In this episode of the podcast, we have a guest on the show, Dr. Jay Shetty, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, specializing in the field of artificial intelligence. We talk about all sorts of topics from AI, neuroscience, and the future of the world, to dreams, and much more. We hope you enjoy this episode, and don t forget to subscribe and comment to stay up to date on all things tech and science! If you liked the episode, please give us a five star rating and a review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share it on your social media so we can spread the word to the rest of the universe about what's going on in the world around us. Thank you so much for listening, and stay tuned for more episodes like this one in the future! XOXO, EJ & Co. - The Future Explorers Podcasts is a production of Gimlet Media and is all about the future, the past, the present, and what's to come in the coming in the next 5 years. - EJ and Co., EJ's vision for the future and EJ s vision for what's coming in 2020 and beyond. Thank you for listening and supporting the podcast. EJ is a great resource for all things science and technology related. and AI related. Please don't forget to like, share it on Anchor and subscribe to the podcast! and subscribe on your favorite podcast, and share it with your friends and family! . and spread the love and spread it around the word around the world! :) -EJ & spread it everywhere you get it! -Nolan & EJ, Ej's thoughts on the world. Thanks EJ! -- Thank you EJ & Ej and Ej, Emanual, EK. -- Ej is a big EJ does the word "The Future Explores the world with EJ (and EJ thinks it's cool. . EJ loves you're cool, EZYO (and it's awesome! , EJ shares it out there's cool, and EK is cool, too! EJ says it's great, EYO does it's good, EVYO is cool. EJ knows it's smart, and it's also cool, so you can do it all.
00:00:36.000They probably don't need people by then.
00:00:38.000They'd probably just do movies with AI and probably really quickly.
00:00:42.000You could probably take a really great novel like The Great Gatsby, run it through an AI video creator, and it would just make you the most amazing version of The Great Gatsby.
00:00:54.000But if we're talking about historical moments in human beings and in technology, the implementation of Neuralink on the first human patient, that's you.
00:01:32.000The Utah Ray Synchron came out with something where basically they go through the artery in the neck and they kind of thread something up into the brain.
00:01:43.000It expands in a vein up there, in an artery up there, and then they can control the brain through that.
00:01:51.000So BCIs have been around for a while, a few decades at least, I think since like the 90s.
00:01:55.000So I always say that we're standing on the shoulders of giants sort of thing, but I know Neuralink just has, it's in a league of its own, and I know that, you know, with Elon's name attached to it, it's going to blow up way more.
00:02:11.000I think everyone else that, you know, comes after this basically is going to be pulled up by the progress Neuralink's making.
00:02:18.000And the fact that they are trying to open source basically all of it, I think the whole field is just going to grow exponentially at this point.
00:02:28.000And it really is fascinating how many different ways and strategies they've employed to try to connect computers to human beings and brains.
00:02:37.000So do you know what year the first one was that they did this?
00:02:47.000That just looks like a chip with more fixed threads on it.
00:02:55.000They were, I think, a lot smaller, and it just sat on the brain.
00:02:59.000So, obviously, another open brain surgery, and they put it in there, and then it would read a section of the brain, motor cortex, I think, as well.
00:03:08.000Have you seen some of the stuff now where they're using...
00:03:11.000Some kind of scanning imagery where they can actually see thoughts?
00:04:03.000MRI scans reveal what we see in dreams Japanese researchers unveiled dreams visuals with 60% accuracy using innovative MRI scans at pivotal Kyoto studies showcasing a breakthrough in sleep science Wow Wild stuff.
00:04:20.000That picture just looked AI. Are we dreaming an AI now?
00:04:25.000I think if the simulation is real, it seems ridiculous now.
00:04:30.000Less so than it seemed five years ago, but I think five years from now it'll seem likely.
00:04:34.000I think it's all interconnected in some very bizarre way.
00:04:38.000I think we're slowly building toward that connection with all of this technology and all of these new innovations and all of a greater understanding of quantum physics and space and all these.
00:04:52.000As they build on all this stuff, I think it's going to become more and more likely that this whole thing is somehow or another real, but not real at the same time.
00:05:13.000That's one of the things I'm really excited about with Neuralink is how much we're going to learn just about the brain from this.
00:05:20.000Like the amount of data that they're collecting.
00:05:24.000I mean, little things like the fact that all the stuff with the thread pullout going on with my brain, one of the reasons that they think it happened is because...
00:05:50.000Course of a month, we saw a lot of the threads start retracting from my brain.
00:05:57.000So the threads that the robot implanted were retracted.
00:06:00.000And so we were getting less signals from a lot of them.
00:06:03.000And they can't see that on brain scans or anything.
00:06:06.000So the threads are so small, not even the size of a human hair, that in order to get a scan of them, you'd have to use such a big machine that it would probably just fry my brain.
00:06:17.000So they can't just go in and look at them.
00:06:20.000So a lot of the data that we have that shows that they were moving or coming out of the brain was literally just whether or not the electrodes on the threads were sending signals anymore if they were picking up neuron spikes.
00:06:34.000So a lot of the threads were getting pulled out and that led to, you know, some decline performance for a while.
00:06:45.000But some of the reason that that happened, at least we think, is because the brain moves more than they thought it would, which is something that was so bizarre to me when I first heard that.
00:06:56.000I was like, you guys don't know how much the brain moves?
00:06:58.000This feels like that should have been something that was solved ages ago.
00:08:23.000I mean, I get like, what happens with me is if my heart rate's higher, I'll get like headaches and stuff.
00:08:31.000So, like, I have a lot of weird things with my body, with being a quadriplegic, where, like, I can tell, like, if I have really high blood pressure, my head just gets, like, really, really...
00:08:42.000Like, I get really bad headaches and stuff.
00:08:47.000My brain moves more than we thought it did, which blew my mind.
00:08:51.000Once we get more people in the study, then we'll really know if for some reason my brain just moves a lot more than it should.
00:08:58.000I imagine that we'll see something around the same and then we will be able to determine like a range like you're talking about.
00:09:06.000If it's, you know, a range of one millimeter to say five millimeters or if it's pretty consistent around three millimeters, I'm not sure.
00:09:13.000So what this implant allows you to do is you can interface with a computer and you can use keyboard, you can type in URLs, you can play video games.
00:10:44.000So if I want to try to move the cursor to the left, I move my hand to the left.
00:10:48.000But that's not necessarily what I would need to do.
00:10:50.000If I wanted to move the cursor to the left, I could kick my foot or I could do any sort of like motor action to train it to learn that's what I want it to do to go left.
00:11:01.000So there will be like a visual on the screen that says like move your hand to the left and then they will train that left movement to left on the cursor control.
00:11:43.000We're working on what works well at this point, so a lot of it is my right hand stuff.
00:11:49.000We have mapped a lot of things to individual fingers, hand movements in general, but we've done left hand stuff, we've done foot kick stuff, and it doesn't look like the signals are as good, but that also might be just due to the fact that some of the threads are pulled out.
00:12:06.000So when they fix that issue with the next people, then those things would be much, much better.
00:12:12.000And if that's the case, then you could theoretically do multiple things at once.
00:12:17.000It's not just, you know, you map, say, my right hand to the cursor control, then you map my fingers and my other hand and my toes to, like, key control.
00:12:27.000So I could be moving the cursor and typing at the same time with my toes or something.
00:13:43.000Like, I think something to try to move, and the signal gets sent.
00:13:48.000So when I'm attempting to move my hand and the cursor's moving, and it's moving basically where I want it to, I'm like, yeah, that makes sense.
00:13:55.000It didn't really shock me that it worked.
00:13:57.000I assumed that it would work because all the signals are still working.
00:14:01.000It's just my spinal cord that's jacked up.
00:14:45.000So you're thinking in your mind or you're trying to get your hands to make the signs of sign language and then the computer interprets that as the language and types it out.
00:15:24.000Because I think it's both me learning what the computer is trying to do, the algorithm, and the algorithm learning what I'm trying to do.
00:15:33.000And so over time, it's just going to be completely thought-based.
00:15:39.000I don't see why it wouldn't get there.
00:15:42.000From what I've seen just with the cursor control, it makes sense that, you know, as I'm attempting, it's learning.
00:15:48.000And then instead of even needing to attempt, it'll just understand what I want to do and it'll do it.
00:15:56.000So you were saying that you're one of the first people to do this and there's going to be more people in the trial and that maybe they'll learn, like, the things that are going wrong with yours.
00:17:27.000So I'm glad we didn't because they learned a lot.
00:17:31.000If we would have just gone in and taken it out and put in a new one, they wouldn't have learned anything that they had learned over the last three months.
00:19:15.000So, um, it would be great if I could get into something and have them fix as much of me as possible.
00:19:21.000I mean, even if I had more control over my hands, the amount of things that I could do would, like, skyrocket, like an order of magnitude, um, better.
00:19:46.000You can do things in other countries that you're not allowed to do in America because of regulations.
00:19:53.000But what they're able to do down there is they're going right into discs and they're alleviating people's disc problems where they're actually making the discs grow larger and heal people with back injuries.
00:20:07.000And I know I've read things about spinal cord injuries and improvements, but I would love to connect you with them.
00:20:14.000And they, you know, they're the experts on this.
00:20:16.000They'd be able to tell you, like, what the state of the art in terms of, like, the research shows that stem cells can and can't do.
00:21:27.000I don't know if you've seen anything on it.
00:21:29.000Basically, they do something similar to what a lot of the stem cell research is.
00:21:34.000A lot of the stem cell stuff is implant stem cells above and below the level of injury, and those stem cells will migrate basically and create a bridge.
00:21:44.000Some of them have even talked about injecting right into the level of injury.
00:21:48.000So, with the Neuralink, the plan is to implant one in the brain, and then implant one below the level of injury, and then the Neuralinks will just talk right to each other.
00:21:59.000All the brain signals that it's picking up in the brain, wherever it's implanted, motor cortex, in this point, in this scenario, would go straight to the other one, and it would send it right through your body like it should.
00:22:12.000And do they have a plan on when to try this?
00:22:18.000They have one in a pig, you can watch the video of it, where basically they have an implant in the pig's brain and an implant in the pig's spinal cord, I think in the thoracic section of the spinal cord.
00:22:30.000And they have been moving the pig's, like, legs on its own.
00:22:37.000The pig's not paralyzed or anything, but basically they, like, tell the pig, come to this section of, you know, they, like, grid off the floor, and they put food in a section of the grid, and they're like, if you're okay with us testing on you, pig, come over here, basically.
00:22:51.000And the pig will go in there, and then they will take control of the pig's leg, and they will, like, start playing around with it, like, making the pig.
00:23:26.000That is the ultimate fear of human beings becoming cyborgs, is that we're going to be subject to all the problems that our computers and our phones have with malware and spyware.
00:23:38.000I mean, people ask me all the time if this thing can be hacked, and short answer is yes.
00:23:44.000But at this point, at least, hacking this wouldn't really do much.
00:23:49.000You might be able to see some of the brain signals, you might be able to see some of the data that Neuralink's collecting, and then you might be able to control my cursor on my screen and make me look at weird stuff, but that's about it.
00:24:04.000I guess you could go in and, like, look through my, like, messages, emails, something like that.
00:24:09.000But I'd also have to be, like, connected already.
00:24:12.000So if I'm not connected to my computer or anything, you can't get in there on your own.
00:24:16.000So it would have to be a time when I am on it and you are able to hack it.
00:24:21.000You're giving it basically a guidebook on how to ruin your life.
00:24:52.000You know, along that line, it's something I've thought a lot about with, like, doing interviews and stuff is, like, some of the people that I've done interviews with, I'm like, are they going to try to attack me to get to, like, Elon Musk or something?
00:25:07.000Are they going to say things about me or, like, you know, try to do, like, a getcha on me, gotcha sort of thing?
00:25:15.000And everyone that I've talked to about that, they're just like, they would have to be the scum of the earth to try to do that to you.
00:26:08.000But a lot of people, when they sit down, They know they're gonna be on camera, they've never been on camera before, and they get very nervous.
00:26:15.000And that's why I like to talk to people before the show, just kinda hang out a little, get you chilled out, I'm just a person, you're just a person, we're gonna just talk.
00:26:30.000So they want to sit there with a clipboard, and they want to look at you in a condescending way, and it's like a little bit of a power move.
00:26:38.000And what they're trying to do is make salacious content.
00:28:13.000Most of those media interviews are bad formats because it's a very limited amount of time and you have to have a clip that fits in between commercials.
00:28:24.000They have executives and there's too many people that get in there and just...
00:28:28.000The person talking to you should just be talking to you and they should have an understanding of what you do and how it happened and what this is all about, what this means for future people.
00:28:38.000You know, it shouldn't be like going after Elon Musk.
00:28:41.000Everyone's so goddamn political right now.
00:28:45.000Even making apolitical people political.
00:28:47.000So to connect you to that, it's just so stupid.
00:28:52.000What you are is, like I said, I think if there's a movie about the future, one of the very first people that has used This kind of technology, and we're learning that these people are getting better at it, and now with the use of AI,
00:29:09.000I mean, who knows what's going to be possible with you just in a few years.
00:30:10.000How many people who are paralyzed don't have to be paralyzed anymore?
00:30:14.000How many people with disabilities, ALS or Alzheimer's or any of these who are blind, how many people are going to be able to live their lives again?
00:30:26.000I know that I feel like people are going to look at me and say, like, I really need to be more concerned about a lot of the things coming down the road.
00:30:35.000And it's something that I'm trying to think more about because at some point people are going to ask and I don't have good answers for it because all I'm thinking about is, you know, like I want to help people and I feel like this is going to help people and that's what I'm focused on.
00:30:47.000Well, I think your perspective is probably the right one because no one knows what's coming.
00:30:53.000And you can be freaked out about it like I am.
00:30:58.000I'm sometimes freaked out about it, but other times I'm just sort of resigned to the fact that this is just the existence that we find ourselves in.
00:32:15.000That's just medical technology and understanding of the human body.
00:32:20.000Implementation of this kind of device that can allow you to move your body and can, as you were saying earlier, you can bring back eyesight to some people.
00:32:29.000This is something that they really are hopeful for.
00:32:32.000Have they done any of that on animals yet?
00:33:06.000You would activate certain things in order to display what's going on around the world to someone, to the back of someone's eye, to their retina, whatever it is.
00:33:19.000So there's a video of them lighting up parts of a screen.
00:33:24.000And they have like basically an eye tracker in the monkey.
00:33:27.000And so the monkey will look to different parts of the screen and like wherever they've lit up on the brain basically.
00:33:36.000So whatever is going, whatever implant they have in the brain, they will like light up somewhere on the brain and then they'll light it up on the screen and the monkey will look there.
00:33:44.000And then at some point they stop lighting it up on the screen and they're just lighting it up in the monkey's brain and the monkey still looks there.
00:34:10.000Basically about a company who had implanted things in people, and the company went under, and then the people in the study were like, well, what do we do now?
00:34:19.000And they didn't know if they were just going to continue.
00:35:27.000They have to, like you said, learn something from the monkeys, from the animals that they're testing on.
00:35:33.000So some of them they will, you know, let live longer.
00:35:36.000Some of them they'll implant something in and then sacrifice almost immediately to see because they have to know what it's doing short term, medium term, long term.
00:35:47.000So basically all animals and all animal testing get sacrificed at some point.
00:35:52.000I don't know how true that is because obviously a lot of them, once they're done with the study that they're in, they let go live if it wasn't too invasive.
00:35:59.000If they don't need to study any part of them, they would need to be killed for.
00:36:03.000But if you're going to study the brain...
00:36:05.000If you're going to study the brain, then there's really no other way.
00:36:54.000It's skewed because all the things that they brought up were just, it was all of the bad.
00:37:00.000Like basically anything bad that happens to the monkey has to be, or any of the animals, has to be reported and gets reported in this like, you know, XYZ format of this is what's going on with the monkey, this is what happens,
00:37:16.000this is what we think happened, we had to kill the monkey, yes or no.
00:37:19.000But none of the other things get reported at all.
00:37:24.000Like if it's five years that the monkey's alive and one bad thing happens, then there's a report about that one bad thing happening to the monkey.
00:37:30.000And you compile all that and you're like, look at all these terrible things that are going on with the monkeys.
00:38:27.000I saw a story of a monkey who basically tore some kid's face off.
00:38:32.000I think he was outside of the village or in his village.
00:38:36.000The whole story was about how they were doing reconstructive surgery on the kid and making him look a bit more normal again, but that's terrifying.
00:38:45.000There's a video of a guy sitting on the ground, cross-legged, and a monkey hops on his shoulder, and then the guy's thinking it's cute and smiley, and then the monkey just decides to take a massive chunk of his scalp off.
00:38:57.000Just bites down on his head and just takes a football-sized chunk of scalp off this dude's head.
00:39:58.000I think when we're looking at these kind of scientific experiments on animals, a lot of people are going to have a problem with.
00:40:06.000But I wonder with new technology if that's even going to be necessary anymore.
00:40:12.000In the future, particularly with the leaps that are going to be made with AI, I wonder if they're going to be able to just be able to map out a study You know, like, understand the interactions between human beings and these devices and be able to map out the possibilities and probabilities without having to do that.
00:40:35.000I feel like at the beginning they would probably need to do that along with a study on a human.
00:40:43.000So they might run, say, simulations a million times on an AI simulation on how this would interact with a human.
00:40:52.000But then they would have to go in and do it to see how true the simulations are.
00:40:57.000And then depending on how accurate they are, then maybe they could just go fully to that.
00:41:01.000But if it ends up being different, then...
00:41:03.000Yeah, I have a feeling they're gonna be able to replace parts with artificial parts too, like the eyeball itself.
00:41:09.000I was just thinking about that the other day, like how complex, like look how small these little cameras are on phones, little tiny ass cameras, but one of these can do a 100x zoom, you know, and one of these is 200 megapixels, this little tiny thin thing.
00:41:24.000Like, what's to say that they wouldn't be able to come up with something that works way better than the human eye?
00:45:03.000I was saying, like, through your teeth, but, I mean, that is how they do it.
00:45:07.000A team of specialists at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine announced Wednesday that they're the first surgeons in the United States to restore a person's sight by using a tooth.
00:45:16.000The procedure is formally called Modified Osteo-Odonto-Keratop...
00:45:26.000Karen K. Thornton, 60, went blind nine years ago from a rare disorder called Steven Johnson Syndrome.
00:45:32.000The disorder left the surface of her eyes so severely scarred she was legally blind, but doctors determined that the inside of her eyes were still functional enough that she might one day see with the help This is a patient where the surface of the eye was totally damaged, no wetness, no tears.
00:45:47.000Dr. Victor L. Perez, the ophthalmologist at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami, who operated on Thornton.
00:45:55.000So we kind of recreate the environment of the mouth in the eye.
00:46:25.000Finally, Perez and his team implanted the modified tooth which had a hole drilled through the center to support a prosthetic lens.
00:46:33.000We used that tooth as a platform to put the optical cylinder into the eye, explained Perez.
00:46:39.000Perez said doctors often use less risky and less invasive techniques to replace corneas, but the damage from Thornton's Steven Johnson syndrome ruled those out.
00:46:48.000Using a tooth might sound strange, but it also offers an advantage because doctors used Thornton's own cheek and tooth tissue.
00:46:56.000She faces less risk that her immune system will attack the tooth and reject the transplant.
00:47:01.000Patients getting a coordinate transplant from a deceased donor, on the other hand, face chances that their immune system will reject the new tissue.
00:47:10.000Yeah, for some reason I thought they were using that tooth to like, I don't know, use it as a replacement for like her vision in some way, but it's literally just a placeholder for like, you know, different things like the tissue and different places to like, like they said,
00:47:46.000And with you, do you have the – like, if they start doing the range of motion studies or the – being able to recreate motion or restore motion, are you going to be available for those studies?
00:48:15.000You would have to do it with someone who already has the implant in their brain.
00:48:19.000So I don't know if it'll be a separate Neuralink that they would need, like a different one specifically for...
00:48:29.000Like the two implants interacting together.
00:48:31.000I don't see why that would be the case.
00:48:33.000Just like the same thing with people who they're going to have to test to see if the surgery to replace a Neuralink is safe at some point.
00:48:41.000They're going to have to go through a whole thing.
00:48:43.000So they're going to have to do it on people who already have it in.
00:48:46.000So I imagine that sort of study might be something I would be involved in if they're planning on implanting one in someone's spinal cord and then seeing how they interact and seeing if it works.
00:48:56.000I don't see why I couldn't be in that, but we'll see.
00:51:53.000So like this study is to prove whether or not it's safe and if it works, basically.
00:51:58.000I think once that's proven, then they're going to get into a lot more of what it's actually capable of.
00:52:03.000And then once it's released to the public, I think people are going to rush to get it, honestly.
00:52:09.000At least a group of people who have been following it at the very least.
00:52:13.000Because once we know that it's safe, then that's one of the big things that people are going to like, once that's lifted, once you're like, okay, it's safe.
00:52:20.000Now we can go through and start talking about being able to communicate with people and being able to, you know, possibly download information or have it be available to you.
00:52:50.000Not invasive because obviously they did brain surgery, but they were expecting it to be something like three to six hours and my surgery took under two hours.
00:53:14.000So once they get this even better, even more tuned in, then I imagine people go into this clinic and go in and come out in a few hours with an Erlink and then they can chat with other friends online or something else.
00:53:29.000Again, I'm not here to talk about like the ethical ramifications of that or like how How it's fun to think about, like the things that might go wrong or could go wrong.
00:53:41.000And it's probably something that people much smarter than me should think about whether or not it should be done.
00:53:46.000But I think there are so many things that you could do with it.
00:53:51.000I think it's going to be done no matter what.
00:53:54.000And if it's not done by Neuralink, it's going to be done by someone in another country.
00:54:11.000We always try to come up with greater things.
00:54:14.000And if someone does figure out a way to connect human beings to some form of wireless internet or wireless data or some completely new thing, instead of thinking as the internet as we know it, being these devices that go to websites, it might be a completely different invention that uses a completely different type of technology to sync All the information and all the minds in the world together.
00:54:40.000It might not be as dopey as going to a website.
00:54:44.000Going to a website is probably an archaic way to do it.
00:54:48.000It'll be like the cloud or the metaverse or something.
00:56:00.000Another problem is deep fakes and songs.
00:56:03.000They made a Drake song that became a hit and Drake had nothing to do with it.
00:56:08.000It's not that far away from it being out of the barn where you're not going to be able to ever stop You're going to be able to do whatever you want in terms of creating videos, audios, and it'll look indistinguishable from a real video,
00:56:25.000They're already going to take this podcast and translate it into different languages without me being able to speak them just through AI. Yeah.
00:56:32.000I mean, I think they did the same thing with the deepfake, like you were just saying.
00:56:36.000I think they did something with Trump recently, where it was a deepfake of Trump, and after a while he had to be like, hey guys, that wasn't me.
00:56:42.000Wasn't there a football player that was saying some wild shit that turned out to be fake, or a basketball player?
00:57:29.000I think it's going to be something that people are able to do, like the next generations, where they look at something online and they're like, oh yeah, that's AI. Oh yeah, that's fake.
00:58:16.000With translation, it's connecting people from different cultures and different countries more.
00:58:22.000I think ultimately what it's going to do is it's going to be some sort of a mind interface.
00:58:27.000I don't think it's going to be as simple as language.
00:58:29.000I think it's going to be a next-level mind interface.
00:58:33.000Through a technology akin to Neuralink or maybe future versions of Neuralink, I think we're going to be able to know what someone's actually thinking.
00:58:43.000I think you're not going to be able to lie anymore is what I'm saying.
00:58:45.000I don't think lying is going to be possible 100 years from now.
00:59:01.000And if you live your life in this manner where there cannot be deception, how much more would we get done?
00:59:10.000How much more would we understand each other in relationships?
00:59:14.000And if you're bullshitting, you'll understand that you're bullshitting by the way another person sees your thoughts, and then you'll be forced to handle those and go, you know what?
00:59:24.000I'm trying to put this off on other people, and it's really me.
00:59:30.000Everyone will see reality instead of these sort of manufactured narratives that people have with this very selective view of memory and their thoughts of the past.
00:59:53.000We'll be able to solve a lot of our social issues that seem insurmountable because of poor communication and the lack of honesty, a lack of real honest conversations instead of just people trying to win arguments.
01:00:29.000No one else is, and that becomes kind of an issue too.
01:00:32.000If in some way you are able to jailbreak your Neuralink so you can't lie anymore, and then you're the only one lying, everyone's going to believe you.
01:00:40.000They think that you can't lie, and then that brings up a whole new world of problems.
01:00:46.000In my eyes, you're seeing right into the thoughts.
01:00:59.000We're going to have to have actual understanding of all the different processes that are in play, whether it's environment or resources or...
01:01:08.000You know, inter-country conflicts, whatever the fuck is going on, we're going to have to have a real understanding of it without politicians bullshitting us as to why we're going to do something that won't exist anymore.
01:01:47.000The government is just a bunch of people.
01:01:49.000The super nerds out there are the ones who are really in charge of this stuff, because even we're seeing this with technology and some of these hearings on AI, the people that are asking the questions don't know what the fuck is going on.
01:02:00.000You know, and I'm sure you saw that with some of the Facebook hearings and some of the other hearings.
01:02:05.000The people that are actually asking about the technology, how much time do you have to get into the understanding of this?
01:02:11.000How much time between worrying about water rights in your district and this and that and all these other problems that you have as a politician?
01:02:19.000How much time are you actually spending trying to figure out how social media works?
01:02:35.000It's like grandpas who argue on Facebook.
01:02:39.000They're not going to be the people that control AI, and they're not going to be the people that are going to be able to figure out how to stop mind-reading technology.
01:02:47.000I think when mind-reading technology comes, it's going to come so fast that it's going to be just like all these other things, like the Internet.
01:02:53.000It came so fast they couldn't control it.
01:02:55.000Because if you looked at the Internet, if you looked at...
01:02:57.000What the internet has done for like a distrust in mainstream media, distrust in politicians, exposing corruption, all the different things that we know about now that are a fact that just 20 years ago you would have thought been crazy conspiracy talk.
01:03:12.000If they knew that that was going to happen and make life so much more difficult for them, they would have regulated the internet from the jump.
01:03:18.000They would have stopped, stepped in, took over like China did.
01:03:22.000Took over like North Korea did, and you would get their version of the internet forever, and that's it, and there's no growth, and they'll silence dissidents.
01:03:29.000And that's how they would have done it if they had ever known that it was going to be what it is now.
01:03:34.000I think that's exactly what's going to happen with mind-reading software and mind-reading technology.
01:03:49.000If they find out there's a technology that allows you to communicate with people in a completely new way and it's much more fulfilling and we understand each other much better and we really do realize that we are all one.
01:04:01.000Imagine we can communicate with this technology and it ends war overnight.
01:04:10.000You realize that these people that you're about to bomb are you, and that we're all the same thing.
01:04:14.000We're all one consciousness experiencing itself through different bodies and different lives and different experiences and different genes and different parts of the world, but we're all genuinely the same thing.
01:04:39.000If that's what it takes to bring aliens down, then I'm all for it.
01:04:42.000If that's what it takes to really get us to be face-to-face, the only thing I keep telling my buddy is, like, I am all down for the whole...
01:04:50.000Like aliens coming, us interacting with them and everything, as long as they're not the mantids.
01:04:55.000If they're the mantis people, I don't want anything to do with them.
01:04:59.000I think that, you know, I just don't want it.
01:05:59.000How many people have seen the mantis aliens?
01:06:01.000Yeah, I know of one story where there was a hunter just walking around and it got like dark over him or something and he looked up and there was just like a ship over him and he looked through his scope and he looked right into some like mantis people.
01:06:21.000Like that's the one alien story I think I'll stay far away from and hope it's something else.
01:06:26.000Well, you gotta think that Insects have some kind of bizarre intelligence because if you've ever seen leafcutter ant colonies when they pour the cement in them and you realize how sophisticated they are, like, how did you guys do this?
01:07:03.000Now, if ants evolved to the point where they develop that kind of intelligence, who's to say that in a different environment, where ants have more accesses to food, more access to resources, and more competition, that they don't evolve to the point where that intelligence,
01:07:20.000it keeps getting scaled up And they get to like a human.
01:07:24.000Human level intelligence from an insect.
01:10:27.000One thing that I found with the Neuralink is something that kind of blew my mind, too, is that when I'm attempting to do stuff sometimes, or I'm thinking it to, like, move in a certain place, Sometimes it's so good that it's moving before I even,
01:10:47.000It's almost like, if you think about moving your hand, the signal is basically already being sent before you move your hand.
01:10:55.000Like, your mind is saying, okay, he's about to move his hand basically, so the signal needs to be sent all the way down and back up in order for you to move your hand.
01:11:04.000So the speed that all that happens, and it's almost a little preemptive, I saw that with the Neuralink, where it was moving the cursor before I was actually moving my hand.
01:11:17.000So with video games, stuff like that, you just need to think for it to move somewhere, and it is that accurate, and it's quicker than you can even think.
01:11:27.000So there's no way it's going to, like, no one else is going to be able to keep up with it.
01:11:31.000That's going to be wild for something like Quake.
01:11:34.000Like a first person, like a fast first person shooter.
01:11:37.000You're running down hallways and you're just catching people and shooting them instantaneously.
01:12:34.000Yeah, because there's tactics and strategy, especially if you're doing one-on-one deathmatch, where you have to know when the health is spawning and when the weapons are spawning, how to control a map.
01:13:34.000The only thing that I would say is that VR actually requires physical movement.
01:13:39.000Like, there's a couple games that we have.
01:13:41.000Yeah, but if the brain is already interpreting your, like, motor cortex, the movement of your motor cortex, then you can just think, move this, and it'll move it in VR as well.
01:14:14.000Yeah, I've always thought if, you know, you just give me an Optimus robot, I'll have it get one of those, like, baby chest carriers or something like that.
01:14:20.000And they can just carry me around like that, and it'd be great.
01:14:24.000Can you imagine walking down the street with that?
01:15:37.000I'm pretty sure some of the people who have left Neuralink have gone and either started their own little companies or have gone to other companies that are doing something similar.
01:15:47.000I think Neuralink's advancements now are going to pull everyone else up.
01:15:52.000I think Neuralink will be at the lead for quite a while, but I don't see why companies that haven't been able to achieve what Neuralink is achieving now won't be able to do it in a year or two time.
01:16:04.000Especially, like I said, because Neuralink is making everything so open source and there's people like me out there who are just talking about it like willy-nilly.
01:16:14.000I don't see why other companies won't find some way to catch up over time.
01:16:21.000I think with them leading the way and the fact that it's been implemented and it's been successful and the fact that they're already improving upon the software and being able to correct issues with it.
01:16:47.000I keep saying that it's all going to happen in my lifetime for sure.
01:16:51.000I keep saying that it's going to happen in the next 10 years, 20 years where quadriplegics like me, paralyzed people won't have to be paralyzed anymore.
01:17:00.000I have this vision of someone being paralyzed, going into the hospital, getting the Neuralink and walking out like a day or two later, which I think is totally possible.
01:17:10.000I think it's going to happen a lot sooner than later, especially how fast all this is moving.
01:17:15.000And the fact that this is like successful now, I think it'll...
01:17:19.000I don't know that it would help me per se, even though I said it's in my lifetime.
01:18:36.000Well, that's also one of the legitimate uses for steroids.
01:18:40.000One of the legitimate uses for steroids is that people with muscle-wasting disease and people who have severely atrophied and that it allows them to build up tissue better.
01:19:06.000With the future of this stuff, it's going to eventually get to a point where it's probably, like, in the beginning, it's probably going to be very difficult to acquire, right?
01:19:24.000If they complete your trial, they find it satisfactory, they have a way to do it, when will the average person who is a quadriplegic be able to start being able to use some of this technology?
01:19:38.000I know that my study is, like, the main part of the study is a year and then five years kind of extensive, like, follow-up stuff in the study.
01:19:47.000So once that's done, however many people, I've seen numbers up to, like, a few hundred people have it in this five-year timeline.
01:19:57.000So once all that happens, I don't know what, like, phase two is with this.
01:22:30.000They called me for the first, like, so I applied like September, late September, September like 19th or something around that day.
01:22:39.000A month later, end of October, I had finished all my testing and interviews and then I didn't find out they had chosen me until maybe the end of November, early December.
01:23:21.000So I was like, maybe I'll let someone else get the first, and then I get a better version in the second or third one.
01:23:27.000But ultimately, being the first is cool.
01:23:30.000It's something that I just decided to do.
01:23:33.000I was like, this is the best way I can help, too.
01:23:37.000If anything goes wrong, I'd rather it go wrong to me than passing it up and having someone else struggle.
01:23:42.000If, God forbid, anything bad happened to someone, I would rather it happen to me, and I would rather not have passed up and watched it happen to someone else.
01:24:06.000I think in December they had told me that it could be me and they said that we might end up having you be the first and it could happen as early as like mid-December.
01:24:16.000And that kind of stressed me out because I was a little worried that something bad would happen and I would have ruined Christmas for my family forever.
01:24:24.000I was like, if this is right around Christmas and something bad happens, like Christmas is going to be ruined forever.
01:24:30.000Luckily, they waited like an extra month and a half, but it was cool.
01:24:34.000Like, I kept pretty level expectations through the whole thing.
01:24:37.000I didn't know what was going to come of it.
01:24:39.000I didn't know if I was going to end up doing media or anything.
01:24:41.000It was something that I had talked to my parents about, but it wasn't something that I really wanted to do, per se.
01:24:48.000I wasn't wanting to, like, get famous or anything from this.
01:24:52.000There are a couple things that I did want to do, and ultimately, that's why I decided to do media.
01:25:08.000No, I would say being paralyzed made me just rethink a lot of things in my life, a lot of my perspective.
01:25:20.000I mean, one thing about being paralyzed is there's, especially being a quadriplegic, you just have a lot of time to think.
01:25:28.000I thought through everything I'd ever done, all the mistakes I ever made, why I was who I was, where I was.
01:25:37.000I realized a lot of things about myself.
01:25:39.000I realized, you know, that I wasn't the person who I thought I was.
01:25:45.000I always built myself up a certain way and then going back through all of my interactions with everyone, all the mistakes I made, I realized I'm painting a much prettier picture of myself in my head.
01:26:08.000I'm not as good of a guy as I thought I was.
01:26:23.000So, I found the reasons why I was doing these things, and I thought about it for probably a few years, just lying in my bed, staring at walls for, you know, eight, ten hours a day just thinking.
01:26:39.000And eventually I came to this conclusion that partly through my, like, faith, my interactions with God, partly just because I wanted to be better, I wanted to be a better person,
01:26:55.000I realized that there were things that I could do to help, and this seemed like my best chance, honestly.
01:30:59.000I'm a pretty chill guy, so I feel like I rolled with the punches pretty well.
01:31:02.000And I thought the same thing with Neuralink.
01:31:04.000And so, like, I never thought of myself, like, trailblazing or anything, but it's just cool to be a part of, and I'm really happy that Neuralink chose me.
01:31:15.000And I'm looking forward to having some, like, cyborg buddies in the future.
01:31:26.000I guess we'll find out when they get the next patient, like the next participant, like maybe a couple months and we'll be chatting with each other.
01:31:35.000I mean, I've been, you know, having telepathic communications with Pager the monkey for a few months.
01:31:41.000No one knows about it, but we talk about that kind of stuff all the time.
01:31:45.000He's oddly obsessed with the new Planet of the Apes movie, but couldn't tell you why.
01:32:06.000You know, if they could develop an eye just like artificial intelligence can make images like pretty fucking close, maybe they can make an eyeball that just really does kind of like talk to you a little bit.
01:32:54.000Just because in order to even interact with the computer, it has to be uploaded with that app.
01:32:59.000And so that's why putting it on a phone or something, you would just upload the app onto it.
01:33:04.000Any sort of other devices, there's ways to connect to them.
01:33:10.000So, like for me, even with the Switch, it's through my computer still, but then you run like a cord from my computer through like a converter box and then into the Switch.
01:33:23.000So it's all through the computer right now.
01:33:25.000I don't think it's going to be that way forever.
01:33:27.000I think it's going to be much easier to connect to other devices in the future.
01:33:30.000Especially if Neuralink takes off like I think it will, then companies will start just uploading the software onto it, downloading the software onto it, so that way you can...
01:33:41.000It's going to be one of those things where it's Alexa compatible.
01:34:06.000I think when he said that they might ban Apple devices because they're going to use open AI, I was like, what is going on?
01:34:13.000I get real nervous when someone way fucking smarter than me gets nervous.
01:34:17.000When he's saying that if AI... Basically what he's saying is, I think, to paraphrase, he's saying that Apple wasn't smart enough to create their own artificial intelligence, but they're smart enough to keep artificial intelligence from running rampant through their operating system.