EB-2: Prophetic - Transcript - Part 3

[59:24.567]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: So let's go back to lucid dreaming then. So let's say you have the device. Now, if you had to create a tutorial, because some people are just like, they don't know what to do with it. So if you had a tutorial or something that you would need to create for someone, is there a series of exercises that you would recommend? In the first one, wake up, take a look around, walk around, try this. Like.
Is that like, what would that, what would tutorial one tutorial two look like? You know,

[59:52.18]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah.

[59:56.118]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Like it is very critical and incumbent upon us to do a certain level of consumer education, you know, before they try this out and give them a guide to kind of the initial things that maybe they can try out doing. Certainly number one right is just taking in and grokking your environment and trying to, you know, maybe even depending on where you are, you know, if there's a dream character, you know, around you, go talk to them, right? Go ask them questions and so on and so forth. These set of questions.

[01:00:23.447]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[01:00:26.158]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Um, you know, maybe, you know, try to, try to make a flower appear out of the ground or a building appear out of the ground, you know, change your environment. Um, it, you know, the thing that's also really important is like, again, the way that this is, you know, experienced phenomenologically is what you imagine becomes, so I think maybe also one of the things to do is to also like go into it and say, what do you, where do you want to be? You know, what, you know, what is the first environment you want to create?

[01:00:35.874]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:00:51.897]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yep.

[01:00:54.494]🌌 Eric Wollberg: And so that when you're, you know, you're lucid, you can do that. But yeah, it is definitely important that we, you know, create some kind of content and guide that does that, as well as, you know, prepare you for what that's gonna feel like, right? It's gonna be a wild experience the first time, no doubt about it. I think people equilibrate to things like very quickly. We already saw that in the context, right, extraordinary things ever. And now it's a completely, you know, banal.

[01:01:16.577]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:01:21.515]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yep.

[01:01:23.81]🌌 Eric Wollberg: But I think you're absolutely correct that we'll have a set of content that kind of walks you through what this is gonna feel like, what maybe to do when you first experience it. But I frankly think that people will very, very quickly become attuned and accustomed to what they can do in these experiences.

[01:01:45.431]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: So let me, just playing around with this idea. Let's say you put on the halo and you fire up, you're fired up, you go to sleep. You also have maybe an app that talks you through it or basically runs like a vocal experience, right? Like something that.
you know, once the lucid state is triggered, says like, hello, blah, wake up, do this, or, you know, or imagine you're doing this, or et cetera, et cetera. Like, because I read through some of the research that you had on your page. There's like a real time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers. So it seems like you can have like conversation, you can have like a little bit of like, you know, interaction. So would that be something that you have a little bit of interactivity, like a vocal,
kind of experience where someone is talking you through something or someone is doing something with you together. Is that something that you guys have experimented with in the lab? Like, have you tried that?

[01:02:38.67]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Thank you.

[01:02:43.022]🌌 Eric Wollberg: su-
Yeah, so the problem with that, right, is when you provide sensory input, you know, your sensory, the worry there is that you could activate the thalamus, which regulates sleep, and that you would just wake them up. And so, I mean, it's interesting, we talked to a guy who did his PhD on tending auditory induction.

[01:02:59.795]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm. I see.

[01:03:11.21]🌌 Eric Wollberg: And he had to do this whole thing where, I mean, and it was a very limited data set where he basically created this algorithm that determined people's different kind of waking thresholds. And so, the term like you're a light sleeper or heavy sleeper, it's kind of like how much auditory noise can you have and tell you like are actually like awoken? Because the problem there is like when your brain hears something or people have tried to use light to induce lucidity.

[01:03:19.959]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:36.23]🌌 Eric Wollberg: If it thinks it's seeing something or something's changing in the environment outside of you, your body's like, holy shit, something's happening. We have to wake up. So I think an auditory guide is really not something that you want to do because you very much increase the chances that you wake them up. And again, I think content providing people like a walkthrough content could be video content and so forth that walks them through what they will expect and so forth. I really think...

[01:03:43.181]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:52.68]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I see.

[01:04:00.147]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right, right. Yep.

[01:04:05.302]🌌 Eric Wollberg: people equilibrate to things very, very quickly. And so once you're like attuned and accustomed to this, you know, there is no need for like this guide. Like you just know that like what you imagine becomes, right? And so, you know, people have their imagination.

[01:04:09.775]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: All right.

[01:04:14.752]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[01:04:20.171]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I see, I see. Music, playing music in the background, is that basically the same? Or does that get tuned out by the brain? You're just, maybe, yeah.

[01:04:30.868]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Again, you're just.
Again, the issue is that when you send sensory data, whether it's through your ears or your nose or your eyes, you can activate the thalamus, which regulates sleep and wakes somebody up.

[01:04:41.968]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.
I see. Wow, wow, interesting. So basically, you allow yourself to experience the dream in fullness without distracting yourself with things outside it. Interesting.

[01:05:00.722]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, I mean, the whole point is that we want to circumvent these auditory or sensory data inputs and we're just focused on activating the prefrontal cortex.

[01:05:12.683]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right on, right on. Tell me something a little bit more about the qualia factory, right, because I guess my layman's, layperson's kind of like understanding of qualia is like your subjective experience of consciousness. I don't know if that's an accurate description. What is qualia and why would you say that, you know, you have some potential to create a qualia factory?

[01:05:41.47]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, so again, I'll define Qualia, but I want to be clear, Qualia Factory is kind of a marketing term. What we're talking about right is a neuroimaging lab that is specifically set up to do simultaneous EEG and fMRI neuroimaging so that we can build more training data sets for more models that give more experiences. Qualia, you know, which Charles Pierce, a famous American philosopher, you know, kind of a contemporary of William James and so on.

[01:05:48.568]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Okay.

[01:05:55.279]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: All right. Okay. So, we're going to go ahead and get started.
Alright.

[01:06:12.283]🌌 Eric Wollberg: created this term qualé, which was, and qualia being kind of the unit economic of a given conscious experience. So the color red, the smell of coffee, et cetera. These are units of qualia or conscious experience. And a conscious experience, right, is the composition of that entire qualia landscape. That's where it comes from. And that's why we kind of named it that.

[01:06:25.365]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yep.

[01:06:38.831]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I see, I see. Very good. The one thing that I think people tend to ask about is that is this a medical device? Is this FDA regulated? Should it be FDA regulated? Describe to me the thought process behind should it be regulated or not? Why is it not regulated, et cetera.

[01:07:00.622]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Sure, we don't make medical claims. That's very important. Two is, you know, the threshold of regulation for ultrasound is 720 milliwatts per centimeter cubed. It's essentially the pressure that's being exerted from the simulation. We're talking about something that's between 100 to 200 milliwatts per centimeter cubed, so well below that threshold. And also to give you a sense, you know, you can get recreational electrical simulation devices today from companies like Lifted, et cetera.

[01:07:03.851]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:07:16.403]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I see.

[01:07:30.002]🌌 Eric Wollberg: And that's, you know, I think, you know, if you look at like the very, you know, it's a far less precise, you know, technology, et cetera, which, you know, and so like the safety record of ultrasound relative to any of these other technologies is far better. I mean, to give you maybe even in a phrase, it's less than a sonogram on a mother's wound. That's what we're talking about. So it's not regulated. We're not, you know, one of the key differences between us and a lot of the, you know, people in the CFUS space.

[01:07:37.295]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: All right.

[01:07:50.316]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[01:07:58.198]🌌 Eric Wollberg: they're almost universally targeting medical applications, which is great. It just means that the time to market is much longer. And so we focus on these recreational consumer experiences. And so, yeah, I mean, that's kind of the framework and why we don't have to go through it. Yeah.

[01:08:02.871]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[01:08:06.091]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right, right.

[01:08:18.599]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Interesting, interesting. So there are people trying to use transcranial focus ultrasound for medical applications, but you are not actually doing any medical claims, medical devices, you're not claiming to cure anyone. It is just a state of lucid dreaming, and that's all that you're trying to do at this point. And the...
amount of ultrasound which is being projected into the brain is something like one seventh regulated limit, right, like one seventh, one eighth of the regulated limit, something

[01:08:57.014]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, 1 7th, 1 5th or something like that, yeah. Between 1 7th and 1 5th, yeah.

[01:08:59.863]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah, something like that. Very good. So what does Morpheus look like? What does V2 of the device look like? We have a V1, it's coming out soon. It's in beta, you know, you have beta testers coming in. Is a V2 basically going to be kind of better and smaller, like more transducers?
And obviously, you can upgrade your model. You can update your model anytime on the back end. But if you have a V2 device, is that, are you looking for further development and miniaturization of the transducers of the EEG? Are you looking for more resolution? Are you looking to pack more of them in a smaller device? What would you look for before you pull the trigger on a V2 in the hardware?

[01:09:55.95]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Sure, we are very dead set and focused on V1, as you can imagine. I mean, right now, right, we're migrating the model and the technical prototype we have to do. Actually, you know, I know you probably can see some of my team building a 3D scan line tank for a hydrophone where we use it to test the pressure and so on and so forth and compare that to simulation, Okshan simulation that we run to basically calibrate it. But in terms of, we're very focused on that,

[01:10:00.779]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Hahaha

[01:10:11.487]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[01:10:25.418]🌌 Eric Wollberg: You know, in terms of what a V2, where the improvements would be, again, reference that, you know, Wes's law that I talked about previously, where you're seeing an increased level of both miniaturization, the number of elements on a given transducer, which will increase, you know, your precision and ability to phase and steer it. Um, and as you mentioned, the model will continuously update in the background. You know, we will launch more and more experiences, which you can subscribe to.

[01:10:42.623]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[01:10:50.754]🌌 Eric Wollberg: and improve the number of experiences that way as well. And so both the number of experiences can be improved by the transducers, both the number of the transducers or the number of elements on a transducer, as well as from the model. So you definitely wanna improve things like that, as well as improving the energy consumption of the transducers so that you can shrink, hopefully, and some of the electronics.

[01:11:15.116]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[01:11:18.87]🌌 Eric Wollberg: where you don't need kind of a side totem gear and hopefully, you know, maybe whether it's V2 or V3, you know, that stuff is just in the headband and so on. So that's how you could kind of see this improving over time, you know, as successive models are produced. But, you know, we are hyper-focused on, I'm just getting V1 done.

[01:11:22.936]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[01:11:40.623]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: What have been the biggest challenges for the hardware? Is it heat? Is it power? What is the thing that has been challenging the most in the last build out while you've been building this?

[01:11:54.458]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, I think, you know, one of the key, a few things, you know, one is, you know, we did this, you know, we did our prototype with card 79, we did, you know, they did Neuralink for Elon, when, you know, and they work with a number of other neurotech companies, I'm not sure I can mention their names. But you know, things like comfort, work is really critical, right? Because you have to be able to fall asleep with this on, or if you're using it for a waking state experience, I guess, it's got to be comfortable. So like just design and form factor is very, very important.

[01:12:09.272]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:12:19.735]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:23.19]🌌 Eric Wollberg: in terms of the hardware and so we did, you know, excessive, you know, studies on, you know, okay, like if you, if you, some people sleep on their side, some people sleep on their stomach, some people sleep on their, on their other side or their back, you know, making sure that it's, you know, fully comfortable and you can fit all the components in that comfortable form factor. And then in terms of like more like brass tacks, right, you know, there's, you know, component selection, etc., which you have to be very, you know, focused on. And then, you know,

[01:12:42.255]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[01:12:51.446]🌌 Eric Wollberg: there's all this equipment that we have to build like this 3D scan line hydrophone tank to actually test, et cetera, and simulation software so that you can cut, because we can't see how the, I can't see how the waves are propagating in your skull. I'd have to cut you open and I don't wanna do that to you. So we have to create, we have to use this hydrophone and the simulation software to create this one-to-one correlation.

[01:12:54.797]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:13:10.411]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah. Right.

[01:13:20.458]🌌 Eric Wollberg: where we can then be able to take somebody's goal and understand how it's gonna propagate through their head. So I think there's a lot of stuff that you just have to build out in order to even get to neuromodulation, which has really been a focus in the last couple of months. But yeah, come spring, we're gonna be doing neurostimulation and validating all these experiences and hopefully having in short order, but you never know, the first ultrasonically induced lucid dream.

[01:13:31.567]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.

[01:13:48.911]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right. In the early days, was there any hurdles where you needed experimental data to decide whether or not this was a go or not? Like, were there any like, you were like, hey, we need to figure out this. And if this is not going to happen, then we need to pivot, right? Like, what were, were there any moments, or were there anything technically or otherwise that you saw you needed to have those decisions?

[01:14:09.71]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Mm.

[01:14:17.61]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, so again, I mean, comparing 2018, when I first thought about doing this to, you know, 2022, when I found TFUS, you needed, you know, a different neuro-stimulation modality than electricity or electromagnetism. And then on TFUS, TFUS has already been used to induce focus, positive mood, deep meditative states, etc. It is neuromodulatory generally. And so as long as you can, you understand, right, the brain state that you are trying to induce.

[01:14:36.715]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[01:14:40.963]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:14:46.686]🌌 Eric Wollberg: it is definitely, this is the integrated circuit for noninvasive neuro-stimulation aid. So, you know, that was, you know, you know, I think from our side, you're very de-risk. And then we, you know, we have this collaboration with the Donner's Institute, you know, for neuro-imaging data. And so that was also very critical that we needed that pipeline. And then having successive, you know, breakthroughs or acquisition to data sets that we could use to supplement that data, as well as, and expand our data pipeline.
But really it was that and then, and of course just the advent of the neural transformer architecture in 2022, which then, you know, Wes expanded and built, you know, from the ground up, you know, to be a multimodal neural transformer. But the go in terms of red light, green light was I think really on the neuro stimulation front more than anything else, the modality.

[01:15:23.201]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:15:29.335]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:15:33.856]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:15:39.791]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right. Do you sometimes come across purists who are like, lucid dreaming is something that you should naturally come to as a part of a kind of religious or semi-religious meditative process, rather than something that is to be offered freely to everyone? Do you come across those kinds of people? Do you come across comments like that?

[01:16:07.254]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, absolutely. I've seen a couple of comments on some of the various things that we posted. I think you see kind of like gatekeeping and like everything, basically everything. And I think, yeah, I mean, I also was in the psychedelic space for a brief while and you kind of saw the same thing in the psychedelic space where you had either like these ethnobotanists kind of, these are sacred plants and compounds.

[01:16:16.959]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah. All right.

[01:16:30.115]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:16:34.39]🌌 Eric Wollberg: And then you had like, you know, the scientists at University College of London and John Hopkins, et cetera, who were really trying to move things in our understanding forward, you know? And so I think you see these dynamics play out across many different areas. But I think it's kind of like, if, you know, we said, again, maybe bring it back to like, you know, fire, it's like, no, like only lightning gets to create fire, or, you know, or something like that.

[01:17:00.975]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Alright.

[01:17:02.926]🌌 Eric Wollberg: you know, we shouldn't control it. We could burn down our village, you know, or somebody could burn down our village, you know? And so, you know, I fully expected, and I'm not surprised that we got, you know, that kind of, you know, feedback from certain people. But frankly, like, you know, the world has moved forward by people who kind of say kind of, you know, this is an extraordinary, powerful thing. What if we gave it to everyone?

[01:17:07.667]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:17:23.317]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:17:29.331]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah, right. And on that note, in your early kind of like testers who are testing with you in the lab, is there anyone like, what has been like a kind of remarkable experience when someone has tried this on and they've come to you and like, this is a whoa moment for them? Like, I'm sure someone has tested it and, you know.

[01:17:54.999]🌌 Eric Wollberg: To be very clear, we're starting a neurostimulation in the spring. We have to migrate the model on and again, as I mentioned, test out all the hardware to make sure that you get it in correspondence with the simulation software so that we're doing this properly. But we have friends at places like the Institute for Advanced Consciousness study that's been running a number of different ultrasound.

[01:18:00.035]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:18:20.838]🌌 Eric Wollberg: you know, experiences, I think meditation and positive mood, I think, were the things that they were doing, as well as maybe some others. And there's actually a really great blog post that somebody wrote on his experience. And it's pretty extraordinary. There's also a really great video that was done, you know, quite some time ago on the research of a gentleman named Dr. Jason Guetti, where he was using it to induce deep meditative states. It's like they use this woman who had never meditated a day in her life.

[01:18:20.897]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[01:18:27.427]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: All right.

[01:18:49.609]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[01:18:49.702]🌌 Eric Wollberg: and induce the deep meditative state, she's very emotional about it. It's an extraordinary thing to be dropped into a brain state that you've never experienced before. So it is a very powerful technology and experience. We look forward to be giving those experiences to our beta users in the spring.

[01:18:53.62]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right, right.

[01:18:58.405]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right, right, right.

[01:19:08.107]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: That's amazing, man. I am so inspired. This is such an awesome piece of technology. Because you often wonder, you often read, let's say, a Hermann Hesse or Siddhartha or a lot of these things. And you wonder, actually, they're not able to fully describe their experience. It is not possible for anyone to fully verbally describe
this kind of altered or different state of consciousness. And we have these kind of like very, very limited understanding and limited ability to describe what's happening in our heads. And to the extent that, you know, there is something that you can experience, which you have not been able to experience, it's inside you, but you can't really experience it. And to the extent that you can use a technological, you know, innovation to kind of like trigger that.
and learn something more about yourself, I mean, that's amazing, right? Yeah, it's absolutely fantastic, so.

[01:20:13.222]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Yeah, obviously, I think we share your enthusiasm. I think the best thing that you can do for people is give them the experience. If you can give them experience, it's empirical for them, you know, innately. And I think one of the things that's going to be pretty extraordinary is, you know, over the years and decades as we have this technology, you know, I have to paraphrase Altman, right? It's like,

[01:20:24.861]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[01:20:40.726]🌌 Eric Wollberg: These are the, this is the worst these neural transformers will ever be. This is the worst TFUS will ever be. And so if we can build, you know, on these, you know, both on, you know, on these, you know, these, um, you know, curves like West's law and, and on top of, you know, machine learning improvements that we're seeing all, you know, uh, every day, um, you know, the ability to, uh, give people a device that allows them to explore the state space of conscious experience.

[01:20:45.155]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: All right.

[01:20:48.984]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.

[01:21:09.154]🌌 Eric Wollberg: is going to be transformative for the world. I frankly don't really have a good sense of what the world looks like when this is available en masse, but it is an exciting world. It is certainly a strange one, but it is, I think, one that is profound and something that I look forward to exploring alongside everyone else.

[01:21:12.299]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yep.

[01:21:19.159]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[01:21:24.419]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:21:34.471]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Awesome, awesome. So I think, thank you, thank you Eric, thank you Wes, thank you for your time today. I'm sure you guys must be super, super busy trying to get product out the door. And I think that's it for the recording. You need to stay on for a while because it's still uploading, but that's pretty much it. So we can do a quick debrief, like, you know, and yeah, so.
What did you guys feel? How was the avatar? How was the call? Like, I'm having some problems with my computer, but yeah, how did it go?

[01:22:04.174]🌌 Eric Wollberg: Thanks for having us.

[01:22:12.278]🌌 Eric Wollberg: No, no, it was a lot of fun. I think like, you know, one of the things that's really hard to kind of explain, like when you talk about things like an auditory guide and so on, you know, the thing for me is like, you won't need one, you know? I think you're right to ask the question on like, content that like, preps you for it, and primes you for it, and gives you kind of a first couple of things that you could do in the experience, but.
But the idea of a guide, both because of the fact that you could then activate the thalamus, potentially waking them up and just end up avoiding the experience entirely, that's just, I think, a difficult thing to explain. And I also think, I understand it's, listen, I'll be very frank, the first time you experience this is gonna be pretty wild. Not pretty wild, very wild. TFUS.

[01:22:51.682]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[01:23:03.424]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right.