we can do it better or I'm the guy that you know kept Ford alive for the last 50 years you listen to me on how to build cars and he says no and so you don't walk into a room that he's in and say well I'm a neurosurgeon let me tell you how to do it uh he's going to say well I'm a human being that has a brain I can think from principles myself thank you

very much uh and here's how I think it ought to be done let's go try it and see who's right uh and that's a you know proven I think over and over in his case to be a very powerful approach if we just take that tangent there's a fascinating interdisciplinary team at neur link that you get to interact with um including Elon what do you think is the secret to a successful team or what have you learned from just getting to observe these folks yeah World experts in different disciplines work together yeah there there's a

sweet spot uh where people disagree and forcefully speak their mind and passionately defend their position and yet are still able to accept information from others and change their ideas when they're wrong and so I like the analogy of sort of how you polish rocks you put hard things in a in a hard container and spin it people bash against each other and out comes uh you know a more refined product and so uh to make a good team at nurlink we've tried to find you know people that are not afraid to defend their ideas passionately

and you know occasionally strongly disagree with people uh that they're that they're working with and have the best idea come out on top um it's not an easy balance again to refer back to the primate brain it's not something that is inherently built into the the primate brain to say I passionately put all my chips on this position and now I'm just going to walk away from it and admit you are right you know part of our brains tell us that that is a power loss that is a loss of face a loss of standing

in the community and uh and and now you're a a Zeta chump because your idea got trounced um and you just have to you know recognize that that little voice in the back of your head is maladaptive and it's not helping the team win yeah you have to have the confidence to be able to walk away from an idea that you hold on to yeah yeah and if you do that often enough you're actually going to uh become the best of in the world that your thing I mean that kind of that rapid iteration yeah

you'll at least be a member of a winning team ride the wave uh what what did you learn you mentioned there's a lot of amazing uh neurosurgeons at USC what what lessons about surgery in life have you learned from those folks yeah I think working your ass off working hard while um you know functioning as a member of a team getting a job done that is incredibly difficult um you know working incredibly long hours being up all night taking care of someone that you know you think probably won't survive no matter what you do working

hard to make people that you passionately dislike look good the next morning these folks were Relentless in their pursuit of um excellent Neurosurgical technique decade over decade and and I think we're well recognized for that that Excellence so you know especially Marty Weiss Steve ganada uh mik apuzzo they made huge contributions not only to surgical technique but they built training programs that trained dozens or hundreds of amazing neurosurgeons I was just lucky to kind of be in their wake what's that like you mentioned mentioned doing a surgery where the person is likely not to survive

does that wear on you yeah um you know it's especially challenging um when you with all respect to to our elders uh it doesn't hit so much when you're taking care of an 80-year-old and something was going to get them pretty soon anyway and so you lose a patient like that and it it was part of the natural course of what is expected of them in the in the coming years regardless uh taking care of you know a father of two or three four young kids someone in their 30s that didn't have it coming and

they show up in your ER having their first seizure of their life and L and bold they've got a a huge malignant inoperable or incurable brain tumor you can only do that I think a handful of times um before it really starts eating away at your at your armor um or you know a young mother that shows up that has a giant Hemorrhage in her brain that she's not going to survive from and you know they bring her four-year-old daughter in to to say goodbye one last time before they turn the ventilator off that um

you know the great Henry Marsh is an English neurosurgeon who said it best I think he says every neurosurgeon carries with them a private graveyard and I I definitely feel that um especially with young parents uh that that kills me uh they they had a lot more to give the the loss of those people specifically has a you know knock on effect that's going to make the world worse for people uh 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 uh 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 we're trying to give people options uh to reduce suffering uh we're trying to we're trying to take the the pain out of life that uh broken brains brings in and and um yeah this is just our our little way that we're fighting back against entropy I guess yeah this the 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 uh is immense and to be able to restore some of that functionality is a real gift yeah we're just starting we're we're going to we're going to do so much more um well can you take me through the full procedure of implanting say the N1 sure chip in New Link yeah it's a really simple really simple straightforward procedure uh the the human part of the surgery uh that that I do is dead simple it's one of the most basic neurosurgery procedures imaginable and I think there's

evidence that it some version of it has been done for thousands of years uh there are examples I think from ancient Egypt of healed or partially healed uh tations and from uh Peru or you know ancient times in South America uh where uh these Proto surgeons would drill holes in people's skulls you know presumably to let out the evil spirits but maybe to drain blood clots and there's evidence of bone healing around the edge meaning the people at least survive some months uh after a procedure and so what we're doing is that we are making

a cut in the skin on the top of the head over the area of the brain that is the most potent uh representation of hand intentions and so if you if you are an expert concert pianist you know this part of your brain is lighting up the entire time you're playing we call it the hand knob the hand knob so it's all the like the finger movements all this all yeah all of that is just firing away yep there's a little squiggle in the cortex right there one of the folds in the brain is kind

of doubly folded right on that spot and so you can look at it on an MRI and say that's the hand knob and then you you do a functional test in a special kind of MRI called an a functional MRI fmri 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 that

part of the brain we confirm is your hand intention area um and so uh 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 uh 1 in diameter hole in the skull remove remove that bit of skull uh open the lining of the brain the covering of the brain it's like a like a little bag of water that the brain floats in and then show that part of the brain to our robot and then the

this is where the robot shines it can come in and take these tiny you know much smaller than human hair electrodes and precisely insert them into the cortex into the surface of the brain to a very precise depth in a very precise spot that avoids all the blood vessels that are coating the surface of the brain and after the robot's done with its part then you know the human comes back in and puts the implant into that hole in the skull and covers it up uh screwing it down to the skull and sewing the skin

back together um so the whole thing is you know a few hours long it's extremely low risk compared to the average neurosurgery involving the brain that that might say open up a deep part of the brain or manipulate blood vessels in the brain uh this this opening on the surface of the brain with um with only cortical micro insertions carries um significantly less risk than a lot of the you know tumor or aneurysm surgeries that are routinely done so cortical micro insertions that are via robot and and computer vision are designed to avoid the blood

vessels exactly so uh I know you're a bit biased here but let's compare human and machine sure so what are human surgeons able to do well and what are robot surgeons able to do well at this stage of our human civilization development yeah yeah that's a good question um humans uh are general purpose machines were able to adapt to unusual situations we're able to change the plan on the Fly um I remember well a surgery that I was doing many years ago down in San Diego where the plan was to um 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 uh the nerve that goes to the face when that blood vessel lays on the nerve it can cause just intolerable horrific shooting pain that people describe like being zapped with a cattle prod and so the beautiful elegant surgery is to go move this blood vessel off the off the nerve the surgery team we 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 preop scans and so the plant had to dynamically change and that the um human surgeons had no problem with that were trained for all those things robots wouldn't do so well in that situation at least in their current Incarnation uh fully robotic surgery like you know the the electrode insertion portion of of the nerling 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 uh but not with a wide degree of latitude and how to react to changing conditions so there could be just a very large number of ways that you could be surprised as a surgeon when you enter a situation there could be subtle things that you have to dynamically adjust to correct and robots are not good at that currently currently I think uh 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 a whmo or self-driving Tesla would have no problem reacting to that appropriately uh and so surgical robots aren't there yet but give it time and then there could be a lot of sort of inter 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 okay this for sure has no issues no surprises and then let the humans deal with the Surprises with the edge cases all that yeah uh that's one possibility so like you think eventually uh you'll be out of the job what you being neurosurgeon your job being neurosurgeon humans there will not be many neurosurgeons left on this Earth I'm not worried about my job in my in the course of my professional life I think I I would tell my my kids not necessarily to

go in this line of work uh depending on depending on how things look in 20 years it's so fascinating because I I mean I if I have a line of work I would say it's programming and if you ask me like for the last I don't know 20 years what I would recommend for people I would I would tell them yeah go there's this you will always have a job if you're a programmer because there's more and more computers and all this kind of stuff and uh it pays well but then you you realize these

large language models come along and they're really damn good at generating code yeah so it's over night you could be surprised like wow wa what is the contribution of the human really but then you start to think okay it does seem that humans have ability like you said to deal with novel situations in the case of programming it's the ability to kind of come up with novel ideas to solve problems it's it seems like like machines aren't quite yet able to do that and when the stakes are very high when it's life critical as it

is in surgery especially neurosurgery then it starts the the stakes are very high for a robot to actually replace a human but it's fascinating that in this case of neuralink there's a uh human robot collaboration yeah yeah it's I do the parts I can't do and it does the parts I can't do um and we we are friends uh I I saw that there's a lot of practice going on so I mean everything in New link is is tested extremely rigorously but one of the things I saw that there's a proxy on which the surgeries

are performed yeah so this is both for the robot and for the human for everybody involved in the entire pipeline yep what's that like practicing the surgery it's pretty intense uh so there's no analog to this in human surgery uh 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 I mean first you watch uh your professors do a bunch of surgery and then finally they put you

know the trivial parts of the surgery into your hands and then the more comp Le Lex parts and as your understanding of the the point and the purposes of the surgery increases you get more responsibility in the perfect condition doesn't always go well in neural Link's case the approach is a bit different um we of course practiced as far as we could on animals we did hundreds of animal surgeries um and when it came time to do the first human uh we had a just a amazing team of engineers build incredibly lifelike models one of

the engineers Fran Romano in particular built built a pulsating brain in a custom 3D printed skull that matches exactly the the patients Anatomy including their face and uh scalp characteristics and so when I was able to practice that I mean it's as close as it really reasonably should get uh to to being the real thing in all the details including you know the having a a Manakin 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 mock CT scan and

wheel it back in and conduct all the normal safety checks verbally you know stop this patient we're confirming his identification is mannequin number blah blah blah and then opening the brain in exactly the right spot using standard operative neuronavigation equipment standard surgical drills in in the same o that we do all of our practice surgeries in at nurlink and having the skull open and have the brain pulse which adds a degree of difficulty for the robot to you know perfectly precisely plan and insert those electrodes to the right depth and location and so uh yeah

we we uh kind of broke new ground on how extensively we practiced for this surgery so there was a historic moment a big milestone uh for nink in part for Humanity with uh the first human getting a neuralink implant in January of this year uh take me through the surgery uh on Noland what did he feel like to be part of this yeah well we um we're lucky to have just incredible Partners at the baron neurologic Institute they are uh I think the premier Neurosurgical Hospital in the world uh they they made everything as easy

as possible for the trial uh to get going and and helped us immensely uh with their expertise on how to uh how to arrange the details it was a much more high pressure surgery in some ways I mean even though the you know the outcome wasn't particularly in question in terms of our participants safety the number of observers you know the number of people there's conference rooms full of people watching live streams in the hospital um rooting for this to go perfectly and that just adds pressure that is not typical for uh even the most

intense production neurosurgery say removing a tumor or you know placing deep brain stimulation electrodes and it had never been done on a human before there were unknown unknowns um and so uh definitely a a moderate pucker Factor there for the whole team uh not knowing if we were going to encounter say a degree of brain movement that was unanticipated or uh 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 uh went well and that that surgery was

one of the smoothest uh outcomes we could have imagined were you nervous I mean you're bit of quarterback and like in the Super Bowl kind of situation extremely nervous uh extremely I was very pleased when it went well and then and when it was over um looking forward to number two yeah even with all that practice all of that just you've never been in a situation that's so high stakes in terms of people watching yeah and we should also probably mention given how the media works a lot of people um you know maybe in a

dark kind of way hoping it doesn't go well well I think wealth is easy to hate um or Envy or or whatever and uh 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 uh is going to be really good for for clicks it just sucks because I think in it puts pressure on people it discourages people from from trying to solve really hard problems because to solve hard problems you have to go into the unknown

you have to do things that haven't been done before and you have to take risks yeah uh calculated risks you have to do all kind of safety precautions but risks nevertheless and uh I just wish there would be more celebration of that of the risk taking versus like yeah people just waiting on the on on the sidelines like waiting for failure yeah and then pointing out the failure uh yeah it sucks but you know in this case it's it's it's really great that everything went just flawlessly but it's unnecessary pressure I would say now that

there is a human with literal skin in the game you know there's a participant who whose well-being rides on this doing well you have to be a pretty bad person to be rooting for that to go wrong yeah um and so you know hopefully people look in the mirror and and realize that at some point so did you get to actually front row seat like watch the robot work like what uh you get to see the whole thing yeah I mean I you know because an MD needs to be charge of all of the medical

decision- making throughout the process um I unscrubbed from the surgery after exposing the brain and presenting it to the robot and um place the targets on the robot uh inter software interface that tells the robot where it's going to insert each thread that was done um with you know my hand on the mouse for whatever that's worth so you were the one placing the targets yeah oh cool so like it you know the the the robot uh with a computer vision provides a bunch of candidates and you kind of finalize the decision right uh you

know they the the software Engineers are amazing on this team and so they actually provided an interface where you can essentially use a lasso tool and select a a prime area of brain real estate and it will automatically avoid the blood vessels in that region and automatically place a bunch of targets so you you know that allows you know the human robot operator to select uh really good areas of brain and make dense applications of Targets in that in those regions the regions we think are going to have the most um High Fidelity representations of

finger movements and arm movement intentions I've seen like images of this and for me with OCD it's for some reason a really doesn't uh I think there's a subreddit called oddly satisfying yeah love that subreddit It's oddly satisfying to see the different Target sites avoiding the blood vessels and uh also maximizing like the usefulness of those locations for the signal it just feels good it's like ah as as a person who has a visceral reaction to the brain bleeding I can tell you it's yes especially it's extremely satisfying watching the electrodes themselves go into the

brain and not cause bleeding yeah yeah so uh you said the feeling was of relief when everything went perfectly yeah how deep in the brain can you currently go and uh eventually go let's say on the neuralink side is it seems the deeper you go in the brain the more challenging it becomes yeah so talking broadly about neurosurgery we can get anywhere uh it's routine for me to put deeper brain stimulating electrodes uh near the very bottom of the brain uh entering from the top and passing about a 2mm wire all the way into the

bottom of the brain and that's not revolutionary a lot of people do that uh and we can do that with very high Precision I I use a robot uh from Globus to do that surgery um you know several times a month uh it's it's pretty routine what are your eyes in that situation what what are you seeing what's what kind of Technology can you use to visualize where you are to light your way yeah so it's a cool process on the software side you take a pre-operative MRI that's extremely high resolution data of the entire

brain you put the patient to sleep put their head in a frame that holds the skull very rigidly and then you take a CT scan of their head while they're asleep with that frame on and then merge uh the MRI and the CT in software you have a a plan based on the MRI where you can see these nuclei deep in the brain you can't see them on CT but if you trust the merging of the two images then you indirectly know on the CT where that is and therefore indirectly know where in reference to

the titanium frame screwed to their head those targets are and so this is 60s technology to manually compute trajectories given the entry point and Target uh and dial in some goofy looking titanium um actuators uh with manual manual actuators with little tick marks on them the modern version of that is to use a robot uh you know just like a a little CA arm you might see it building cars at the Tesla Factory this small robot arm can show you the trajectory that you intended from the preop MRI and establish a very rigid holder through

which you can drill a small hole in the skull and pass a small rigid wire deep into that area of the brain that's Hollow and put your electrode through that Hollow wire and then remove all of that except the electrode uh so you end up with the electrode very very precisely placed far from the skull surface now that's standard technology um that's already you know been out in the world for for a while neuralink right now is focused entirely on cortical targets surface targets uh because there's no trivial way to get say hundreds of wires

deep inside the brain without doing a lot of damage so your question what do you see well I see an MRI on a screen I can't see everything that that DBS electr is passing through on its way to that deep Target and so it's accepted with this approach that there's going to be about one in a hundred patients who have a a bleed somewhere in the brain uh as a result of passing that wire blindly into the the Deep part of the brain that's not an acceptable safety profile for neuralink we uh start from the

position that we want this to be dramatically maybe two or three orders of magnitude safer than that uh safe enough really that you know you or I without a profound medical problem might on our lunch break someday say yeah sure I'll get that I've been meaning to upgrade to the latest version and so that the safety constraints given that are high and so we haven't uh settled on a final solution for arbitrarily approaching deep Targets in the brain it's interesting because like you have to avoid blood vessels somehow you have to maybe there's creative ways

of doing the same thing like mapping out high resolution geometry of blood vessels and then you can go in blind but like how do you map out that in a way that's like super stable it's there's a lot of interesting challenges there right yeah but there's a lot to do on the surface Lu exactly so we've got Vision on the surface um you know we we actually have made a huge amount of progress sewing uh electrodes into the spinal cord uh as a potential workaround for a spinal cord injury that would allow a brain mounted

implant to Translate motor intentions to a spine mounted implant that can affect muscle contractions in previously paralyzed arms and legs that's just incredible so like the effort there is to try to bridge the brain to the spinal cord to the periphery peripheral nervous so uh how hard is that to do we have that working in uh in very crude forms in animals that's amazing yeah we've done it so similar to like with Nolan where he's able to digitally move the cursor here you're doing uh the same kind of communication but with the actual defectors that

you have yeah that's fascinating yeah so we have anesthetized animals doing grasp and moving moving their legs and an sort of walking pattern uh again early days uh but uh the future is bright for this kind of thing and and people with paralysis uh should look forward to that bright future they're going to have options yeah and there's a lot of sort of uh intermediate or extra options where you take like an Optimus robot like the uh the arm and to be able to control the arm yeah the the the fingers the hands of the

arm sure as a prosthetic are getting better too exoskeletons yeah so that that goes hand in hand although I didn't quite understand until thinking about a deep doing more research about neuralink how much you can do on the digital side so this digital telepathy yeah I I didn't quite understand that you can really map the intention as you described in the hand knob area that you can map the intention just imagine it think about it that intention can be mapped to actual action in the digital world right and now more and more so much can

be done in in the digital world that it it it can reconnect you to to the outside world it can allow you to have freedom have Independence if you're a quadriplegic yeah that's really powerful like you can go really far with that yeah our first part participant is he's incredible he's breaking World Records left and right and he's having fun with it it's great um just going back to the surgery your whole journey you uh mentioned to me offline you have surgery on Monday so you're like you're doing surgery all the time yeah maybe the

ridiculous question what does it take to get good at surgery practice repetitions you just same with anything else you know there's a million ways of people saying the same thing and selling books saying it but do you call it 10,000 hours do 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 um repetitions uh humility recognizing that you aren't perfect at any stage along the way uh recognizing you've got improvements to make in your Technique being open to feedback and coaching

from people with a different perspective how to do it um and then um just the constant will to do better uh that fortunately you know if you're not a sociopath I think your patients bring that with them to the office visits every day they you know force you to want to do better all the time yeah just step up I mean it's a 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 surging and a different

person yeah a fair bit I mean a good example for us is that the angle of the skull relative to the normal plane of the body axis of the skull over hand knob uh is pretty wide variation I mean some people have really flat skulls and some people have really steeply angled skulls over that area and that has you know consequences for or how their head can be fixed in in uh in sort of the frame that we use um and how the robot has to approach the skull and um yeah people's people's bodies are

built as differently as you know the people you see walking down the street as as much variability in body shape and size as you see there we see in brain anatomy and skull Anatomy um there are some people who we've had to kind of exclude from our trial for having skulls that are too thick or too thin or scalp that's too thick or too thin um I think you know we have like the middle 97% or so uh of people but you can't account for all human anatomy variability how much like mushiness and mess is

there CU I uh you know taking biology classes the diagrams are always really clean and crisp Neuroscience the pictures of neurons are always was really nice and very um but whenever I look at pictures of like real brains they're all I I don't know what is going on yeah uh so how much our biological systems in reality like how hard is it to figure out what's going on not too bad uh once you really get used to this you know that's where experience and and skill and uh 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 susai 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 uh and with more experience you you learn to kind of peel back that layer of blood vessels and see the underlying pattern of wrinkles in the brain and use

that as a landmark for where you are the wrinkles are a 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 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 where is it about in the it's so you have this strip of brain running down the top called the primary motor area and I'm sure you've seen this picture of the homunculus laid over the surface of the brain the weird little guy with huge lips and giant hands uh that guy sort of lay with his legs uh up at the top of the brain and and face arm uh areas farther down and and then some kind of mouth lip tongue areas uh farther down and so the hand is right in there and then

the areas that control speech at least on the on the left side of the brain in most people are are just below that and so uh any muscle that you voluntarily move in your body um the vast majority of that references that strip or those intentions come from that strip of brain and the the wrinkle uh for hand knob is right in the middle of that and vision is back here yep also on close to the surface vision's a little deeper uh and so you know this gets to your question about how deep can you

get um to do Vision we can't just do the surface of the brain we have to be able to go in uh not not as as deep as we'd have to go for DBS but maybe a centimeter deeper than we're used to for hand insertions uh and so that's you know work in progress that's a a new set of challenges to overcome by the way you mentioned uh the Utah aray and I just saw a picture of that and that thing looks terrifying yeah it's because of it's rigid and then if you look at the

threads they're flexible what can you say that's interesting to you about the flex that kind of approach of the the flexible threads to to deliver the electrodes next to the neurons yeah I mean the the goal there comes from experience I mean we stand on the shoulders of people that made Utah rays and and used Utah Rays for decades before we ever even came along um neuralink arose 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 uh those spikes generate a bad immune response that encapsulates the the electrode spikes in uh Scar Tissue essentially and so one of the projects that was being worked on in in the Anderson Lab at Caltech when I got there was to 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 nurl Link's approach of using highly flexible tiny electrodes avoids a lot of the bleeding avoids a lot of the immune response that ends up happening uh when rigid electrodes are pounded into the brain and so what we see is our electrode longevity and functionality uh and the and the health of the brain tissue immediately surrounding the electrode uh is excellent I mean it goes on for for years now in our animal models what do most people not understand about the biology of the brain we mention

the vasculature that's really interesting I think the most interesting maybe underappreciated fact uh is that it really does control almost everything I mean I don't know for out of the blue example imagine you you want a lever on fertility you want to be able to turn fertility on and off I mean it there are legitimate Targets in the brain itself to modulate fertility say um blood pressure you want to modulate blood pressure they're legitimate tar Targets in the brain for doing that um things that aren't immediately obvious as brain problems are potentially solvable in the

brain um and so I think it's an under explored area for primary treatments of of all the things that bother people that's a really fascinating way to look at it like there's a lot of conditions we might think have nothing to do with the brain but they might just be symptoms of something that actually started in the brain the actual source of the problem the primary source is the is something in the brain yeah not not always I mean you know there kidney disease is real uh but um there are levers you can pull in

the brain that affect all of the all of these systems there's knobs yeah onoff switches and knobs in the brain from which this all or originates yeah uh would you have a neuralink chip implanted in your brain yeah um I think use case right now is use a mouse right I can already do that and so there's no value proposition uh on safety grounds alone sure I would do it tomorrow you know you say the use case of the mouse is after like researching all this and part of is just watching Nolan have so much

fun if you can get that bits per second like really high with a the mouse like being able to interact because if you think about the the way the on the smartphone the way you swipe that was transformational yeah how we interact with a thing it's subtle you don't realize it but you're able to touch a phone and to uh scroll with your finger that's like that changed everything that people were sure you need a keyboard to type and that uh there's a lot of HCI aspects to that that changed how we interact with Compu

computers so there could be a certain rate of speed with the mouse that would change everything yes like you might be able to just click around a screen extremely fast and that if it I I seem must have gotten the neur link for much more rapid interaction with the digital devices yeah I think recording speech intentions from the brain might might change things as well you know the value proposition for the average person um a keyboard is a pretty clunky human interface requires a lot of training it's you know highly variable in the maximum performance

that the average person can uh can achieve uh I think taking that out of the equation and just having a natural you know word to computer interface uh might change things for a lot of people it'd be hilarious if if that is the reason people do it even if you have speech to text that's extremely accurate it currently isn't right but it say gotten super accurate it'd be hilarious if people went for neuralink just so you avoid the embarrassing aspect of speaking like looking like a douchebag speaking to your phone in public which is a

real like that's a real constraint yeah I mean with a bone conducting case uh that can be an invisible headphone say um and the ability to think words into software and have it respond to you um you know that starts to sound sort of like embedded super intelligence you know if you can silently ask for the Wikipedia article on any subject and have it read to you without any observable change happening in the outside world uh 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 if it transforms Society but it really uh can create a kind of shift in the way we interact with digital devices and the way that a smartphone did yeah I would um just having to look into the safety of everything involved I would totally try it so it doesn't have to go to some like incredible thing where you have it connects to your vision or to some other like you connects all over your brain that could be like just connecting to the hand knob uh you might have a lot of interesting

interaction human computer interaction possibilities yeah that's really interesting yeah and the technology on the academic side is progressing at light speed here I think there was a really amazing paper out of UC Davis Sergey stavis lab that basically made a initial solve of speech decode it was something like 125 5,000 words uh that they were getting with you know very high accuracy which is so you're just thinking the word yeah thinking the word and you're able to get it yeah oh boy like you have to have the intention of speaking it right so like do

that inner voice man it's so amazing to me that you can do the intention to Signal mapping all you have to do is just imagine yourself doing it and if if you get the feedback that it actually worked you can get really good at that like your brain will first of all adjust and you develop like any other skill yeah like touch typing you develop in that same kind of way that is that is really to me it's just really fascinating yeah to be able to even to play with that honestly like I would get

a new link just to be able to play with that just to play with the capacity the capability of my mind to learn this skill it's like learning the skill of typing or 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 we're cavemen right now we're we're like banging rocks with a stick and thinking that we're making music um at some point when these are more widespread there's going

to be the equivalent of a of a piano that you know someone someone can make art with their brain in a way that we didn't even anticipate um I'm looking forward to it give it to like a teenager like anytime I think I'm good at something I'll always go to like I don't know even even uh even with the the bit per second of playing a video game you realize you give it to a teen you give a your link to a teenager just a large number of them the kind of stuff you they get

good at stuff they're going to get like hundreds of uh bits per second yeah even just with the current technology probably probably just uh cuz it's also addicting how like the the the number go up aspect of it of like improving and training cuz it is it's almost like a skill and plus there's a software on the other end that adapts to you and especially if the adapting procedure algorithm becomes better and better and better you like learning together yeah we're scratching the surface on that right now there's so much more to do so on

the complete other side of it you have an RFID chip yeah implanted in you yeah this so I here nice so this is subtle thing it's a passive device that you use for unlocking like a a safe with top secrets or what what is what do you use it for what's the story behind it I'm not the first one there's there's this whole community of weirdo biohackers that uh have done this stuff and I think one of the early use cases was storing you know private crypto wallet keys and and whatever um I dabbled in

that a bit and and had some fun with it um you have some bigcoin implanted in your body somewhere you can't tell where yeah yeah actually yeah uh it was you know the modern day equivalent of finding change in the sofa cushions after I I put some orphan crypto on there that I thought was worthless and forgot about it for a few years went back and found that some community of people loved it uh and had propped up the value of it and so it had gone up 50 fold so there was a lot of

change in those cushions that's hilarious but the the primary use case is mostly as a as a tech demonstrator you know it it has my business card on it you can scan that in uh by touching it to your phone it opens the front door to my house you know whatever simple stuff it's a cool step it's a cool leap to implant something in your body I mean it has perhaps that's it's a similar leap to a neur link because for a lot of people that kind of notion of putting putting something inside your body

something electronic inside a biological system is a big leap yeah we have a kind of a mysticism around the barrier of our skin we're completely fine with knee Replacements hip replacements you know uh dental implants um but uh you know there's a mysticism still around the inviable barrier that the skull represents and I think that needs to be treated like any other uh pragmatic barrier you know it's the question isn't how how incredible is it to open the skull the question is you know what benefit can we provide so from all the surgeries you'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 uh other people of my demographic is that you know plasticity decreases with age healing decreases with age I have too much gray hair to uh to be optimistic about that there are theoretical ways to increase plasticity using electrical stimulation uh nothing that is you know totally proven out as a robust enough mechanism to offer

widely to people but um yeah I think I think there's cause for optimism that we might find something useful in terms of say an implanted electrode that improves learning um certainly there's been some really amazing work recently from uh Nicholas Schiff Jonathan Baker you know and others uh who have a a cohort of patients with moderate traumatic brain injury who have had electrodes placed in the Deep nucleus in the brain called the central median nucleus or just near Central median nucleus and when they apply small amounts of electricity to that part of the brain it's

almost like electronic caffeine they're able to improve people's attention and focus um they're able to improve how well people can perform a task I think in one case someone who was unable to work after the device was turned on they were able to get a job uh and that's sort of you know one of the Holy Grails uh for me with neuralink and other Technologies like this is from a purely utilitarian standpoint um can we can we make people able to take care of themselves and their families economically again can we make it so someone

who's fully dependent and even maybe requires a lot of caregiver resources can we put them in a position to be fully independent taking care of themselves giving back to their communities um I think I think that's a very compelling uh proposition and what motiv motivates a lot of what I do and what a lot of the people at neuralink are working for it's just a cool possibility that if you put a neur link in there that the brain adapts like the the other part of the brain adapts too yeah and integrates it the the 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 uh once it's doing uh stimulation like the the biological brain and the uh the electronic brain outside of it working together like the possibilities there really interesting 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 uh like everything serves the purpose and so you don't want to

mess with it too much yeah it's like you know eliminating a species from a from an ecology you know you don't know what the delicate interconnections and dependencies are um the brain is certainly a delicate complex beast and we don't know uh you know every potential Downstream consequence of of a single uh change that we make do you see yourself doing uh so mentioned P1 surgeries of P2 P3 P4 P5 five just well more and more and more humans I think you know it's a certain kind of brittleness or you know a failure on the

company's side if we need me to do all the surgeries um 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 um we want to get away from requiring intense expertise or intense experience uh to 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 the planet had no problem doing this um I think we're probably far from a regulatory

environment that would allow uh people that aren't neurosurgeons to do this but uh not impossible all right I'll sign up for that did you ever anthropomorphize the the robot R1 like do you do you give it a name do you see it as like a friend that's like working together with you I mean to a certain degree it's or an enemy who's going to take the job to a certain degree it's it's yeah it's complex relationship uh all the good relationships are it's funny when in the middle of the surgery there's a part of it

where I stand should basically shoulder-to-shoulder with the robot um 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 we're working together on the same problem um yeah I'm not threatened by it keep telling yourself that yeah um how have all the surgeries that you've done over the years the people you've helped and the the stakes the high stakes that you've mentioned how how is that uh change your understanding of life and death yeah um you know it gives you a very visceral

sense and this may sound trit but it gives you a very visceral sense that death is inevitable you know on one hand you know you you are as a neurosurgeon you're deeply involved in these like just hard to Fathom tragedies um you know young parents dying leaving you know a four-year-old behind to say uh and and on the other hand you know it takes the sting out of it a bit because you see how just mind-numbingly Universal death is there's zero chance that I'm going to avoid it uh I know you know techno optimists right

now and Longevity Buffs right now would disagree on that 0.00% estimate uh but I don't see any chance that our generation is going to avoid it entropy is a powerful force and we are very ornate delicate brittle DNA machines that aren't up to the cosmic ray bombardment that we're subjected to so on the one hand every human that has ever lived died or will die uh on the other hand it's just one of the hardest things to imagine um inflicting on anyone that you love is is having them gone I mean I'm sure you've had

friends that aren't living anymore and it's it's hard to even think about them um and so uh I wish I had you know uh arrived at the point of Nirvana Where you know death doesn't have a sting I'm not worried about it but um I can at least say that I'm comfortable with the certainty of it uh if not having found out how to take the the tragedy out of it when I think about you know my kids uh either not having me or or me not having them or my wife um maybe I've come

to accept the intellectual certainty of it but uh it may be the pain that comes of losing the people you love but I don't think I've come to understand the existential aspect of it like that this is going to end and I don't mean like uh in some uh trite way I mean like it certainly feels like it not going to end like you live life like it's not going to end right and the fact that this light that's shining this Consciousness is is is going to uh no longer be one moment maybe today it's

like a it it fills me when I really am able to load all that in with Ernest Becker's Terror like it's a real fear I think people aren't always honest with how terrifying it is yeah um I think the more you are able to really think through it the more terrifying it is it's it's not such a simple thing oh well this the way life is and if you really can load that in uh it's hard but I think that's why the stoics did it because it like helps you get your together and be like

this well the like the moment every single moment you're alive is just beautiful and it's terrifying that it's going to end and it's and it's like you like almost like you're shivering in the cold a child helpless this kind of feeling yeah and then it makes you when you have warmth when you have the safety when you have the love to really appreciate it uh I feel like sometimes in your position when you mentioned armor just to see death it might make you not be able to see that the the finiteness of life because if

you kept looking at that it might break you so it it's good to know that you're kind of still struggling with that there's the the neurosurgeon and then there's a human yeah and the human is still able to struggle with that and feel the the fear of that and the pain of that yeah you know it definitely makes you ask the question of how long how many time how many of these can you see and uh and not say I can't do this anymore um but I mean you said it well I think it gives

you an opportunity to just appreciate that you're alive today and uh you know I've got I've got three kids and an amazing wife and I'm really happy things are good I get to help on a project that I think matters I think it moves us forward I'm a very lucky person it's the early steps of a potentially uh gigantic leap for Humanity it's a really interesting one and it's cool cuz like you you read about all this stuff in history where it's like the early days I've been reading uh before going to the Amazon I

would read about explorers uh they would go and explore even the Amazon jungle for the first time it's just those are the early steps yeah or early steps into space early early steps in any discipline in in physics and Mathematics and it's cool cuz this is like the on the grand scale these are the early steps into delving deep into the human brain so not just observing the brain but be able to interact with the human brain yeah it's going to help a lot of people but it also might help us understand what the hell's

going on in there yeah I think ultimately we want to give people more levers that they can pull right like you want to give people options if you can give someone a dial that they can turn on how happy they are I think that makes people really uncomfortable but um 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 queasiness in those in that light of you can give people a knob to take away suicidal ideation suicidal intention I would I

would give them that knob I don't know how you justify by not doing that you can think about like all the suffering that's going on in the world like every single human being that's suffering right now it's like a it would be a glowing red dot the more suffering the more it's glowing you just see the map of human suffering and any technology that allows you to dim the that light of suffering uh on a grand scale is is pretty exciting because there's a lot of people suffering and most of them suffer quietly and we

turn our uh we we look away too often uh and we we should remember those are suffering cuz once again most of them are suffering quietly well and you know on a grander scale the fabric of society you know people have a lot of complaints about how our social fabric is working or not working how our politics is working or not working uh those things are made of neurochemistry too in in aggregate right like our politics is composed of individuals with human brains and the way it works or doesn't work is potentially tunable uh in

the sense that I don't know say remove our addictive behaviors or tune our addictive behaviors for social media or our addiction to outrage our addiction to sharing the most angry political tweet we can find um I don't think that leads to a functional society and uh if if you had options for people to moderate that maladaptive Behavior U there could be huge benefits to society maybe we could all work together a little more harmoniously toward useful ends there's a sweet spot like you mentioned you don't want to completely remove all the Dark Side of human

nature cuz those kind of uh 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 there like a glowing light you know I have this sense that uh I never found it okay never removed it you know like like a dementor in Harry Potter um I have this sense that Consciousness is a lot less magical than our

instincts want to claim it is um it it seems to me like a useful analog for thinking about what Consciousness is in the brain um you know is that we we have a really good intuitive understanding of what it means to say t touch your skin and know what's being touched um I think Consciousness is just that level of sensory mapping applied to the the thought processes in the brain itself so what I'm saying is consciousness is the sensation of some part of your brain being active so you you feel it working you feel the

part of your brain that thinks of red things or winged creatures or the taste of coffee you feel those parts of your brain being active the way that I'm feeling my palm being touched MH right and that sensory system that feels the brain working is consciousness 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 SpaceTime or some Quantum Field Effect right it's nothing magical people always

want to ascribe to ious something truly different uh and there's this awesome long history of people looking at whatever the latest Discovery in physics is to explain Consciousness um because it's the most magical the most out there thing that you can think of and and people always you know want to do that with Consciousness I don't think that's necessary it's just a you know a very useful and gratifying way of feeling your brain work and as we said as one heck of a brain yeah everything we see around us everything we love everything that's beautiful

it's came from brains like these it's all electrical activity happening inside your skull and uh I for one am uh Greatful there people like you that are uh exploring all the ways that it works and all the ways it can be made better thank you so much for talking today it's been a joy thanks for listening to this conversation with Matthew McDougall and now dear friends here's Bliss Chapman brain interface software lead at neurolink you told me that you've met hundreds of people with spinal cord injuries or with ALS and that your motivation for helping

at neural link is grounded in wanting to help them can you describe this motivation yeah first just a thank you to all the people I've gotten a chance to speak with for sharing their stories with me I don't think there's any world really in which I can share their stories in as powerful way as they can but uh just I think to summarize at a very high level What I Hear over and over again is that people with uh ALS or severe spinor injury in a place where they basically can't move physically anymore really at

the end of the day are looking for Independence and that can mean different things for different people for some folks it can mean the ability just to be able to communicate again independently without needing to wear something on their face without needing a caretaker to be able to put something in their mouth for some folks it can mean independent 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 themsel to be able to move out and ultimately be

able to supports after their family maybe isn't there anymore to take care of them and uh for some folks it's as simple as just being able to respond to their kid in time before they you know run away or get interested in something else and these are deeply personal and 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 with the right team we can make a lot of progress on and

uh at the end of the day I think that's a deeply inspiring message and something that makes me excited to get up every day so it's both an engineering problem in terms of a BCI for example that can give them capabilities where they can interact with the world but also on the other side it's an engineering problem for the rest of the world to make it more accessible for people living with quadriplegia yeah and I I'll take a Broadview sort of lens on this for a second I think I'm very in favor of anyone working

in this problem space so beyond BCI I'm I'm happy and excited and willing to support in any way I can folks working on ey tracking systems working on you know speech detect systems working on head trackers or Mouse sticks or quad sticks and I've met many engineers and folks in the community that do exactly those things and I think for the people who were trying to help it doesn't matter what the complexity of the solution is as long as the problem is solved and I want to emphasize that there can be many solutions out there

that can help with these problems and uh BCI is one of a collection of of such Solutions so BCI in particular I think offers several advantages here and I think the folks that recognize this immediately are usually the people who have spawner crit injury or some form of 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 Spa cour injury or who don't know somebody with ALS uh 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 nuancing to the degree that I've learned a huge amount just working with Noland in the first narland clinical trial and understanding from him in his words why this device is impactful for him and it's a Nuance topic it can be the case that even if you can achieve the same thing for example with a mouse stick when navigating a computer he doesn't have access to that Mouse 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 of Independence and autonomy that if it wasn't literally physically part of your body it' be hard to achieve in any other way so there's a lot of fascinating aspects to what it takes to get no one to be able to control a cursor on the screen with his mind uh you texted me something that I just love you said I was part of the team that interviewed and selected P1 I was in the operating room doing

the first human surgery monitoring live signals coming out of the brain I work with the user basically every day to develop new ux paradigms decoding strategies and I was part of the team that figured out how to recover useful BCI to New World Record levels when the signal quality degraded we'll talk about I think every aspect of that but um just zooming out what was it like to be part of that part part of that team and part of that historic I would say historic first yeah I think for me this is something I've been

excited about for close to 10 years now and so to be able to be even just some small part of making it a reality is extremely exciting a couple maybe special moments during that whole process that I'll never really truly forget one of them is during the actual surgery uh you know at that point in time I I know Nolan quite well I know his family and so I think the the initial reaction when uh Nolan is rolled into the operating room is just oh kind of reaction but at that point muscle memory kicks in

and you sort of go into uh you let your body just do the all the all the talking and I have the lucky job in that particular procedure to just be in charge of monitoring the implant so my job is to sit there to look at the signals coming off the implant to look at the live brain data streaming off the device as threads are being inserted into the brain and just to basically observe and make sure that nothing is going you know wrong or that there's no red flags or fault conditions that we need

to go and investigate or pause the surgery to uh did he bug and uh because I had that sort of spectator view of the surgery I had a slightly removed perspective than 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 you know when you when you look inside little craniectomy 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 your when your uh

heart beats and you can see it visibly so you know that's something that I think was a surprise to me and very very exciting uh to be able to see someone's brain who you physically know and have talked with that length actually pusing and moving inside their skull and they used that brain to talk to you previously and now it's right there moving y uh actually I didn't realize that in terms of the thread sending so the the neuralink implant is active during surgery so and one thread at a time you're able to start seeing

the signal yeah so that's part of the way you test that the thing is working yeah so actually in the in the operating room right after we sort of um finished the all the thread insertions I started collecting what's called broadband data so Broadband is uh basically the most raw form of signal you can collect from a nurlink electrode it's uh essentially a measurement of the local field potential or the yeah the voltage essentially measured by that electrode and uh we have a certain mode in our in our application that allows us to visualize where

detected spikes are so it visualizes sort of where uh in the Broadband signal in it's very very raw form of the data a neuron is actually spiking and so one of the these moments that I'll never forget as part of this whole clinical trial is seeing live in the operating room while he's still under anesthesia beautiful spikes being shown in the application just streaming live to a device I'm holding in my hand so this is no signal processing the raw data and then the signals processings on top of it you're seeing the spikes detected right

yeah and that's a ux too cuz that looks beautiful as well during that procedure there was actually a lot of cameramen in the room so they also were curious and wanted to see there's several neurosurgeons in the room who are all just excited to see robots taking their job and uh they're all you know crowded around a small little iPhone watching this live brain data stream out of his uh his brain what was that like seeing the robot do some of the surgery so the computer vision aspect where it detects all the all the spots

that avoid the the blood vessels and then obviously with the human supervision then actually doing the really high Precision uh connection of the threads to the brain yeah it's a good question my answer is going to be uh pretty lame here but it was boring yeah I've seen it uh so many times yeah that's exactly how you want surgery to be you want it to be boring yeah because I've seen it so many times I've seen the the robot do this surgery literally hundreds of times and so it was just one more time yeah all

the practice surgeries and the proxies and this is just another day y so what about when uh Nolan woke up well do do you remember a moment where uh he was able to move the cursor not move the cursor but get signal from the brain such that it was able to show that there's a connection yeah yeah so we are uh 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 uh we we waited till the next

morning very patiently it's a long night um and the next morning in the ICU where he was uh recovering he uh wanted to get started and actually start to understand what kind of signal we could measure from his brain and maybe for folks who are not familiar with um the neuralink system we implant the nurlink system or the nurlink implant in the motor cortex so the motor cortex is responsible for representing things like motor intent uh s if you imagine closing and opening your hand that kind of signal representation would be present in the motor

cortex if you imagine moving your arm back and forth or wiggling a pinky this sort of signal can be present in the motor cortex so one of the ways we start to sort of map out what kind of signal do we actually have access to in any particular individual's brain is through this task called body mapping and body mapping is where you essentially present a visual to the user and you say hey imagine doing this and the visual is you know a 3d hand opening and closing or index finger modulating up and down and uh

you ask the user to imagine that and obviously you can't see them do this because they're paralyzed so you can't see them actually move their arm but while they do this task you can record 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 uh for example control a computer cursor and he started playing with it you know the first time we showed him it and we actually just took the same live view of his brain activity and put it in front of him and we said hey you tell us what's going on uh you know we're not you you're able to imagine different things and we know that it's modulating some of these neurons so you figure out for for us what that is actually representing and so he played with it for a bit he was like I

don't quite get it yet he played for a bit longer and he said oh when I move this finger I see this particular Don start to fire more and I said okay prove it do it again and so he said okay 3 two 1 boom and the minute he move you can see like instantaneously this neuron is firing single neuron I I can tell you the exact channel number if you're interested it's stuck in my brain now forever but that single uh Channel firing was a beautiful indication that it was behaviorally modulated neural activity that

could then be used for Downstream tasks like decoding a computer cursor and when you say single channel is that associated with a single electrode yeah so Channel electrode are interchangeable and there's a 1,24 of those 1,24 yeah it's incredible that that works that really when I was um learning about all this and like loading it in it was just blowing my mind that the intention you can visualize yourself moving the finger that can turn into a signal and the fact that you can then skip that step and visualize the cursor moving or have the intention

of the cursor moving and that leading to a signal that can then be used to move the cursor this there is so many exciting things there to learn about the brain about the way the brain works the very fact of their existing signal that can be used is really powerful yep but it feels like that's just like the beginning of figuring out how that signal could be used really really effectively I should also just uh there's so many fascinating details here but you mentioned the body mapping step uh at least in the version I saw

that Nolan was showing off there's like a super nice interface like a graphical interface but like it just felt like I was like in the future cuz it it like uh you know I guess it visualizes you moving the hand and there's a very like like a sexy polished interface that that hello yeah I don't know if there's a voice component but it just felt like uh it's like when you wake up in a really nice video game and this is a tutorial at the beginning of that video game this is what you're supposed to

do it's cool no I mean the future should feel like the future but it's not easy to pull that off I mean it needs to be simple but not too simple yeah and I think the ux design component here is uh underrated for BCI uh development and general there's a whole interaction effect between the ways in which you visualize uh an instruction to the user and the kinds of signal you can get back and that quality of sort of your behavioral alignment to the neural signal is a function of how good you are at expressing

to the user what you want them to do and so yeah we spend a lot of time thinking about the ux uh of how we build our applications of how the decoder actually functions the control surfaces it provides to the user all 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 uh N1 implant that has like we mentioned uh 1,24 electrodes and that's collecting raw data raw signal what does that signal

look like and uh what are the different steps along the way before it's transmitted and what is transmitted all that kind of stuff yeah Yep this is going to be a fun one let's go uh so uh maybe before diving into what we do it's worth understanding what we're trying to measure because uh that dictates a lot of the requirements for the system that we build and what we're trying to measure is really individual neurons producing action potentials an action potential is you can think of it like a little electrical impulse that you can uh

detect if you're close enough and by being close enough I mean like within let's say 100 microns of that cell and 100 microns 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 the width of that action potential is about 1 millisecond so from the start of the spike to the end of the spike that whole width

of that uh sort of characteristic feature of a neuron firing is 1 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 uh 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 all24 electrodes about 20,000 times a second 20,000 times a second means for given 1

millisecond window we have about 20 samples that tell us what that exact shape of that action potential looks like MH and once we've sort of sampled at super high rate the underlying electrical field nearby uh these cells we can process that signal into just where do we detect a spike or where do we not sort of a binary signal one or zero do we detect a spike in this one millisecond or not and we do that because the actual information character carrying uh uh sort of Subspace of neur activity is just when are 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 are spikes firing in any given window of time and so that allows us to do sort of a crazy amount of compression from this very rich high density uh you know signal to something that's much much more sparse and compressible that can be sent out over a wireless uh radio like a Bluetooth communication for example quick tangents here you mentioned electrode neuron there's a local neighborhood of neurons nearby how difficult is it to

like isolate from where the spike came from yeah so there's a whole field of sort of academic Neuroscience work on exactly this problem of basically given a single electrode or given a electrodes measuring a set of neurons how can you sort of sort Spike sort which spikes are coming from what uh neuron and 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 uh Neuroscience of the of the brain if you care about understanding how the brain is representing information how that's

evolving through time then that's a very very important question to to understand for sort of the engineering side of things at least at the current scale if the number of neurons per electrode is relatively small you can get away with basically ignoring that problem completely you can think of it like sort of a random projection of neurons to electrodes and there may be in some cases more than one neuron per electrode but if that number is small enough those signals can be thought of as uh sort of a union of the two and for many

applications that's a totally reasonable trade-off to make and can simplify the problem a lot and as you sort of scale out Channel count the uh relevance of distinguishing individual neurons becomes less important because you have more overall signal and you can start to rely and sort of correlations or coari structure in the data to help understand when that channel is firing what does that what does that actually represent because you know that when that channel is firing in concert with these other 50 channels that means move left but when that same channel is firing with

concert with these other 10 channels that means move right okay so you have to do this kind of Spike detection on board and you have to do that super efficiently so fast and not use too much power because you don't want to be generating too much heat so it have to be a super simple signal processing step yeah um is there some wisdom you can share about what it takes to overcome that challenge yeah so we've tried many different versions of basically turning this raw signal into uh sort of a feature that you might want

to send off the device and I'll say that I don't think we're at the final step of this process this is a long journey we have something that works clearly today but there can be many approaches that we find in the future that are much better than what we do right now so some versions of what we do right now and there's a lot of academic her to these ideas so I don't want to you know claim that these are original nurlink ideas or anything like that but uh one of these ideas is basically to

build a sort of like a convolutional filter almost if you will that slides across the signal and looks for a certain template to be matched that template consists of sort of How deep the spike modulates how much it recovers and what the duration and window of time is that the whole process takes and if you can see in the signal that that template is matched within certain bounds then you can say okay that's a spike one reason that approach is super convenient is that you can actually Implement that extremely efficiently in Hardware which means that

you can run it uh in low power across 1,24 channels all at once another approach that we've recently started uh exploring and this can be combined with the spike detection approach something called Spike band power and the benefits of that approach are that you may be able to pick up some signal from neurons that are maybe too far away to be detected as a spike because the farther away you are from an electrode the weaker that actual Spike waveform will look like on that electrode so uh you might be able to pick up you know

population level activity of things that are you know maybe slightly outside the normal recording radius what what neuroscientist sometimes refer to as the hash of activity the other stuff that's going on yeah uh and you can look at sort of across many channels how that uh sort of background noise is behaving you might be able to get more juice out of the signal that way but it comes at a cost that signal is now a floating Point representation which means it's more expensive to send out over a power it means you have to find different

ways to compress it that are different than you can apply to Binary signals so there's a lot of different challenges associated with these different modalities so also in terms of communication you're limited by the amount of data you can send yeah so and also because you're currently using the Bluetooth protocol you have to batch stuff together but you have to also do this keeping the latency crazy low like crazy low anything to say about the latency yeah this is a passion project of mine so uh I want to build the best mouse in the world

yeah I don't want to build like the you know the Chevrolet Spark or whatever of electric cars I want to build like the Tesla Roadster version of of a mouse and I really do think it's quite possible that within you know 5 to 10 years that most Esports competitions are dominated by people with paralysis this is like a very real possibility for number of reasons one is that they'll have access to the 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 uh esport competitors unless uh people without paralysis are also allowed to implant NE right which is it is another way to interact with a digital uh device and there's some there's something to that if if it's a fundamentally different experience more efficient experience even if it's not like some kind of full-on high bandwidth communication if it's just ability to move the mouse uh 10x faster like the bits per second if I can achieve a bis per second at 10x what I can do with the mouse that's a really interesting possibility what they

can do especially as you get really good at it uh with training it's definitely the case that you have a higher ceiling of performance like you because you don't have to buffer your intention through your arm through your muscle you get just by nature of having a brain implant at all like 75 millisecond lead time on any action that you're actually trying to take and there's some Nuance of this like there there's evidence that the motor cortex you can sort of plan out sequences of actions so you may not get that whole benefit all the

time but for sort of like Reaction Time style uh games where you just want to somebody's over here snipe them you know that kind of thing uh 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 you know faster than uh you know 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 sort of our end to

end latency right now from brain Spike to cursor movement is about 22 milliseconds if you think about uh the best mice in the world the best gaming mice that's about 5 milliseconds is of latency depending on how you measure depending how fast your screen refreshes there's a lot of characteristics that matter there but yeah and the rough time for like a neuron in the brain to actually impact your uh command of your hand is about 75 millisecond so if you look at those numbers you can see that we're already like you know competitive and slightly

faster than what you'd get by actually moving your moving your hand and this is something that you know if you ask Nolan about it when he moved the cursor for the first time we asked him about this this 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 he said it moves before he is like actually intending it to which is kind of a surreal thing it's something that uh you know I would love

to experience myself one day what is that like to have the thing just be so immediate so fluid that it feels like it's happening before you're uh actually intending it to move yeah I suppose we've gotten used to that latency that natural latency that happens uh so is the currently the bottom like the communication so like the Bluetooth communication is that what's the actual bottle like I mean there's always going to be a bottle neck what's the current Bott on like yeah a couple things so kind of hilariously Bluetooth uh low energy protocol has uh

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 and uh as we push latency down to the level of sort of individual spikes impacting control that level of of resolution that kind of protocol is going to become a limiting factor at some scale um another sort of important Nuance to this is that it's not just the uh neur 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 like you need your whole system to be able to uh be as reactive as the sort of limits of what the technology can offer like you need the screen like 120 HZ just doesn't you know work anymore if you're trying to have something respond at something that's you know at the level of 1 millisecond that's a really cool challenge I also like that for a t-shirt the uh the best mouse in the world tell me on the receiving end so the decoding step

now we we figured out what the spikes are got them all together now we're sending that over uh 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 what it means to decode brain activity actually even if we zoom out beyond that what is the app so there's a there's an implant that's wirelessly communicating with any digital device that has an app installed yep so maybe can you tell me at high level what the app

is what the software is outside of the uh the brain yeah so maybe working backwards from the goal the goal is to help someone with paralysis in this case Noland 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 uxs that are built natively for BCI but in terms of what's useful for

people today I think we most people would prefer to be able to just control mouse and keyboard inputs to all the applications that they want to use for their daily jobs for communicating with their friends Etc and so the job of the application is really to translate this Wireless stream of brain data coming off the implant into control of the computer and we do that by essentially building a mapping from brain activity to sort of the hid inputs to the 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 that we spent a lot of time to try to get right and we're still in the early stages of a long journey to figure out how to do that optimally uh so one part of that process is decoding so decoding is this process of taking the statistical patterns of brain data that's being channeled across this Bluetooth connection to the application and turning

it into for example of mouse movement and that decoding step you can think of it in a couple different parts so similar to any machine learning problem there's a training step and there's an inference step the training step in our case is a very uh intricate behavioral uh process where the user has to imagine doing different actions so for example they'll be presented a screen with a cursor on it and they'll be asked to push that cursor to the right then imagine pushing that cursor to the left push it up push it down and we

can basically build up a pattern or using any sort of modern ml method uh a mapping of given this brain data and that imagin behavior map one to the other and then 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 their implant you decode it by pattern matching to what you saw at calibration time and you use that for a control of the computer now a couple like sort of rabbit holes that I think

are quite interesting one of them has to do with how you build that best template matching system because there's uh a variety of Behavioral challenges and also debugging challenges when you're working with someone who's paralyzed because again fundamentally you don't observe what they're trying to do you can't see them attempt to move their hand and so you have to figure out a way to instruct the user to do something and validate that they're doing it correctly such that then you can Downstream build with confidence the mapping between the neural spikes and the intended action and

by doing the action correctly what I really mean is at the level of resolution of what neurons are doing so if in Ideal World you could get a signal of Behavioral intent that is ground truth accurate at the scale of sort of 1 millisecond resolution soltion then with high confidence I could build a mapping from my neuros spikes to that behavioral intention but the challenge is again that you don't observe what they're actually doing and so there's a lot of nuance to how you build user experiences that give you more than just sort of a

course on average correct representation of what the user intending to do if you want to build the world's best Mouse you really want it to be as responsive as possible you want it to be able to do exactly what the user intending at every sort of Step along the way not just on average be correct when you're trying to move it from left to right and building behavioral sort of calibration game or or sort of software experience that gives you that level of resolution is what we spend a lot of time working so the calibration

process the interface has to encourage Precision meaning like whatever it does it should be super intuitive that the next thing it the human is going to likely do is exactly that intention that you need and only that intention yeah and you don't have any feedback except that may be speaking to you afterwards what they actually did you can't oh yeah right so that's a that's fundamentally that is really exciting ux challenge because that's all on the ux it's not just about being friendly or nice or usable it's like user experience is how it works it's

how it works for the calibration and calibration at least at this stage of neuralink is like fundamental to the operation of the thing and and not just calibration but continued Cali celebration essentially yeah and maybe you said something that I think is worth exploring there a little bit you said it's you know primarily a ux challenge and I think a large component of it is but there is also a very interesting machine learning challenge here which has given some you know uh data set including some on average correct behavior of asking the user to move

up or move down move right move left and given a data set 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 like there probably is because there are enough data points in the data set enough constraints on your model that there should be a way with the right sort of formulation to let the model figure out itself for example at this millisecond this is exactly how hard they're pushing upwards and at this

millisecond this is how hard they're trying to push upwards it's really important to have very clean labels yes so like the problem because much harder from the machine learning perspective the labels are noisy that's correct and and then to get the clean labels that's a ux challenge correct although um 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 it makes about what the user is attempting to do those assumptions can be formulated in a loss function or they can be formulated

in terms of humanistics that you might use to just try to estimate or guesstimate what the user is trying to do and what really matters is how accurate are those assumptions for example you might say hey user push upwards and follow the speed of this cursor and you're curis might be that they're trying to do exactly what that cursor is trying to do another competing juristic 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 characteristics may or may not be accurate

reflections of what the user is trying to do another version of the task might be hey user imagine moving this cursor a fixed offset so rather than follow the cursor just try to move it exactly 200 pixels to the right so here's the cursor here's the target okay cursor disappears tried 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 heris that are trying to guesstimate at each millisecond what the user is trying to do so you can imagine different tasks that make different assumptions about the the nature of the user intention and those assumptions being correct is what I would think of as a clean label for that step what are we supposed to be visualizing there's a cursor and you want to move that cursor to the right or the left up and down or maybe 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 as a game like web grid MH 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 Y is that or is it is that not an effective way for initial calibration yeah great question there's a lot to unpack there so uh the first thing I would draw a distinction between a sort of open loop versus close loop so

open loop what I mean by that is the user is sort of going from zero to one they have no model at all and they're trying to get to the place where they have some level 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 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 themsel and then retraining on that data to give you sort of a boost in performance M there's a lot of challenges associated with both of these techniques and we can sort of rabbit hole into both of them if if you're interested but the sort of challenge with the open loop task is that the user themselves doesn't get propri receptive feedback about what they're doing they don't you know necessarily perceive themsel or feel you know the mouse under their hand when they're using an open loop or when they're trying to do

an open loop calibration they're being asked to perform something like imagine if you sort of had your whole right arm numbed and you stuck it in a box and you couldn't see it so you had no visual feedback and you had no appropri acceptive feedback about what the position or activity of your arm was and now you're asked okay given this thing on the screen that's moving from left to right match that speed and you basically can try your best to you know invoke whatever that imagined action is in your brain that's moving the cursor

from left to right but in any situation you're going to be inaccurate and maybe inconsistent in how you do that task and so that's sort of the fundamental challenge of open loop the challenge with Clos Loop is that once the users given a model uh and they're able to start moving the mouse on their own they're going to very naturally adapt to that model and that co-adaptation between the model learning what they're doing and the user learning how to use the model may not find you the best sort of global Minima it maybe that your

first model was noisy in some ways or um you know maybe just had some like Quirk there's some like part of the data distribution it didn't cover super well and the user now figures out because they're you brilliant user like Nolan they figure out the right sequence of imagin motion 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 used the

previous day and so there's a complicated sort of feedback cycle here that can uh that can emerge and can make it a very very difficult debugging process okay there's a lot of really fascinating things there uh yeah actually just to stay on the on the closed loop I I've uh seen situations this actually happened uh watching uh psychology gr crd students they use piece of software when they don't know how to program themselves they use piece of software that somebody else wrote and has a bunch of bugs and they figure out like and they've been

using it for years yeah they figure out ways to walk around oh that just happens like nobody H nobody like considers maybe we should fix this they just adapt and that's a really interesting notion that we just had we were really good at adapting but you need to still that might not be the optimal yeah okay so how do you solve that problem do you have to restart from scratch every once in a while kind of thing yeah it's a good question um first and foremost I would say this is not a solved problem and

for anyone who's you know listening in Academia who works on bcis I would also say this is not a problem that's solved by simply scaling Channel count so this is you know maybe that can help and you can get sort of richer covariant structures that you can use to exploit when trying to come up with good labeling strategies but if you know you're interested in problems that aren't going to be solved inherently by scaling Channel account this is one of M 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 Clos Loop uh is going to become a very difficult debugging problem and one of my sort of generalistic for choosing what problems to tackle is that you want to choose the one that's going to be the easiest to debug MH because if you can do that uh even if the ceiling is lower you're going to be able to move faster because you have a tighter iteration Loop debugging the problem and in the open loop setting there's not a feedback

cycle 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 the Clos Loop setting there's no special sof or magic of how to infer what the user is truly attempting to do in the Clos Loop setting although they're moving the cursor on the screen they may be attempting something different than what your model is outputting so what the model is outputting is not a signal that you can use to retrain if you want to

be able to improve the model further you still have this very complicated 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 closeup scenario um another thing I want to I want to mention and call out is that this problem doesn't need to be solved in order to give useful control to people um you know even today with the solutions we

have now and that Academia has built up over over decades the level of control that can be given to a user you know today is quite useful it doesn't need to be solved to get to that that level of control but again I want to build the world's best Mouse I want to make it you know so good that it's not even a question that you want it and uh to build the world's best Mouse the Superhuman version you really need to uh 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 user is trying to do and you can get this with an able-bodied monkey a monkey that has an neuralink device implanted and moving them to control a computer even with that ground TR data set it turns out that the optimal thing to predict to produce high performance BCI is not just the direct control of the mouse you can imagine you know building data set of

what's going on in the brain and what is the mouse exactly doing on the table and it turns out that if you build the mapping from neuros spikes 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 straight line to the Target M it turns out that making those assumptions is actually more effective in producing a model than actually predicting the

underlying hand move so the the intention not like the physical movement or whatever yeah there's a obviously a really strong correlation between the two but the intention is a more powerful thing to be chasing right well that that's also super interesting I mean the intention itself is fascinating because yes with the BCI here in this case with the digital telepathy you're acting on the attention 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 super human performance probably in terms of the control of the mouse so the for open loop just to clarify so whenever the a person is tasked to like move the mouse to the right you said there's not feedback so they don't get to get that satisfaction of like actually getting it to move right so you you could imagine giving the user feedback on the screen but uh it's difficult because at this point you don't know what they're attempting to do so what 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 so your instructions to the user are hey the cursor is here now when the cursor disappears IM manag to moving it 200 pixels from where it was to the right to be over this Target in that kind of scenario you could imagine coming up with some sort of consistency metric that you could display to the user of okay I know what the spike train looks

like on average when you do this action to the right maybe I can produce some sort of probabilistic estimate of How likely is that uh to be the action you took given the latest trial or trajectory that you that you imagined and that could give the user some sort of feedback of how consistent are they across different trials you could also imagine that if the user is prompted with that kind of uh 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 just because it keeps the user motivated to try to increase that number or push it upwards so there's a p psychology element here yeah absolutely and again all of that is ux challenge how much signal drift is there hour to hour day to day week to week month to month how often do you have to recalibrate because of the signal drift yeah uh so this is uh a problem

we've worked on both with nhp non-human primates before our clinical trial and then also with Noland during the clinical trial uh 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 uh you know can use the device whenever they want to however they want to and uh that's really what we're aiming for and so there can be a set of solutions that get to

that state without um considering this stationarity problem so maybe the first solution here that's important is that they can recalibrate whenever they want this is something that um that Nolan has the ability to do today so he can recalibrate the system you know at 2 am in the middle of the night without his you know caretaker or parents or friends around to help push a button for him the other uh 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 T depends really on his appetite for performance there are uh we observe sort of a degradation through time of how well any individual model works but this can be mitigated behaviorally by the user adapting their control strategy it can also be mitigated through a combination of sort of software features that we we provide to the user for example we let the user adjust exactly how fast the cursor is moving uh 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 in tension actually is they can also adjust the friction which is how easy is it to stop and hold still and all these software tools allow the user a great deal of flexibility and troubleshooting mechanisms to be able to solve this problem for themselves by the way all this is done by looking to the right side of the screen selecting the mixer and in the mixer you have it's it's like DJ mode DJ mode for your BCI so I mean it's

a really well done interface it's really really well done and so yeah there's that bias uh that there's a cursor drift that Nolan talked about in a stream uh although he said that uh you guys were just playing around with it with him and they're constantly improving so that could have been just a snapshot of that particular moment particular day but he said that there was uh this cursor drift and this bias that could be removed by him I guess looking to the right side of the screen or left side of the screen to kind

of adjust the bias that's one interface action I guess to adjust the bias yeah so this is actually an idea idea that comes out of Academia um there there is some prior work with uh uh sort of BrainGate clinical TR participants where they pioneered this idea of bias correction the way we've done it I think is yeah it's very przed very uh uh beautiful user experience where the user can essentially um Flash the cursor over to the side of the screen and it opens up a window where they can actually uh sort of adjust or

tune exactly the the bias of the cursor so bias maybe for people who aren't familiar is just sort of what is the default motion of the cursor if you're imagining nothing and it turns out that that's one of the first um first sort of qualia of the cursor control experience that's impacted by neur aity quality of the cursor experi I don't know how else to describe it like you know I'm not the I'm not the guy very poetic I love it the quality of the cursor experience yeah I mean it's it sounds poetic but it

is uh deeply true there is an experience when it works well it is a joyful a really pleasant experience and when it doesn't work well it's a very frustrating experience that's actually the art of ux it's like you have the possibility to frustrate people or the possibility to give them joy and at the end of the day it really is truly the case that ux is how the thing works and so it's not just like what's showing on the screen it's also you know what control surfaces does a dcard provide the user like we want

them to feel like they're in the F1 car not like the you know some like minivan right you and that really truly is how we think about it um Nolan himself is an F1 fan so um we refer to oursel as a pick crew he really is truly the the F1 driver and there's different you know control surfaces that that different kinds of cars and airplanes provide the user and we take a lot of inspiration from that when designing how the cursor should behave and maybe one Nuance of this is you know even details like

when you move a mouse on a MacBook trackpad the sort of response curve of how that uh input that you give the trackpad translates to cursor movement is different than how it works with a mouse when you move on the trackpad there's a different response function a different curve to how much a movement translates to input to the computer than when you do it physically with the mouse and that's because somebody sat down a long time ago when they're designed the initial input systems to any computer and they thought through exactly how uh it feels

to use these different systems and now we're designing sort of the next generation of this input system to a computer which is entirely done via the brain and there's no proceptive feedback again you don't feel the mouse in your hand you don't feel the keys under your fingertips and you want a control surface that still makes it easy and intuitive for the user to understand the state of the system and how to achieve what they want to achieve and ultimately the end goal is that that ux is completely Fades into the background it becomes something

that's so natural and intuitive that is subconscious to the user and they just should feel like they have basically direct control over the cursor just does what they want it to do they're not thinking about the implementation of how to make it do what they want it to do it's just doing what they want it to do is there some kind of things along the lines of like Fitz law where you should move the mouse in a certain kind of way that maximizes your chance to hit the target uh I don't even know what I'm

asking but I'm hoping the intention of my question will land on on a found answer no uh is there some kind of understanding of the laws of ux when it comes uh to the context of somebody using their brain to control it like that's different than actual with a mouse I think we're in the early stages of discovering those laws so I wouldn't claim to have solved that problem yet but uh there's definitely some things we've learned that uh make it uh easier for the user to get stuff done mhm and it's pretty straightforward when

you when you verbalize it but it takes a while to actually get to that point when you're in the process of debugging the stuff in the trenches one of those things is that the any any machine Learning System you build has some number of errors and uh it matters how those errors translate to the downstream user experience for example if you're developing a search algorithm in your photos if you search for you know your friend Joe and it pulls up a photo of your friend Josephine maybe that's not a big deal because the cost of

a of an error is not that high in uh a different scenario where you're trying to you know detect Insurance F or something like this and you're directly sending someone to court because of some machine learning model out but then the errors make a lot more uh 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 sort of different trade-offs of how precise you need to be before it becomes useful to the end user for velocity it's okay to be on average correct because the output of the model is integrated through time so if the user is trying to click at position a and they're currently at 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 in

the mix they 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 neurons firing and so you want to be very sure that that click is correct because a false click can be very destructive to the user they might accidentally close the tab that they're trying to you know do something in and lose all their progress they might accidentally like you know hit some send button on some text that there only like half composed

and reads funny after you uh so you know there's different sort of cost functions associated with errors in this space and part of the ux design is understanding how to build a solution that is when it's wrong still useful to the end user that's so fascinating that assigning cost to every action when uh 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 accidentally like if you're a cursor imagine if your cursor misclicked every once in a while that's like super obnoxious and the worst part of it is usually when the user is trying to click they're also holding still because they're over the target they want to hit and they're getting ready to click which means that in the data sets that we build on average is the case that sort of low speeds or desire to hold still it's correlated with when the user

is attempting to click wow that is really fascinating it's also it's also not the case you know people think that oh click is a binary signal this must be super easy to decode well yes it is but the bar is so much higher for it to become a useful thing for the user and there's ways to solve this I mean you can sort of take the compound approach of well let's just give the like Let's Take 5 Seconds to click let's take a huge window of time so we 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 500 milliseconds to click it takes five milliseconds to click or less and so if you're aiming for that kind of high bar then you really want to solve the underlying problem so maybe this is a good place to ask about how to measure performance this whole bits per second what uh can you like explain what you mean by that maybe a good place to start is to talk about web grid as a game as a good illustration of the measurement

of performance yeah maybe I'll take one zoom out step there which is just explaining why uh we care to measure this at all so again our goal is to provide the user the ability to control their 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 it means that they have access to all the same functionality that I have including you know all those little details like command tab command space you know all this stuff they need to be able

to do it with their brain and with the same level of reli AB ility 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 uh we present the user a gr of targets and basically we compute uh a score which is dependent on how fast an accur they can select and then how small are the targets and the more targets that

are on the screen the smaller they are the more information you you present per click and so uh 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 uh bits per second is a measure that's competed by taking the log of the number of targets on the screen uh you can subtract one if you care to model a keyboard because you have

to subtract one for the delete key on the keyboard but log of the number of targets on the screen times the number of correct selections minus incorrect divided by some time window for example 60 seconds and that's sort of the standard way to measure uh a cursor control task in Academia and all credit in the world goes to this great Professor Dr sh of Stanford who came up with that task and he's also one of my Inspirations for being in the field so um 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 to say that noan is the best in the world at this at this task with his PCI it's very important for Progress that you have standardized metrics so people can compare across different techniques and approaches how well does this do so yeah big big kudos to him and to all all the team at Stanford um yeah so for Noland and for me playing this task uh there's also different modes that you can configure this task the web grid task can be presented

as just sort of a left click on the screen or you could have you know targets that you just dwell over or you could have targets that you left right click on you could have targets that are left right click middle click scrolling clicking and dragging you know you can do all sorts of things within this this General framework but the simplest purest form is just blue targets show up on the screen blue means left click that's the simplest form of the game and uh the sort of Prior records here in uh academic work and

uh at Nur link internally with sort of nhps uh have all been matched or beaten by by Nolan with his nurlink device so sort of prior to nurlink the sort of world record for a human using device is uh somewhere between 4.2 to 4.6 BPS depending on exactly what paper you read and how you interpret it um Nolan's current record is 8.5 BPS and again the sort of median neural Linker performance is 10 BPS so you can think of it roughly as he 85% the level of control of a median neural Linker using their cursor

to slot blue Targets on the screen and uh yeah I think there's a very interesting journey ahead to get us to that same level of 10 BPS performance it's not the case that sort of the tricks that got us from you know 4 to 6 BPS and then 6 to 8 BPS are going to be the ones that get us from 8 to 10 and uh 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 user is attempting to do and

uh yeah I highly encourage folks in Academia to uh 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 89,4 185 Targets in web grid y so 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 Nolan side of like figuring out how to convey his intention more cleanly yeah no this is a great question so in my view one of the primary reasons why Nolan's performance is so good is because of Nolan Nolan is extremely focused and very energetic he'll play web grid sometimes for like four hours in the middle of the night like from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. he'll be playing web grid just because he wants to push it to the limits of what he can do and uh you know this is not us like asking

him to do that I want to be clear like we're not saying hey you should play webg tonight we just gave him the game as part of our research you know and he is able to play independently and practice whenever he wants and he really pushes hard to push it the technology is the absolute limit and he used it as like you know his job really to make us be the bottleneck and boy has he done that well uh and so that the first thing to acknowledge is that you know he was extremely motivated to

make this work I've also had the privilege to meet other you know clinical trial participants from brain gain and other trials and they very much share the same attitude of like they they they view this as their life's work to uh you know Advance the technology as much as they can and uh if that means fting Targets on the screen for 4 hours 2 a.m. to 6: a.m. then so be it and uh there's something extremely admirable about that that's worth uh calling out okay so now how do you how do you sort of get

from where he started which is no cursor control at PPS so I mean when he started there's a huge amount of learning to do on his side and our side to figure out uh what's the most intuitive control for him and the most intuitive control for him is uh 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 repres for every part of the body so there may be some

SS that we have better sort of decode performance on than others for example on his left hand we have a lot of difficulty distinguishing his 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 were able to record for his pinky and his thumb and his index finger so you can imagine how these different uh you know subspaces 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 controlling the cursor for example he could imagine controlling the cursor by wiggling his wrist side to side or by moving his entire arm but I think at one point he did his feet you know he tried like 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 real just to clarify it's through the body

mapping procedure that you're able to figure out which finger he can move uh yes yes that's one way to do it um maybe one Nuance of the when he's doing it he can imagine many more things than 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 of you know we know that this particular action we can represent well but it's really up to him

to go and explore and figure out what works the best but at which point does he no longer visualize the movement of his body and he's just visualizing the movement of the cursor yeah how quickly does he go from how quickly does it get there so this happened on a Tuesday I remember this day very clearly because at some point during the during the day uh it looked like he wasn't doing super well like it looked like the model wasn't performing super well and he was like getting distracted but he actually it wasn't the case

like what actually happened was he was trying something new where he was just controlling the cursor so he wasn't imagining moving his hand anymore he was just imagining I don't know what it is some like abstract intention to move the cursor on the screen and uh I cannot tell you what the difference between those two things are I truly cannot he's tried to explain it to me before I cannot uh you know give a first- person account of what that's like but the expletives that he uttered in that moment where uh you know enough to

suggest that it was 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 uh to me that he's a Pioneer so he discovered that on his own through all this uh the process of trying to trying to move the cursor with different kinds of intentions but that is clearly a really powerful thing to arrive at which is to let go of trying to control the fingers and the

hand and control the actual digital device with your mind that's right ux is how it works and the ideal ux is one that it's the user doesn't have to think about what they need to do in order to get it done they just it just does it that is so fascinating but I wonder on the on the biological side how long it takes for the brain to adapt yeah so is it just simply learning like highle software or is there like a neuroplasticity component where like the the brain is adjusting slowly yeah I the truth

is I don't know um I'm very excited to see with sort of the second participant that we implant what the you know what the journey is like for them because we'll have learned a lot more potentially we can help them understand and explore that direction more quickly this is something I didn't you know this wasn't me prompting Nolan to go try this he was just exploring how to use his device and figured it out himself but now that we know that that's a possibility that maybe there's a way to you know for example hint the

user don't try super hard during calibration just do something that feels natural or just directly control the cursor you know don't imagine explicit action and from there we should be able to hopefully understand how this is for somebody who has not experienced that before maybe that's the default mode of operation for them you don't have to go through this into mediate phase of explicit emotions 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 form in a mile

just the knowledge that that's possible pushes you to do it yeah enables you to do it and then it becomes trivial and then it also makes you wonder this is the cool thing about humans if once there's a lot more human participants they will discover things that are possible yes and share their experiences each other and that because of them sharing it they'll be able to do it m uh all of a sudden that's that's unlocked for everybody y because just the knowledge sometimes is the thing that enables it to do it yeah I me

just coming on that too like there's we've probably tried like a thousand different ways to do various uh aspects of decoding and now we know like what the right Subspace is to continue exploring further again thanks to Nolan and the many hours he's put into this and so even just that help like help constraint sort of the beam search of different approaches that we could explore really helps accelerate for the next person you know the set of things that we'll get to try on day one how fast we hopefully get them to useful control how

fast we can enable them to use it independently and to get value out of the system so yeah massive hats off to to Noland and and all the participants that came before him uh to make this technology a reality so how often are the updates to the decoder because Nolan mentioned like okay there's a new update that we're working on and that in the Stream he said he plays the snake game because it's like super hard it's a good way for him to test like how good the date is so and he says like sometimes

the update is a a step backwards it's like it's a constant like iteration so how often like what does the update entail is it mostly on the decoder side yeah couple comments so one is it's probably worth drawing 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 wanted to have you know ability to just go use a device how anybody would want to use their MacBook and uh so what he's referring to is I think usually in the

context of research session where we're trying you know many many different approaches to you know even unsupervised approaches like we talked about earlier to to try to come up with better ways to estimate his true intention and more accurately decoded and uh in those scenarios I mean we try in any given session he'll sometimes work for like eight hours a day and so that can be you know hundreds of different models that we would try in that day like a lot of different things um now it's also worth noting that we update the application he

uses quite frequently I think you know sometimes up to like four or five times a day we'll update his application with different features or or bug fixes or feedback that he's given us so he's been able to he's a very articulate person who uh is part of the solution he's not a complaining person he says hey here's this thing that I've I've discovered is is not optimal in my flow here's some ideas how to fix it let me know what your thoughts are let's figure out how to how to solve it and it often happens

that those things are addressed within you know a couple hours of him giving us his feedback because that's the kind of iteration cycle we'll have and so sometimes at the beginning of the session he'll give us feedback and at the end of the session he's he's giving us feedback on the next iteration of that of that of that process that set up that's fascinating cuz one of the things you mentioned that 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 uh smart and excited and all like positive and Good Vibes like noan that they can provide feedback continuous feedback yeah it also requires just to 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 I have all these meetings we're going to skip that today and we're

going to do this you know that level of focus commitment is uh I would say under underappreciated in the world and also uh you know you obviously have to have the talent to be able to execute on these things effectively and uh yeah we have that in in loads yeah and this is such a interesting space of ux design because because you have there's so many unknowns here and I can tell ux is difficult because of how many people do it poorly it's just not a trivial thing yeah it's also you know ux is not

something that you can always solve by just constant iterating on different things like sometimes you really need to step back and think globally am I even like the right sort of Minima to be chasing down for a solution like there's a lot of problems in which sort of fast iteration cycle is the the predictor of how successful you will be as a good example like in a in an RL simulation for example the more frequently you get 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 express it but what the true underlying problem is to actually get to the right place yeah that's the old like story 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 disc drive or whatever the I forgot all the crazy stories of Steve Jobs like making wild uh design decisions but there some some of his aesthetic that some of it is about the love you put into the design which is very much as Steve Job J Johnny I type thing but when when you have a human being using their brain to interact with it there it also is deeply about function it's not just aesthetic Y and that you have to empathize with with a human being before you while not always listening to them directly

like you have to deeply empathize it's fascinating it's really really fascinating and at the same time iterate right but not iterate in small ways sometimes a complete like rebuilding the design he said that noan said the early days the ux sucked yeah but you improved quickly what was that Journey like yeah I mean I'll give one concrete example so uh he really wanted to be able to Read Manga this is something that he I mean yeah it sounds like a simple thing but it's actually a really big deal for for him and he couldn't do

it with this mouse stick it just it wasn't accessible you can't scroll with the mouse sck on his iPad and the on the website that he wanted to be able to use to read the the new mang so 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 it's a stylus that you hold between your teeth it's basically a very long stylus and it's it's exhausting it's it hurts and it's inefficient yeah

and maybe it's also worth calling out there are other alternative assistant Technologies but uh the particular situation Nolan'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 so he'll have muscle spasms from time to time and so any assistant technology that requires him to be positioned directly in front of a camera for example an eye tracker or anything that requires him to put something in his mouth just as a nogo because he'll either be shifted out of frame when he has a spasm

or if he has something in his mouth it'll stab him in the in the face you know if he spasms too hard so these kind of considerations are important when thinking about what advantages a PCI has in someone's life if 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 users uh in that user's life so one of these very fun examples is scroll so again manga is something he wanted to be able to read and uh there's many ways to do scroll with the BCI you can imagine like different gestures for example the user could do that would move the move the page but scroll is a very fascinating uh control surface because it's a huge thing on this on the on screen in front of you so any sort of Jitter in the model output any sort of air in

the model output causes like a an earthquake on the screen like you really don't want to have your manga page that you're trying to read be shifted up and down a few pixels just because you know your scroll decoder is not completely accurate and so this was an example where uh we had to figure out how to formulate the problem in a way that the errors of the system whenever they do occur and we'll do our best to minimize them but whenever those errors do occur that it doesn't interrupt the qualia again of the experience

that the user is is having it doesn't interrupt their flow of reading their book and so what we ended up building is this really brilliant um feature this is uh teammate named Bru 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 maest to understand where are the the scroll bars actively present on the screen using the sort of accessibility tree that's available to uh to ma apps and we identified

where that those scroll bars are and we provided a BCI scroll bar and the BCI scroll bar looks similar to a normal scroll bar but it behaves very differently in that once you sort of move over to it your cursor sort of morphs onto it it sort of attaches or latches onto it and then once you push up or down in the same way that You' use a push to control you know the normal cursor uh 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 over to attach to it it feels like magnetic so you're like sort of stuck onto it and then it's one continuous action you don't have to like switch your imagine movement you sort of snap onto it and then you're good to go you just immediately can start pulling the page down or pushing it up and even once you get that right there's so many little nuances of how the scroll Behavior Works to make it natural and intuitive so one example is momentum like when

you scroll a page with your fingers on the screen you know you you actually have some like flow like it doesn't just stop right when you lift your finger up the same is true with BCI scroll so we had to spend some time to figure out what are the right nuances when you don't feel the screen under your fingertip anymore what is the right sort of dynamic or what's the right amount of page give if you will uh when you push it to make it flow the right amount for the user to have uh a

natural experience reading their book and there's a million I mean there's I could tell you like there's so many little minua of how exactly that scroll works that we spent probably like uh a month getting right to make that feel extremely natural and uh 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 uh ux design that we were talking about don't always listen to

the users but also listen to them and also have like Visionary big like throw everything out think from first principles but also not yeah yeah by the way it just makes me think that scroll bars on the desktop probably have stagnated and never taken that like cuz uh the snap same as like Snap gri snap to scroll bar action you're talking about is something that could potentially be extremely useful in the desktop setting y even just for users to just improve the experience because the current scroll bar experience in the desktop is horrible y it's

hard to find hard to control there's not a momentum there's uh and the intention should be clear when I start moving towards a scroll bar there should be a snaping to the scroll bar action but of course you know uh maybe I'm I'm okay paying that cost but there's hundreds of millions of people paying that cost non-stop but anyway uh but in this case this is necessary because there's an extra cost paid by Nolan for the jittering this 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 right so that is one drawback of the current the current approach um 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 feuture detection level of what we detect in the brain to how we design the decoder what we choose to decode to then how it works once it's being used by the user so another good example in the sort of how it works once they're actually using the decoder

uh you know the output that's displayed on the screen is not just what the decoder says it's also a function of uh you know what's going on on the screen so we can understand for example that you know when you're trying to close a tab that very small stupid little X that's extremely tiny which is hard to get precisely hit if you're deal 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 uh you know used to like the iOS keyboard for example it actually adapts the target size of individual keys based on an underlying language model so it'll actually understand that if I'm typing hey I'm going to see L it'll make the E key bigger because it knows Lex is the person I'm going to go see and so that kind of you know predictiveness can make the experience much more smooth even without you know improvements to the underlying decoder or uh or 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 you know very small targets might be difficult to hit here's the kind of cursor Dynamics around that location that might be indicative of the user trying to select it let's make it easier let's blow up the size of it in a way that makes it easier for the user to sort of snap onto that Target so all these little details they matter a lot in helping the user be independent

in their day-to-day living so how much of the work on the decoder is generalizable to P2 P3 P4 P5 PN H how do you improve the decoder in a way that's generalizable yeah great question so the underlying uh signal we're trying to decode is going to look very different in P2 than in P1 for example channel number 345 is going to mean something different in user one than it will user two just because that electrode that corresponds with Channel 345 is going to be in next to a different neuron in user one versus user two

but the approaches the methods the user experience of how do you get the right sort of behavioral pattern from the user to associate with that neural signal we hoped it will translate over over multiple generations of users and beyond that it's very very possible in fact quite likely that we've overfit to sort of Nolan user experience desires and preferences and so what I hope to see is that uh you know when we get a second third fourth participant that we find sort of what the right wide minimas are that cover all the cases that 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 but with this user who just can fundamentally not speak at all this user experience is not optimal and that will actually those improvements that we make there should hopefully translate then to even people who can speak but don't feel comfortable doing so because they're in a public setting like their doctor's office so the the actual mechanism of open loop labeling and then closed loop labeling would 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 the interesting thing about web grid which is like Clos loop it's like I love it when there's like uh there used to be kind of an idea of human computation which is using actions that human would want to do anyway to get a lot of signal from yeah and like webg great is that like a nice video game that also serves as great calibration it's so funny this is I've

heard this reaction so many times before sort of the you know first user was implanted we had an internal perception that the first user would not find this fun yeah and so we thought really quite a bit actually about like should we build other games that like are more interesting for the user so we can get this kind of data and help facilitate research that's you know for long durations stuff like this turns out that like people love this game yeah I always loved it but I didn't know that that was a shared perception yeah

just in case it's not clear web grid is there's a a grid of let's say 35 by 35 uh cells and one of them lights up blue and you have to move your mouse over that and click on it and if you miss it and it's red and I play this game for so many hours so many hours and what's your record you said my I think I have the highest at nurlink right now my record is 17 BPS 17 BPS which about if you imagine that 35 by 35 grid you're hitting about 100 trials

per minute so 100 correct Selections in that one minute window so you're averaging about you know between 500 600 milliseconds per selection so one one of the reasons I think I struggle with that game is I'm such a keyboard person so everything is done with via keyboard if if I can avoid touching the mouse it's great so how can you explain your h performance I have like a whole ritual I go through when I play web GD so it's ESS actually like a diet plan associated with this like it's a whole thing so the first

I have to fast for 5 days I have to go up to the mountain actually it kind I mean the fasting thing is important so this is like you know focus is the mind yeah it's true so what I do is I I actually I don't eat for a little bit beforehand and then I'll actually eat like a ton of peanut butter right before I play and I get this is a real thing this is a real thing yeah and then it has to be really late at night this is again a night owl thing

I think we share but it has to be like you know midnight 2: a.m. kind of time window and I have a very specific like physical position I'll sit in which is uh I used to be I was homeschooled growing up and so I did most of my work like on the floor uh just like in my bedroom or whatever and so I have a very specific situation on the floor on the floor that I sit and play and then you have to make sure like there's not a lot of weight on your elbow when

you're playing so you can move quickly and then I turn the gain of the cursor so the speed of the cursor way way up so it's like small motions that actually move the cursor are you moving with your wrist or you you never I move with my fingers so I 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 um set the world record in Tetris those folks they're playing there's a

there's a way to did you see this seen like the like all the fingers are moving yeah you you could you could find a way to do it where like it's using a loophole like a bug that you can do some incredibly fast stuff so it's it's along that line but not quite but you do realize there'll be like a few programmers right now listening to this who fast and eat peanut butter please please break my record I mean the reason I did this literally was just because I wanted the bar to be high for

the 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 yeah I don't know what the limits I mean the limits you can calculate just in terms of like screen refresh rate and like cursor immediately jump into the next Target but there's I mean I'm sure there's limits before that with just sort of reaction time and visual perception and

things like this um I'd guess it's in the below 40 but above 20 somewhere in there it's probably the right the right number to be thinking about it also matters like how difficult the task is you could imagine like some people might be able to do like 10,000 Targets on the screen and maybe they can do better that way um so there's some like task optimizations you could do to try to boost your performance as well what uh do you think it takes for Nolan to be able to do above 85 to keep increasing that

number you said like every increase in the number might require different yeah different improvements in the system yeah I think the nature of this work is I the first the first answer that's important to say is I don't know um this is you know edge of the research so again nobody's gotten to that number before so what's next is going to be a you know heris a guess from my part um what we've seen historically is that different parts of the staff come bottlenecks at different time points so you know when I first joined nlink

like three years ago or so one of the major problems was just the latency of the Bluetooth connection it was just like the radio on the device wasn't super good it was an earlier rision of the implant and uh it just like no matter how good your decoder was if your thing is updating every 30 milliseconds or 50 milliseconds it's just going to be choppy and uh no matter how good you are that's going to be frustrating and lead to uh challenges so you know at that point it was very clear that the main challenge

is just get the data off the device in a very reliable way such that you can enable the next challenge to be to be tackled and then you know at some point it was um you know actually the modeling challenge of how do you uh 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 neurod decoder architecture and hyperparameters to optimize that that was a problem for a bit and once you solve that it

became a different bottleneck um I think the next bottleneck after that was actually just sort of software stability and reliability um you know if you have widely varying sort of inference latency uh in your in your system or your you know 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 uh improvements we made that basically increased the performance of the system made it much more

reliable much more stable and led to a state where we could reliably collect data to build better models with so that was a problem for a while is just sort of like the software stack itself um if I were to guess right now uh there's sort of two major directions you could think about for improving BPS further um the first major direction is labeling so labeling is again this fundamental challenge of given uh a window of time where the user is expressing some behavioral intent what are they really trying to do at the at the

granularity of every millisecond and that again is a task design problem it's a ux problem it's a machine learning problem it's a software problem sort of touches all those different domains the second uh thing you can think about to improve BPS further is either completely changing the thing you're decoding or just extending the number of things that you're decoding so this is serving the direction of functionality basically you can imagine giving more clicks for example left click a right click a middle click uh different actions like click and drag for example and that can improve

the effective bit rate of your communication prothesis if you're trying to uh allow the user to express themselves through any given Communication channel you can measure that with bits per second but what actually matters at the end of the day is how effective are they at navigating their computer and so from the perspective of the downstream task that you care about functionality and extending functionality is something we're very interested in because not only can It improve the sort of number of BPS but it can also improve the downstream sort of Independence that the user has

and the skill and efficiency with which they can operate their computer would the number of threads increasing also potentially help yes short answer is yes it's a bit nuanced how that curve uh or how that manifests in uh in the numbers so what you'll see is that if you sort of plot a curve of number of channels uh that you're using for decode verse either the offline metric of how good you are decoding uh or the online metric of sort of uh in practice how good is the user using this device you see roughly a

log curve so as you move further out in number of channels you get a corresponding sort of logarithmic Improvement in control quality and offline validation metrics the important Nuance here is that each Channel corresponds with a specific uh you know represented intention in the brain so for example if you have a channel 254 it might correspond with moving to the right channel 256 might mean mve to the left if you want to expand the number of functions you want to control uh you really want to have a broader set of channels that covers a broader

set of imagin movements you can think of it like uh kind of like Mr Potato Man actually like if you had a bunch of different imagine movements you could do how would you map those imagine movements to input to a computer uh you could imagine you know handwriting to Output characters on the screen you could imagine just typing with your fingers and have that output text on the screen you could imagine Different Finger modulations for different clicks you could imagine wiggling your big nose for uh opening some some menu or wiggling your you know your

big toe to have like command tab occur or something like this so it's really uh 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 all right so that's more about the number of actions so actually as you increase the number of threads that's more about increasing uh 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 paralysis to control the computer as fast as

I can so that's BPS uh with all the same functionality I have which is what we just talked about but then also as reliably as I can yeah and that last point is very related to channel count discussion so as you scale out number of channels the relative importance of any particular feature of your model input to the output control of the user diminishes which means that if the sort of neural nonstationarity effect is per Channel or if the noise is independent such that more channels means on average less output effect then your reliability of

your system will improve so one sort of core thesis um that at least I have is that scaling Channel count should improve the reliability system without any work on the decoder itself can you Linger on the reliability here so first of all when you say nonstationarity 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 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 signal at least in the motor cortex it's very correlated with the output intention the behavioral uh task that the user is doing you could you can imagine actually this is not obvious that rate coding which is the name of that um phenomena is like the only way the brain could represent information you can imagine many different ways in which the brain could encode uh 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

the mechanism of information uh representation but at least in the motor cortex there's substantial evidence that it's uh rate coding or at least one like first order of fact is that it's R coding so then if the brain is representing information by changing the sort of frequency of a neuron firing what really matters is sort of the Delta between sort of the Baseline state of the neuron and what it looks like when it's modulated and what we've observed and what has also been observed in academic work is that that Baseline rate sort of the if

you're to Tar the scale if you imagine uh 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 dayto day mhm and so if what you're trying to measure is how much rice is in the pot you're going to get a different measurement different days because you're measuring with different pots so that basine rate shifting is really the thing that uh at least from A first order description of the problem is what's causing this Downstream bias there can be other effects

not linear effects on top of that but at least a very first order description of the problem that's what we observe 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 um with monkeys we we have found various ways to do this um one example way to do this is you ask them to do some behavioral task 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 in the input when you're doing your BCI session Works 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 several explanations um one such explanation could be that the context effect difference between some open loop task and some closed loop task is much more significant with um Nolan than it is with monkey maybe in this open loop task

he's you know watching The Lex Freeman podcast while he's doing the task or he's whistling and listening to music and talking with his friend and ask his mom what's for dinner while he's doing this task and so the the exact sort of difference in context between those two states may be much larger and thus lead to a bigger S generalization gap between the features that you're normalizing at sort of open loop time and what you're trying to use at close loop time that's interesting just on that point it's kind of incredible to watch noan be

able to do uh to multitask to do multiple tasks at the same time to be able to move the miles cursor effectively while talking and while being nervous because he's talking front of kicking my ass in chest too yeah kicking your ass and not wor 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 helping somebody move a mouse on the screen and it's it's a really a fair question and one that I actually did was not confident before s Nolan that this was going to be a profoundly transformative technology for people like him and uh 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 ey tracker or with a mouse sck but you don't need to have that thing in your face you don't need to be position a certain way you don't need your caretaker to be around to set it up for you you can activate it when you want how you want wherever you want that level of Independence is so gamechanging for people it means that they can text a friend at night privately without their mom needing to be in the loop it means that they can like open up you know and browse the internet

at 2: a.m. when nobody's around to set their their iPad up for them this is like a profoundly gamechanging thing for folks in that situation and this is even before we start talking about folks that you know may not be able to communicate at all or ask for help when they want to this be the potentially the only link that they have to the outside world and uh 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 is it to come up with a decoder that figures out what these uh sequence of spikes mean yeah good question uh there's a couple 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 data set plus compiling it into the weights and uh each of those steps is important uh the direction I think of further Improvement is primarily going to be

in the data set side of how do you construct the optimal labels for the model but there's an entirely separate challenge of then how do you compile it the best model and so I'll go briefly down the second one down the second Rabbit Hole one of the main challenges with designing the optimal model for BCI is that offline metrics don't necessarily correspond to online metrics M uh 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 uh impacts

your ability to control so for example if you just look at validation loss as predicted by your model there can be multiple ways to achieve the same validation loss not all of them are equally controllable by the end user and so the you know it might be as simple as saying oh you could just add auxiliary loss terms that like help you capture the thing that actually matters but this is a very complex Nuance process so how you turn the labels into the model is uh more of a Nuance process than just like a standard

supervised learning problem one very fascinating uh anecdote here we've tried many different sort of neural network architectures that translate brain data to uh velocity outputs for example and one uh example that's stuck in my brain from a couple years ago now uh is we at one point we were using just fully connected networks to decode the brain activity we tried a Ab test where we were measuring uh the relative performance in online control sessions of uh sort of 1D convolution over the input signal so if you imagine per Channel you have a sliding window that's

producing some uh convolve 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 you're reducing parameters it's sort of a standard uh uh standard procedure when you're dealing with time series data now it turns out that when using that model online the controlability was was worse was far worse even though the offline metrics were better and uh 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 comput at this problem and you were trying to sort of hyper parameter optimize or you know let some gbt model hard code or come up with or invent many different solutions if you were just optimizing for loss it would not be sufficient which means that there's still some inherent modeling Gap 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 uh data constrainted at this time like the which is what it sounds like like how do you get a lot of good labels yeah I think it's data quality constrained not necessarily data quantity constrainted but even like even just the quantity I mean because it has to be trained on the on the interaction I guess there's not that many interactions yeah so it depends what version of this you're talking about so if you're talking about like let's say the simplest example

of just 2D velocity then I think yeah data quality is the main thing if you're talking about how to build a sort of multifunction output that lets you do all the inputs the computer that you and I can do then it's actually a much more sophisticated Nuance modeling challenge because now you need to think about not just when the user is 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 they're trying to move the

mouse so one examp of an interesting bug from like sort of week one of uh BCI with Nolan was when he moved the mouse uh The Click signal sort of dropped off a cliff and when he stopped the click in went up so again there's a contamination between the the two the two inputs another good example was at one point he was trying to do uh sort of a left click and drad 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 you need to come up with some way to either in the data set or in the model build robustness against this kind of uh you think of it like overfitting but really it's just that the model has not seen this kind of variability before so you need to find some way to help the model with that this is super cool cuz I it feels like all of this is very solvable but it's hard yes it is fundamentally an engineering challenge this is important to emphasize and it's also important to emphasize that it may not

need fundamentally new techniques which means that you know people who work on let's say unsupervised speech classification using CTC loss for example with internal toi they could potentially have very applicable skills to this so what things are you excited about in uh the future development of the software stack on the neur link so everything we've been talking about the decoding the ux I think there's some I'm excited about like something I'm excited about from the technology side and some I'm excited about 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 uh you know cannot speak at all that have no ability to sort of bootstraps into useful control by voice command for example and are extremely Limited in their current capabilities I think that will be an incredibly useful signal for us to understand I mean really what is an existential Ty for all startups which is product 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 most efficiently so that's what I'm very excited about for the next year or so of clinical trial operations the on the technology side uh I'm quite excited about basically everything we're doing I think uh it's going to be awesome the most prominent one I would say is is scaling Channel count so right now we have a th000 channel device the next version will have between 3 and 6,000 channels and I would 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 we choose to focus our time and resources on and also in terms of the you even things as simple as nonstationarity like does that problem just completely go away at that scale or do we need to come up with new creative uis still even at that point um and also when we

get to that time point when we start expanding out traumatically the set of functions that you can output from one brain how to deal with all the nuances of both the user experience of not being able to feel the different keys under your fingertips but still need to be able to modulate all of them in synchrony to achieve the thing you want and uh again you don't have that prop set to feedback loop so how can you make that intuitive for a user to control a high dimensional control surface without feeling the thing physically I

think that's going to be a super interesting problem uh I'm also quite excited to understand uh you know do these scaling laws continue like as you scale Channel count how much further out do you go before that saturation point is is truly hit 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 Z and 1024 but we don't know what's beyond that um and then there's a whole sort of like range of interesting sort of Neuroscience and brain questions which is when you stick

more stuff in the brain in more places you get to learn much more quickly about what those brain regions represent and so I'm excited about that fundamental Neuroscience learning which is also important for figuring out how and to most efficiently insert electrodes in the future so yeah I think all those Dimensions I'm really really excited about and that doesn't even get close to touching the sort of software stack that we work on every single day and what we're working on right now yeah it uh seems virtually impossible to me that uh a thousand electrodes is

where it saturates it feels like this would be one of those uh silly Notions in the future where obviously you should have millions of electrodes and this and this is where like the true breakthroughs happen yeah uh you tweeted oh some thoughts are most precisely described in poetry why do you think that is I think it's because the the information bottleneck of language is uh pretty steep and yet you're like you're able to reconstruct on the other person's in the other person's brain more effectively without being literal like if you if you can express a

sentiment such that in their brain they can reconstruct the the actual true underlying meaning and beauty of the thing that you're trying to get across the S the generator function in their brain is more powerful than What language can express and so the the mechanism of poetry is really just to uh feed or seed that generator function so being literal sometimes is a suboptimal compression for the 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 what you mean like that's the

that's the beautiful part it's also like when you look at a beautiful painting like it's not the the pixels of the painting that are beautiful it's the thought process that occurs when you see that the the experience of that that actually is a thing that matters yeah it's resonating with some deep yeah thing within you that the artist also experienced and was able to convey that through the pixels and that's actually going to be relevant for for for fullon telepathy you know it's like if you just read the Poetry literally that doesn't say much of

anything interesting it requires a human to interpret it so it's the combination of the human mind and all the experiences that a 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 uh meaning might not may seem trivial but may actually carry a lot of power uh because of the complexity of the human mind and the receiving end yeah that's interesting I poetry still doesn't who was it

I think uh Yoshi first said uh uh something about all the people that think we've achieved AGI EX explain why humans like music oh yeah and and until until the AGI Likes music you haven't achieved AGI or something like do you not think that's like some next token entropy surprise kind of thing going on there I don't know I don't know either I I listen to a lot of classical music and also read a lot of poetry and uh yeah I do wonder if like there is some element of the next token surprise Factor going

on there yeah maybe cuz I mean like a lot of the the tricks in both poetry and music are like basically you have some repeated structure and then you do like a Twist like it's like okay verse or like Clause 1 2 3 is one thing and then Clause 4 is like okay now we're on the next theme yeah and they kind of play with exactly when the surprise happens and the expectations of the user and that's even true like through history as musicians evolve music they take like some know and structure that people are

familiar with and they just tweak it a little bit like they tweak it and add a surprising element this is especially true in like in classical music Heritage but that's what I'm Wonder like is it all just entropy like the the uh so so bra so breaking structure or breaking symmetry is something that humans seem to like maybe as simple as that yeah and I mean great artists copy uh and they also you know knowing which rules to break is the important part and that fundamentally it must be about the The Listener of the piece

like which rulle is the right one to break is about the user or the audience member perceiving that as interesting uh what do you think is the meaning of human existence there's a TV show I really like called The West Wing and in uh In The West Wing there's a character he's the president of the United States who's uh having a discussion about the Bible with one of their colleagues and uh the colleague says something about you know the Bible says X Y and Z and uh the President says yeah but it also says ABC

and the person says well do you believe the Bible to be literally true and the President says yes but I also think that neither of us are smart enough to understand it I think to like the analogy here for the meaning of life is that largely we don't know the right question to ask and so I'm I think I'm very aligned with uh sort of The Hitchhiker's guided 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 uh people asking such questions or generally of Consciousness and conscious being asking such questions um so again I think I'll take the I don't know card here but say I do think there are meaningful things we can do that improve the likelihood of answering that question it's interesting how much value you assign to the task of asking the right questions that's the that's the main thing it's not the answers is the questions this point

by the way is driven home uh in a very painful way when you try to communicate with someone who cannot speak because a lot of the time the last thing to go is they have the ability to somehow you know wiggle a lip or move something that allows them to say yes or no and in that situation it's very obvious that what matters is are you asking them the right question to be able to say yes or no 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 thanks for listening to this conversation with bliss Chapman and now dear friends here's Nolan our boss the first human being to have a neuralink 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 it was sort of a freak thing that happened imagine you're running into the ocean um although this is a lake 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 um and then I just never came back up not sure what happened uh 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 uh the left side of my head was sore for about a month afterward so must have taken a pretty big knock and then uh they both

came up and I didn't and so I was face down in the water for a while I was conscious um and then eventually just you know realized I couldn't hold my breath any longer and I keep saying took a big drink um people I don't know if they like that I say that it seems like I'm making light of it all but um this is kind of how I am and I don't know like I'm a very relaxed sort of stressfree person I rolled with the punches for a lot of this I kind of took

it in stride it's like all right well what can I do next how can I improve my life even a little bit um on a day-to-day basis at first just trying to find some way to heal as much of my body as possible um to try to get healed to try to get off a ventilator um learn as much as I could so I could somehow survive um once I left the hospital um and then thank God I had like my family around me if I didn't have my parents uh my siblings then I would

have never made it this far they've done so much for me um more than like I can ever than them for honestly and a lot of people don't have that a lot of people in my situation their families either aren't capable of providing for them or honestly just don't want to and so they get placed somewhere and you know in some sort of home uh so thankfully I had my family I have a great group of friends a great group of buddies from college who have all rallied around me and we're all um still Incredibly

Close people always say you know if you're lucky you'll end up with one or two friends from high school that you keep throughout your life I have uh about 10 10 or 12 from high school that have all stuck around and we still get together all of us twice a year um we call it the spring series and the fall series um this last one we all did uh we dressed up like X-Men so I did a Professor 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 waited on um all the time people bring me food and drinks and I get to sit around and watch as much TV and movies and Anime as I want I get to read as much as I want um I mean it's it's great it's beautiful to see that you see the Silver Lining and all of this uh was just going back do you remember the moment when you first realized you're paralyzed from NE down yep I was face down in the

water um right when I whatever something hit my head I um tried to get up and I realized I couldn't move and it just sort of clicked I'm like all right I'm paralyzed can't move what do I do um if I can't get up I can't flip over can't do anything then I'm going to drown eventually um and I knew I couldn't hold my breath forever so I just held my breath and thought about it for maybe 10 15 seconds um I've heard from other people that like look onlookers I guess the two girls that

pulled me out of the water were two of my best friends they were lifeguards um and one of them said that um it looked like my body was sort of shaking in the water like I was trying to flip over and stuff um but I knew I knew immediately and I just kind of I realized that that's like what my situation was from here on out maybe if I got to the hospital they'd be able to do something when I was in the hospital like right before surgery I was trying to calm uh one of

my friends down I had like brought her with me from college to camp and she was just balling over me and I was like hey it's going to be fine like don't worry um I was cracking some jokes to try to lighten the mood um the nurse had called my mom and I was like don't tell my mom um she's just going to be stressed out call her after I'm out of surgery cuz at least she'll have some answers then like whether I live or not really um and I didn't want her to be stressed

through the whole thing but I knew and then when I first woke up after surgery um I was super drugged up uh they had me on fentanyl like three ways which was awesome um I don't I don't recommend it but um I saw I saw some crazy stuff uh on that Fentanyl and it was still the best I've ever felt uh on drugs um medication sorry on medication um and uh I remember the first time I saw my mom in the hospital I was just balling I had like ventilator in um like I couldn't talk

or anything and uh I just started crying because it was more like seeing her not that I mean the whole situation obviously was pretty rough but uh it was just like seeing her face for the first time was pretty hard but um yeah I just I never had like a moment of you know man I'm paralyzed this sucks I don't want to like be around anymore it was always just I hate that I have to do this but like sitting here and wallowing isn't going to help so immediate acceptance yeah yeah has there been low

point along the way yeah yeah sure um I mean there are days when I don't really feel like doing anything not So Much Anymore like not for the last couple years I don't really feel that way I've um more so just wanted to try to do anything possible to make my life better at this point um but at the beginning there were some ups and downs there were some really hard things to adjust to um first off just like the first couple months the amount of pain I was in was really really hard I mean

I remember screaming at the top of my lungs in the hospital because I thought my legs were on fire and obviously I can't feel anything but it's all nerve pain and so that was a really hard night I asked them to give me as much pain meds as possible they're like you've had as much as you can have so just kind of deal with it go to a happy place sort of thing so that was a pretty low Point um and then every now and again it's hard like realizing things that I wanted to do

in my life that I won't be able to do anymore um you know I always wanted to be a husband and father and I just don't think that I could do it now as a quadriplegic maybe it's possible but I'm not sure I would ever um put you know someone I love through that um like having to take care of me and stuff um not being able to you know go out and play sports I was a huge athlete growing up so that was pretty hard um just little things 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 like the feel uh the texture the smell like as you turn the pages like I just love it I can't do it anymore and it's little things like that um the two-year Mark was pretty rough two years is when they say you will um get back BAS 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 movement back and then when the 2year mark hit so um June 30th 2018 I was I was really sad that that's kind of where I was um and then just randomly here and there but I was never like depressed for long periods of time just it never seemed worthwhile to me what gave you strength my faith my faith in God uh was a big one my understanding that it was all for a purpose

and even if that purpose wasn't anything involving neuralink even if that purpose was you know there's there's a story in the Bible about job and I think it's a really really popular story about how job you know has all of these terrible things happen to him and he Praises God throughout uh the whole situation I thought and I think a lot of people think for most of their lives that they are job that they're the ones going through something terrible and they just need to you know praise God through the whole thing and everything will

work out at some point after my accident I realized that I might not be job that I might be you know one of his children that gets killed or kidnapped or taken from him and so it's about terrible things that happen to those around you who you love so maybe you know in this case my mom would be job and she has to get through something extraordinarily hard and I just need to try and make it as best as possible for her because um she's the one that really going through this massive trial um and

that gave me a lot of strength and obviously my family um my family and my friends they they give me all the strength that I need uh on a day-to-day basis so makes things a lot easier having that great support system around me from everything I've seen of you online your streams and uh the way you are today I really admire let's say your unwavering positive outlook on life has that always been this way yeah yeah I've I mean I've just always thought I could do anything I ever wanted to do there was never anything

too big like whatever I set my mind to I felt like I could do it um I didn't want to do a lot I wanted to like travel around and be sort of like a gypsy and like go work odd jobs I had this dream of traveling around Europe and being like I don't know a Shepherd in like Wales or Ireland and then going to being a fisherman in Italy uh doing all these things for like a year like it's such like cliche things but I just thought it would be so much fun to go

and travel and do different things and so um I've always just seen the best in people around me too and I've always tried to be good to people and growing up with my mom too she's like the most positive energetic person in the world and we're all just people people like uh I just get along great with people um I really enjoy meeting new people and so um I just wanted to do everything um this is It's kind of just how I've been it's just great to see that cynicism didn't take over given everything you've

been through yeah that's uh was that like a deliberate choice you made that you're not going to let this keep you down yeah a bit also like I just it's just kind of how I am I just like I said I roll with the punches with everything I always used to tell people like I don't stress about things much um and whenever I'd see people getting stressed just say you know like it's not hard just don't stress about it and like that's all you need to do uh and they're like that's not how that works

like it works for me like just don't stress and everything will be fine like everything will work out obviously not everything always goes well and it's not like it all works out for the best all the time but I just don't think stress has had uh any place in my life since I was a kid what was the experience like of you being selected to be the first human being to have a neuralink device implanted in your brain were you scared excited no no it was cool um like I was I was never afraid of

it I to think through a lot should I should I do this um like be the first person I could wait until number two or three and get a better version of the neuralink like the first one might not work maybe um it's actually going to kind of suck um 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 like I'm

sure they would let me they're looking for a few people anyways but ultimately I was like I don't know there's something about being the first one to do something it's pretty cool I always thought that if I had the chance that I would like to do something for the first time um this seemed like a pretty good opportunity um and I was I was never scared I think my like Faith had a huge uh part in that I always felt like God Was preparing me for something um I almost wish it wasn't this because I

had many conversations with God about not wanting to do any of this as a quadriplegic I told him you know I'll go out and talk to people I'll go out and travel the world and talk to you know stadiums thousands of people give my testimony I'll do all of it but like heal me first don't make me do all this in a chair that sucks um and I guess he won that argument I didn't really have much of a choice I always felt like there was something going on and to see how I guess easily

I made it through the interview process and how quickly everything happened um how the star sort of aligned with all of this it it just told me like as the surgery was getting closer it just told me that you know it it was all meant to happen it was all meant to be and so I shouldn't be afraid of anything that's to come and so I wasn't I kept telling myself like you know you say that now but as soon as the surgery comes you're probably going to be freaking out like you're about to have

brain surgery and brain surgery is a big deal for a lot of people but it's a even bigger deal for me like it's all I have left the amount of times I've been like thank you God that you didn't take my brain and my personality and my ability to think um my like love of learning like my character everything like thank you so much like as long as you left me that then I think I can get by and I was about to let people go like root around and they're like hey we're going to

go like put some stuff in your brain like hopefully it works out um and so it was it was something that gave me pause but like I said how smoothly everything went I never expected for a second that anything would go wrong plus the more people I met on the borrow side and on the nuring side they're just the most impressive people in the world like I can't speak enough to how much I trust these people with my life and how impressed I am with all of them and to see the excitement on their faces

to like walk into a room and roll into a room and see all of these people looking at me like we're just we're so excited like we've been working so hard on this and it's finally happened it's super infectious and um it just makes me want to do it even more and to help them achieve their dreams like I don't know it's so it's so rewarding and I'm so happy for all of them honestly what was the uh day of surgery like what's uh when did you wake up what' you feel yeah minute by minute

yeah were you freaking out no no I thought I was going to but as surgery approached the night before the morning of I was just excited like I was like let's make this happen I think I said that uh something like that to Elon on the phone uh beforehand we were like U FaceTiming and I was like let's rock and roll and he's like let's do it uh I 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 700 a.m. so we woke up pretty early I'm not sure much of us slept that night um um got to the hospital 5 :30 went through like all the pre op stuff everyone was super nice uh Elon was supposed to be there in the morning um but something went wrong with his Planes so we ended up FaceTiming uh that was cool had one of the greatest onliners of my life after that phone call um hung up with him there were like 20 people around me and I was like I just hope he

wasn't too Star Struck talking to me nice and yeah good well done yeah yeah did you write that ahead of time or just came it just came to me I was like this is this seems right you know went into surgery um 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 uh just to like calm her nerves out there uh woke up played a bit of a prank on my mom uh I

don't know if you've heard about it yeah I read about it yeah uh she was she was not happy uh can you take me through the prank and yeah this is something you regret doing that no no no not one bit um it was something it was something I I had talked about ahead of time with my buddy Bane I was like I would really like to play a prank on my mom um uh very specifically my mom she's very gullible um I think she had knee surgery once even and um after she came out

of knee surgery um uh she was super groggy she's like I can't feel my legs and my dad looked at her he was like you don't have any legs like they they had they had to amputate both your legs and we just do very mean things to her all the time um I'm so surprised that she still loves us um but right after surgery I was really worried that I was going to be too like groggy like not all there I had had anesthesia once before and it it messed me up like I could not

function um for a while afterwards and I um I like said a lot of things that I was like I was really worried that I was going to start I don't know like dropping dropping some bombs and I wouldn't even know I wouldn't remember um so I was like like please God don't let that happen and please let me be there enough to do this to my mom um and so she walked in uh after surgery it was like the first time they had been able to see me after surgery and she just looked at

me she said hi like how are you how are you doing how do you feel and I looked at her and just this very I think the anesthesia helped very like groggy sort of confused look on my face it's like who who are you and she just started looking around the room like at the surgeons at the doctors like what did you do to my son like you need to fix this right now tear 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 uh it's all right and uh still she was not happy about it she uh still says she's going to get me back someday but I mean I I don't know I don't know what that's going to look like it's a lifelong battle Yeah Yeah but it was good in some sense it was a demonstration that you still got that's that's all I wanted to that's all I wanted it to be and I knew that doing something super mean to her like that would show her yeah to show that

you're still there you love her yeah exactly exactly it's a dark way to do it but I love it yeah uh what was the first time you were able to feel that you can use the neuralink device to affect the world around you yeah um the first little taste I got of it was uh actually not too long after surgery um some of the neuralink team had brought in um like a little iPad uh a little tablet screen and they' put up eight different um channels um and that were recording some of my neuron spikes

um and they put it in front of me they're like this is like real time your brain firing I like that's super cool um my first thought was I mean if they're firing now let's see if I can affect them in some way so I started trying to like wiggle my fingers and I just started like scanning through the channels and one of the things I was doing was like moving my index finger up and down and 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 what are you seeing I was like look look at this one look at like this top Row third box over this yellow Spike like that's me right there there there and everyone was freaking out they started like clapping I was like that's super unnecessary like this is what's supposed to happen right like so you're imagining your yourself moving each individual finger one at a time and then seeing like you can notice something and then when

you did the index finger you're like oh yeah I was I was wiggling kind of all of my fingers to see if anything would happen there was a lot of other things going on but that big yellow Spike was the one that stood out to me like I'm sure that if I would have stared at it long enough I could have mapped out maybe a hundred different things but the big yellow Spike was the one that I noticed maybe you could speak to what it's like to sort of wiggle your fingers to like to to

imagine that the 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 uh it's something that at the very beginning after my accident they told me to try and move my body as much as possible even if you know you can't just keep trying because that's going to create new like neural Pathways or Pathways in my spinal cord to like reconnect these things um to hopefully regain some movement someday that's fascinating yeah I know it's it's bizarre but I

that's part of the recovery process is to keep trying to move your body yep and day as much as you can and the nervous system does its thing it's starts reconnecting it'll start reconnecting um for some people some people it never works some people they'll do it like for me I got some bicep control back um and that's about it I can if I uh try enough I can wiggle some of my fingers not like on command it's more like if I try to move say my right Pinky and I just keep trying to move

it after a few seconds it'll wiggle um so I know there's stuff there like I know like and that happens with you know a few different of my fingers and stuff um but yeah that's that's what they tell you to do um one of the people at the time when I was in the hospital came in and told me for one guy who had recovered um most of his control what he thought about every day was actually walking like the act of walking um just over and over again so I try that for years I

try 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 of the activations uh that have to happen along your leg in order for one step to occur but you're not just imagining you're like doing it right I'm trying yeah so it's like it's imagining over again what I had to do to take a step because it's not something any of us think about we just you want to walk and you take

a step um you don't think about all of the different things that are going on in your body so I had to recreate that in my head as much as I could and then I practice it over and over and over so it's not like a third person perspective as a first person perspective you're like it's not like you're imagining yourself walking you're like literally doing this everything all the same stuff as if you're walking yeah 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 um there's a there's a scene in one of the Kill Bill movies actually uh oddly enough where she is like paralyzed I don't know from like a drug that was in her system and then she like finds some way to get into the back of a truck or something and she stares at her toe and she says move like move your big toe and uh after you know a few seconds on screen she does it and she did that with every one of her like body parts until she could move

again I did that for years just stared at my body and said move your index finger move your big toe um sometimes vocalizing it like out loud sometimes just thinking it I tried every different way to do this to try to get some movement back and it's hard because it it actually is like taxing like physically taxing on my body which is something I would have never expected because it's not like I'm moving but it feels like there's a buildup of I don't know the the only way I can describe it is there are like

signals that aren't getting through from my brain um down because of my there's that Gap in my spinal cord so brain down and then from my hand back up to the brain and so it feels like those signals um get stuck in whatever body part that I'm trying to move and they just build up and build up and build up until they burst um and then once they burst I get like this really weird sensation of everything sort of like dissipating back out to level and then I do it again um it's also just like

a fatigue thing like a muscle fatigue but without actually moving your muscles it's very very bizarre and then you know uh 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's takes a lot of focus um it was a lot easier at the beginning because I wasn't able to like control a TV in my room or anything I wasn't able to um control any of my environment so for the first few years a lot of

what I was doing was staring at walls and so um obviously I did a lot of thinking and I tried to move a lot just over and over and over again so you never gave up Sort of hope there just training hard essentially yep and I still do it I do it like subconsciously and I think that uh that helped a lot with things with neuralink honestly it's something that I talked about the other day at the All Hands that I did at nerling Austin facility Welcome to Austin by the way yeah hey thanks man

I I went to school hey thanks thanks man the the gigafactory was super cool I went toool cool at Texas A&M so I've been around for um so you should be saying welcome to me welcome to Texas Le yeah I get you um but yeah I was talking about how a lot of what they've had me do especially at the beginning um well I still do it now um is body mapping so like there will be a visualization of a hand or an arm on the screen and I have to do that motion and that's

how they sort of train um the algorithm to like understand what I'm trying to do and so it it made things very uh seamless um for me I think that's really really cool so it's it's it's amazing to know cuz I I've learned a lot about the body mapping procedure yeah like with the with the interface and everything like that it's cool to know that you've been essentially like training to be like world class at that task yeah yeah I I I don't know if other quadriplegics like other paralyzed people give up I hope they

don't um I hope they keep trying because I've heard other paralyzed people say like don't ever stop they tell you two years but um you you just never know you the human body's capable of amazing things so um I've heard other people say don't give up uh like I think one girl had um spoken to me through some family members and said that she had been paralyzed you know for 18 years and she'd been trying to like wiggle her index finger for all that time and she finally got it back like 18 years later so

like I know that it's possible and I'll never give up doing it I just I do it when I'm lying down like watching TV I'll find myself doing it kind of just almost like on its own it's just something I've gotten so used to doing that I don't know I I don't think I'll ever stop that's really awesome to hear cuz I think it's one of those things that can really pay off in in the long term cuz like it is training you're not VIs seen the results of that training at the moment but like

there's that like Olympic level nervous system getting getting ready for something honestly was like something that I think nurlink gave me that um I can't I can't think them enough for like I can't show my appreciation for it enough was being able to visually see that what I'm doing is actually having some effect yeah um it's a huge part of the reason why like I know now that I'm going to keep doing it forever because before nuring I was doing it every day and I was just assuming that things were happening like it's not like

I knew I wasn't getting back any Mobility or um sensation or anything so I could have been running up against a brick wall for all I knew and with nurlink I get to see like all the signals happening real time and I get to see that you know what I'm doing can actually be mapped you know when we started doing like click calibrations and stuff when I go to click my index finger for a left click that it actually recognizes that like it it changed how I think about what's possible with like retraining my body

to move and so yeah I'll I'll never give up now and also just the signal that there's still a Powerhouse of brain there that's like that's and as the technology develops that brain is I mean that's the most important thing about the human body is the brain and it can do a lot of the control so what did it feel like when you first could wiggle the index finger and and saw the environment respond like that little yeah where everybody was being way too dramatic according to you yeah it was very cool I mean it

was cool but it I keep telling this to people it made sense to me like it made sense that you know there are signals still happening in my brain and that as long as you had something near it that could measure those that could record those then you should be able to like visualize it in some way like see it happen and so that was not very surprising to me I was just like oh cool like we we found one like we found something that works um it was cool to see that their technology worked

um and that everything that they had worked so hard for was like going to pay off um um but I hadn't like moved a cursor or anything at that point I hadn't like interacted with a computer or anything at that point um so it it it just made sense it was cool like like I I I didn't really know much about BCI at that point either so I didn't know like what sort of Step this was actually making um like I didn't know if this was like a huge deal or if this was just like

okay this is you know it's cool that we got this far but we're actually hoping for something like much better down the road it's like okay I just thought that they knew that it turned on so I was like cool like this is this is cool well did you like read up on the specs of the hardware you get installed like the number of threads kind I knew all of that but it's all like It's All Greek to me I was like okay threads 64 threads 16 electrodes 1,24 channels okay like like that that that

math checks out uh sounds right yeah when was the first time you were able to move a milous cursor I know it must have been within the first maybe week a week or two weeks that I was able to like first move the cursor and again like it kind of made sense to me like it it didn't seem like that big of a deal like it it it was like okay well how do I explain this when everyone around you starts clapping for something that you've done it's it's easy to say okay like I did

something cool like that was that was impressive in some way um what exactly that meant what it was hadn't really like set in for me um so again I knew that me trying to move a body part um and then that being mapped um in some sort of like machine learning algorithm to be able to um identify like my brain signals and then take that and give me cursor control that all kind of made sense to me I don't know like all the in 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 move the cursor for the first time I was like that's cool but I expected that that should happen like it made sense to me um when I moved the cursor for the first time um 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 attempted movement and imagine movement yeah that's a fascinating difference from one 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 um and that's all attempted attempt to you know like lift my finger up and down attempt to kick or something um I'm physically trying to do all of those things even if you can't see it like I'm this would be like me attempting to like shrug

my shoulders or something that's all attempted movement um that all that's what I was doing for the first couple of weeks when they were going to give me cursor control when I was doing body mapping it was attempt to do this attempt to do that when um near was telling me um 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 um as a child and they said okay write your name with this pencil and so you do that like okay

now imagine writing your name with that pencil kids would think uh like I guess like that kind of makes sense and they would do it um 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 it never really connected with me like I guess you could maybe describe it as like a Prof professional athlete like has swinging a

baseball bat or swinging like a golf club like imagine what you're supposed to do but then you go right to that and physically do it like you then you get a bat in your hand and then you do what you've been imagining and so I don't have that like connection so telling me to imagine something versus attempting it it just there wasn't a lot that I could do there um mentally I just kind of had to accept what was going on and try um but the attempted moving 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 it was it was like yes this should happen like I'm I'm not surprised by that well 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 visualizing doing

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 Moto cortex but the the difference I think has to do with the naturalness of imagining something inverse got it attempting it and sort the fatigue of that over time and by the way on the mic is bliss uh so like this is just different ways to prompt you to kind of get to the thing that you're around that yeah attemp to movement

does sound like the right thing try yeah I mean it makes sense to me cuz imagine for me I'll be I would start visualizing like in my mind visualizing attempted I would actually start trying to like yeah there's a I mean I you know I did like Combat Sports my whole life like wrestling when I'm imagining a move see I'm like moving my muscle exactly like there's a there is a bit of an activation almost versus like visualizing yourself like a picture doing it yeah it's something that I feel like naturally anyone would do if

you try to tell someone to imagine doing something they might close their eyes and then start physically doing it um but it it's just just click yeah it's it's hard it was very hard at the beginning but attempted worked attempted worked it worked just like it should work like work like a charm um remember there was like one Tuesday we were messing around and I think I get what swear word you used but there's a swear word that came out of your mouth when you figured out you could just do the direct cursor control yeah

that's it it blew my mind like no pun intended blew my mind when I first um moved the cursor just with my thoughts and not attempting to move it's something that I found um like over the couple of weeks like building up to that um that as I get better cursor controls like the model uh gets better um then it gets easier for me to like um like I don't have to attempt as much to move it and part of that is something that I had even talked with them about um when I was watching

the signals of my brain one day I was watching when I like attempted to move to the right and I watched the screen as like I saw the spikes like I was seeing the spike the signal was being sent before I was actually attempting to move um I imagine just because you know when you go to say move your hand or any body part that signal gets sent before you're actually moving has to make it all the way down and back up before you actually do any sort of movement so there's a delay there and

I noticed that there was something going on in my brain before I was actually attempting to move that um my brain was like anticipating what I wanted to do and that all started sort of um I don't know like percolating in my brain like it just it was just sort of there like always in the back like that's so weird that it could do that it kind of makes sense but I wonder what that means um as far as like using the neuralink and um you know and then as I was playing around with the

attempted movement and playing around with the cursor and I saw that like as the cursor control got better that it was anticipating my movements um and what I wanted it to do like cursor movements what I wanted to do a bit better and a bit better and then one day I just randomly as I was playing web grid I um like looked at a Target before I had started like attempting to move I was just trying to like get over like train um my eyes to start looking ahead like okay this is the target I'm

on but if I look over here to this target I know I can like maybe be a bit quicker getting there and I looked over and the cursor just shot over it it was wild like it I had to take a step back like 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' 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 is it really with my mind like I'm attempting to move and it's just picking that up so it doesn't feel like it's with my mind but when I moved it for the first time like that it was oh man it like it made me think that this technology that what I'm doing is actually way way more impressive than I ever thought it was way cooler than I ever thought and it just open open 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 y I mean this a 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 that's what it felt like like I didn't feel like like I felt like I had discovered something but for

me maybe not necessarily for like the World At Large or like this field at large it just felt like an aaot moment for me like oh this works like obviously it works um and so that's what I do like all the time now uh I kind of intermix um the attempted movement and uh imagined movement I do it all like together because I found that there is some interplay with it that maximizes efficiency with the cursor so it's not all like one or the other it's not all just I only use attempted or I only

use like imagine movements it's more I use them um in parallel and uh I can do one or the other I can just completely think about um whatever I'm doing but um I don't know I I like to play around with it I also like to just experiment with these things like every now and again I'll get this idea in my head like hm 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 um I was

I I thought of something and I wanted to try it and so I did it seems like it works so maybe we should like explore that a little bit so I think that Discovery is not just for you at least from my perspective that's a discovery for everyone else who ever uses in your link that this is possible like I don't think that's an obvious thing that this is even possible it's like uh I was saying to Bliss earlier uh it's like the 4minute mile people thought it was impossible to run a mile in four

minutes and once the first person did it then everyone just started doing it so like just to show that it's possible that paves the way to like anyone can now do it that's the thing that's actually possible you don't need to do the attempted movement you just go Direct that's crazy that is crazy it is crazy yeah uh 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 uh describing the app uh can can you just describe how

it works yeah so it's just an app that Nur link created um to help me interact with a computer so on the link app uh there are a few different settings and different uh modes and things I can do on it so there's like the body mapping which we kind of touched on um there's a calibration um calibration is how I actually get cursor control so calibrating what's going on in my brain to uh translate that into cursor control so it will pop out um models what what they use I think is like time so

it would be you know five minutes in calibration will give me um so good of a model and then if I'm in it for 10 minutes and 15 minutes uh the models will progressively get better and um so you know the longer I'm in it generally the um better the models will get that's really cool cuz you often refer to the models the model is the thing that's constructed once you go through the calibration step and then you also talked about some sometimes sometimes you'll play like a really difficult game like snake just to see

how good the model is yeah yeah so snake is kind of like my litm best for models if I can control snake decently well then I I know I have a pretty good model so yeah the link app has all of those it has web Grid in it now um it's also how I like connect to the computer just in general um so uh 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 um as long as I have uh

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 um the implant charger uh over my head when I want to connect to have it wake up cuz the implant's in hibernation mode uh like always when I'm not using it um I think there's a setting to like wake it up every you know so long so we could set it to half an hour or 5 hours or something if I just want it to wake up

uh periodically um so yeah I'll like connect to the link app and then go through all sorts of things uh calibration for the day maybe body mapping I have like I made them give me like a little homework tab um because I am very forgetful and I forget to do things a lot um so I have like a lot of data collection things uh that they want me to do is the body mapping part of the data collection or is that also part of the yeah it is it's something that they want me to do

um daily which I've been slacking on because I've been doing so much media and traveling so much so I've been you got super famous yeah I've I've been a terrible um first candidate for how much I've uh been slacking on my homework um but yeah it's just something that they want me to do every day to you know track um how uh well the neuralink is performing over time and have something to give I imagine to give to the FDA to you know create all sorts of fancy charts and stuff and show like hey this

is what the neuralink this is how it's performing you know day one versus day 90 versus day 180 and things like that what's the calibration step like is it is it like move left move right it's uh a bubble game so there will be like yellow bubbles that pop up on the screen at first it is open loop so open loop this is something that I still don't fully understand the open loop and closed loop thing me and Bliss talked for a long time about the difference between the two from the on the technical side

so it' be great to hear your okay your side of the story Loop is basically um I have no control over the cursor um the cursor will be moving on its own across the screen and I am following by intention um the cursor to different Bubbles and then my um the algorithm is training off of what like the signals it's getting are as I'm doing this there are a couple different ways that they've done it they call it Center out Target so there will be a bubble in the middle and then eight bubbles around that

and the cursor will go from uh the middle uh to one side so say middle to left back to Middle to up to Middle like up right and they'll do that all the way around uh the circle and I will follow that cursor um the whole time and then it will train off of my intentions what it is expecting my intentions to be um 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 uh generally for calibration I'm doing

attempted movements uh because I think it works better I think the better models as I progress through calibration um make it easier um to use imagine movement 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 um doing calibration with imagined movement and it just doesn't work as well um for some reason so that was the center out targets there's also one where you know a random Target will pop up on the screen and it's the same I just like

move I follow along um with wherever the cursor is to that Target all across the screen um I've tried those with imagine movement and for some reason models just don't um they don't give as high level as quality when we get into Clos Loop um I haven't played around with it a ton so maybe like the different ways we're doing calibration now might make it a bit better but what I've found is there will be a point in calibration where I can use uh 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 um and after a certain point uh I I can just sort of feel it I can tell it moves different uh that's the best way I can I can describe it like it's almost as if it is anticipating what I am going to do again before I go to do it um and so using attempted movement for 15 minutes at some point I can kind of tell when I like move my eyes to the

next Target that the cursor is starting to like pick up like it's starting to understand it's learning like what I'm going to do so first of all it's really cool that I mean you are a true Pioneer in all of this you're like exploring how to do every aspect of this most effectively and there's just uh I imagine so many lessons learn from this so thank you for being a Pioneer in all these kinds of different like super technical ways and it's also cool they hear that there's like a different like feeling to the experience

when it's calibrated in different ways like just cuz I mean I imagine your brain is doing something different and that's why there's a different feeling to it and then try and Define the words and the measurements to those feelings would be also interesting but at the end of the day you can also measure that your actual performance on whether it's snake or web grid you can 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 so the open loop you don't

get the feedback that's something that you did something yeah I'm is that frustrating no no it makes sense to me like uh we've done it with a cursor and without a cursor in open loop so sometimes it's just um say for like the center out the um 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 3 seconds the bubble will pop and then I come back to the middle um so I'm doing it all Ju 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 yellow brick road that it'll all work out um you're full of great references uh is the is the bubble game fun like yeah they always feel so bad making me do calibration like oh we're about to do you know a 40-minute calibration I'm like all right do you guys want to do two of them um 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 um 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 um I can talk about all sorts of things uh I could throw something on on my TV in the background and kind of like split my attention between them um like it's not bad at all I don't like is there score that you get like can you do better on the bubble game no I would

love that um I I I would love Yeah writing down uh s suggests from noan that's uh make it more fun gamified yeah that's one thing that I really really enjoy about web grid is because I'm so competitive um like the higher the BPS the higher the score I know the better I'm doing and so if I I think I've asked at one point one of the guys like if he could give me some sort of numerical feedback for calibration like I would like to know what they're looking at like oh you know it is

um we see like this number while you're doing calibration and that means at least on our end that we think calibration is going well um and I would love that because I would like to know if what I'm doing is going well or not but then theyve also told 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 how like the end result that's at least what I got from it uh one thing I do uh I have asked them in something that I really enjoy um striving for is towards the end of calibration there is like a time between targets um and so I like to keep like at the end that number as low as possible so at the beginning it can be you know four five six seconds between me popping bubbles but towards the end I like to keep it below

like 1.5 or if I could get it to like one second between like bubbles because in my mind that translates um really nicely to something like web grid where I know if I can hit a Target uh one every second that I'm doing real real well there you that's a way to get a score on the calibrations like the speed how quickly can you get from Bubble to Bubble yeah uh so there's the open loop and then it goes to the closed loop the closed loop can already start giving you a sense because you're getting

feedback of like how good the model is yeah so closed loop is when I um first get cursor control and how they've uh described it to me someone who does not understand this stuff I am the dumbest person in the room every time I'm with any of humility um is that I am closing the loop so I am actually now um the one that is like finishing the loop of whatever this Loop is I don't even know what the loop is they've never told me they just say there is a loop and at one point

it's open and I can't control and then I get control and it's closed so I'm finishing the loop so how long the calibration usually take you said like 10 15 minutes well yeah they're they're trying to get that number down pretty low um that's what we've been working on a lot recently is getting that down is uh low as possible so that way you know if this is something that people need to do on a daily basis or if something people need to do on a um like every other day basis or once a week

they don't want people to be sitting in calibration for long periods of time I think they wanted to get it down s minutes or below um at least where we're at right now it'd be nice if they you never had to do calibration um so we'll get there at some point I'm sure the more we learn about the brain and um like I think that's you know the dream um I think right now for me to get like really really good models um I'm in calibration 40 or 45 minutes um and I don't mind like

I said they always feel really bad but if it's going to get me a model that can like break these records on web grid I'll stay in it for flipping two hours let's talk business so web grid um I saw a presentation that where Bliss said by March you selected 89,000 Target gets a web grid can you explain this game what what what is web grid and what does it take to be a worldclass performer and web grid as you continue to break World Records yeah um it's like a gold medalist like well you know

I'd like to thank I'd like to thank everyone who's helped me get here my coaches my parents for driving me to practice every day at 5: in the morning um like to thank god um and just overall my dedication to my the interviews with athletes are always like that exact it's like that template yeah so so um so web grid is grid it it's 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 so it's you know pretty straightforward you just click targets only one blue cell appears and you're supposed to move the mouse to there and click on it so I I like playing on like bigger grids cuz it the bigger the grid the like more BPS it's bits per second um that you get every time you click one so I'll say I'll play on like a 35x 35 um grid and then one of those little squares cell call it Target whatever will

light up and you move the cursor there and you click it and then you do that um forever and you've been able to achieve at first eight bits per second and You' recently broke that yeah I'm I'm at 8.5 right now I would have beaten that literally the day before I came to Austin um but I had like a I don't know like a 5-second lag right at the end and um I just had to wait until the latency calm down and then I kept clicking but um I was at like 8.01 and then 5

Seconds of lag and then the next like three targets I clicked all stayed at 8.01 so if I would have been able to click um during that time of lag I probably would have hit I don't know I might have 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 frustrating yeah so that's all you thinking about right now yeah I know I just I just want I want to do better at nine I want to do better

I want to hit nine I think well I know nine is very very achievable I'm right there um I think 10 I could hit maybe in the next month like I could do it probably in the next few weeks if I really push I think you and Elon are basically the same person CU 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 you I could just tell there's some percentage of

his brain in entire time was thinking like I wish I was right now attempting I think he did it that night he did it that night he stayed up and did it that night which is crazy to me I mean it's in a in a in a fundamental way it's really inspiring and what you're doing is inspiring in that way because I mean it's not just about the game everything you're doing there has impact by striving to do well on web grid you're helping everybody figure out how to create the system all 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 like making it fun yeah it's addicting I'm I've joked about um like what they actually did when they went in and put this thing in my brain they must have flipped a switch to make me uh more susceptible to these kinds of games to make me addicted to like web Grid or something yeah do you know bliss's high

score yeah he said like 14 or something 17 oh boy 17.1 or something 177 a01 yeah he told me he like does it on the floor with peanut butter and he like fasts it's it's it's weird it sounds like cheating sounds like performance enhancing uh noan like the first time Nolan uh played this game he asked you know how good are we at this game and I think you told me right then you're going to you're going to try to beat me I'm going to get there someday I think I I fully believe you I

think I can I'm excited for that yeah so I've been playing first off with the dwell cursor which really hampers my web grid playing ability basically I have to wait3 seconds for every click oh so you can't do the click so you have to you have to so you click by dwelling you said three3 seconds which which sucks it really slows down how much I'm able to like how high I'm able to get I still hit like 50 I think I hit like 50 something trials net trials per minute in that um which was pretty

good um because I'm able to like um there's one of the settings is also like how slow you need to be moving in order to initiate a click to start a click so I can tell sort of when I'm on that um 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 time it just right wow so you're slowing down yeah just a just a hair right before the

TS this is like a lead performance okay but that's still it's it sucks that there's a ceiling of the three well there I can get down to 0 2 and 0.1 Point one's what yeah and I've played with that a little bit too um I have to adjust a ton of different parameters in order to play with 0.1 and I don't have control over all that on my end yet it also changes like how the models are trained like if I train a model like in web grid like a bootstrap on a model which basically

is them uh training models as I'm playing web grid um based off of like the web grid data that I'm so like if I play web grid for 10 minutes they can train off that data specifically um in order to get me a better model um if I do that with. 3 versus 0.1 the models come out different um the way that they um interact it's just much much different so I have to be really careful I found that doing it with3 is actually better in some ways unless I can do it with 01 and

change all of the different parameters then that's more ideal cuz obviously point3 is faster than 0.1 so uh I could I could get there I can get there can you click using your brain for right now it's the hover clicking with the dwell cursor um we before all the thread retraction stuff happened we were calibrating clicks left click right click that was um my previous ceiling um before I broke the record again with the dwell cursor was I think on a 35x 35 grid with left and right click and you get more um BPS more

bits per second using multiple clicks because it's more difficult oh because what is it the you get you're supposed to do either a left click or a like right click is it different color like this yeah blue targets for left click orange targets for right click is what they had done so uh my previous record of 7.5 with the blue and the orange targets yeah which um I think if I went back to that now um doing the click calibration I would be able to and being able to like initiate clicks on my own I

think I would break that 10 ceiling like in a couple days max like yeah you'll start making Bliss nervous about his 17 why do you think we haven't given him the EXA exactly uh so what would it feel like with the retractions that there is uh some of the threads retracted that sucked it it was really really hard the day they told me was the day of my big neuralink tour at their Fremont 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 like I went to sleep couple hours later I woke up and here we are um I didn't feel any pain didn't take like any um um pain pills or anything so I just knew that if they wanted to they could go in and put in a new one like next day if that's what it took cuz I just wanted I wanted it to be better and I wanted not to lose the capability I had so much

fun um playing with it for a few weeks for a month I had like it had opened up so many doors for me it had opened up so many more possibilities that I didn't want to lose it after mon 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 uh like I how I saw it was I was just

now starting to climb the mountain and I was it like there was so much more that I knew was possible and so to have all of that be taken away was really really hard um but then on the drive over to the facility I don't know like five minute drive whatever it is um I talked with my parents about it I prayed about it I was just like you know I'm not going to let this ruin my day I'm not going to let this um ruin this amazing like tour that they have set up for

me like I want to go show everyone how much I appreciate all the work they're doing I want to go like meet all of the people who have made this possible and I want to go have one of the best days of my life and I did and it was amazing and it absolutely was one of the best days I've uh ever been privileged to experience and then for a few days uh I was pretty down in the dumps but uh 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 neuralink even if I lost um even if I like lost out on everything to come um if I could keep giving them data in any way then I would do that if I needed to just do um like some the data collection every day or body mapping every day for a year then I would do it um because I know that everything I'm doing helps everyone to come after me and

that's all I wanted I guess the whole reason that I did did this was to help people and I knew that anything I could do to help I would continue to do even if I never got to use the cursor again then you know I was just happy to be a part of it and everything that I 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 well

that said you were able to get to work your way up to get the performance back so this is like going from Rocky one to Rocky two so when did you first realize that this is possible and what gave you sort of the strength the motivation DET determination to do it to increase back up and beat your previous record uh yeah I was within a couple weeks like again this feels like I'm interviewing an athlete this is great I like to thing my parents uh the road the road back was long and hard prob many

difficulties there were Dark Days uh uh it was it was a couple weeks uh I think and then there was just a turning point I think they had switched how um they were measuring um the neuron spikes in my brain like the Bliss help me out uh yeah the way in which we were measuring uh the behavior of individual neurons yeah so we're switching from uh sort of individual Spike detection to something called Spike band power which uh if you watch the previous segments with either me or DJ you probably have some content yeah okay

so when when they did that it was kind of like uh you know light over the head like light bulb moment like oh this works and um this seems like like we can run with this and I saw the um uptick 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 cuz it was before they even told me like everything before this sucked like let's keep doing what

we're doing now and at that point it was not like oh I know I'm still only at like say in web grid terms like four or five BPS compared to my 7.5 before but I know that if we keep doing this then like I can I can get back there and then they gave me the dwell cursor and the dwell cursor sucked at first it's not obviously not what I want but it gave me a path forward to be able to continue using it and um hopefully to continue to help out and so I just

ran with it never looked back like I said I just kind of person I roll with the punches anyways so what was the process what was the feedback loop on the figuring out how to do the spike detection in a way that would actually work well for Noah yeah it's a great question so maybe just to describe first how the actual update worked it basically an update to your implant so we just did an over the a software update to his implant and way you'd update your Tesla or your iPhone and uh that firmware change

enabl us to record sort of averages of populations of neurons nearby individual electrodes so we have uh of less resolution about which individual neuron is doing what but we have a broader picture of what's going on nearby an electrode overall and uh that feedback I mean basically as no one described it was immediate when we flipped that switch uh I think the first day we did that you hit three or four BPS right out of the box and that was a light bul moment for okay this is the right path to go down and from

there there's a lot of feedback around like how to make this useful for independent use so what we about ultimately is that you can use it independently to do whatever you want and uh to get to that point it required us to re-engineer the ux as you talked about the dwell cursor to make it something that you can use independently without us need to be involved all the time and uh yeah this is obviously the start of this journey still hopefully we get back to the places where you're doing multiple clicks and uh using that

to control much more fluidly everything and much more naturally the applications that you're trying to interface with and most importantly get that web grid number up yes yeah so how's the on the hover click do you accidentally click stuff sometimes y like what's how hard is it to avoid accidentally clicking I have to continuously keep it moving basically so like I said there's a threshold where it will initiate a click so if I ever um drop below that it'll start and I have3 seconds to move it before it clicks anything um and if I don't

want it to ever get there I just keep it moving at a certain speed and like just constantly like doing circles on screen screen moving it back and forth to keep it from clicking stuff um I actually noticed uh a couple weeks back that I was when I was not using the implant I was just moving my hand back and forth or in circles like I was trying to keep the cursor from clicking and I was just doing it like while I was trying to go to sleep and I was like okay this is a

problem yeah to avoid the clicking I guess does does that create problems like when you're gaming accidentally click a thing like yeah yeah it happens in chess um I've lost 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 accident click it's a nice excuse right you can always anytime you lose you could just say that was accidental yeah you said the app improved a lot from version one when you first started using it it was very different so can you just

talk about the trial and error that you went through with the team like 200 plus pages of notes like what's that process like of yeah work going back and forth and working together to improve the thing it's a lot of me just using it like day in and day out and saying like hey can you guys do this for me like give me this I want to be able to do that um I need this um I think a lot of it just doesn't occur to them maybe until someone is actually actually using the app

using the implant it's just something that you they just never would have thought of or um it's very specific to even like me maybe what I want it's something I'm a little worried about with the next people that come is you know um maybe they will want things much different than how I've set it up or what the advice I've given the team and they're going to look at some of the things I've they've added for me I'm like that's a dumb idea why would he ask for that um and so I'm really looking forward

to get the next people on because I guarantee that they're going to think of things that I've never thought of and they're going to think of improvements I'm like wow that's a really good idea like I wish I would have thought of that um and then they're also going to give me some push back about like yeah what you are asking them to do here um that's a bad idea let's do it this way and I'm more than happy um to have that happen but it's just a lot of like you know uh different interactions

with different games or applications um the internet just with the computer in general um there's tons of bugs um that end up popping up left right center um so it's just me trying to use it as much as possible and showing them what works and what doesn't work and what I would like to be better and um then they take that feedback and they usually create amazing things for me they solve these problems in ways I would have never imagined uh they're so good at everything they do um and so I'm just really thankful that

I'm able to give them feedback and they can make something of it because a lot of my feedback is like really dumb it's just like I want this please do something about it and they'll come back and 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 links like what what relationship if any would you want to have with them because you said

like they might have a different set of like ideas of how to use the thing uh yeah would you be intimidated by their web grid performance no no I hope compete I hope day one they like wipe the floor with me I hope they beat it um and they crush it you know double it if they can um just because on one hand it's only going to push me to be better um cuz I'm super competitive I want other people to push me um I think that is important for anyone trying to um achieve greatness

is they need other people around them who are going to push them to be better and I even made a joke about it on X once like once the next people get chosen like Q buddy cop music like I'm just excited to have other people to do this with and to like share experiences with I'm more than happy to interact with them as much as they want more than happy to give them advice I don't know what kind of advice I could give them but if they have questions I'm more than happy what advice would

you have for uh the next participant in the clinical trial that they should have fun with this um because it is a lot of fun um and that I hope they work really really hard because it's not just for us it's for everyone that comes after us um and you know come to me if they need anything and to go to nurlink if they need anything man nurlink moves mountains like they do absolutely anything for me that they can and it's an amazing support system to have um it it puts my mind at ease um

for like so many things that I have had like questions about so many things I want to do um and they're always there and that's really really nice um and so I just I would tell them not to be afraid to go to neuralink with any questions that they have any concerns uh anything that you know they're looking to do with this and any help that neuralink is capable of providing I know they will um and I don't know I don't know just work your ass off because it's it's really important that we try to

give our all to this so have fun 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 um maybe it's good to talk about what you have been able to do now that you have a neuralink game plant like the the freedom you gain from this way of interacting with the outside world like you play video games all night and you do that by yourself yeah and that's a kind of Freedom can you speak to

that freedom that you gain yeah it's what all I don't know people in my position I 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 uh without using my family without going through any of my friends um like needing them to help me with things the better um if I'm able to sit up on my computer all night and not need someone to like sit me up uh say like on my iPad like in a position where

I can use it and then have to have them wait up for me all night until I'm ready to be done using it um like that it takes a load off of all of us and it's it's really like all I can ask for um it's something that you know I could never thank nurlink enough for and I know my family feels the same way um you know just being able to have the freedom to do things on my own uh at any hour of the day or night it means the world to me and

um I don't know when you're up at 2 a.m. playing web grid mhm by yourself yeah I just imagine like it's darkness and there just a light glowing and you're just focused what what's going through your mind or you're like in a state of flow where it's like the mind is empty like those like Zen Masters yeah generally it is me playing music of some sort I have a massive playlist and so I'm just like rocking out to music and then it's also just like a Race Against Time because I'm constantly constantly looking at how

much battery percentage I have left on my implant like all right I have 30% which equates to you know x amount of time which means I have to break this record in the next you know hour and a half or else it's not happening tonight um and so it's it's a little stressful when that happens when it's like when it's above 50% I'm like okay like I got time it start getting down to 30 and then 20 it's like all right uh 10% a little pop Up's going to pop up right here and it's going

to really screw my web grid flow it's going to tell me that you know like there's a like the low battery low battery popup comes up and I'm like it's really going to screw me over so if I have to if I'm going to break this record I have to do it in the next like 30 seconds or else that popup is going to get in the way like cover my web grid um and then it after that I go click on it go back into web grid and I'm like all right that means I

have you know 10 minutes left before this thing's dead that's what's going on in my head generally that and whatever song is playing um and I just I just want I want to break those records so bad like it's all I want when I'm playing web grid it it has become less of like oh this is just a leisurely activity like I just enjoy doing this because it just feels so nice and it puts me at ease it is no once I'm in web grid you better break this record or you're going to waste like

5 hours of your life right now and um I don't know it's just fun it's fun man uh have you ever tried web grid with like two Targets and three targets can you get higher BPS with that can you can you do that you mean like different color targets or you being oh multiple targets does that 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 doubling the number of active targets got it so you

know you basically higher BPS the more options there are the more difficult to task and uh there's also like Zen mode you've played in before which is like infinite can covers it covers the whole screen with a grid and um I don't know what yeah and so you can go like that's that's insane yeah he doesn't like it because it didn't show BPS so like you know oh yeah I had them I had them put in a giant BPS in the background so now it's like the opposite of Zen mode it's like it's like super

hard mode like just metal mode if it's just like a giant number in the back C we should name that metal mode is a much better name so you also play Civilization 6 I love Civ six yeah um usually go with Korea I do yeah so the great part about Korea is they um focus on like Science Tech victories which was not planned like I've been playing Korea for years and then all of the nuring stuff happened um so it kind of aligns um but what I've noticed with tech victories is if you can just

rush Tech Rush science um then you can do anything like at one point in the game you will be so far ahead of everyone technologically that you will have like musket men infantrymen planes sometimes and people will still be fighting with like bows and arrows and so if you want to win a domination Victory you just get to a certain point with the science and then go and wipe out the rest of the world or um you can just take science all the way and win that way and you're going to be so far ahead

of everyone because you're producing so much science that it's not even close um I've accidentally won in different ways just by focusing on science accidentally won by focusing on science I was yeah I like I I was playing only science obviously like just science all the way way just Tech and I was trying to get like every Tech in the tech tree and stuff and then I accidentally won through a diplomatic Victory and I was so mad I was so mad uh it because it just like ends the game one turn it was like oh

you won you're so diplomatic I'm like I don't want to do this I should have declared war on more people or something um it was terrible but you don't need like giant civilizations with tech especially with Korea you can keep it pretty small so I generally just you know get to a certain military unit and put them all around my border to keep everyone out and then I will just build up so very isolationist um nice just work on the science and the tech that's it you're making it sound so fun it's so much fun

and I also saw a civilization 7 trailer oh man I'm so pumped and that's probably coming out come on S7 hit me up I'll alpha beta test whatever that'd be wait when does it coming us yeah yeah next year yeah what other stuff would you like to see improved uh about your link app and just the entire experience I would like to like I said get back to the um like click on demand like the regular clicks that would be great uh I would like to be able to connect to more devices right now it's

just the computer I'd like to be able to use it on my phone or use it on different consoles different uh platforms um I'd like to be able to control as much stuff as possible honestly um like an Optimus robot would be pretty cool that would be sick if I could control an Optimus robot uh the link app itself um it seems like we are getting pretty um dialed in to what um it might look like down the road seems like we've gotten through a lot of what I want from it at least the only

other thing I would say is like more control over all the parameters that I um can tweak uh with my like cursor and stuff there's a lot of things that you know go into how the cursor moves in certain ways um and I have I don't know like three or four of those parameters and there might gain and friction all gain friction yeah and there's maybe double the amount of those with just like velocity and then with the actual dwell cursor um so I would like all of it I want as much control over my

environment as POS possible um especially you want like advanced mode you know like in like there's menus usually there basic mode and you're like one of those folks like the power user Advan yeah that's that's that's what I want I want as much control over this as possible um so yeah that's that's really all I can ask for just give me give me everything uh 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 cuz there's also a keyboard so there's a virtual keyboard that's another thing I would like to work more on is finding some way to um type or text in a different way right now it is um like a dictation basically and a virtual keyboard that I can use with the cursor but we've played around with um like finger spelling like sign language finger spelling um and that seems really promising so I have this thought in my head that it's going to be a very similar learning curve that I

had with um the cursor where I went from attempted movement to imagin movement at one point I have a feeling um this is just my intuition that at some point I'm going to be doing finger spelling and I won't need to actually attempt to finger spell anymore that I'll just be able to think the like letter that I want and it'll pop up that would be epic that's challenging that's that's a lot of work for you to kind of take that leap but that would be awesome and then like going from letters to words is

another step like you would go from you know right now it's finger spelling of like just the sign language alphabet but if it's able to pick that up then it should be able to pick up like the whole sign language like language um and so then if I could do something along those lines or just the sign language um spelled word if I can you know spell it at a reasonable speed and it can pick that up then I would just be able to think that through and it would do the same thing I don't

see why not after what I saw with the um with the cursor control I don't see why it wouldn't work but we'd have to play around with it more what was the process in terms of like training yourself to go from attempted movement to imagine movement how long did 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 could make it happen with other things I think it would be

much much simpler would you get an upgraded implant device sure absolutely whenever whenever they'll let me uh so you don't have any concerns for you the surge your experience all of it was um like no regrets no so everything's been good so far yep you just keep getting upgrades yeah I mean why not I've seen how much it's impacted my life already and I know that everything from here on out it's just going to get better and better so um I would love to I would love to get the upgrade what uh future capabilities are

you excited about sort of Beyond this kind of uh telepathy is Vision interesting so for folks who for example who are blind so you're like enabling people to see or or for speech yeah there's a lot that's very very cool about this I mean we're talking about the brain so there's like this is just motor cortex stuff there's so much more that can be done the vision one is fascinating to me I think that is going to be very very cool to give someone the ability to see for the first time in their life would

just be I mean it it might be more amazing than even helping someone like me like that just sounds incredible um the speech thing is really interesting being able to have some sort of like real time translation and um cut away that language barrier would be really cool um any sort of like actual impairment um that it could solve like with speech would be very very cool and then also there are a lot of different disabilities that all originate in the brain and you would be able to hopefully be able to solve a lot of

those um I know there's already stuff to help people with seizures um that can be implanted in the brain this would do I imagine the same thing and so you could do something like that I know that you know even someone like Joe Rogan has talked about uh the possibilities with being able to um stimulate the brain in different ways um I'm not sure I'm not sure what you know like how ethical a lot of that would be that's beyond me honestly but I know that there is a lot that can be done when we're

talking about the brain and being able to go in and physically make changes to help people or to improve their lives so I'm really looking forward to everything that comes from this and I don't think it's all that far off um I think a lot of this can be implemented within my lifetime um assuming that I live a long life what you were referring to is things like people suffering from depression or things of that nature potentially getting help yeah flip a switch like that make someone happy um I know I think Joe is talked

about it more in terms of like you want to experience like what a drug trip feel feel like like you want to experience what be like to be on yeah mushrooms or something like that DMT like you can just flip that switch in the brain uh my buddy Bane has talked about being able to like wipe parts of your memory and re-experience things that like for the first time like your favorite movie or your favorite book like just wipe that out real quick and then refall in love with Harry Potter or something um I told

them I was like I don't know how I feel about like people being able to just wipe parts of your memory um that seems a little sketchy to me he's like they're already doing it so sounds legit uh I would love memory replay just like actually like high resolution replay of all memories yeah I saw an episode of Black Mirror about that once I don't think I want it yeah so Black Mirror 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 we love drama yeah it's like how is this new technology going to kill everybody we just love that 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 yeah I assume you're going to have to take over the world I mean you're I love your Twitter you uh you tweeted I'd like to make jokes about hearing voices in my head since getting the neur link but I feel

like people would take it the wrong way plus the voices in my head told me not to yeah yeah yeah please never stop so you're talking about Optimus um is that something uh you would love to be able to do to control the robotic arm or the entirety of Optimus oh yeah for sure for sure absolutely you think there's something like fundamentally different about just being able to physically interact with the world yeah oh 100% um um this I I know another thing with like being able to like give people the ability to like feel

sensation and stuff too by going in with the brain and having the Nur link maybe do that that could be something that um could be translated through transferred through the Optimus as well like there's all sorts of really cool um interplay between that and then also like you said just physically interacting I mean 99% of the things that I can't do myself um obviously need I need a caretaker for someone to physically do things for me if an Optimus robot could do that like I could live an incredibly independent life and not be such a

burden on those around me um and that would it would change the way people like me live um at least until whatever this is gets cured um but being able to interact with the world physically like that would just be amazing um and and there not just like for being for having it be a caretaker or something but something like I talked about just being able to read a book imagine an Optimus robot just being able to hold a book open in front of me like get that smell again I might not be able to

feel it at that point um or maybe I could again with the sensation and stuff but being there's something different about reading like a physical book than staring at a screen or listening to an Audi book I actually don't like audiobooks I've listened to a ton of them at this point but I don't really like them um I would much rather like read a physical copy so one of the things you would love to be able to experience is opening the book bringing it up to you yeah and to feel the touch of the paper

yeah oh man the touch the smell I mean it's just like just something about the words on the page and you know they've they've replicated you know that page color on like the Kindle and stuff yeah it's just not the same yeah so just something as simple as that so one of the things you miss is touch I do yeah a lot of a lot of things that I interact with in the world like clothes or literally any physical thing that I interact with in the world a lot of times what people around 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 uh it it is it's something that I miss a lot um and something I would love to do again but we'll see what would be the first thing you do with a with a hand that can touch give your mom a hug after that right yeah yeah I know that's it's one thing

that I've that I've asked um like God for basically every day since uh my accident was just being able to like one day move even if it was only like my hand so that way like I could squeeze my mom's hand or something just to like show her that you know like how much I care and how much I love her and everything um so along those lines um being able to just interact with the people around me handshake give someone a hug um I don't know anything like that being able to help me eat

like I'd probably get really fat um which would be a terrible terrible thing uh also beat Bliss and chess on a physical chess board yeah yeah I mean there are just so many upsides you know and any any way to find some way to feel like I'm bringing Bliss down to my level yeah because yeah um he's just such an amazing guy and everything about him is just so above and beyond um that anything I can do to take him down a notch I'm happy yeah yeah humble him a bit he needs it yeah okay

as he's sitting next to me uh did you ever make sense of why God puts good people through such hardship oh man um I think it's all about understanding how much we need God and I don't think that there's any light without the dark I think that if all of us were happy all the time um there would be you know no reason to turn to God ever I feel like there would be no concept of you know good or bad and think that as much of like the darkness and the evil that's in the

world it makes us all appreciate the good and the things we have so much more and I think you know like when I had my accident the first one of the first things I said to one of my best friends was and this was within like the first month or two after my accident I said you know everything about this accident has just made me understand and believe that like God is real and and that there really is a god basically and that um 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 um but I believe that it is it is a way for God to test us to build our character to um um send us through trials and tribulations to make sure that we understand um how precious you know he is and the things that he's given us and the time that he's given us and then um to hopefully grow from all of that um I think that's a huge part of being

here is to um not just you know have an easy life and do everything that's easy but to step out of our comfort zones and really challenge ourselves uh because I think that's how we grow what gives you hope about this whole thing we have going on hum civilization oh man um I think people are my biggest uh inspiration even just being at nurlink um for a few months looking people in the eyes and hearing their motivations for why they're doing this it's it's so inspiring and I know that they could be other places um

at cushier jobs um working somewhere else doing XY wi Z that doesn't really mean that much um but instead they're here and they want to better humanity and they want to better just the people around them the people that they've interacted with in their life they want to make better lives for their own family members who might have disabilities or they look at someone like me and they say you know I can do something about that so I'm going to and it's always been what I've connected with most in the world are people I'm I've

always been a people person and I love learning about people and I love learning like how people developed and where they came from and to see like how much people are willing to do for someone like me when they don't have to and they're going out of their way to make my life better it gives me a lot of Hope for just Humanity in general how much how much we care and how much we're capable of when we all kind of get together and try to make a difference and I know there's a lot of

bad out there in the world but there always has been and there always will be um and I think that that is it shows human resiliency and it shows what we're wble what we're able to endure and how much how much we just want to be there and help each other and how much satisfaction we get from that because I think that's one of the reasons that we're here is just to help each other and um I don't know that that always gives me hope is just realizing that there are people out there who still

care and who want to help and thank you for being one such human being and continuing to be a great human being through everything you've been through and being an inspiration to many people to myself for many reasons including your epic unbelievably great performance on web grid I will be training all night tonight to try to try to catch up you can do it and I believe in you that you can uh once you come back so sorry to interrupt with the Austin trip once you come back I eventually beat Bliss yeah yeah for sure

absolutely I'm rooting for you the the whole world is rooting for you thank you for everything you've done man thanks thanks man thanks for listening to this conversation with Nolan arbaugh and before that with Elon Musk DJ saw Matthew McDougall 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 Aldis 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 try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self Transcendence in vain but its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy its Solitude Sensations feelings insights fancies all these are private and accept through symbols and at secondhand incommunicable we can pull information about experiences but never the experiences themselves from family to Nation every human group is a society of Island universes thank you for listening and hope to see you next time