There's a long history, dating back really prior to the 1950s, of scientists doing experiments on themselves. Not because they are reckless, but because they want the exact sorts of information that you're talking about. The ability to really understand how intention and awareness of goals can shape outcomes in biology.

And if that is vague to people listening, what I mean here is that for many, probably hundreds of years, if not longer, scientists have taken the drugs they've studied, or stimulated their own brain, or done things to really try and get a sense of what the animals they work on or the patients they work on might be experiencing.

Psychiatrists are sort of famous for this, by the way. I'm not pointing fingers at anybody, but psychiatrists are known to try the drugs that they administer. And some people would probably imagine that's a good thing, just so that the clinicians could have empathy for the sorts of side effects and not-so-great effects of some of these drugs that they administer to patients.

But the confidence test I present you is, would you be willing, or are you willing, if allowed, to have these electrodes implanted into your motor cortex? You're not a quadriplegic. You can move your limbs. But given the state of the technology at Neuralink now, would you do that? Or maybe in the next couple of years, if you were allowed, would you be willing to do that and be the person to say, hey, turn up the stimulation over there?

I feel like I want to reach for the cup with that robotic arm, but I'm feeling some resistance. Because it's exactly that kind of experiment done on a person who can move their limbs and who deeply understands the technology and the goals of the experiment that I would argue actually stands to advance the technology fastest, as opposed to putting the electrodes first into somebody who is impaired at a number of levels and then trying to think about why things aren't working.

And again, this is all with the goal of reversing paralysis in mind. But would you implant yourself with these microelectrodes? Yeah, absolutely. I would be excited to do that. I think for the first iteration of the device, it probably wouldn't be very meaningful. It wouldn't be very useful, because I can still move my limbs.

And our first outputs from this are things that I can do just as easily with my hands, right? Moving a mouse, typing on a keyboard. We are necessarily making this device as a medical device, for starters, for people with bad medical problems and no good options. It wouldn't really make sense for an able-bodied person to get one in the near term.

As the technology develops and we make devices specifically designed to perform functions that can't be done even by an able-bodied person, say, eventually refine the technique to get to the point where you can type faster with your mind and one of these devices than you can with text-to-speech or speech-to-text and your fingers, that's a use case that makes sense for someone like me to get it.

It doesn't really make sense for me to get one when it allows me to use a mouse slightly worse than I can with my hand currently. That said, the safety of the device, I would absolutely vouch for. From the hundreds of surgeries that I've personally done with this, I think it's much safer than many of the industry-standard FDA-approved surgeries that I routinely do on patients that no one even thinks twice about their standard of care.

Neuralink has already reached, in my mind, a safety threshold that is far beyond a commonly accepted safety threshold. Along the lines of augmenting one's biological function or functions in the world, I think now's the appropriate time to talk about the small lump present in the top of your hand.

For those listening, not watching, it looks like a small lump between Dr. McDougal's forefinger and thumb or index finger and thumb placed on skin on the top of his hand. You've had this for some years now because we've known each other for, gosh, probably seven years now or so, and you've always had it in the time that I've known you.

What is that lump and why did you put it in there? Yeah. It's a small writable RFID tag. What's an RFID? What does RFID stand for? Yeah, radio frequency identification. It's just a very small implantable chip that wireless devices can temporarily power. If you approach an antenna, they can power and send a small amount of data back and forth.

Most phones have the capability of reading and writing to this chip. For years, it let me into my house. It unlocked a deadbolt on my front door. For some years, it unlocked the doors at Neuralink and let me through the various locked doors inside the building. It is writable.

I can write a small amount of data to it. For some years in the early days of crypto, I had a crypto private key written on it to store a cryptocurrency that I thought was a dead offshoot of one of the main cryptocurrencies after it had forked. I put the private wallet key on there and forgot about it and remembered a few years later that it was there and went and checked and it was worth a few thousand dollars more than when I had left it on there.

That was a nice finding change in the sofa in the 21st century. When you say you read it, you're essentially taking a phone or other device and scanning it over the lump in your hand, so to speak, and then it can read the data from there essentially. What other sorts of things could one put into these RFIDs in theory?

How long can they stay in there before you need to take them out and recharge them or replace them? These are passive. They're coated in biocompatible glass and as an extra, I'm a rock climber and so I was worried about that glass shattering during rock climbing. I additionally coated them in another ring of silicone before implanting that.

It's pretty safe. They're passive. There's no battery. There's no active electronics in them. They could last the rest of my life. I don't think I'd ever have to remove it for any reason. At some point, the technology is always improving, so I might remove it and upgrade it. That's not inconceivable.

Already, there's 10X more storage versions available. That could be a drop-in replacement for this if I ever remove it, but it has a small niche use case and it's an interesting proof of concept tiptoeing towards the concept that you mentioned of you have to be willing to go through the things that you're suggesting to your patients in order to say with a straight face that you think this is a reasonable thing to do.

A small subcutaneous implant in the hand is a little different than a brain implant. What's involved in getting that RFID chip into the hand? I'm assuming it's an outpatient procedure. Presumably, you did it on yourself. Yeah, yeah. This was a kitchen table kind of procedure. Any anesthetic or no?

I've seen people do this with a lidocaine injection. For my money, I think a lidocaine injection is probably as painful as just doing the procedures. Just a little cut in that thin skin on the top of the hand. Some people are cringing right now. Other people are saying, "I want one," because you'll never have to worry about losing your keys or passwords.

I actually would like it for passwords, because I'm dreadfully bad at remembering passwords. I have to put them in places all over the place. I'm like that kid in – remember that movie, Stand By Me, where the kid hides the pennies under the porch and then loses the map?

Spends all summer trying to find them. I can relate. Yeah, so it was just a little slit and then put in there. No local immune response, no pus, no swelling. All the materials are completely biocompatible. They're on the surface, exposed to the body, so no bad reaction. It healed up in days and it was fine.

Very cool. Since we're on video here, can you just maybe raise it and show us? Were you not to point out that little lump, I wouldn't have known to ask about it. Any other members of your family have these? A few years after having this and seeing the convenience of me being able to open the door without keys, my wife insisted that I put one in her as well, so she's walking around with one.

Fantastic. We consider them our version of wedding rings.