Bryan Johnson is the founder and CEO of Kernel, OS Fund, and previously Braintree. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Bryan's Twitter: https://twitter.com/bryan_johnson
Bryan's Website: https://www.bryanjohnson.co/
Kernel's Twitter: https://twitter.com/KernelCo
Kernel's Website: https://www.kernel.com/

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:13 - Kernel Flow demo
10:25 - The future of brain-computer interfaces
43:54 - Existential risk
49:33 - Overcoming depression
1:04:52 - Zeroth principles thinking
1:13:05 - Engineering consciousness
1:19:19 - Privacy
1:23:48 - Neuralink
1:33:27 - Braintree and Venmo
1:49:10 - Eating one meal a day
1:55:22 - Sleep
2:15:04 - Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro
2:22:02 - Advice for young people
2:26:38 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Brian Johnson, founder of Kernel, 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, 4 Sigmatic, 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 watch 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.

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.

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

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

So we have 2 incredible pieces of technology and a machine running Ubuntu 2004 in front of us.

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

As like an ego or are you saying physically both?

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

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?

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.

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.

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 If I'm seeing the muscle activation correctly on your lips, you're not gonna do well on this.

What kind of fish performs brain surgery?

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

We're getting activation patterns of your entire cortex.

I'll edit out all the parts where I left and Photoshop a serious face over me.

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

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 LIDAR as you know.

And we're using that to image, it's a 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 you'll see in the reconstructions we do for you, you'll see your activation patterns in your brain as throughout this entire time we were 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.

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

There's 52 modules and each module has 1 laser and 6 sensors and the sensors fire in about 100 picoseconds and then the photons scatter and absorb in your brain, and then 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 1,000 plus channels that are sampling your activity.

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

I would not think it would be comfortable.

Something that's measuring brain activity, I would not think it would be comfortable, but it is.

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

It measures 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 where, 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 they're kind of, there's like a rubber band thing where they mold to the shape of your head.

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

But I have a giant head and it fits fine.

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

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.

Yeah, 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 and 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.

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

Most people have intuitions about brain interfaces 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.

And I think the more relevant understanding of brain interfaces or neuroimaging 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 2 hours, but I'm being told that for a bunch of reasons, just because we probably wanna keep the data small and visualize it nicely for the final product, we wanna cut this off and take this amazing helmet away from me.

So Brian, thank you so much for this experience and let's continue without helmet-less.

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?

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 a 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, in a high bandwidth way from my brain, opens up all kinds of, you know, at the very, I was kinda joking when we were 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 quite put it into words, but there is a genuinely for me, this is not some kind of joke about me being a robot, it just genuinely feels like I'm being heard in a way 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.

Now a 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 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 1 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.

So 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 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 it, Huberman Lab Podcast.

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

and I'm a data person, 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 or a large number of individuals.

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

Like there's a very powerful thing to it being so easy to just put on that you could 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, have 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 a 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 largest raw input material into society at any given moment.

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

And we have 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.

I mean, for example, I know if I buy an appliance 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.

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

Everyone's agreed upon engineering standards.

And we don't have engineering standards around cognition is not a for 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, 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 tweets and texts and so on.

Just a very hardcore, mini-scale compression of actual, the raw data.

But maybe you can comment, because you used 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 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 as I'm sure you know, we understand a few things, but we don't understand most of

This has been 1 of the most significant challenges of building Kernel.

And Kernel wouldn't exist if I wasn't able to fund it initially by 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.

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 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 to the company.

And to raise the round of funding, the first 1 we did, I spoke to 228 investors.

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 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 the analogy is like brain interfaces are like early nineties of the internet.

Is you wanna 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 2 or 3 year time period?

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 1 alien civilization in that equation.

So meaning like, this is in search of an application that's impactful and transformative.

By the way, we need to come up with a better term than killer

You can go like viral app, that's horrible too, right?

It's some very inspiringly impactful application.

Okay, so let's stick with killer app, that's fine.

I dislike the chosen words in capturing the concept.

You know, it's 1 of those sticky things that is effective to use in the tech world, but when you 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.

I actually regret now having called attention to this, 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.

So you're basically creating a framework where there's the possibility of a discovery of an application that people love using.

a fun game internally where when we have these discussions, we begin circling around this concept of does anybody have an idea?

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 tuitions.

And it's interesting, we're also seeing a few neuroscientists who have been talking to us.

Well, I was speaking to this 1 young associate professor and I approached a conversation and said, hey, we have these 5 data streams that we're pulling off.

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

Like which 1 do you think is gonna be valuable for your objectives and which ones 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 or have these functions, he didn't care.

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 more 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 applying 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, you know, technology like this to market.

It's why most of the time it just linguishes in academia for quite some time.

But we hope that we will over, you know, 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 a Angry Birds style application that's just too exciting to not use?

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 that it's an end, like 1 night, and that's not good enough to run all my trials.

And so if you look just at the information that 1 can acquire on their wrist.

And now you're applying it 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.

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Bryan Johnson: Kernel Brain-Computer Interfaces | Lex Fridman Podcast #186