01 / recommendation
Likes Twitter.
“Yeah, I assume you’re going to have to take over the world. I mean, I love your Twitter.”
- Speaker
- Lex Fridman
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
Lex Fridman Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
90 published records
01 / recommendation
“Yeah, I assume you’re going to have to take over the world. I mean, I love your Twitter.”
02 / recommendation
“If I train a model, like in Webgrid, I bootstrap on a model, which basically is them training models as I’m playing Webgrid based off of the Webgrid data that I’m… So if I play Webgrid for 10 minutes, they can train off that data specifically in order to get me a better model.”
03 / belief
“I’ve seen images of this and for me with OCD, for some reason, are really pleasant. I think there’s a Subreddit called Oddly Satisfying.”
04 / evaluation
“You compute some mean of what’s going on across all the input features, and you subtract that on the input when you’re doing your BCI session, works super well. For whatever reason, that doesn’t work super well with Noland.”
05 / belief
“I’ve lost a number of games because I’ll accidentally click something. I think the first time I ever beat you was because of an accidental click.”
06 / uncertainty
“I would’ve beaten that literally the day before I came to Austin. But I had a, I don’t know, a five-second lag right at the end, and I just had to wait until the latency calmed down, and then I kept clicking.”
07 / belief
“Repetitions, humility, recognizing that you aren’t perfect at any stage along the way, recognizing you’ve got improvements to make in your technique, being open to feedback and coaching from people with a different perspective on how to do it, and then just the constant will to do better. That, fortunately, if you’re not a sociopath, I think your patients bring that with them to the office visits every day.”
08 / belief
“I think you and Elon are basically the same person because last time I did a podcast with him, he came in extremely frustrated that he can’t beat Uber Lilith as a Druid.”
09 / uncertainty
“If it’s done well in the UX side, it could change, I don’t know if it transforms society, but it really can create a kind of shift in the way we interact with digital devices in the way that a smartphone did.”
10 / belief
“If it’s extremely safe, and you can have superhuman abilities, and let’s say you can upload your memories, so you wouldn’t lose memories, then I think probably a lot of people would choose to have it.”
11 / uncertainty
“Just being able to have the freedom to do things on my own at any hour of the day or night, it means the world to me and… I don’t know.”
12 / belief
“The direction I think of further improvement is primarily going to be in the dataset side of how do you construct the optimal labels for the model.”
13 / belief
“I don’t think there’s any world really in which I can share their stories as powerful way as they can, but just I think to summarize at a very high level, what I hear over and over again is that people with ALS or severe spinal cord injury in a place where they basically can’t move physically anymore, really at the end of the day are looking for independence.”
14 / belief
“I think the most interesting maybe underappreciated fact is that it really does control almost everything.”
15 / belief
“I think something that I would very much like to work towards is a process that is so simple and so robust on the surgery side that literally anyone could do it.”
16 / belief
“Maybe someday you can imagine there’s UXs that are built natively for BCI, but in terms of what’s useful for people today, I think most people would prefer to be able to just control mouse and keyboard inputs, to all the applications that they want to use for their daily jobs, for communicating with their friends, et cetera.”
17 / belief
“The only other thing I would say is more control over all the parameters that I can tweak with my cursor and stuff.”
18 / belief
“We care about being compliant with whatever regulations are in front of us, but I think more important than that, people want to give their all in becoming a better neurosurgeon because the stakes are so high.”
19 / belief
“” If you really can load that in, it’s hard, but I think that’s why the Stoics did it, because it helps you get your shit together and be like, “The moment, every single moment you’re alive is just beautiful” and it’s terrifying that it’s going to end, and it’s almost like you’re shivering in the cold, a child helpless.”
20 / observation
“People thought it was impossible to run a mile in four minutes and once the first person did it, then everyone just started doing it. So just to show that it’s possible, that paves the way to anyone can now do it.”
21 / commitment
“What do most people not understand about the biology of the brain? We will mention the vasculature.”
22 / belief
“Noland, the first time Noland played this game, he asked how good are we at this game? And I think you told me right then, you’re going to try to beat me [inaudible 07:54:24]- I’m going to get there someday.”
23 / belief
“I do it subconsciously, and I think that that helped a lot with things with Neuralink, honestly.”
24 / belief
“Maybe one other just sort of case study here. So, again, UX is how it works, and we think about that holistically, from the… Even the feature detection level of what we detect in the brain, to how we design the decoder, what we choose to decode, to then how it works once it’s being used by the user.”
25 / uncertainty
“If there’s a single word that is able to convey something that would normally require, I don’t know, 10 simple words, then you’ve got maybe a 10X compression on your hands.”
26 / belief
“First of all, there are, if you look at worldwide, people suffering from movement disorders and visual deficits, I mean, that’s in the tens if not hundreds of millions of people. So, that alone, I think there’s a lot of benefit and potential good that we can do with this type of technology.”
27 / belief
“The way we’ve done it, I think is, it’s very prioritized, very beautiful user experience.”
28 / belief
“I think there’s a very interesting journey ahead to get us to that same level of 10 BPS performance.”
29 / belief
“There were a couple of moments, key moments in my life where some of those I think influenced how the trajectory of my life got me to studying what I’m doing right now.”
30 / commitment
“You can keep it pretty small. So I generally just get to a certain military unit and put them all around my border to keep everyone out, and then I will just build up.”
31 / belief
“I think I would tell my kids not necessarily to go in this line of work depending on how things look in 20 years.”
32 / commitment
“The thing that I will say also is that, as I mentioned, this is the first time ever that we’re putting these threads in the human brain.”
33 / belief
“I think working your ass off, working hard while functioning as a member of a team, getting a job done that is incredibly difficult, working incredibly long hours, being up all night, taking care of someone that you think probably won’t survive no matter what you do.”
34 / belief
“I mean, I think if you are able to control a cursor and able to click and be able to get access to a computer or a phone, I mean, the whole world opens up to you.”
35 / uncertainty
“I guess it visualizes you moving the hand, and there’s a very sexy polished interface that, “Hello,” I don’t know if there’s a voice component, but it just felt like when you wake up in a really nice video game, and this is the tutorial at the beginning of that video game.”
36 / uncertainty
“The brain is certainly a delicate, complex beast, and we don’t know every potential downstream consequence of a single change that we make.”
37 / evaluation
“I think that is important for anyone trying to achieve greatness is they need other people around them who are going to push them to be better.”
38 / belief
“I think what AGI is is when it’s smarter than the collective intelligence of the entire human species in our [inaudible 00:52:49].”
39 / belief
“Before all the thread retraction stuff happened, we were calibrating clicks, left click, right click. That was my previous ceiling, before I broke the record again with the dwell cursor, was I think on a 35 by 35 grid with left and right click.”
40 / belief
“If you can give someone a dial that they can turn on how happy they are, I think that makes people really uncomfortable.”
41 / observation
“Our model’s constantly updating the way to say, “Oh, if someone is thinking about this sophisticated forms of spiking patterns, that actually means to do this.”
42 / uncertainty
“I don’t know all the ins and outs of it, but I was like, “There are still signals in my brain firing. They just can’t get through because there’s a gap in my spinal cord, and so they can’t get all the way down and back up, but they’re still there.”
43 / belief
“I think there’s probably a lot of folks listening that just have no clue what it means to decode brain activity.”
44 / belief
“We think about thought experiments and things, but that’s not a physical action of doing things.”
45 / belief
“I think there’s just, people who study Alzheimer’s and those kinds of things, it’s just surprising how much you can understand of that from the immune system, from the other systems that don’t obviously seem to have anything to do with the nervous system.”
46 / belief
“I want to do better. I want to hit nine, I think, well, I know nine is very, very achievable.”
47 / belief
“You said it’s primarily a UX challenge, and I think a large component of it is, but there is also a very interesting machine learning challenge here.”
48 / uncertainty
“I could not function for a while afterwards. And I said a lot of things that… I was really worried that I was going to start, I don’t know, dropping some bombs and I wouldn’t even know.”
49 / uncertainty
“What actually happened was, he was trying something new, where he was just controlling the cursor, so he wasn’t imagining moving his hand anymore, he was just imagining… I don’t know what it is, some abstract intention to move the cursor on the screen, and I cannot tell you what the difference between those two things are, I truly cannot.”
50 / belief
“I think taking that out of the equation and just having a natural word to computer interface might change things for a lot of people.”
51 / belief
“You can understand chimp and bonobo behavior in the same lights much more easily. And I think doing so gives you the tools you need to reduce human behavior from the kind of false complexity that we layer onto it with language, and look at it in terms of, oh, well, these humans are looking for companionship, sex, food, power.”
52 / uncertainty
“Our politics is composed of individuals with human brains, and the way it works or doesn’t work is potentially tunable in the sense that, I don’t know, say remove our addictive behaviors or tune our addictive behaviors for social media or our addiction to outrage, our addiction to sharing the most angry political tweet we can find.”
53 / belief
“The more sophisticated higher level processing areas like the Broca’s area or Wernicke’s area, those are still very, very big mystery in terms of the underlying mechanism of how all that stuff works. But I mean, I think Neuralink’s eventual goal is to understand those things and be able to provide a platform and tools to be able to understand that and study that.”
54 / belief
“Nothing that is totally proven out as a robust enough mechanism to offer widely to people. But yeah, I think there’s cause for optimism that we might find something useful in terms of say, an implanted electrode that improves learning.”
55 / uncertainty
“I think we only know what’s in the interpolation space. We only know what’s between 0 and 1,024, but we don’t know what’s beyond that.”
56 / belief
“I still hit 50, I think I hit 50-something net trials per minute in that, which was pretty good because I’m able to… One of the settings is also how slow you need to be moving in order to initiate a click, to start a click.”
57 / belief
“I think there’s something I’m excited about from the technology side and some I’m excited about for understanding how this technology is going to be best situated for entering the world, so I’ll work backwards.”
58 / belief
“The software engineers are amazing on this team, and so they actually provided an interface where you can essentially use a lasso tool and select a prime area of brain real estate, and it will automatically avoid the blood vessels in that region and automatically place a bunch of targets. That allows the human robot operator to select really good areas of brain and make dense applications of targets in those regions, the regions we think are going to have the most high fidelity representations of finger movements and arm movement intentions.”
59 / belief
“I think any given labeling strategy will have some number of assumption to make, about what the user is attempting to do.”
60 / belief
“I was like, “Let’s make this happen.” I think I said that, something like that to Elon on the phone.”
61 / belief
“I think a lot of this can be implemented within my lifetime, assuming that I live a long life.”
62 / belief
“There’s almost, I mean, the entire world that could benefit from these types of things. And then, if we’re talking about next generation of how we interface with machines or even ourselves, in many ways, I think BCI can play a role in that.”
63 / belief
“You have an amazing stream on the topic. Your first stream, I think, on X describing, the app.”
64 / belief
“We’re completely fine with knee replacements, hip replacements, dental implants, but there’s a mysticism still around the inviolable barrier that the skull represents, and I think that needs to be treated like any other pragmatic barrier.”
65 / uncertainty
“Why do anything at all? And so, if our simple limbic system provides a source of will to do something, that then goes through our cortex, that then goes to our tertiary compute layer, then I don’t know, it might actually be that the AI, in a benign scenario, is simply trying to make the human limbic system happy.”
66 / belief
“I think wealth is easy to hate or envy or whatever, and I think there’s a whole industry around driving clicks and bad news is great for clicks, and so any way to take an event and turn it into bad news is going to be really good for clicks.”
67 / observation
“With the insects, with the animals all around you, the jungle as far as the eye can see, there’s no… That’s the way to do it.”
68 / belief
“In this specific example, you would want to have it right next to where the huddle is happening. So I think that’s kind of a good illustration of what we’re trying to do when we say invasive or minimally invasive or implanted brain computer interfaces versus non-invasive or non-implanted brain interfaces.”
69 / uncertainty
“People, I don’t know if they like that I say that. It seems like I’m making light of it all, but it’s just how I am, and I don’t know.”
70 / uncertainty
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. But I kept thinking about, I had extremely high resolution thoughts about the people I know in my life.”
71 / belief
“” Now, I think we’re actually going to aim for augmentation with people who have neuron damage.”
72 / belief
“” I think one girl had spoken to me through some family members and said that she had been paralyzed for 18 years, and she’d been trying to wiggle her index finger for all that time, and she finally got it back 18 years later.”
73 / commitment
“I have a feeling, this is just my intuition, that at some point, I’m going to be doing finger spelling and I won’t need to actually attempt to finger spell anymore, that I’ll just be able to think the letter that I want and it’ll pop up.”
74 / belief
“I think that’s a huge part of being here, is to not just have an easy life and do everything that’s easy, but to step out of our comfort zones and really challenge ourselves because I think that’s how we grow.”
75 / belief
“There’s this whole community of weirdo biohackers that have done this stuff, and I think one of the early use cases was storing private crypto wallet keys and whatever.”
76 / belief
“One of the interesting aspects of my experience is I thought I would have some demons, some stuff to work through.”
77 / uncertainty
“I told him, I was like, “I don’t know how I feel about people being able to just wipe parts of your memory.”
78 / belief
“Once the scar tissue forms, and with Noland as well, we believe that that’s the thing that’s currently anchoring the threats.”
79 / belief
“I would say that part of what enabled this was just the innovations in the wearable.”
80 / evaluation
“I think the first day we did that, you had three or four BPS right out of the box, and that was a light bulb moment for, okay, this is the right path to go down.”
81 / prediction
“I think with Tesla and the real time video coming from several million cars, ultimately tens of millions of cars with Optimus, there might be hundreds of millions of Optimus robots, maybe billions, learning a tremendous amount from the real world.”
82 / evaluation
“” People get a little shook by that, but it makes sense because if you’re so conservative as to never have to put anything back in, you obviously have a lot of stuff that isn’t needed.”
83 / prediction
“We could better align collective human will with AI if the output rate especially was dramatically increased. And I think there’s potential to increase the output rate by, I don’t know, three, maybe six, maybe more orders of magnitude.”
84 / evaluation
“That is insane.” But if you’ve got that kind of thing programmed in, the AI could conclude something absolutely insane like it’s better in order to avoid any possible misgendering, all humans must die, because then misgendering is not possible because there are no humans.”
85 / evaluation
“Well, I think people tend to take, say, an endorsement as, well, I agree with everything that person has ever done their entire life 100% wholeheartedly, and that’s not going to be true of anyone.”
86 / evaluation
“Now, there is an argument that that’s actually a healthy thing to do, or a helpful thing to do because as you try to compress complex concepts, you’re perhaps forced to distill what is most essential in those concepts, as opposed to just all the fluff.”
87 / preference
“I have this very basic first principles algorithm that I run kind of as a mantra, which is to first question the requirements, make the requirements less dumb.”
88 / prediction
“” And you can do things where you adjust the electric field. So, even if you’ve got, say 10,000 neurons, it’s not just 10,000 pixels, because you can adjust the field between the neurons, and do them in patterns in order to have say, 10,000 electrodes, effectively give you, I don’t know, maybe like having a megapixel, or a 10 megapixel situation.”
89 / preference
“Yeah, so Black Mirror always considers the worst case, which is important. I think people don’t consider the best case or the average case enough.”
90 / prediction
“We’ll improve the signal processing. So, even with only roughly, I don’t know, 10, 15% of the electrodes working with Noland, with our first patient, we were able to get to achieve a bit per second.”