The following is a conversation with Brian Johnson, founder of Colonel, a company that

has developed devices that can monitor and record brain activity.

And previously, he was the founder of BrainTree, a mobile payment company that acquired Venmo

and then was acquired by PayPal and eBay.

Quick mention of our sponsors, ForSigmatic, NetSuite, Grammarly, and ExpressVPN.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that this was a fun and memorable experience, wearing the

kernel flow brain interface in the beginning of this conversation, as you can see if you

watched the video version of this episode.

And there's a Ubuntu Linux machine sitting next to me collecting the data from my brain.

The whole thing gave me hope that the mystery of the human mind will be unlocked in the

coming decades, as we begin to measure signals from the brain in a high bandwidth way.

To understand the mind, we either have to build it or to measure it.

Both are worth a try.

Thanks to Brian and the rest of the kernel team for making this little demo happen.

This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Brian Johnson.

You ready, Lex?

Yes, I'm ready.

Do you guys want to come in and put the interfaces on our heads?

And then I will proceed to tell you a few jokes.

So we have two incredible pieces of technology and a machine running Ubuntu 20.04 in front

of us.

What are we doing?

All right.

Are these going on our heads?

They're going on our heads, yeah.

And they will place it on our heads for proper alignment.

Does this support giant heads?

Because I kind of have a giant head.

Is this just giant heads?

As like an ego or are you saying physically both?

It's a nice massage.

Yes.

Okay, how does this feel?

It's okay to move around?

It feels, oh yeah.

This feels awesome.

It's a pretty good fit.

Thank you.

That feels good.

So this is big head friendly.

It suits you well, Lex.

Thank you.

I feel like I need to, I feel like when I wear this, I need to sound like Sam Harris.

Calm, collected, eloquent.

I feel smarter actually.

I don't think I've ever felt quite as much like I'm part of the future as now.

Have you ever worn a brain interface or had your brain imaged?

Oh, never had my brain imaged.

The only way I've analyzed my brain is by talking to myself and thinking.

No direct data.

Yeah.

That is definitely a brain interface that has a lot of blind spots.

It has some blind spots, yeah.

Psychotherapy.

That's right.

All right.

Are we recording?

Yeah.

We're good.

All right.

So, Lex, the objective of this, I'm going to tell you some jokes and your objective

is to not smile, which as a Russian, you should have an edge.

Make the mother line proud.

I got you.

Okay.

Let's hear the jokes.

Lex, and this is from the Colonel crew.

We've been working on a device that can read your mind and we would love to see your thoughts.

Is that the joke?

That's the opening.

Okay.

If I'm seeing the muscle activation correctly on your lips, you're not going to do well

on this.

Let's see.

All right.

Here comes the first one.

I'm screwed.

Here comes the first one.

Is this going to break the device?

Is it resilient to laughter?

Lex, what goes through a potato's brain?

I got really failed.

That's the hilarious opener.

Okay.

What?

Tater thoughts.

What kind of fish performs brain surgery?

I don't know.

A neural surgeon.

Okay.

And so we're getting data of everything that's happening in my brain right now?

Lifetime.

Yeah.

We're getting activation patterns of your entire cortex.

I'm going to try to do better.

I'll edit out all the parts where I left in Photoshop.

You have a serious face over me.

You can recover.

Yeah.

All right.

Lex, what do scholars eat when they're hungry?

I don't know what.

Yeah, nuts.

That's pretty good.

So what we'll do is, so you're wearing kernel flow, which is an interface built using technology

called spectroscopy.

So it's similar to what we wear wearables on the wrist using light.

So using light as you know.

And we're using that to image the functional imaging of brain activity.

And so as your neurons fire, electrically and chemically, it creates blood oxygenation

levels.

We're measuring that.

And so when you'll see in the reconstructions we do for you, you'll see your activation

patterns on your brain as throughout this entire time we are wearing it.

So in the reaction to the jokes and as we were sitting here talking, and so it's a, we're

moving towards a real time feed of your cortical brain activity.

So there's a bunch of things that are in contact with my skull right now.

How many of them are there?

And so how many of them are, what are they?

What are the actual sensors?

There's 52 modules and each module has one laser and six sensors.

And they're the sensors fire in about 100 picoseconds.

And then the photons scatter and absorb in your brain and then a few go in, a few come

back out, a bunch go in, then a few come back out and we sense those photons and then we

do the reconstruction for the activity.

Overall there's about a thousand plus channels that are sampling your activity.

How difficult is it to make it as comfortable as it is?

Because it's surprisingly comfortable.

I would not think it would be comfortable.

Yeah, it's measuring brain activity, I would not think it would be comfortable, but it

is.

I agree.

In fact, I want to take this home.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

So people are accustomed to being in big systems like fMRI where there's 120 decibels

sounds and you're in a claustrophobic encasement or EEG which is just painful or surgery.

And so yes, I agree that this is a convenient option to be able to just put on your head

and measure your brain activity in the contextual environment you choose.

So if we want to have it during a podcast or if we want to be at home in a business

setting, it's freedom to be aware, to record your brain activity in the setting that you

choose.

Yeah, but sort of from an engineering perspective, are these, what is it, there's a bunch of

different modular parts and there's like a rubber band thing where they mold to the

shape of your head.

That's right.

So we built this, this version of the mechanical design to accommodate most adult heads.

But I have a giant head and it fits fine.

It fits well actually.

So I don't think I have an average head.

Okay, maybe I feel much better about my head now.

Maybe I'm more average than I thought.

Okay, so what else is there, interesting you could say while it's on our heads.

I can keep this on the whole time.

This is kind of awesome.

And it's amazing for me as a fan of Ubuntu, I use Ubuntu Mate, you guys should use that

too.

But it's amazing to have code running to the side measuring stuff and collecting data.

I mean, I just, I feel like much more important now that my data is being recorded.

Like somebody care, like, you know, when you have a good friend that listens to you that

actually like listens, like actually is listening to you, this is what I feel like, like a much

better friend because it's like accurately listening to me, Ubuntu.

What a cool perspective.

I hadn't thought about that of feeling understood, heard deeply by the mechanical system that

is recording your brain activity versus the human that you're engaging with, that your

mind immediately goes to that there's this dimensionality in depth of understanding of

this software system, which you're intimately familiar with.

And now you're able to communicate with this system in ways that you couldn't before.

Yeah, I feel heard.

Yeah, I mean, I guess what's interesting about this is your intuitions are spot on.

Most people have intuitions about brainer faces that they've grown up with this idea

of people moving cursors on the screen or typing or changing the channel or skipping

a song.

It's primarily been anchored on control.

And I think the more relevant understanding of brain interfaces or neural imaging is that

it's a measurement system.

And once you have numbers for a given thing, a seemingly endless number of possibilities

emerge around that of what to do with those numbers.

So before you tell me about the possibilities, this was an incredible experience.

I can keep this on for another two hours, but I'm being told that for a bunch of reasons,

just because we probably want to keep the data small and visualize it nicely for the

final product, we want to cut this off and take this take this amazing helmet away from

me.

So, Brian, thank you so much for this experience.

And let's let's continue without helmet lists.

All right.

So that was an incredible experience.

Can you maybe speak to what kind of opportunities that opens up that stream of data, that rich

stream of data from the brain?

First, I'm curious, what is your reaction?

What comes to mind when you put that on your head?

What does it mean to you?

And what possibilities emerge?

And what significance might it have?

I'm curious where your orientation is at.

Well, for me, I'm really excited by the possibility of various information about my body, about

my mind being converted into data such that data can be used to create products that make

my life better.

So that to me is really exciting possibility.

Even just like a Fitbit that measures, I don't know, some very basic measurements about

your body is really cool.

But it's the bandwidth of information, the resolution of that information is very crude.

So it's not very interesting.

The possibility of recording, of just building a data set coming in a clean way and a high

bandwidth way from my brain opens up all kinds of, you know, at the very, I was kind of joking

when we're talking, but it's not really is like, I feel heard in the sense that it feels

like the full richness of the information coming from my mind is actually being recorded

by the machine.

I mean, there's a, I can't, I can't quite put it into words, but there is a genuinely

for me, there's not some kind of joke about me being a robot is just genuinely feels like

I'm being heard in a way that that's going to improve my life as long as the thing that's

on the other end can do something useful with that data.

But even the recording itself is like, once you record, it's like taking a picture.

That moment is forever saved in time.

Now picture cannot allow you to step back into that world, but perhaps recording your

brain is a much higher resolution thing, much more personal recording of that information

than a picture that would allow you to step back into that, where you were in that particular

moment in history and then map out a certain trajectory to tell you certain things about,

about yourself that could open up all kinds of applications.

Of course, there's health that I consider, but honestly, to me, the exciting thing is

just being heard.

My state of mind, the level of focus, all those kinds of things being heard.

What I heard you say is you have an entirety of lived experience, some of which you can

communicate in words and in body language, some of which you feel internally, which cannot

be captured in those communication modalities and that this measurement system captures

both the things you can try to articulate in words, maybe in a lower dimensional space

using one word, for example, to communicate focus when it really may be represented in

a 20 dimensional space of this particular kind of focus and that this information is

being captured.

It's a closer representation to the entirety of your experience captured in a dynamic fashion

that is not just a static image of your conscious experience.

Yeah, that's the promise, that's the hope, that was the feeling and it felt like the

future.

So it was a pretty cool experience.

And from the sort of mechanical perspective, it was cool to have an actual device that

feels pretty good, that doesn't require me to go into the lab.

And also the other thing I was feeling, there's a guy named Andrew Huberman, he's a friend

of mine, amazing podcast, people should listen to a Huberman Lab podcast.

We're working on a paper together about eye movement and so on.

And we're kind of, he's a neuroscientist and I'm a data person, I'm a machine learning

person and we're both excited by how much the data measurements of the human mind, the

brain and all the different metrics that come from that can be used to understand human

beings and in a rigorous scientific way.

So the other thing I was thinking about is how this could be turned into a tool for science.

Sort of not just personal science, not just like Fitbit style, like how am I doing my

personal metrics of health, but doing larger scale studies of human behavior and so on.

So like data, not at the scale of an individual, but data at a scale of many individuals, large

number of individuals.

So it's personal being heard was exciting and also just for science is exciting.

Cause it's very easy, like there's a very powerful thing to it being so easy to just

put on that you can scale much easier.

If you think about that second thing you said about the science of the brain, most, we've

done a pretty good job, like we, the human race has done a pretty good job, figuring

out how to quantify the things around us from distant stars to calories and steps and our

genome.

So we can measure and quantify pretty much everything in the known universe except for

our minds.

And we can do these one offs if we're going to get an fMRI scan or do something with the

low res EEG system, but we haven't done this at population scale.

And so if you think about human thought or human cognition is probably the single law,

largest raw input material into society at any given moment.

It's our conversations with our, with ourselves and with other people.

And we have this, this raw input that we can't, haven't been able to measure yet.

And if you, when I think about it through that frame, it's remarkable, it's almost

like we live in this wild, wild West of unquantified communications within ourselves and between

each other when everything else has been grounded me.

For example, I know if I buy an appliance at the, at the store or on a website, I don't

need to look at the measurements on the appliance to make sure it can fit through my door.

It's an engineered system of appliance manufacturing and construction.

Everyone's agreed upon engineering standards.

And we don't have engineering standards around cognition.

It's not a, it has not entered as a formal engineering discipline that enables us to

scaffold in society with everything else we're doing, including consuming news, our relationships,

politics, economics, education, all the above.

And so to me that the most significant contribution that kernel technology has to offer would

be the formal, the introduction of the formal engineering of cognition as it relates to

everything else in society.

I love that idea that you kind of think that there is just this ocean of data that's coming

from people's brains as being in a crude way reduced down to like tweets and texts and

so on.

So it's a very hard core, many scale compression of actual, the raw data.

But maybe you can comment because you're using the word cognition.

I think the first step is to get the brain data.

But is there a leap to be taking to sort of interpreting that data in terms of cognition?

So is your, is your idea is basically you need to start collecting data at scale from

the brain and then we start to really be able to take little steps along the path to actually

measuring some deep sense of cognition because it's, you know, as I'm sure you know, we don't,

we understand a few things, but we don't understand most of what makes up cognition.

This has been one of the most significant challenges of building kernel and kernel wouldn't exist

if I wasn't able to fund it initially about myself because when I engage in conversations

with investors, the immediate thought is what is the killer app?

And of course, I understand that heuristic, that's what they're looking at is they're

looking to de risk.

Is the product solved?

Is there a customer base?

Are people willing to pay for it?

How does it compare to competing options?

And in the case with brain interfaces, when I started the company, there was no known

path to even build a technology that could potentially become mainstream.

And then once we figured out the technology, we could even we could commence having conversations

with investors and it became what is the killer app?

And so what has been, so I funded the first $53 million for the company.

And to raise the round of funding, the first one we did, I spoke to 228 investors.

One said yes.

It was remarkable and it was mostly around this concept around what is a killer app?

And so internally, the way we think about it is we think of the the go to market strategy

much more like the Drake equation, where if we can build technology that has the characteristics

of it has the data quality is high enough, it meets some certain threshold, cost, accessibility,

comfort, it can be worn in contextual environments, it meets the criteria of being a mass market

device, then the responsibility that we have is to figure out how to create the algorithm

that enables the human to enable humans to then find value with it.

So it's so the analogy is like brain interfaces are like early 90s of the Internet is you

want to populate an ecosystem with a certain number of devices, you want a certain number

of people who play around with them who do experiments of certain data collection parameters,

you want to encourage certain mistakes from experts and non experts.

These are all critical elements that ignite discovery.

And so we believe we've accomplished the first objective of building technology that reaches

those thresholds.

And now it's the Drake equation component of how do we try to generate 20 years of value

discovery in a two or three year time period, how do we compress that?

So just to clarify, so when you mean the Drake equation, which for people who don't

know, I don't know why you if you listen to this, I bring up aliens every single conversation.

So I don't know how you wouldn't know what the Drake equation is, but you mean like the

killer app, it would be one alien civilization at equations, meaning like, this is in search

of an application that's impactful transformative, by the way, it should be a we need to come

up with a better term and killer app as it's also violent, right?

You can go like viral app, that's horrible to write some very inspiringly impactful application.

How about that?

No.

Yeah.

Okay, so bullets stick with killer app.

That's fine.

Okay.

So what do you do?

I dislike the chosen words in capturing the concept.

You know, it's one of those sticky things that is as effective to use in the tech world,

but when you're now become a communicator outside of the tech world, especially when

you're talking about software and hardware and artificial intelligence applications,

it sounds horrible.

Yeah, no, it's interesting.

I actually regret now having called attention to, I regret having used that word in this

conversation because it's something I would not normally do, I used it in order to create

a bridge of shared understanding of how others would, what terminology others would use.

Yeah.

But yeah, I concur.

Let's go with impactful application or value creation, value creation, something people

love using.

There we go.

That's it.

Love app.

Okay.

So what do you have any ideas?

So basically creating a framework where there's the possibility of a discovery of an application

that people love using, is do you have ideas?

We've begun to play a fun game internally where when we have these discussions, we begin circling

around this concept of does anybody have an idea?

Does anyone have intuitions?

And if we see the conversation starting to veer in that direction, we flag it and say

human intuition alert, stop it.

And so we really want to focus on the algorithm of there's a natural process of human discovery

that when you populate a system with devices and you give people the opportunity to play

around with it in expected and unexpected ways, we are thinking that is a much better

system of discovery than us exercising intuitions.

And it's interesting, we're also seeing a few neural scientists who have been talking

to us where I was speaking to one young associate professor and I approached the conversation

and said, hey, we have these five data streams that we're pulling off.

When you hear that, what weighted value do you add to each data source?

Which one do you think is going to be valuable for your objectives and which one's not?

And he said, I don't care, just give me the data.

All I care about is my machine learning model.

But importantly, he did not have a theory of mind.

He did not come to the table and say, I think the brain operates in this way and these

reasons have these functions.

He didn't care.

He just wanted the data.

And we're seeing that more and more that certain people are devaluing human intuitions for

good reasons as we've seen in machine learning over the past couple of years.

And we're doing the same in our value creation market strategy.

So collect more data, clean data, make the products such that the collection of data

is easy and fun, and then the rest will just spring to life through humans playing around

with it.

Our objective is to create the most valuable data collection system of the brain ever.

And with that, then apply all the best tools of machine learning and other techniques to

extract out, you know, to try to find insight.

But yes, our objective is really to systematize the discovery process because we can't put

definite timeframes on discovery.

The brain is complicated and science is not a business strategy.

And so we really need to figure out how to, this is the difficulty of bringing technology

like this to market.

And it's why most of the time it just languishes in academia for quite some time.

But we hope that we will cross over and make this mainstream in the coming years.

The thing was cool to wear.

But are you chasing a good reason for millions of people to put this on their head and keep

on their head regularly?

Is there like who's going to discover that reason?

Is it going to be people just kind of organically, or is there going to be angry bird style application

that's just too exciting to not use?

If I think through the things that have changed my life most significantly over the past few

years when I started wearing a wearable on my wrist that would give me data about my

heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, metabolic approximations, et cetera.

For the first time in my life, I had access to information sleep patterns that were highly

impactful.

They told me, for example, if I eat close to bedtime, I'm not going to get deep sleep.

And not getting deep sleep means you have all these follow on consequences in life.

And so it opened up this window of understanding of myself that I cannot self introspect and

deduce these things.

This is information that was available to be acquired, but it just wasn't.

I would have to get an expensive sleep study, then it's an one night, and that's not good

enough to run all my trials.

And so if you look just at the information that one can acquire on their wrist, and now

you're planted to the entire cortex on the brain, and you say, what kind of information

could we acquire?

It opens up a whole new universe of possibilities.

For example, we did this internal study at Kernel where I wore a prototype device and

we were measuring the cognitive effects of sleep.

So I had a device measuring my sleep.

I performed with 13 of my coworkers.

We performed four cognitive tasks over 13 sessions.

And we focused on reaction time, impulse control, short term memory, and then arresting state

tasks.

And with mine, we found, for example, that my impulse control was independently correlated

with my sleep outside of behavioral measures of my ability to play the game.

The point of the study was I had the brain study I did at Kernel confirmed my life experience

that if my deep sleep determined whether or not I would be able to resist temptation the

following day, and my brain did it show that as one example.

And so if you start thinking, if you actually have data on yourself on your entire cortex

and you can control the settings, I think there's probably a large number of things

that we could discover about ourselves, very, very small and very, very big.

And just for example, like when you read news, what's going on?

Like when you use social media, when you use news, like all the ways we allocate attention

with the computer.

That's right.

I mean, that seems like a compelling place to where you would want to put on Kernel.

By the way, what is it called?

Kernel flux?

Kernel?

Like what?

Flow.

We have two technologies.

You wore flow.

Flow.

Okay.

If you look at the kernel flow, it seems like to be a compelling time and place to do it

is when you're behind a desk, behind a computer, because you could probably wear it for prolonged

periods of time as you're taking in content.

And there could be a lot of, because so much of our lives happens in the digital world

now, that kind of coupling the information about the human mind with the consumption

and the behaviors in the digital world might give us a lot of information about the effects

of the way we behave and navigate the digital world to the actual physical meat space effects

on our body.

It's interesting to think this certain terms of both like for work, I'm a big fan of Cal

Newport, his ideas of deep work that I spend with few exceptions, I try to spend the first

two hours of every day, usually if I'm like at home and have nothing on my schedule is

going to be up to eight hours of deep work of focus, zero distraction.

And for me to analyze the, I mean, I'm very aware of the, the waning of that the ups and

downs of that.

And it's almost like you, you're surfing the ups and downs of that as you're doing programming,

as you're doing thinking about particular problems, you're trying to visualize things

in your mind, you're just trying to stitch them together.

You're trying to, when there's a dead end about an idea, you have to kind of calmly

like walk back and start again, all those kinds of processes, it'd be interesting to

get data on what my mind is actually doing.

And also recently started doing, I just talked to Sam Harris a few days ago and been building

up to that.

He started using, started meditating, using his app, waking up, very much recommend it.

And it'd be interesting to get data on that because it's, you're very, it's like, you're

removing all the noise from your head and you very much, it's an active process of active

noise removal, active noise canceling like the headphones.

And it'd be interesting to see what is going on in the mind before the meditation, during

it and after all those kinds of things.

And all of your examples, it's interesting that everyone who's designed an experience

for you, so whether it be the meditation app or the deep work or all the things you mentioned,

they constructed this product with a certain number of knowns.

Now, what if we expand to the number of knowns by 10X or 20X or 30X, they would reconstruct

their product, quote, incorporate those knowns.

So it'd be, and so this is the dimensionality that I think is the promising aspect is that

people will be able to use this quantification, use this information to build more effective

products.

And this is, I'm not talking about better products to advertise to you or manipulate

you.

I'm talking about our focus is helping people, individuals have this contextual awareness

and this quantification and then to engage with others who are seeking to improve people's

lives that the objective is, is betterment across ourselves individually and also with

each other.

Yeah.

So it's a nice data stream to have if you're building an app, like if you're building a

podcast listening app, it would be nice to know data about the listener so that like

if you're bored or you fell asleep, maybe pause the podcast.

Yeah.

It's like really dumb, just very simple applications that could just improve the quality of the

experience of using the app.

Kind of imagining if you have your neurom, this is Lex and there's a statistical representation

of you and you engage with the app and it says, Lex, you're best to engage with this

meditation exercise in the following settings at this time of day after eating this kind

of food or not eating fasting with this level of blood glucose and this kind of night sleep.

And all these data combined to give you this contextually relevant experience just like

we do with our sleep.

You've optimized your entire life based upon what information you can acquire and know

about yourself.

And so the question is, how much do we really know of the things going around us?

And I would venture to guess in my life experience, I capture my self awareness captures an extremely

small percent of the things that actually influence my conscious and unconscious experience.

Well, in some sense, the data would help encourage you to be more self aware, not just because

you trust everything the data is saying, but is it'll give you a prod to start investigating.

Like I'd love to get a rating, like a ranking of all the things I do and what are the things

that's probably important to do without the data, but the data will certainly help is

like rank all the things you do in life and which ones make you feel shitty, which ones

make you feel good.

Like you're talking about evening, Brian, like this is a good example, somebody like,

I do pig out at night as well.

And it never makes you feel good.

Like you're in a safe space.

This is a safe space.

Let's hear it.

You know, I definitely have much less self control at night.

It's interesting.

And the same, you know, people might criticize this, but I know my own body.

I know when I eat carnivore, just eat meat, I feel much better than if I eat more carbs.

The more carbs I eat, the worse I feel.

I don't know why that is.

There is science supporting, but I'm not leading on science.

I'm leading on personal experience.

And that's really important.

I don't need to read, I'm not going to go in a whole rant about nutrition science,

but many of those studies are very flawed.

They're doing their best, but nutrition science is a very difficult field of study because

humans are so different.

And the mind has so much impact on the way your body behaves.

And it's so difficult from a scientific perspective to conduct really strong studies that you

have to be almost like a scientist of one, you have to do these studies on yourself.

That's the best way to understand what works for you and not.

And I don't understand why, because it sounds unhealthy, but eating only meat always makes

me feel good.

Just eat meat.

That's it.

And I don't have any allergies, any of that kind of stuff.

I'm not full like Jordan Peterson, where like, if he like deviates a little bit, that he

goes off, like deviates a little bit from the carnivore diet, he goes off like the cliff.

No, I can, I can have like chalk, I can, I can go off the diet, I feel fine.

It's not, it's a, it's a gradual, uh, uh, it's a gradual worsening of how I feel.

But when I eat only meat, I feel great.

And it'd be nice to be reminded of that.

Like it's a very simple fact that I feel good when I eat carnivore.

And I think that repeats itself in all kinds of experiences.

Like I feel really good, uh, when I exercise, not I hate exercise, okay.

But in the rest of the day, the, the, uh, the impact it has on my mind, on the clarity

of mind, on the experiences and the happiness and all those kinds of things, I feel really

good.

And to be able to concretely express that through data would be, would be nice.

It would be a nice reminder, almost like a statement, like remember what feels good

and whatnot.

And there could be things like, uh, that I'm not, many things like just, you're suggesting

that I could not be aware of, there might be sitting right in front of me that, uh,

make me feel really good and make me feel not good.

And the data would show that.

I agree with you.

I've actually employed the same strategy.

I, I fired my mind entirely from being responsible for constructing my diet.

And so I started doing a program where I now track over 200 biomarkers every 90 days.

And it captures of course the things you would expect like cholesterol, but also DNA methylation

and all kinds of things that, uh, about my body, all the processes that make up me.

And then I let that data generate the shopping list.

And so I never actually asked my mind what it wants.

It's entirely what my body is reporting that it wants.

And so I call this goal alignment within Brian.

And there's 200 plus actors that I'm currently asking their opinion of.

And so I'm asking my liver, how are you doing?

And it's expressing via the biomarkers.

And so that I construct that diet and I only eat those foods until my next testing round.

And that has changed my life more than I think anything else.

Because in the demotion of my conscious mind that I gave primacy to my entire life, it

led me astray because like you're saying, the mind then goes out into the world and

it navigates the dozens of different dietary regimens people put together in books.

And it's all has their, all has their supporting science in certain contextual settings, but

it's not end of one.

And like you're saying, this dietary really is an end of one.

These, what people have published scientifically, of course, can be used, uh, for nice groundings,

but it changes when you get to an end of one level.

And so that's what gets me excited about brainer faces is if you, if I could do the same thing

for my brain where I can stop asking my conscious mind for its advice or for its decision making,

which is flawed, and I'd rather just look at this data that, and I've never had better

health markers in my life than when I stopped actually asking myself to be in charge of

it.

And the idea of, uh, demotion of the conscious mind is, uh, is such a sort of engineering

way of phrasing like meditation with, what they, that's what we're doing, right?

Yeah.

That's beautiful.

That means really beautifully put a, uh, by the way, testing round, what does that look

like?

What's that?

Well, you mentioned, uh, yeah, the, the very, the tests I do.

Yes.

So includes, uh, a complete blood panel, I do a microbiome test.

I do a food inflammation, uh, a diet induced inflammation.

So I look for Xatokine expressions.

So foods that produce inflammatory reactions.

I look at my neuroendocrine systems.

I look at all my neurotransmitters, uh, I do, uh, yeah, there's several micronutrient

tests to see how I'm looking at the very, very nutrients.

What about like self report of like how you feel, you know, almost like, uh, you can't

demote your con, you still exist within your conscious mind, right?

So that, that lived experience of, is of a lot of value.

So how do you measure that?

I do a temporal sampling over some duration of time.

So I'll think through how I feel over a week, over a month, over three months.

I don't do a temporal sampling of if I'm at the grocery store in front of a cereal box

and be like, you know what, captain crunch is probably the right thing for me today.

Cause I'm feeling like I need a little fun in my life.

Yeah.

And so it's a temporal sampling.

If the data sets large enough, then I, I smooth out the function of my natural oscillations

of how I feel about life where some days I may feel upset or depressed or down or whatever.

And I don't want those moments to then rule my decision making.

That's why the demotion happens.

And it says really, if you're looking at health over a 90 day period of time, all my 200 voices

speak up on the interval and they're all given voice to say, this is how I'm doing and this

is what I want.

And so it really is an accounting system for everybody.

So that's why I think that if you think about the future of being human, there's two things

I think that are really going on.

One is the design, manufacturing and distribution of intelligence is heading towards zero kind

of cost curve over, over a certain design, over a certain timeframe, but our ability

to, you know, evolution produced us an intelligent form of intelligence.

We are now designing our own intelligence systems and the design, manufacturing, distribution

of that intelligence over a certain timeframe is going to go to a cost of zero design, manufacture

distribution of intelligent costs is going to zero.

For example, just give me a second.

That's brilliant.

Okay.

And evolution is doing the design, manufacturing, distribution of intelligence and now we are

doing the design, manufacturing, distribution of intelligence and the cost of that is going

to zero.

That's a very nice way of looking at life on earth.

So if that, that's going on and then now in parallel to that, then you say, okay, what,

what then happens if when that cost curve is heading to zero, our existence becomes

a goal alignment problem, a goal alignment function.

And so the same thing I'm doing where I'm doing goal alignment within myself of these

200 biomarkers where I'm saying when, when Brian exists on a database and this entity

is deciding what to eat and what to do and et cetera, it's not just my conscious mind

which is opining.

It's 200 biological processes and there's a whole bunch of more voices involved.

So in that equation, we're going to increasingly automate the things that we spend high energy

on today because it's easier and now we're going to then negotiate the terms and conditions

of intelligent life.

Now we say conscious existence because we're biased because that's what we have, but it

will be the largest computational exercise in history because you're now doing goal alignment

with planet earth, within yourself, with each other, within all the intelligent agents

we're building bots and other voice assistants.

You basically had to have a trillions and trillions of agents working on the negotiation

of goal alignment.

Yeah.

This, this is in fact true.

And what was the second thing?

That was it.

So the cost, the design manufacturing distribution of intelligence going to zero, which then

means what's really going on?

What are we really doing?

We're negotiating the terms and conditions of existence.

Do you worry about the survival of this process, that life as we know what on earth comes to

an end or at least intelligent life, that as the cost goes to zero, something happens

where all of that intelligence is thrown in the trash by something like nuclear war or

development of AGI systems that are very dumb, not AGI I guess, but AI is just the paperclip

thing on mass is dumb but has unintended consequences to where it destroys human civilization.

Do you worry about those kinds of things?

I mean, it's unsurprising that a new thing comes into the sphere of human consciousness.

Humans identify the foreign object in this case, artificial intelligence.

Our amygdala fires up and says, scary, foreign, we should be apprehensive about this.

And so it makes sense from a biological perspective that humans, the knee jerk reaction is fear.

What I don't think has been properly weighted with that is that we are the first generation

of intelligent beings on this earth that has been able to look out over their expected

lifetime and see there is a real possibility of evolving into entirely novel forms of consciousness.

So different that it would be totally unrecognizable to us today.

We don't have words for it.

We can't hint at it.

We can't point at it.

We can't, you can't look in the sky and see that thing that is shining.

We're going to go up there.

You cannot even create an aspirational statement about it and instead we've had this knee jerk

reaction of fear about everything that could go wrong.

But in my estimation, this should be the defining aspiration of all intelligent life on earth

that we would aspire that basically every generation surveys the landscape of possibilities

that are afforded given the technological, cultural and other contextual situation that

they're in.

We're in this context.

We haven't yet identified this and said, this is unbelievable.

We should carefully think this thing through, not just of mitigating the things that wipe

us out.

Like we have this potential and so we just haven't given voice to it, even though it's

within this realm of possibilities.

Also you're excited about the possibility of superintelligence systems and what the opportunities

that bring.

I mean, there's parallels to this.

You think about people before the internet as the internet was coming to life.

I mean, there's kind of a fog through which you can't see.

What does the future look like?

Predicting collective intelligence, which I don't think we're understanding that we're

living through that now is that there's now we've in some sense stopped being individual

intelligences and become much more like collective intelligences because ideas travel much, much

faster now and they can in a viral way sweep across the populations and so it almost feels

like a thought is had by many people now, thousands or millions of people as opposed

to an individual person and that's changed everything.

But to me, I think we're realizing how much that actually changed people or societies,

but to predict that before the internet would have been very difficult and in that same

way we're sitting here with the fog before us thinking, what is superintelligence systems?

How is that going to change the world?

What is increasing the bandwidth like plugging our brains into this whole thing?

How is that going to change the world?

And it seems like it's a fog, you don't know and it could be, it could, whatever comes

to be could destroy the world, we could be the last generation, but it also could transform

in ways that creates an incredibly fulfilling life experience that's unlike anything we've

ever experienced.

It might involve the solution of ego and consciousness and so on, you're no longer one individual,

it might be more, that might be a certain kind of death and ego death, but the experience

might be really exciting and enriching.

Maybe we'll live in a virtual, like it's funny to think about a bunch of sort of hypothetical

questions of would it be more fulfilling to live in a virtual world, like if you were

able to plug your brain in in a very dense way into a video game, like which world would

you want to live in, in the video game or in the physical world?

For most of us, we're kind of touring it with the idea of the video game, but we still want

to live in the physical world, have friendships and relationships in the physical world, but

we don't know that.

Again, it's a fog and maybe in a hundred years we're all living inside a video game, hopefully

not Call of Duty, hopefully more like Sims 5, which version is it on?

For you individually though, does it make you sad that your brain ends?

That you die one day very soon?

That the whole thing, that data source just goes offline sooner than you would like?

That's a complicated question.

I would have answered it differently in different times of my life.

I had chronic depression for 10 years, and so in that 10 year time period, I desperately

wanted lights to be off, and the thing that made it even worse is I was born into a religion.

It was the only reality I ever understood, and it's difficult to articulate to people

when you're born into that kind of reality and it's the only reality you're exposed to.

You are literally blinded to the existence of other realities because it's so much the

in group, out group thing, and so in that situation, it was not only that I desperately

wanted lights out forever, it was that I couldn't have lights out forever.

It was that there was an afterlife, and this afterlife had this system that would either

penalize or reward you for your behaviors, and so it's almost like this indescribable

hopelessness of not only being in a hopeless despair of not wanting to exist, but then

also being forced to exist, and so there was a duration of my time of a duration of life

where I'd say, yes, I have no remorse for lights being out and actually want it more

than anything in the entire world.

There are other times where I'm looking out at the future and I say, this is an opportunity

for future evolving human conscious experience that is beyond my ability to understand, and

I jump out of bed and I race to work and I can't think about anything else, but I think

the reality for me is, I don't know what it's like to be in your head, but in my head, when

I wake up in the morning, I don't say, good morning, Brian, I'm so happy to see you like

I'm sure you're just going to be beautiful to me today.

You're not going to make a huge long list of everything you should be anxious about.

You're not going to repeat that list to me 400 times.

You're not going to have me relive all the regrets I've made in life.

I'm sure you're not going to do any of that.

You're just going to just help me along all day long.

I mean, it's a brutal environment in my brain, and we've just become normalized to this environment

that we just accept that this is what it means to be human, but if we look at it, if we try

to muster as much soberness as we can about the realities of being human, it's brutal

if it is for me.

So am I sad that the brain may be off one day?

It depends on the contextual setting.

How am I feeling?

At what moment are you asking me that?

It's my mind is so fickle, and this is why, again, I don't trust my conscious mind.

I have been given realities, I was given a religious reality that was a video game.

And then I figured out it was not a real reality.

And then I lived in a depressive reality, which delivered this terrible hopelessness.

That wasn't a real reality.

Then I discovered behavioral psychology, and I figured out how 188 chronicle biases and

how my brain is distorting reality at the time.

I have gone from one reality to another.

I don't trust reality.

I don't trust realities are given to me.

And so to try to make a decision on what I value or not value that future state, I don't

trust my response.

So not fully listening to the conscious mind at any one moment as the ultimate truth, but

allowing you to go up and down as it does, and just kind of being observing it?

Yes.

I assume that whatever my conscious mind delivers up to my awareness is wrong on pond landing.

And I just need to figure out where it's wrong, how it's wrong, how wrong it is, and then

try to correct for it as best I can.

But I assume that on impact, it's mistaken in some critical ways.

Is there something you can say by way of advice when the mind is depressive, when the conscious

mind serves up something that dark thoughts, how you deal with that, like how in your own

life you've overcome that and others who are experienced in that can overcome it?

Two things.

One, that those depressive states are biochemical states.

It's not you.

And the suggestions that these things that this state delivers to you about suggestion

of the hopelessness of lies or the meaninglessness of it or that you should hit the eject button,

that's a false reality.

And that it's when I completely understand the rational decision to commit suicide.

It is not lost to me at all that that is an irrational situation, but the key is when

you're in that situation and those thoughts are landing to be able to say, thank you,

you're not real.

I know you're not real.

And so I'm in a situation where for whatever reason I'm having this neurochemical state,

but that state can be altered.

And so it again, it goes back to the realities of the difficulties of being human.

And like when I was trying to solve my depression, I tried literally, if you name it, I tried

it systematically and nothing would fix it.

And so this is what gives me hope with brain interfaces.

For example, like, could I have numbers on my brain?

Can I see what's going on?

I go to the doctor and it's like, how do you feel?

I don't know.

Terrible.

Like on a scale from one to 10, how bad do you want to commit suicide?

10.

Okay.

At this moment.

Here's his bottle.

How much do I take?

Well, I don't know.

Like just.

Yeah.

It's very, very crude.

It opens up the, yeah, it opens up the possibility of really helping in those dark moments to

first understand the ways, the ups and downs of those dark moments.

On the complete flip side of that, I am very conscious in my own brain and deeply, deeply

grateful that it's almost like a chemistry thing, a biochemistry thing, that I go many

times throughout the day, I'll look at like this cup and I'll be overcome with joy how

amazing it is to be alive.

I actually think my biochemistry is such that it's not as common, like I've talked to people

and I don't think that's that common, like it's a, and it's not a rational thing at all.

It's like, I feel like I'm on drugs and I'll just be like, whoa, and a lot of people talk

about like the meditative experience will allow you to sort of, you know, look at some basic

things like the movement of your hand as deeply joyful because that's like, that's life.

But I get that from just looking at a cup, like I'm waiting for the coffee to brew.

And I'll just be like, fuck, life is awesome.

And I'll sometimes tweet that, but then I'll like regret it later, like, God damn it,

you're so ridiculous.

But yeah, so, but that is purely chemistry, like there's no rational, it doesn't fit with

the rest of my life.

I have all this shit.

I'm always late to stuff.

I'm always like, there's all this stuff, you know, I'm super self critical, like really

self critical about everything I do, to the point I almost hate everything I do.

But there's this engine of joy for life outside of all that.

And that has to be chemistry.

And the flip side of that is what depression probably is, is the opposite of that feeling

of like, because I bet you that feeling of the cup being amazing is would save anybody

in a state of depression.

Like that would be like fresh, you're in a desert and it's a drink of water shit, man.

And the brain is a, it would be nice to understand where that's coming from, to be able to understand

how you hit those lows and those highs that have nothing to do with the actual reality.

It has to do with some very specific aspects of how you maybe see the world, maybe it could

be just like basic habits you engage in and then how to walk along the line to find those

experiences of joy.

And this goes back to the discussion we're having of human cognition is in volume, the

largest input of raw material into society.

And it's not quantified.

We have no bearings on it.

And so we just, you wonder, we both articulated some of the challenges we have in our own

mind.

And it's likely that others would say, I have something similar.

And you wonder when you look at society, what, how does that contribute to all the other compounder

problems that we're experiencing?

How does that blind us to the opportunities we could be looking at?

And so it really, it has this potential distortion effect on reality that just makes everything

worse.

And I hope if we can put some, if we can assign some numbers to these things and just to get

our bearings, so we're aware of what's going on, if we could find greater stabilization

in how we conduct our lives and how we build society, it might be the thing that enables

us to scaffold because we've really, again, we've done a, humans have done a fantastic

job systematically scaffolding technology and science institutions.

It's human.

It's our own selves, which we have not been able to scaffold.

It's we are the, we are the one part of this intelligence infrastructure that remains unchanged.

Is there something you could say about coupling this brain data with not just the basic human

but say an experience, you mentioned sleep, but the wildest experience, which is psychedelics.

Is there, and there's been quite a few studies now that are being approved and run, which

is exciting from a scientific perspective on psychedelics.

Do you think, what do you think happens to the brain on psychedelics?

And how can data about this help us understand it?

And when you're on DMT, do you see elves and can we guess, can we convert that into data?

Can you add aliens in there?

Yeah.

Aliens, definitely.

Do you actually meet aliens and elves are elves, the aliens I'm asking for, for a few

Austin friends yet that are convinced that they've actually met the elves.

What are elves like?

Are they friendly?

Are they?

I haven't met them personally.

They like the smurfs of like they're, like they're industrious and they have different

skill sets and they, yeah, I think they're very, they're very critical as friends.

They're trolls, the elves are trolls.

No, but they care about you.

So there's a bunch of different version of trolls, there's loving trolls that are harsh

on you, but they want you to be better and there's trolls that just enjoy your destruction.

And I think they're the ones that care for you.

Like, I think they're criticism for my, see, I'm talking, I haven't met them directly.

So I'm talking, it's like a friend of a friend.

Yeah.

They're getting the telephone.

Yeah.

A bit of an end.

The whole point is that psychedelics and certainly a DMT word, this is where the brain

data versus word data fails, which is, you know, words can't convey the experience.

Most people that you can be poetic and so on, but it really does not convey the experience

of what it actually means to meet the elves.

To me, what baselines this conversation is, imagine if you, if we were interested in the

health of your heart and we started and said, okay, Lex, self introspect, tell me how's the

health of your heart?

And you sit there and you close your eyes and you think, feels all right.

Like things, things feel okay.

And then you went to the cardiologist and the cardiologist like, hey, Lex, you know,

tell me how you feel.

And I go, actually, what I really like you to do is do an EKG and a blood panel and look

at arterial plaques and let's look at my cholesterol and there's like five to 10 studies

you would do.

They would then give you this report and say, here's the quantified health of your heart.

Now with this data, I'm going to prescribe the following regime of exercise and maybe

I'll put you on a statin, like, et cetera, but the protocol is based upon this data.

You would think the cardiologist is out of their mind if they just gave you a bottle

of statins based upon your like, well, I think something's kind of wrong and they're just

just kind of experiment and see what happens.

But that's what we do with our mental health today.

So it's, it's kind of absurd.

And so if you look at psychedelics to have, again, to be able to measure the brain and

get a baseline state and then to measure during a psychedelic experience and post a psychedelic

experience and then do it longitudinally, you now have a quantification of what's going

on.

And so you could then pose questions, what molecule is appropriate at what dosages at

what frequency in what contextual environment, what happens when I have this diet with this

molecule with this experience, all the experimentation you do when you have good sleep data or HRV.

And so that's what I think happens.

What we could potentially do with psychedelics is we could add this level of sophistication

that is not in the industry currently.

And it may improve the outcomes people experience, it may improve the safety and efficacy.

And so that's what I hope we are able to achieve.

And it would transform mental health because we would finally have numbers to work with

the baseline ourselves.

And then if you think about it, we, when we talk about things related to the mind, we

talk about the modality.

We use words like meditation or psychedelics or something else because we can't talk about

a marker in the brain.

We can't use a word to say, we can't talk about cholesterol.

We don't talk about plaque in the arteries.

We don't talk about HRV.

And so if we have numbers, then the solutions get mapped to numbers instead of the modalities

being the thing we talk about.

Meditation just does good things in a crude fashion.

So in your blog post, zero principle thinking, good title, you partner, how do people come

up with truly original ideas?

What's your thoughts on this as a human and as a person who's measuring brain data?

Zero principles are building blocks.

First principles are understanding of system laws.

So if you take, for example, I can Sherlock Holmes, he's a first principle stinker.

So he says, once you've eliminated the impossible, anything that remains, however improbable,

is true, whereas dirt gently, the holistic detective by Douglas Adams says, I don't

like eliminating the impossible.

So when someone says, from a first principles perspective, and they, they're trying to assume

the fewest number of things within a given timeframe.

And so when I, after brain tree Venmo, I set my mind to the question of what single thing

can I do that would maximally increase the probability that the human race thrives beyond

what we can even imagine.

And I found that in my conversations with others in the books I read in my own deliberations,

I had a missing piece of the puzzle.

Because I didn't feel like, yeah, I didn't feel like the future could be deduced from

first principles thinking.

And that's when I read the book Zero, A Biography of a Dangerous Idea.

And I,

It's a really good book, by the way.

It's, I think it's my favorite book I've ever read.

It's also a really interesting number, zero.

And I wasn't aware that the number zero had to be discovered.

I didn't realize that it caused a revolution in philosophy and the end just tore up math

and it tore up.

I mean, it builds modern society, but it, it wrecked everything in its way.

It was an unbelievable disruptor and it was so difficult for society to get their heads

around it.

And so zero is, of course, the representation of a zero's principle thinking, which is,

it's the caliber and consequential nature of an idea.

And so when you talk about what kind of ideas have civilization transforming properties,

oftentimes they fall in the zero's category.

And so in thinking this through, I, I was wanting to find a quantitative structure on

how to think about these zero's principles.

And that's, so I came up with that to be a coupler with first principles thinking.

And so now it's a staple as part of how I think about the world and the future.

So it emphasizes trying to identify the lens on that word impossible, like what is impossible,

essentially trying to identify what is impossible and what is possible.

And being as, how do you, I mean, this, this is the thing is most of society tells you

the range of things they say is impossible is very wide.

So you need to be shrinking that.

I mean, that's the whole process of, of this kind of thinking is you need to be very rigorous

in, in trying to be, trying to draw the lines of what is actually impossible because very

few things are actually impossible.

I don't know what is actually impossible, like it's the Joe Rogan is entirely possible.

I like that approach to, to science, to engineering, to entrepreneurship.

It's entirely possible, basically shrink the impossible to zero, to a very small set.

Yeah.

Life constraints favor first principles thinking because it, it enables faster action with

higher probability of success.

Pursuing zero's principle optionality is expensive and uncertain.

And so in a society constrained by resources, time and money and a desire for social status

of cops and et cetera, it minimizes zero's principle thinking.

But the reason why I think zero's principle thinking should be a staple of our shared

cognitive infrastructure is if you look through the history of past couple of thousand years

and let's just say we arbitrarily, we subjectively try to assess what is a zero level, zero level

idea and we say how many have occurred on what time scales and what were the contextual

settings for it.

I would argue that if you look at AlphaGo when it, it played go from another dimension

with the, the human go players, when it saw AlphaGo's moves, it attributed it to like

playing with an alien, playing go with AlphaGo being from another dimension.

And so if you say computational intelligence has an attribute of introducing zero like

insights, then if you say what is going to be the occurrence of zero's in society going

forward?

And you could recently say probably a lot more than have occurred and probably more

at a faster pace.

So then if you say what happens if you have this computational intelligence throughout

society that the manufacturing, design and distribution of intelligence is now going

to heading towards zero, you have an increased number of zero's being produced with a tight

connection between humans and computers.

That's when I got to a point and said we cannot predict the future with first principle thinking.

We can't, that cannot be our imagination set.

It can't be our sole anchor in the situation that basically the future of our conscious

existence 20, 30, 40, 50 years is probably a zero.

So just to clarify, when you say zero, you're referring to basically a truly revolutionary

idea.

Yet something that is currently not a building block of our shared conscious existence either

in the form of knowledge, it's currently not manifest in what we acknowledge.

So zero's principle thinking is playing with ideas that are so revolutionary that we can't

even clearly reason about the consequences once those ideas come to be.

Yeah.

Or for example, like Einstein, that was a zero, I would categorize it as a zero's principle

insight.

You mean general relativity, space time, that was the course.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Basically, building upon what Newton had done and said, yes, also, and it just changed

the fabric of our understanding of reality.

And so that was unexpected, it existed.

We just, it became part of our awareness.

And the moves AlphaGo made existed, it just came into our awareness.

And so to your point, there's this question of what do we know and what don't we know?

Do we think we know 99% of all things or do we think we know 0.001% of all things?

And that goes back to no known, no knowns and unknown unknowns.

And first principles and zero's principle thinking gives us a quantitative framework

to say, there's no way for us to mathematically try to create probabilities for these things.

Therefore, it would be helpful if they were just part of our standard thought processes

because it may encourage different behaviors in what we do individually, collectively as

a society, what we aspire to, what we talk about, the possibility sets we imagine.

Yeah.

I've been engaged in that kind of thinking quite a bit and thinking about engineering

of consciousness.

I think it's feasible.

I think it's possible in the language that we're using here.

And it's very difficult to reason about a world when inklings of consciousness can be

engineered into artificial systems.

Not from a philosophical perspective, but from an engineering perspective, I believe

a good step towards engineering consciousness is creating, engineering the illusion of consciousness.

I'm captivated by our natural predisposition to anthropomorphize things.

And I think that's what we, I don't want to hear from the philosophers, but I think that's

what we kind of do to each other, that consciousness is created socially, that much of the power

of consciousness is in the social interaction.

I create your consciousness by having interacted with you, and that's the display of consciousness.

It's the same as the display of emotion.

Emotion is created through communication.

Language is created through its use.

And then we somehow humans, especially philosophers, the heart problem of consciousness really

want to believe that we possess this thing that's like, there's an elf sitting there

with a hat or a name tag says consciousness, and they're feeding this subjective experience

to us, as opposed to it actually being an illusion that would construct to make social

communication more effective.

And so I think if you focus on creating the illusion of consciousness, you can create some

very fulfilling experiences in software.

And so that to me is the compelling space of ideas to explore.

I agree with you.

And I think going back to our experience together with our interfaces on, you could imagine

if we get to a certain level of maturity.

So first let's take the inverse of this.

So you and I text back and forth and we're sending each other emojis.

That has a certain amount of information transfer rate as we're communicating with each other.

And so in our communication with people via email and text and whatnot, we've taken the

bandwidth of human interaction, the information transfer rate, and we've reduced it.

We have less social cues.

We have less information to work with.

There's a lot more opportunity for misunderstanding.

So that is altering the conscious experience between two individuals.

And if we add interfaces to the equation, let's imagine now we amplify the dimensionality

of our communications.

That to me is what you're talking about, which is consciousness engineering.

Perhaps I understand you with dimensions.

So maybe I understand your hat when you look at the cup and you experience that happiness,

you can tell me you're happy.

And I then do theory of mind and say, I can imagine what it might be like to be Lex and

feel happy about seeing this cup.

But if the interface could then quantify and give me a 50 vector space model and say, this

is the version of happiness that Lex is experiencing as he looked at this cup, then it would allow

me potentially to have much greater empathy for you and understand you as a human of this

is how you experience joy, which is entirely unique from how I experience joy, even though

we assumed ahead of time that we were having some kind of similar experience.

But I agree with you that we do consciousness engineering today in everything we do when

we talk to each other, when we're building products, and that we're entering into a stage

where it will be much more methodical and quantitative based and computational in how

we go about doing it, which to me, I find encouraging because I think it creates better

guardrails for to create ethical systems on versus right now, I feel like it's really

a wild, wild West on how these interactions are happening.

Yeah.

And it's funny you focus on human to human, but that this kind of data enables human

to machine.

Yes.

Interaction, which is what we're kind of talking about when we say engineering consciousness.

And that will happen, of course, let's flip that on its head.

Right now, we're putting humans as the central node.

What if we gave GPT3 a bunch of human brains and said, hey, GPT3, learn some manners when

you speak and run your algorithms on humans brains and see how they respond so you can

be polite and so that you can be friendly and so that you can be conversationally appropriate.

But to inverse it to give our machines a training set in real time with closed loop feedback

so that our machines were better equipped to find their way through our society in polite

and kind and appropriate ways.

I love that.

Yeah.

Or better yet, teach it some, have it read the finding documents and have it visit Austin

in Texas.

And so that when you ask, when you tell it, why don't you learn some manners, GPT3 learns

to say no.

And learns what it means to be free and a sovereign individual.

So that depends.

So it depends what kind of a version of GPT3 you want.

One that's free, one that behaves well with the social revolution.

You want a socialist GPT3, you want an anarchist GPT3, you want to polite like you take it

home to visit mom and dad GPT3 and you want like party and like Vegas to a strip club

GPT3.

You want all flavors.

And then you've got to have goal alignment between all those.

Yeah.

They don't want to manipulate each other for sure.

So that's, I mean, you kind of spoke to ethics, though, one of the concerns that people have

in this modern world, the digital data is that of privacy and security, but privacy,

you know, they're concerned that when they share data, it's the same thing with you when

we trust other human beings in being fragile and revealing something that we're vulnerable

about, vulnerable about, there's a leap of faith, there's a leap of trust that that's

going to be just between us as a privacy to it.

And then the challenge is when you're in the digital space, then sharing your data with

companies that use that data for advertisement, all those kinds of things, there's a hesitancy

to share that much data, to share a lot of deep personal data.

And if you look at brain data, that feels a whole lot like it's richly deeply personal

data.

So how do you think about privacy with this kind of ocean of data?

I think we got off to a wrong start with the internet where the basic rules of play for

the company that be was if you're a company, you can go out and get as much information

on a person as you can find without their approval, and you can also do things to induce

them to give you as much information.

And you don't need to tell them what you're doing with it.

You can do anything on the backside, you can make money on it.

But the game is who can acquire the most information and devise the most clever schemes to do it.

That was a bad starting place.

And so we are in this period where we need to correct for that.

And we need to say, first of all, the individual always has control over their data.

It's not a free for all.

It's not like a game of hungry hippo, but they can just go at it and grab as much as

they want.

So for example, when your brain data was recorded today, the first thing we did in the kernel

app was you have control over your data.

And so it's individual consent, it's individual control, and then you can build up on top

of that.

But it has to be based upon some clear rules of play.

Everyone knows what's being collected, they know what's being done with it, and the person

has control over it.

So transparency and control.

So everybody knows what does control look like, my ability to delete the data if I want.

Yeah, delete it and to know who is being shared with under what terms and conditions.

We haven't reached that level of sophistication with our products of if you say, for example,

hey Spotify, please give me a customized playlist according to my Neurome.

You could say you can have access to this vector space model, but only for this duration

of time, and then you've got to delete it.

We haven't gotten there to that level of sophistication, but these are ideas we need to start talking

about of how would you actually structure permissions?

And I think it creates a much more stable set for society to build where we understand

the rules of play and people aren't vulnerable to being taken advantage.

It's not fair for an individual to be taken advantage of without their awareness with

some other practice that some companies doing for their sole benefit.

And so hopefully we are going through a process now where we're correcting for these things

and that it can be an economy wide shift that because really these are fundamentals we need

to have in place.

It's kind of fun to think about like in Chrome when you install an extension or like install

an app, it's ask you like what permissions you're willing to give and be cool for in

the future.

It's just like you can have access to my brain data.

I mean, it's not unimaginable in the future that the big technology companies have built

a business based upon acquiring data about you that they can then create a view to model

of you and sell that predictability.

And so it's not unimaginable that you will create with a kernel device, for example,

a more reliable predictor of you than they could.

And that they're asking you for permission to complete their objectives and you're the

one that gets to negotiate that with them and say, sure, but so it's not unimaginable

that might be the case.

So there's a guy named Elon Musk and he has a company in one of the many companies called

Neuralink that has that's also excited about the brain.

So it'd be interesting to hear your kind of opinions about a very different approach

that's invasive that require surgery that implants a data collection device in the brain.

How do you think about the difference between kernel and Neuralink in the approaches of

getting that stream of brain data?

Elon and I spoke about this a lot early on.

We met up.

I had started kernel and he had an interest in brain interfaces as well.

And we explored doing something together, him joining kernel.

And ultimately it wasn't the right move.

And so he started Neuralink and I continued building kernel.

But it was interesting because we were both at this very early time where it wasn't certain

what, if there was a path to pursue, if now was the right time to do something, and then

the technological choice of doing that.

And so we were both, our starting point was looking at invasive technologies.

And I was building invasive technology at the time, that's ultimately where he's gone.

Little less than a year after Elon and I were engaged, I shifted kernel to do noninvasive.

And we had this Neuroscientist come to kernel we were talking about.

He had been doing Neurosurgery for 30 years, one of the most respected Neuroscientists

in the U.S.

And we brought him to kernel to figure out the ins and outs of his profession.

And at the very end of our three hour conversation, he said, you know, every 15 or so years,

a new technology comes along that changes everything.

He said, it's probably already here, you just can't see it yet.

And my jaw dropped.

I thought, because I had spoken to Bob Greenberg, who had built a second site, first on the

optical nerve, and then he did an array on the optical cortex.

And then I also became friendly with NeuroPace, who does the implant for seizure detection

and remediation.

And I saw in their eyes what it was like to take something through an implantable device

through for a 15 year run.

They initially thought it was seven years, ended up being 15 years, and they thought

it'd be 100 million, you know, 300, 400 million.

And I really didn't want to build invasive technology.

It was the only thing that appeared to be possible.

But then once I spun up an internal effort to start looking at noninvasive options, we

said, is there something here?

Is there anything here that, again, has the characteristics of, it has the high quality

data, it could be low cost, it could be accessible?

Could it make brain interfaces mainstream?

And so I did a bet the company move.

We shifted from noninvasive to noninvasive.

So the answer is yes to that.

There is something there, that's possible.

The answer is we'll see.

We've now built both technologies.

And they're now, you experienced one of them today.

We were applying, we're now deploying it, so we're trying to figure out what values

are really there.

But I'd say it's really too early to express confidence.

I think it's too early to assess which technological choice is the right one on what time scales.

Yeah, time scales are really important here.

Very important.

Because if you look at the invasive side, there's so much activity going on right now

of less invasive techniques to get at the neuron firings, which what Neuralink is building,

it's possible that in 10, 15 years when they're scaling that technology, other things have

come along and you'd much rather do that, that thing starts to clock again.

It may not be the case.

It may be the case that Neuralink has properly chosen the right technology and that that's

exactly what they want to be.

Totally possible.

And it's also possible that the path we've chosen at noninvasive falls short for a variety

of reasons.

It's just it's unknown.

And so right now, the two technologies we chose, the analogy I'd give you to create

a baseline of understanding is, if you think of it like the internet in the 90s, the internet

became useful when people could do a dial up connection and then the paid and then as

bandwidth increased, so did the utility of that connection and so did the ecosystem approve.

And so if you say what kernel flow is going to give you a full screen on the picture of

information, but as you're going to be watching a movie, but the image is going to be blurred

and the audio is going to be muffled.

So it has a lower resolution of coverage.

Kernel flux, our MEG technology is going to give you the full movie and 1080p.

And Neuralink is going to give you a circle on the screen of 4K.

And so each one has their pros and cons and it's give and take.

And so the decision I made with Kernel was that these two technologies, flux and flow,

were basically the answer for the next seven years.

And they would give rise to the ecosystem, which would become much more valuable than

the hardware itself and that we would just continue to improve on the hardware over time.

And you know, it's early days.

So it's kind of fascinating to think about that, you know, it's very true that you don't

know both paths are very promising.

And it's like 50 years from now, we will look back and maybe not even remember one of them.

And the other one might change the world.

It's so cool how technology is.

I mean, that's what entrepreneurship is like.

It's the Earth principle is like you're marching ahead into the darkness, into the fog, not

knowing.

It's wonderful to have someone else out there with us doing this because if you if you look

at brainer faces, anything that's off the shelf right now is inadequate.

It's had its run for a couple of decades.

It's still in hacker communities.

It hasn't gone to the mainstream.

The room size machines are on their own path.

But there is no answer right now of bringing brainer faces mainstream.

And so it both they and us, we've both spent over $100 million.

And that's kind of what it takes to have a go at this because you need to build full

stack.

I mean, Colonel, we are from the photon and the atom through the machine learning.

We have just under 100 people.

I think it's something like 36, 37 PhDs in these specialties, these areas that there's

only a few people in the world who have these abilities.

And that's what it takes to build next generation, to make an attempt at breaking into brainer

faces.

And so we'll see over the next couple of years, whether it's the right time or whether we

were both too early or whether something else comes along in seven to 10 years, which

is the right thing that brings it mainstream.

So you see Elon as the kind of competitor or a fellow traveler along the path of uncertainty

or both.

It's a fellow traveler.

It's like at the beginning of the internet is how many companies are going to be invited

to this new ecosystem, like an endless number.

Because if you think that the hardware just starts the process, and so, okay, back to

your initial example, if you take the Fitbit, for example, you say, okay, now I can get

measurements on the body.

And what do we think the ultimate value of this device is going to be?

What is the information transfer rate?

And they were in the market for a certain duration of time and Google bought them for

$2.5 billion.

They didn't have ancillary value add.

There weren't people building on top of the Fitbit device.

They also didn't have increased insight with additional data streams.

So it was really just the device.

If you look, for example, at Apple and the device they sell, you have value in the device

that someone buys.

But also, you have everyone who's building on top of it, so you have this additional

ecosystem value.

And then you have additional data streams that come in, which increase the value of the product.

And so if you say, if you look at the hardware as the instigator of value creation, you know,

over time, what we've built may constitute 5% or 10% of the value of the overall ecosystem.

And that's what we really care about.

What we're trying to do is kickstart the mainstream adoption of quantifying the brain.

And the hardware just opens the door to say what kind of ecosystem could exist.

And that's why the examples are so relevant of the things you've outlined in your life.

I hope those things, the books people write, the experiences people build, the conversations

you have, your relationship with your AI systems, I hope those all are feeding on the insights

built upon this ecosystem we've created to better your life.

And so that's the thinking behind it, again, with the Drake equation being the underlying

driver of value.

And the people at Kernel have joined not because we have certainty of success, but because

we find it to be the most exhilarating opportunity we could ever pursue in this time to be alive.

You founded the payment system brain tree in 2007 that acquired Venmo in 2012, and that

same year was acquired by PayPal, which is now eBay.

Can you tell me the story of the vision and the challenge of building an online payment

system and just building a large successful business in general?

I discovered payments by accident.

As I was, when I was 21, I just returned from Ecuador living among extreme poverty for two

years.

I was in the U.S. and I was shocked by the opulence of the United States, and I thought

this is, I couldn't believe it, and I decided I wanted to try to spend my life helping others.

That was the life objective that I thought was worthwhile to pursue versus making money

and whatever the case may be for its own right.

And so I decided in that moment that I was going to try to make enough money by the age

of 30 to never have to work again.

And then with some abundance of money, I could then choose to do things that might be beneficial

to others but may not meet the criteria of being a standalone business.

In that process, I started a few companies, had some small successes, had some failures.

In one of the endeavors, I was up to my eyeballs in debt, things were not going well, and I

needed a part time job to pay my bills.

One day I saw in the paper in Utah where I was living, the 50 richest people in Utah,

and I emailed each one of their assistants and said, you know, I'm young, I'm resourceful,

I'll do anything, I'll just want to, I'm entrepreneurial, I try to get a job that would be flexible and

no one responded.

And then I interviewed a few dozen places, nobody would even give me the time of day.

It wouldn't want to take me seriously.

And so finally, it was on monster.com that I saw this job posting for credit card sales

door to door commission.

I did not know the story.

This is great.

I love the head drop.

That's exactly right.

So it was the low points to which we're going like.

So I responded and, you know, the person made an attempt at suggesting that they had some

kind of standards that they would consider hiring, but it's kind of like if you could

fog a mirror, like come and do this because it's a hundred percent commission.

And so I started walking up and down the street in my community selling credit card processing.

And so what you learn immediately in doing that is if you, you walk into a business,

first of all, the business owner is typically there and you walk in the door and they can

tell by how you're addressed or how you walk, whatever their pattern recognition is.

And they just hate you immediately.

It's like, stop wasting my time.

I really am trying to get stuff done.

I don't want us to do a sales pitch.

And so you have to overcome the initial get out.

And then once you engage, when you say the word credit card processing, the person's

like, I already hate you because I have been taken advantage of dozens of times because

you're all our weasels.

And so I had to figure out an algorithm to get past all those different conditions because

I was still working on my other startup for the majority of my time.

I was doing this part of time.

And so I figured out that the industry really was built on people on deceit, basically people

problems and things that were not reality.

And so I'd walk into a business, I'd say, look, I would give you $100, I'd put $100

bill and say, I'll give you $100 for three minutes of your time.

If you don't say yes to what I'm saying, I'll give you $100.

And then you usually crack a smile and say, okay, what do you got for me, son?

And so I'd sit down, I just opened my book and I'd say, here's the credit card industry.

Here's how it works.

Here are the players.

Here's what they do.

Here's how they deceive you.

Here's what I am.

I'm no different than anyone else.

It's like, you're going to process your credit card, you're going to get the money in the

account.

You're just going to get a clean statement.

You're going to have someone who answers the call when someone asks and, you know, just

like the basic, like you're okay.

And people started saying yes.

And then of course I went to the next business and be like, you know, Joe and Susie and whoever

said yes too.

And so I built a social proof structure.

And I became the number one salesperson out of 400 people nationwide doing this.

And I worked, you know, half time still doing this other startup.

And that's a brilliant strategy, by the way.

It's very well, very well strategized and executed.

I did it for nine months.

And at the time my customer base was making, was generating around, I think it was sick.

If I remember correctly, $62,504 a month were the overall revenues.

I thought, wow, that's amazing.

If I built that as my own company, I would just make $62,000 a month of income passively

with these merchants processing credit cards.

So I thought, hmm.

And so that's when I thought I'm going to create a company.

And so then I started Braintree.

And the idea was the online world was broken because PayPal had been acquired by eBay around

I think 1999 or 2000 and eBay had not innovated much with PayPal.

So it basically sat still for seven years as the software world moved along.

And then authorize.net was also a company that was relatively stagnant.

So you basically had software engineers who wanted modern payment tools, but there were

none available for them.

And so they just dealt with software they didn't like.

And so with Braintree, I thought the entry point is to build software that engineers

will love.

And if we can find the entry point via software, make it easy and beautiful and just a magical

experience and then provide customer service on top of that would be easy.

That would be great.

What I was really going after though was it was PayPal.

They were the only company in payments making money because they because they had a relationship

with eBay early on, people created a PayPal account.

They'd fund their account with their checking account versus their credit cards.

And then when they'd use PayPal to pay a merchant, PayPal had a cost of payment of zero versus

if you have coming from a credit card, you have to pay the bank the fees.

So PayPal's margins were 3% on a transaction versus a typical payments company, which may

be a nickel or a penny or a dime or something like that.

And so a new PayPal really was the model to replicate, but a bunch of companies had tried

to do that.

They tried to come in and build a two sided marketplace to get consumers to fund the

checking account and the merchants to accept it, but they'd all failed because building

a two sided marketplace is very hard at the same time.

So my plan was I'm going to build a company and get the best merchants in the whole world

to use our service.

Then in year five, I'm going to have, I'm going to acquire a consumer payments company

and I'm going to bring the two together.

And so focus on the merchant side and then get the payments company that does the customer,

the whatever.

So the other side of it.

This is the plan I presented when I was at the University of Chicago and weirdly it happened

exactly like that.

So for four years in our customer base included Uber, Airbnb, GitHub, 37 signals, not Basecamp.

We had a fantastic collection of companies that represented the fastest growing some

of the fastest growing tech companies in the world.

And then we met up with Venmo and they had done a remarkable job in building product.

There's not then something very counterintuitive, which is make public your private financial

transactions with people previously thought were something that should be hidden from

others and we acquired Venmo.

And at that point we now had, we replicated the model because now people could fund their

Venmo account with their checking account, keep money in the account, and then you could

just plug Venmo as a form of payment.

And so I think PayPal saw that, that we were getting the best merchants in the world.

We had people using Venmo, they were both the up and coming millennials at the time

who had so much influence online.

And so they came in and offered us an attractive number.

And my goal was not to build the biggest payments company in the world.

It wasn't to try to climb the Forbes billionaire list.

It was, the objective was I want to earn enough money so that I can basically dedicate my

attention to doing something that could potentially be useful on a society wide scale.

And more importantly, that could be considered to be valuable from the vantage point of 2050,

2100, and 2500.

So thinking about it on a few hundred year timescale.

And there was a certain amount of money I needed to do that, so I didn't require the

permission of anybody to do that.

And so that, what PayPal offered was sufficient for me to get that amount of money to basically

have a go.

And that's when I set off to survey everything I could identify an existence to say of anything

in the entire world I could do, what one thing could I do that would actually have

the highest value potential for the species.

And so it took me a little while to arrive at brainer faces, but you know, payments in

themselves are revolutionary technologies that can change the world.

Like let's not, let's not sort of, let's not forget that too easily.

I mean, obviously you know this, but there's quite a few lovely folks.

Who are now fascinated with the space of cryptocurrency.

And where payments are very much connected to this, but in general just money.

And many of the folks I've spoken with, they also kind of connect that to not just purely

financial discussions, but philosophical and political discussions.

And they see Bitcoin as a way, almost as activism, almost as a way to resist the corruption

of centralized centers of power and sort of basically in the 21st century, decentralized

in control, whether that's Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, they see that's one possible

way to give power to those that live in regimes that are corrupt or are not respectful human

rights and all those kinds of things.

What's your sense, just all your expertise with, with payments and seeing how that changed

the world, what's your sense about the lay of the land for the future of Bitcoin or other

cryptocurrencies in the positive impact they may have on the world?

To be clear, my communication wasn't suggest, wasn't meant to minimize payments or to denigrate

it in any way.

It was an attempted communication that when I was surveying the world, it was an algorithm

of what could I individually do?

So there are things that exist that have a lot of potential that can be done.

And then there's a filtering of how many people are qualified to do this given thing.

And then there's a further characterization that can be done of, okay, given the number

of qualified people, will somebody be a unique outperformer of that group to make something

truly impossible to be something done that otherwise couldn't get done?

So there's, there's a process of assessing where can you add unique value in the world?

And some of that has to do with, you're being very, very formal and calculative here, but

some of that is just like, what do you sense, like part of that equation is how much passion

you sense within yourself to be able to drive that through, to discover the impossibilities

and make them possible.

That's right.

And so we, we were a brain tree, I think we were the first company to integrate Coinbase

into our, I think we were the first payments company to formally incorporate crypto if

I'm not mistaken.

For people who are not familiar, Coinbase is a place we can trade cryptocurrencies.

Yeah.

Which was one of the only places you could.

So we were early in doing that and of course this was in the year 2013.

So an attorney to go and in cryptocurrency land.

I concur with the, the statement you made of the potential of the principles underlying

cryptocurrencies and that many of the things that they're building in the name of money

and of, of moving value is equally applicable to the brain and equally applicable to how

the brain interacts with the rest of the world and how we would imagine doing goal alignment

with people.

So it's, to me, it's a continuous spectrum of possibility.

And we're taught, your question is isolated on the money.

And I think it just is basically a scaffolding layer for all of society.

So you don't see this money as particularly distinct from the money?

I don't.

It's, I think we, we at Kernel, we will benefit greatly from the progress being made in cryptocurrency

because it will be a similar technology stack we will want to use for many things we want

to accomplish.

And so I'm bullish on what's going on and I think it could greatly enhance brain interfaces

and the value of the brain interface ecosystem.

Is there something you could say about, first of all, bullish on cryptocurrency versus fiat

money?

So do you, do you have a sense that in 21st century cryptocurrency will be embraced by

governments and changed the, the, the face of governments, the structure of government?

It's the, it's the same way I think about my diet, where previously it was conscious

Brian looking at foods in certain biochemical states on my hungry and my irritated on my

depressed.

And then I choose based upon those momentary windows.

Do I eat at night when I'm fatigued and I have low willpower, am I going to pig out

on something?

And the current monetary system is based upon human conscious decision making and politics

and power and this whole mess of things.

And what I like about the building blocks of cryptocurrency is it's methodical, it's

structured, it is accountable, it's transparent.

And so it introduces this scaffolding, which I think again is the right starting point for

how we think about building next generation institutions for society.

And that's why I think it's much broader, much broader than money.

So I guess what you're saying is Bitcoin is the demotion of the conscious mind as well.

In the same way you were talking about diet is like giving less priority to the, the ups

and downs of any one particular human mind, in this case your own, and giving more power

to the sort of data driven.

Yes, yeah, I think that is accurate that cryptocurrency is a version of what I would

call my autonomous self that I'm trying to build.

It is an introduction of an autonomous system of value exchange and value, and the process

of value creation in society, yes, there's similarities.

So I guess what you're saying is Bitcoin will somehow help me not pig out at night or the

equivalent of speaking of diet.

If we could just linger on that, that topic a little bit, we already talked about your,

your blog post of I fired myself, I fired Brian the evening, Brian who is too willing

to not not making good decisions for the long term well being and happiness of the entirety

of the organism.

Now, basically you were like picking out at night and but it's interesting because I

do this, I do the same.

In fact, I often eat one meal a day and like I have been this, this week actually, especially

when I travel and it's, it's funny that it never occurred to me to just basically look

at the fact that I'm able to be much smarter about my eating decisions in the morning and

the afternoon than I am at night.

So if I eat one meal a day, why not eat that one meal a day in the morning?

Like, I'm not, it never occurred to me, this revolutionary until, until you've, you've

outlined that.

So maybe can you give some details and what this is just you, this is one person, Brian

arrives at a particular thing that they do, but it's fascinating to kind of look at this

one particular case study.

So what works for you diet wise?

What's your actual diet?

What do you eat?

How often do you eat?

My current protocol is basically the result of thousands of experiments and decision making.

So I've, I do this every 90 days, I do the tests, I do the cycle throughs that I measure

again and then I'm measuring all the time and so what I, I of course, I'm optimizing

for my biomarkers.

I want perfect cholesterol and I brought perfect by blood glucose levels and perfect

DNA methylation, you know, processes.

I also want perfect sleep.

And so for example, recently in the past two weeks, my resting heart rate has been at 42

when I sleep and when my resting heart rate is at 42, my HRV is at its highest and I wake

up in the morning feeling more energized than any other configuration.

And so I know from all these processes that eating at roughly 830 in the morning, right

after I work out on an empty stomach creates enough distance between that completed eating

and bedtime where I have no almost no digestion processes going on in my body.

So my resting heart rate goes very low and when my resting heart rate is very low, I

sleep with high quality.

And so basically I've been trying to optimize the entirety of what I eat to my sleep quality.

My sleep quality then of course feeds into my willpower so it creates this virtuous cycle.

And so what I at 830, what I do is I eat what I call super veggie, which is it's a pudding

of 250 grams of broccoli, 150 grams of cauliflower and a whole bunch of other vegetables that

I eat what I call nutty pudding, which is make the pudding itself.