🪐 kernel, neurotech, agi, bci and biohacks with Sam J

BCI Wisdom Podcast. Not sure how we're gonna call that one, but we have Sammy Jawhar with us. Good job, Charles. He's a neurotechnologist, serial entrepreneur, digital nomad, builder of things. He works at Kernel, so. Really caught my attention. Me and Sammy have been discussing a bunch of interesting things in the past couple minutes, ranging from philosophy to bci, neural hacking, and everything in between. And we just took a bio break, which I find out is taking a pee break. Never heard that before. Sun is kind of. Yeah.

Take care. You know, you use the restroom, you get a snack, you know, it's a bio break. You gotta take care of your biological needs.

Right. And that's a very Sammyish thing to say. Sam and I were talking about, you know, the what's in the popular culture and how to be an independent thinker. I can't. I kind of identify myself quite a lot with you, Sammy, but in the. The last few years, you know, like, maybe I've kind of moderated my hermetic, like, being a hermit behaviors. You know, I've worked on my social skills a little bit. But, yeah, you're. You're kind of. You're in your own bubble, which is. Which is a good thing, by the way. I. Me personally, I'm seeking a lot of startup co founders, hyper nerds like you. You're really focused. And like me, I'm in multiple directions. Anyway, can you try to introduce yourself? Try to define yourself in, like, less than 30 seconds?

Sure. Yeah. So I. I'd say the easiest way to define, you know, to get to know me is that my purpose in life is to improve the general mental wellness of people. I'm especially interested in meditation and neurotechnology. I work at Kernel as a data scientist. But just as a disclaimer, nothing I say reflects any of the opinions of anyone at Kernel. I am here as an independent person. Kernel, not representing Kernel in any way, but that's where my path has led me most recently. And so that gives you a good sense of, you know, the things I'm interested in and the type of technology that I work with.

Yeah, and that's really cool, though. Okay. And for those wondering, watching Sammy walk, he's not walking on air. He's walking on a walking treadmill.

Walking treadmill?

Yeah, the biohackers seen Ben Greenfield do that. I've had another guy thick yesterday on a walking treadmill. And as a nomad, I'm. I'm like, stabilizing my life. I'm buying a house and I Will have one of these. You're not doing the nomadic, nomadic thing right now because you have this walking treadmill, right? Like how's your life right now?

Yeah, yeah. I was a nomad for three years. It's what I call my neuroscience ronin period where I, I essentially I traveled the world after helping co found a cyber security company in the Netherland. That's kind of what started the nomading. And then I just went around after that. Didn't work out. Me and my co founder had some, we didn't work that well together, so that was, but it was a good learning experience for me. And then after that I transitioned out and just started emailing random neuroscience labs and saying, hey, I can do things, let me do things for you. And so I, I would travel around and hop from, you know, country to country and work remotely and do interesting work for different labs that would let me do things. And then I eventually got the gig at Colonel Nice.

What did you learn from your nomad journey so far and why are you going to restart it and when.

Yeah, so right now I'm in, I'm in Salt Lake City. I'm kind of stabilizing a home base here, both for myself and for my, my little sister who I support. So I'm like trying to make a nice central home base here. And then, you know, the summer is nice in Salt Lake. There's hiking, there's, you know, some fun stuff to do. So I'll stick around here. You know, I've been really appreciating being near family. And then once it gets uncomfortably cold, I will leave because I just, that's one of the things I have, I have lost all tolerance for is the ability to deal with uncomfortably cold weather. I'll just go somewhere warm. There's a lot of places in the world.

Right, but what about cold exposure? What about the brown fat that you get out of it, the resilience and the nice biochemicals?

Well, I, I, I mean, I have nothing to say about that. I don't know the literature. I've heard, I've heard about this. I take, I mean I take cold showers every day. Does that, does that count?

Yes, yes, that counts for sure. But your body kind of self regulating, one of the problem nowadays that everything is so comfortable. Right?

Yeah.

Back in the days it used to be all about suffering like me. That's why I put myself into situations multiple times a week. If it's raining, I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna carry that goddamn groceries. You Know, and the heavier the better.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm 100 with you there. Like, you know, my people, people who come to my house often say, like, they, I just. I warn them, like, it's not a comfortable place. When it's hot, I just take off my shirt. Like, I'm not gonna turn on the ac. I don't own a car. I walk to the grocery store, you know, and exactly the same thing. Like, if I'm gonna go for a run and it's raining, I'm still gonna go for a run. Like, the rain I'll be. What happens if it's raining? I get wet. Like, you know, so. I agree. I bet there are. There are. You know, there's also just. There's so much of the world to explore and why, you know, if I can. If I can move around and, you know, see so much of the world, then I'm gonna do that.

And you're this kid from Lebanon. Why are you so weird? You know, because me, I can put some dots on my eyes of like, why I'm weird, why I'm this way. You know, I was this popular kid in primary school, then went from popular to not so popular. That created trauma in me. I be. I began being this World of Warcraft addict, became number one on my server, went through party and alcohol to cope with all of that, and discovered entrepreneurship and then began traveling the world, you know, and I'm. I'm. I've always been kind of a philosopher and intellectual type of kid, so that's why I'm weird. Why. Why are you that way?

I. I think. I think asking why questions often like that is sometimes just an invitation to tell stories that make ourselves feel good. I'm not sure I have a really good answer to why a lot of, you know, I can, I can say things about my childhood or, or whatnot that. That paint a nice narrative, but I don't know, you know, why am I like, this way? Biology and the coincidence of life.

Love it.

That's all I can really say.

Right. But the why? I find that when we ask these questions, sometimes it's how we formulate the questions. 80 of the answer is in there. And just pointing out to some piece of data will bring some mental release. But yes, there's this Hollywood part to it, which is to entertain and rags to riches. And as we said, you know, like, marketing and educating is in part like first entertaining and then going with the information and, and pinpointing it. But no, I mean, yeah, that's a very rational way to view it, but you've been put on a very special path. There must have been some stuff that made you that way still.

I mean, I definitely, I definitely would say that being different is, is probably something like that's part of my, my identity now. And I take pride in, I take pride in my differences. And that probably comes, you know, from childhood things and, and, you know, trying to define yourself in terms of your uniqueness. And so now I don't think it's terribly uncommon for one to, you know, define, you know, seek some kind of identity in being an outlier or in being a, you know, countercultural type person. So there's probably some of that which in. In itself is not very, you know, not very unique, but whatever.

I find that us meditators or folks part of the spiritual community, we also detach yourself from ego. And we have not a good relationship with ego. Like, if this ego thing was bad, me coming from various retreats, often the. I did value ego after that. You know, I do think that egos is quite important. It's the testosterone in the estrogen. It's the, you kind of need that to, to move yourself forward. And you. Nothing wrong with having like some kind of story and an identity. I do think that even yourself, as a very rational guy, you. You're constantly telling yourself stories, you know, like, oh, walking on this treadmill will make me better. Did. And accepting this podcast will help me. I mean, us humans, I think that's the way we reason, right? Stories. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely, there's, I think that there's. There. So I, I, you know, I'm. I'm more and more often find myself aware of the stories that I'm telling myself. And you know, and, and one can try to fight against that. One can try to say, like, oh, no, I should be rational and I, I should, I should not only care. I shouldn't care about X or Y, but it's irrational to ignore the realities of human biology. And the realities of human biology are such that we have certain psychological tendencies. We, we are motivated by certain things and not by other things. And if you can use those as tools to, to structure your life in a way that, that, you know, aligns with your values, then why would you not use those tools? Why would you pretend like telling yourself a story does not motivate you when instead you could tell yourself a great story that motivates you towards your values? Like, yep, if, if, if that's something you can do, why would you Take that tool set away from you and pretend like, you know, you know, the, the Spock kind of thing.

Yeah. And if you can experiment in your life, what values, what really, what values do you really embody and how to embody them with a scientific method of testing what works and what doesn't work. I think that's where you reach your goal. And then we're probably talking about happiness and generating that happiness biochemically in your brain. If you are happy, then you can reach your goals faster. And then another thing that popped in my head was like, okay, should we try to fight our existing mindset? Is there any value of becoming a monk? I don't think so. My, one of my goal is to help the world, you know, and it's not by meditating 20 hours a day that I will achieve these goals. And the final thing that popped is I'm very much bullish on BCI to modify biochemically. My brain, I mean mindset has paid quite a lot. In my case, just adding these mental Lego blocks and oh, stoicism will help me in that situation and, and so forth. But what do you think about a time in which we will be able to modify the brain, force it to be some way to reach your goals quicker?

I, I, I hope to help usher in that, that those days. I think meditation and philosophy are technologies that we have developed, you know, to live a better life. But technology has progressed. We have more tools available to us now. And I think it, you know, if, if we still value this goal of alleviating suffering, you know, within humanity, I definitely think there's a place for, there's still a place for meditation, there's still a place for contemplation, there's still a place for living the unintentional life. But there's also no reason to ignore the other tools that we have available to us. And whether that is like direct brain stimulation or just, you know, we're discovering now very ways to have very fine tuned control over mood and things with, with stuff like light stimuli and sound stimuli and like, yes, there are, there are biological facts about the brain and we're great, we're getting better and better at measuring and manipulating them. So why wouldn't we. I would love to have, it's essentially my purpose in life to, you know, help develop the next generation of, of meditation where meditation again is the technology that we use to develop to cultivate that, you know, suffering, suffering, suffering, alleviating mindfulness state. And that could, that could include any

kind of technology as you were mentioning alleviating suffering. You know, I've done crazy things like Iron Mans and Ultra events you run on a daily basis. You're familiar with that might. And I was covering that in a previous podcast. But I've got to love pain. You know, literally love pain. And then it came to my mind like, okay, like, do I need to alleviate suffering? Don't people. Can't people adapt to that and get to almost love it? But then came like, oh, with the golden rule, what if I love pain and then I impose pain on others? And I'm like, yeah, you should be able to love, but I don't think that'd be a, an ideal world. So

it seems to me you've conflated suffering with pain. And pain is a sensation, and suffering is our experience of that sensation. And one of the things that, like, some of the most painful experiences I've ever had have also been some of the ones where I have been able to decouple the pain from the suffering. Like, there was, I think it was my, my last meditation retreat or the one before that, where I just decided, I'm not going to move for this entire two hours. I'm just not going to move. And by the end of it, I was in excruciating pain. But I could also watch. I was like, I could see moment by moment as my, my brain decided, this is bad. I don't like it, I don't like it. And then it just decided, nah, you know what? It's fine. The physical sensation did not change. But my experience of the sensation, all of a sudden it was like, yeah, there is pain, and that's not something I need to do anything about.

And then that's month level right there.

But then, like, it came back, right? It's like, oh, no, I don't like it. I don't like it. Oh, oh, no, actually, it's fine. So, you know, pain and suffering are not the same thing, and neither is. And pleasure also can be a source of suffering. So I think that's something we need to learn to decouple in our understanding of, you know, human wellness is that point you, you can have pain but not suffer.

And what are examples in which pleasure can cause suffering? And give us also, like, examples of how you suffered or typical example of suffering purely to mental constructs.

Well, I think one that's really, that's really common. This is not, you know, any unique inside of mine is that the things that we enjoy, we start to crave, right? And that craving that, like, anticipated Pleasure that like, oh, I'm gonna like this so much. And. But then that craving can kind of take over your thinking and it can start to become anxiety inducing in and of itself. You're like, oh I, I really don't want this pleasant thing to end and that becomes suffering that like I just, I want this to, I really want this, you know, this cheesecake milkshake to last forever. And you know there's like for this

party did like my 18 years old self, you know, I. Let's finish the night at 3am and let's get very, very drunk, you know, else it's not a good Saturday. Yeah.

Yeah. So the, the attachment to, to pleasure itself creates suffering. And then the, the and then once you start to recognize that in yourself, you want to start to recognize that mental pattern of attachment to, you know, attachment to pleasure and attachment to these pleasant sensations. You, you want to change that in yourself. And then whenever you see yourself not having yet change that can also become a source of suffering because you have not yet relinquished, you know, this attachment. And so it's like, you know, we, we are just humans as a species. We did not evolve to, you know, to have a suffering free life. And there's just so many ways where I saw, I saw our psychology gets in the way of us. It gets in the way of our well being unfortunately.

But how did mother Nature or that force behind of it all the laws of thermodynamics. How did we get there? How did we created an environment that we cannot adapt quick enough? Like how did that happen?

Well, I think this is another one of those things where we're going to tell stories that make ourselves feel good. The, you know, the, the reality is that evolution is not teleological.

Right?

Evolution is not goal directed. It's just, you know, landscape and mutations and whatever happened to survive is the thing that is gonna, you know, pass on. And there's no, the universe is under no obligation to respect our preference for a suffering free life when it comes to the things that tend that happen to fit the fitness landscape at the moment and you know, be, be the things that evolve.

So isn't there some intelligence between that evolution, for example, we see, I mean that's still a theory. It's not provable in the lab, but Covid happened because we're just too much humans on this planet Earth. And then there's mosquitoes that are driving, there's sticks that are driving under that environment. Isn't there an intelligence force that is always balancing it out in the End or is that a story?

I don't believe so, no. I mean I'm not, I'm not someone that believes in cosmic purposes and, and you know, some grand guiding intelligence or reasons. Like I think often that asking questions why of the universe is just, it's a, it's an illusion of language. The language gives us the ability to construct sentences where we can ask things like why did X happen? But the fact that this is a syntactically correct sentence doesn't mean that it actually means anything. This is just like, I just, I think some of these questions are just logically incoherent. I don't think they. And not, not only do they not have answers, they're not. The questions themselves don't even really make sense.

Why with our human brains? How can we introduce better question asking skills in our human brains? Is it the how question? Is it the what? What, what makes for a good question, a scientific question that can lead to advancement.

Hmm. I think that's, that's a quite, I mean this kind of goes back to what we were talking about before we started reporting with you know, a someone who has a deep training and philosophy would I think be better able to recognize these, these traps that people fall into of asking certain types of questions that aren't actually as well posed as they seem to be. I think there's probably. But also from a purely, you know, from a purely practical point of view, I know there's an emerging field of progress studies and like what are the types of practices in science or otherwise that tend to lead to, you know, more fruitful innovation and stuff like that. Maybe those guys have something to say about what are the types of questions that tend to lead to more progress. I me, I just, I try to avoid these questions of why, like why did X happen? X happened because all of the previous things that happened and the evolution of the schrodinger of the, you know, the wave function of the universe under the Schrodinger equation.

But isn't that how you make science? Isn't that how you operate that kernel, like with data and you ask the why and you dig deeper and then you finally get to gold.

Well, these are different, these are different types of questions. These are different types of. I'm not sure we're asking. Well, I suppose you can you. I mean language is a game where you could always restructure a question so that it's a why question. But again there are just, there are certain domains where I think asking why it, it's not actually as meaningful as it seems to be, just because you put it in a nice English sentence.

Language has its limitation for sure. It's one way to get insights. And I'm, I'm pondering how. Yeah, like. Well, let's lead to my next question. Do you, do you think we could straight up inject information in there instead of naturally generating these neurons connecting together? Do you think that would be a better solution to ask better questions?

I'm not sure I understand the question. Can you, can you explain what you mean by inject information?

Yeah, neuralink style. Injecting information in the sense of generating new biological or artificial neurons, pathways, connections.

I don't see any reason why, given a complete, a completed science of the brain and body, we couldn't have some kind of information transfer between people or like, you know, have some kind of mate, you know, the Matrix style. I know Kung fu, you know, download. I don't, I, you know, I don't, I don't see any reason why that's impossible in principle. But for that to, and I could see how that could be useful for accelerating the rate of progress if you can, you know, fast track the learning progress among people. But in terms of like generating genuinely new knowledge, you know, if you're injecting information to someone's brain and you're expecting that to generate something new, genuinely new, you know, in the landscape of, you know, human, human knowledge. I don't know that, that, I'm not sure how that, how that helps really

would, helps, would help tons. What if we can instantly educate people on some matters so that they don't fall into serotonin traps and unhappiness and suffering? No.

Yeah, and like I said, absolutely, I think it, it can, it can, it can accelerate that learning process. Right. But if, if you're expecting like I inject you with X and now you will be able to generate something that no one before has ever thought. I, I don't know, it seems to me like that's, that, that's kind of begging the question because you'd have to already know the thing before you injected it into my, into my brain.

If AGI would generate that piece and you inject it in someone else. But it begs the question, like, what is new information? Like you said, everything is constructed on layers. There's a knowledge graph and everything comes from a past source of information. Because it, maybe your point is, or, or what I thought about at least is that alien intelligence would have nothing to do with, or current intelligence. Maybe we just understand nothing about it. And it wouldn't be need, it would need to be connected with something that we already know. But if we do believe in universal science and, and physics principles, I do think that it would be somewhat related, this new piece of information, we would have to connect it to something artificially to make the brain believe with some kind of story that makes sense.

Yeah, that, I mean, so, so you said, you know, if AGI came up with some, some new, like develop new knowledge, which I also see no reason in principle why that wouldn't be possible. I totally believe that AGI could develop and you know, entirely to, you know, new new knowledge. And then yeah, you would have to kind of like build the scaffolding from the concepts that are in your brain to the concept that you're trying to transmit from the AGI. And maybe the AGI is the one that knows how to build that scaffolding because it's so much smarter than raw humans. So I don't. Yeah, I think the landscape of knowledge if, if we develop AGI and AGI can actually accelerate beyond or not just beyond, but in different directions than natural human intelligence. I think that the landscape of knowledge could expand significantly. Yeah, I see no reason why that wouldn't be the case.

You have predictions in that regard. When could no expect AGI? When could we expect bci? I mean, we would need to define both. Right.

I'm probably more pessimistic than most. I don't see any reason in principle why things are impossible. That could be because I am just not educated enough on the topic. But just because something is in principle not impossible doesn't mean that we, there's any guarantee that we will find a path towards it. So it could it. You know, I have no idea. I have no idea.

Colonel, what's your role there? What do you do on a daily basis and why did you accept it to take that job?

Yeah, well, I first found out about Kernel probably from their founding press release back when they were actually planning on doing invasive bci. And one of the reasons that this, it was always very clear to me or they were, they were always very clear about their intentions to, you know, alleviate help humans in some way. Like that was the goal. It wasn't just, hey, this technology is cool and we're going to make money. It was like, you know, we're going to address problem X. And problem X was always very appealing to me. I probably applied three or four times before I convinced them to finally hire me. I'm essentially, if you know the space you could call me, an MLOps engineer, but essentially I'm a software engineer that helps data scientists by developing or, or implementing tools that help them do their work, help them do their work more reproducibly, more trust, you know, in a trustworthy way, faster, better, higher quality, better tested, that kind of stuff. So I help accelerate this, the scientists and the data scientists and in the, the analysis pipelines that they need to extract insights from the data. With machine learning, machine learning is something that has, it depends on how you define machine learning. There's a lot of the sciences and especially neuroscience, there's a lot of skepticism about complex machine learning models for good reasons, because we still don't really understand the brain that well, like no one does. And so building complex models on top of data of a thing that we don't really understand is, it's hard, it's hard to tell convincing scientific stories about that. You know, a scientist wants to be able to say, I looked at, I did intervention X and I saw predicted response in region. Yes. And it produced behavior Z. And I could do this reliably across, you know, a thousand people. So therefore I understand something about the brain. And it's hard to say. It's hard to tell a straightforward story like that when the, the story isn't said. Complicated. Model X gave me prediction Y about participant A and I can't really tell you why, but hey, it worked. It's just, it's a different model. So there's kind of some skepticism there in terms of what the neuroscientist community, neuroscience community wants out of machine learning. But we are also kernels. Also, you know, there are opportunities because of the nature of our technology, there are some very interesting opportunities for us to do our own neuroscience. And we're not afraid about using, we're not afraid of using complex machine learning.

So what hypothesis would you put forward to solve that complex problem?

Well, I don't think it's one problem. I, you know, like the brain and body is a very complex system that does a lot of things. And so I think you have to have a very well formulated question like, you know, how does one, how might one alleviate feelings of anhedonia amongst people with certain, with like, certain subtypes of depression? Like, you have to be very specific in the question you want to ask and then you can start collecting data that might address that question and start building intervention, you know, useful interventions on top of that. But it's not, it's like there is no one question. It's like, how does the brain work that's not a, that's not a well formulated question.

With what question would you start? Which one would be the priority?

Well, I'm personally motivated by stories of my family and, and you know, other people that I've known throughout my life that have suffered in particular from disorders of mood and disorders of psychosis. And those are the ones that are particularly motivational to me. So like I said at the beginning, you know, I'm really interested in how we can improve everyone's mental wellness by developing technology that cultivates mindfulness. Because I think this is one of the most like it's so it's, it's the, it's the, the next, the adjacent possible. Yeah, that's the phrase, you know, like it's there, it's within our grasp, within our current technological capabilities. You know, many people are exploring different ways of doing it and it's, you know, so that's what is especially interesting to me. But I can't say that that's any, any higher priority than you know, Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or like anything else that's, you know, has a neurological basis. So that's just what's motivating to me.

Yeah, and what about the industry is a question I had. But like what, what do they think would be the best pathway there? If, if the goal is to build this device that could optimize brain. And just before I go to that segment, is mental disease or physical ills in your brain the trojan horse pathway to get the FDA approval and then go with the optimization route. Is that the plan?

Plan for whom?

For kernel, for neuralink. Both are going after, for example restoring blindness or getting back the control of this limb by plugging something in your brain. Both companies are going to, for physical or mental health and I think they do that to get the approval of the fda. Right. Which is the step one so that they can go the optimization route just like the same with my nootropic company. We developed a natural supplement at first to prove her concept to get approved and all of that. And while that was to get the approval and after that we would go into straight up pharma and chemical components to yeah scale and do things more efficiently to kind of trojan horse regulations out there, which is to be fair like too restrictive in my opinion.

I would actually say that the most common approach is the opposite is to go non FDA regulated consumer device, collect lots of data and then try to do something important on top of that. Like if you see what Apple has done with the Apple watch. They put a watch on everyone's wrist and then they're like, okay, now we can do ekg, right? And we can get FDA approval for, for Parkinson's, you know, symptom detection. And we like. So I think that's, it's FDA approval is freaking hard. Like that's not easy. So that doesn't seem to me in any way to be the Trojan horse approach. That is the very much the, the thing we're doing. We have no other way of doing other than to get FDA approval. So we have to do it.

And fda, it's because it is invasive. If it's non invasive, then you don't need the FDA approval, right?

Well, I'm not an FDA expert, I'm not a legal expert on these things, but it has a lot to do with just how you phrase, whether your device or whatever can, can give meaningful benefits. Like, there's very technical definitions and, and you know, and I think there's a lot of parallels there with like the supplement industry. And you don't have to get FDA approval if, if you do, if you say certain things, but if you say other things then you do. So, you know, again, not a legal expert on that topic, but definitely anything that requires an invasive intervention, which kernel is not, by the way, you know, the kernel flow is a non invasive device, but anything that would, you know, would require fda.

Yeah, so let's ask it that way. FDA apart, you know, like is the focus right now. Fixing illness, curing rather than preventing, slash, optimizing.

For whom?

For colonel yeah, and you can also talk about neuralink, your main competitor, quote unquote, if you are knowledgeable about them.

Okay, I actually need to use the restroom again and then I can come back and answer that question.

Biobreak number 2.

Biobreak number 2.

Yeah, sure.