Engineering Brains - EP 09 Max Hodak

**Max Hodak** (0:01)
I was in fifth grade, and literally I saw The Matrix, and I was like, I don't know if we're living in a simulation, but we should build one, basically. Look, earth is small, resources are intensely contested, space is big, the speed of light is low. There are real limits to building with atoms and doing things in the physical world where there's these conflicts, like a piece of land can only be used by one person at a time, building buildings is super expensive and complicated. But like in the simulation, none of those limits are true. In the simulation, there's no scarcity. Have you heard of the Jennifer Aniston Neuron? So there's a well-known result that in some part of the brain, if you record from these cells, if you show them pictures of different people, in some cases will respond very selectively. So there's a nature paper a while ago that showed that if you showed pictures of different people, there's a cell that would fire just for pictures of Jennifer Aniston. Or if they showed you types of different houses, they would fire for just specific types of architecture. And so the intuition here is that if you look at all of the millions of neurons in that area, they encode a representation of architecture, or of faces, or of people, or of places. And this is embedded on a mathematical object called a manifold. And so what you want to do is you want to access that statistical representation somehow. And when these neurons grow into the brain and they wire up, you get all this, when the cells in the brain fire, you're getting all this partial information which represent information about the statistics of those representations. And so you can access this information in and out of the brain through this. This is a very, very deep well of neuroscience that we are at the very beginning of. Just making these devices at all is pretty tricky. I would say this is up there with modern semiconductors for complexity.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:59)
Hello, everyone. It's Ashlee Vance, your friendly neighborhood host of Core Memory. Our guest on this wonderful episode is Max Hodak. He is co-founder of Neuralink, currently CEO and co-founder of Science Corp, which is an amazing name. And we'll get to that in the podcast. But if you've been reading the site at all these first couple months, we've written a couple stories about Max and science. They're doing some of the most cutting-edge research and products imaginable in the brain-computer interface field. They're helping people get their vision back, and then they're pushing us possibly in some very weird cyborg-ish directions. So you're gonna have a great time listening to this. We went to Science's headquarters in Alameda, California, and Max was full of weird and wonderful ideas. As ever, maybe you're getting this podcast off of Core Memory. I just want to remind you, you can get it off iTunes, Spotify, wherever you like to get your podcast. Please do us a favor, leave a review, a like, all that stuff. It'd be a great help. And with that, let us dive right in to the brain and Science Corp with Max Hodak.
Max Hodak, hello.

**Max Hodak** (3:25)
Hey, Ashlee.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:27)
I would say welcome to my office, but I'm in your office.

**Max Hodak** (3:30)
Welcome to Science.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:31)
Yeah. So for people who don't know, where are we?

**Max Hodak** (3:35)
This is our little pocket of the future in Alameda. When we started the company, the brand, we wanted this white mirror, optimistic vision of the future, and we created these landscape renders that are on our website now. And we wanted this thing that people wouldn't tell if it was like far future, ancient past. I think those kind of blur together as technology disappears.
And when we moved here, we took some photography, updated the website, built some out, and people actually sometimes couldn't tell like what were the renders and what was Alameda. And so it's like this far future vision of utopian future. It's like, or you could live in Alameda.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:12)
Yeah. Alameda is a cool place. It's underrated and it's been transforming. There's a bunch of really cool startup set up shop here.

**Max Hodak** (4:23)
Yeah. I mean, I have, I think, a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of Bay Area lab real estate. And it's, I mean, I say this, this will of course change very quickly, I'm sure, but like cheaper than a lot of everywhere else. And it's also a good commute for whether you're coming from the East Bay, SF, the peninsula, kind of all over. And so, employees really like it. It's its own power grid, it's not PG&E, which is actually underrated for a lot of things, especially if you need a lot of power. It's like an idyllic community, and it is very cost effective for this type of infrastructure.