Speaker 1: From electric cars to spaceships to social media. Elon Musk
Speaker 1: is constantly getting into our heads, so maybe it shouldn't
Speaker 1: come as a surprise that Musk now wants to actually
Speaker 1: get into our heads. His company, called Neuralink, has been
Speaker 1: racing to develop a brain implant that can convert a
Speaker 1: person's thoughts into a range of commands a computer can understand.
Speaker 1: After testing on animals, the company is now seeking a
Speaker 1: volunteer for its first human clinical trial, and if the
Speaker 1: product works as intended one day, it could conceivably improve
Speaker 1: the lives of people suffering from paralysis, stroke, and hearing
Speaker 1: and vision loss. Of course, Musk being Musk, he also
Speaker 1: has a more out there motivation for racing to complete
Speaker 1: this device.
Speaker 2: Elon's vision this is a guy who's consumed by the
Speaker 2: idea that AI might go a muck, might leave the
Speaker 2: human race behind. And so in this very futuristic version
Speaker 2: of this tech, we would be these human machine hybrids
Speaker 2: where information could go into our brains sort of matrix style,
Speaker 2: like you download Kung Fu, or you download Spanish, and
Speaker 2: then information would go out. Maybe you could send your
Speaker 2: thoughts directly to another person.
Speaker 1: That's Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter Ashley Vance. He's been covering Neuralink
Speaker 1: for years, including ten trips to the company's facilities in
Speaker 1: California and Texas. He's gotten to watch the place and
Speaker 1: its founder in action. Ashley's here to tell us what
Speaker 1: he found inside what's arguably Elon Musk's most ambitious and
Speaker 1: controversial project.
Speaker 2: Is this the most sort of stable, pragmatic, judicious guy
Speaker 2: that you want to be in control of the world
Speaker 2: of mind control devices? Probably not.
Speaker 3: Is he the.
Speaker 2: Person that will probably be the first to sort of
Speaker 2: make this happen?
Speaker 1: Yes, I'm Wes Kasova. That's today on the Big Take.
Speaker 1: Hey Ashley, good, see.
Speaker 2: Again, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: So you've had a pretty interesting time lately taking a
Speaker 1: look at Elon Musk's big project, Neuralink, and you called
Speaker 1: it the most consequential product launch of his career. That's
Speaker 1: kind of like a big statement given everything that this
Speaker 1: guy has done.
Speaker 2: You can read that in a few different ways. I yes,
Speaker 2: in one sense, Neuralink is this brain implant, and so
Speaker 2: it's a medical device. And look, I mean, rockets and
Speaker 2: cars are serious business. But in the past these companies
Speaker 2: have messed up on their first product launches. SpaceX had
Speaker 2: rockets blow up, Tesla struggled for years and years and
Speaker 2: years to mass produce its car. You had some room
Speaker 2: for error to get these things right. The US Food
Speaker 2: and Drug Administration is taking a very close look at Neuralink,
Speaker 2: and so this is going to go into a human
Speaker 2: for the first time after many years of animal trials,
Speaker 2: and so you know, there's a lot of pressure. And
Speaker 2: then for the rest of us, I mean, the sort
Speaker 2: of exciting and possibly scary thing about all this is
Speaker 2: this device really could be this incredible piece of technology
Speaker 2: that one day in the near term, it's going to
Speaker 2: help people with illness. One day maybe it makes us
Speaker 2: all these human machine hybrids. And so there's a lot
Speaker 2: of stake here. You know, maybe the future of the
Speaker 2: human species.
Speaker 1: Tell us about Neuralink exactly what it is and what
Speaker 1: must hopes that the thing is going to do.
Speaker 2: This company started in twenty sixteen, it's always had pretty
Speaker 2: much the same goal, which is basically to put a
Speaker 2: computer chip into people's brains. And the reason you would
Speaker 2: do this is to you essentially put a electrodes right
Speaker 2: up against neurons in our brain and you can watch
Speaker 2: brain activity is neurons fire. They fire in certain patterns
Speaker 2: depending on what you're doing. And so the big idea
Speaker 2: is to read this brain activity, put it through AI
Speaker 2: algorithms and all kinds of other software, and come to
Speaker 2: some insights about the brain. In the near term, this
Speaker 2: would be things like people who are paralyzed or have
Speaker 2: als or strokes and are having trouble speaking or having
Speaker 2: trouble using a computer. This device would be able to
Speaker 2: read their thoughts. They would think what they want to
Speaker 2: do on a computer, think about navigating a web page
Speaker 2: or typing what they want to say, and the brain
Speaker 2: implant would send those signals out and it would get
Speaker 2: translated onto a computer. So sort of amazing Elon's vision.
Speaker 2: This is a guy who's consumed by the idea that
Speaker 2: AI might go amuck, might leave the human race behind,
Speaker 2: and so in this very futuristic version of this tech,
Speaker 2: we would become these human machine hybrids. So Neuralink has
Speaker 2: been working on an implant to make this happen. As
Speaker 2: far as I follow all these companies, it's the most advanced,
Speaker 2: powerful and invasive implant that anyone's ever built.
Speaker 1: In this space. I guess they call it the Brain
Speaker 1: computer interfaces or BCIs has been pretty busy, and Neuralink
Speaker 1: has a lot of competition that at the moment at
Speaker 1: least seems like they're a little bit ahead of Musk.
Speaker 2: I follow this field closely, and there's two There's two
Speaker 2: big competitors that at least Elon Musk has been most
Speaker 2: concerned about in the meetings that I've watched. And one
Speaker 2: company is called Synchron. They're headquartered in New York. They
Speaker 2: have a brain implant. It does not require a crany
Speaker 2: ectomy to have your skull cut open. They actually it's
Speaker 2: like a stent, similar to a stent that would go
Speaker 2: in your heart. They thread this stent through your arteries
Speaker 2: into a blood vessel in the brain. And for years
Speaker 2: now they started in Australia and are now New York.
Speaker 2: They have many people, dozens of people who have had
Speaker 2: the same plant. Essentially, the person kind of thinks it's
Speaker 2: almost like a binary on or off as to what
Speaker 2: you want to do on a computer. Do you want
Speaker 2: to select this letter, do you want to select this word?
Speaker 2: Do you want to click your mouse here? And that
Speaker 2: people think and that happens.
Speaker 1: And some listeners might remember we went to visit Synchron
Speaker 1: back in March and I spoke to the company's CEO,
Speaker 1: Thomas Oxley. Here's a bit of that.
Speaker 3: On the Apple iPhone. There is a way in which
Speaker 3: you can start to control the iPhone without having to
Speaker 3: touch the screen if you have an ability to send
Speaker 3: command clicks into the iPhone. So we have our patients
Speaker 3: sending their command functions and we've integrated into the iPhone
Speaker 3: where they're able to navigate their way and use the iPhone.
Speaker 3: It's not as fast as what you and I can
Speaker 3: do with our fingers, but Apple have created mechanisms of
Speaker 3: accessibility control that allow these types of inputs to work.
Speaker 3: So that's a really big deal with getting our patients
Speaker 3: back control over the iPhone.
Speaker 1: And if you'd like to listen to that show, there's
Speaker 1: a link in the episode nets.
Speaker 2: There's another company based in Switzerland called Onward. They are
Speaker 2: not in the brain, they are on the spine. They
Speaker 2: put an implant right on a person's spine and I
Speaker 2: have seen in person in Switzerland. It's one of the
Speaker 2: most amazing things I've ever seen. A fully paralyzed person.
Speaker 2: This Italian gentleman named Michelle. He'd been paralyzed for three
Speaker 2: years from a car accident, he walked again right in
Speaker 2: front of me. It's not a totally natural gait, but
Speaker 2: this is a person who's standing up walking across rooms.
Speaker 2: Another young woman, Julie, she was paralyzed in a car accident.
Speaker 2: And when you're paralyzed often you have trouble regulating your
Speaker 2: blood pressure. And it used to take her seven hours
Speaker 2: to get out of bed each day. She would pass
Speaker 2: out so many times. And she had this implant and
Speaker 2: it's totally changed her life.
Speaker 1: And so what is the difference between what these companies
Speaker 1: that seem to be a bit ahead of neuralink or
Speaker 1: doing and what Neuralink aims to do once they're able
Speaker 1: to implant the device.
Speaker 2: So in a lot of ways, some of these startups
Speaker 2: are tackling very specific problems. You know, synchron is giving
Speaker 2: you this amazing but sort of limited access on your
Speaker 2: computer Onward has about a dozen electrodes on the spine.
Speaker 2: Neuralink is looking to put dozens, if not hundreds of
Speaker 2: electrodes into the brain. So it's just this massive increase
Speaker 2: in computing horsepower, and they want to be you could
Speaker 2: think of it as like a general purpose computing system,
Speaker 2: so it's not just doing words, it's not just the spine.
Speaker 2: They want to link a brain implant with a spinal implant.
Speaker 2: They want to do speech, they want to do movement,
Speaker 2: they want to restore feeling to people's limbs, they want
Speaker 2: to have people walk again, they want to you know,
Speaker 2: restore vision, I mean sort of do everything. And it's
Speaker 2: through having this extra computing horsepower that they would be
Speaker 2: able to pull all these things off.
Speaker 1: Can you describe exactly what it would take to get
Speaker 1: one of these Neuralink implants into a person's brain.
Speaker 2: So from the start, Elon wanted this to be something
Speaker 2: closer to like a consumer electronics device. And so the
Speaker 2: way Neuralink does it, surgery is a human surgeon for
Speaker 2: the moment, cut a hole in the skull, and the
Speaker 2: Neuralink has built this rather amazing robot that has a tiny, tiny,
Speaker 2: tiny needle and it grabs these threads is what Neuralink
Speaker 2: calls them. They're wires with electrodes on them, and the
Speaker 2: robot peers through this hole in the skull with all
Speaker 2: kinds of computer visions, software and cameras and then it
Speaker 2: pushes these threads into your brain. And after it's done
Speaker 2: that with sixty four of these threads in this first
Speaker 2: human trial that'll start in just a matter of weeks.
Speaker 2: Then the hole in your skull is plugged up, for
Speaker 2: lack of a better term, with Neuralink's computing device that
Speaker 2: has a battery, wireless communications to send the signals out,
Speaker 2: and then it has all of this computing systems to
Speaker 2: read the signals in your brain, and that device goes
Speaker 2: flush with your skull. When I've seen primates and pigs
Speaker 2: that have had this implant, you couldn't tell which animal
Speaker 2: has had the implant and which hasn't.
Speaker 1: How long does it take for the robot to implant
Speaker 1: all of these wires in the device itself.
Speaker 2: The actual surgery would take two to three hours when
Speaker 2: you take into account being anthesized and the surgeon's getting
Speaker 2: ready to go into the r and prepping the patient.
Speaker 2: Once the robot sets to work, it's about a twenty
Speaker 2: five minute procedure. They've done it as quick as eighteen minutes.
Speaker 2: The faster the better because it does less damage to
Speaker 2: the brain and the recovery is quicker. And in the future,
Speaker 2: you know, Elon's vision for this is that we all
Speaker 2: show up at like a clinic or some sort of store,
Speaker 2: and you go in and the robot does everything, and
Speaker 2: it takes about ten or fifteen minutes, and you leave
Speaker 2: with a chip in your head and a new more
Speaker 2: advanced human.
Speaker 1: While you're waiting for your tesla to get charged in
Speaker 1: right after the break. What's it like to work at Neuralink? Actually,
Speaker 1: you've spent a lot of time at Neuralink. There are
Speaker 1: two big facilities, I guess ones in California and ones
Speaker 1: in Texas watching this operation and watching Elon musk. What's
Speaker 1: it like there.
Speaker 2: I've been going for about three years. I'm the only reporter.
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure that's ever been allowed in there. It's fascinating.
Speaker 2: As with all of Elon's companies, you know, he has
Speaker 2: a gift for assembling very smart people and having them
Speaker 2: charged toward a goal, and Neuralink is no different. I
Speaker 2: mean that these are world class engineers in this room.
Speaker 2: This company is a little odd in that Elon only
Speaker 2: pops in about once a month come check out what's
Speaker 2: going on. And it's ostensibly run by a triumvirate of people,
Speaker 2: and so Elon will show up and everybody briefs him
Speaker 2: on the latest of what's happening with the company. I
Speaker 2: went to a couple meetings. I found them sort of funny. Typically,
Speaker 2: Elon will stand at the head of this table and
Speaker 2: eight to ten top engineers will be gathered around it,
Speaker 2: and they start presenting on what's going on in Elon.
Speaker 2: He's actually surprisingly adept. He knew a lot about brain science,
Speaker 2: about the implant technologies, about the rivals. I was actually
Speaker 2: quite surprised. I was, on one hand, kind of impressed
Speaker 2: with his knowledge in this field, just as he did
Speaker 2: with rockets in self driving cars. Elon seems to learn
Speaker 2: by osmosis from talking to all of his engineers and
Speaker 2: actually digest these facts and can talk in quite detail
Speaker 2: about what's going on in the brain and with these implants.
Speaker 2: On the other hand, you know, sometimes he comes up
Speaker 2: with suggestions for the device that you could tell the
Speaker 2: engineers aren't quite convinced that it's going to work or
Speaker 2: that he knows what he's talking about it. So, you know,
Speaker 2: in the story I described this as when I would
Speaker 2: witness these moments, is Elon sort of having this like
Speaker 2: PhD and self confidence. I mean, he's not afraid to
Speaker 2: share his opinion, and the engineers kind of let it
Speaker 2: wash over them. And nod and then go back to
Speaker 2: whatever they're doing. But then Elon will jump in and
Speaker 2: his commandment pretty much always is to move faster. And
Speaker 2: this has made people nervous. Again, this is a biotech device,
Speaker 2: this might be an area where you don't want to
Speaker 2: move faster. So in one meeting I saw this firsthand.
Speaker 2: The engineers had gone through a demo that Neuralink was
Speaker 2: planning to do, and Elon says to them, we want
Speaker 2: to get there with a maniacal sense of urgency, maniacal
Speaker 2: like the world is coming to an end. We need
Speaker 2: to get there before the AI takes over, or at
Speaker 2: least try And this was not an unusual out of
Speaker 2: the blue remark. I went to several meetings and this
Speaker 2: was a common refrain.
Speaker 1: Another big moment of friction that you describe is when
Speaker 1: one of the people at Neuralink said it was going
Speaker 1: to take a long time for the FDA to approve
Speaker 1: this device.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it wasn't even just to approve the device.
Speaker 2: It was once we get our first human trial, the
Speaker 2: FDA wants us to wait a year before we do
Speaker 2: another implant. And Elon just blurts out, unacceptable, that cannot happen.
Speaker 2: We want to be going into more humans as quickly
Speaker 2: as we can. And so he starts advising the engineers
Speaker 2: on how this is going to play out in his mind,
Speaker 2: and he says, look, I've been at SpaceX where we
Speaker 2: battle against the Federal Aviation Administration to get permits to
Speaker 2: launch our rockets and try new prototypes. And as long
Speaker 2: as we can show that this works and make some progress,
Speaker 2: the FDA will bend to our will and let us
Speaker 2: do more these So, you know, he tells them, look,
Speaker 2: we need to get this into a person, and that
Speaker 2: person needs to be an advocate for the technology. If
Speaker 2: need be, we'll start a letter writing campaign, and I'm
Speaker 2: quite sure the FDA will let us move faster.
Speaker 1: The Elms you described in the story as always pushing
Speaker 1: to move forward, always trying to be more ambitious than
Speaker 1: any of the people who work for him think that
Speaker 1: can be is very much the way he's operated as
Speaker 1: other companies. But you also write about a kind of
Speaker 1: tension about Musk himself that lately his reputation has been
Speaker 1: a lot different than it was when he was sort
Speaker 1: of the hero of SpaceX and the hero of Tesla
Speaker 1: in those earlier days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean probably I might have watched this more
Speaker 2: than anyone, being his biographer and writing my book during
Speaker 2: kind of an earlier time in Elon's life. He's changed,
Speaker 2: you know, he's kind of a professional troll on Twitter.
Speaker 2: He seems to want to pick fights with people for sports.
Speaker 2: He's obviously all over the map up politically and getting
Speaker 2: involved in world affairs. And so he's this mercurial wild
Speaker 2: card of a human with this particular technology. It's a
Speaker 2: brain implant, if you want to joke around, I don't
Speaker 2: even think it's joking. It's a mind control device that
Speaker 2: they want to put into literally billions of people one day.
Speaker 2: We've seen Elon in the war in Ukraine with his
Speaker 2: Space Internet systems. You know, if he decides he doesn't
Speaker 2: want the Ukrainians to be using the Space Internet systems
Speaker 2: one weekend, he turns them off, and then so people
Speaker 2: talk to him and he turns them back on. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's a bit of very serious whimsy attached to all this.
Speaker 2: And so is this the most sort of stable, pragmatic,
Speaker 2: judicious guy that you want to be in control of
Speaker 2: a world of mind control devices? Probably not. Is he
Speaker 2: the person that will probably be the first to sort
Speaker 2: of make this happen. Yes, And so this is always
Speaker 2: the great conundrum with Elon, I think, and increasingly so.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is a field that he should know
Speaker 2: nothing about. Neuralinks should not work. I mean, you don't
Speaker 2: just go into the biomedical field and start producing something
Speaker 2: like this and have it work and sort of race
Speaker 2: ahead of everyone when you've come from the car and
Speaker 2: the rocket and the internet software industry. And yet it is,
Speaker 2: it seems to be we're on the cusp of this working.
Speaker 2: And so I think this is a great dilemma with
Speaker 2: Elon that we all have to deal with, is this
Speaker 2: guy gets stuff done, but we don't always want him
Speaker 2: to be the one doing it when we.
Speaker 1: Come back Neuralinks testing on animals, especially, maybe the most
Speaker 1: controversial part of Neuralinks operations has been testing on animals.
Speaker 1: And there's been a lot written about what's happened to
Speaker 1: some of the animals who've been used in developing this product.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and just to give people a flavor for Neuralinks
Speaker 2: set up and how these animals play in the company
Speaker 2: started in California. It has a headquarters in Fremont, which
Speaker 2: is on the edge of Silicon valley, and in that
Speaker 2: facility they've got pigs, they've got monkeys, about almost twenty monkeys,
Speaker 2: and so these animals do get implants. They live at
Speaker 2: the NEURALA facility. Their watch their brain activity is red.
Speaker 2: And then in Austin, Texas, which I think is going
Speaker 2: to be the future home of Neuralink, they've bought thirty
Speaker 2: seven acres of former ranch land and they already have
Speaker 2: about one hundred sheep and pigs there in a barn.
Speaker 2: The hope is to have sort of a primate set
Speaker 2: up where the primates can be indoors and outdoors. That
Speaker 2: facility also has operating rooms where they have the robots
Speaker 2: to perform these surgeries, a lab to go over the
Speaker 2: samples and everything.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: The huge controversy around the animals has been that there's
Speaker 2: been reports gathered from public documents from reporting that some
Speaker 2: of these surgeries have gone wrong, that pigs and the
Speaker 2: monkeys in particular have suffered as a result of the implant.
Speaker 2: Some of these stories I have to give credit to
Speaker 2: Wired and Reuter's they've done most of the reporting here.
Speaker 2: They've suggested it was unnecessary suffering on parts of the animals,
Speaker 2: and the stories are hard to read, really hard.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: You hear about about monkeys being despondent, bleeding, scratching at
Speaker 2: these things. It's a tough read.
Speaker 1: We should say that Neuralink has said it's made mistakes
Speaker 1: during exploratory surgeries, but it says it was human error,
Speaker 1: not issues with its equipment, and the company stresses that
Speaker 1: the most troubling reports are from its early years before
Speaker 1: it built its own testing facility in Fremont. Neuralink says
Speaker 1: it's gone to great lengths to provide better living conditions
Speaker 1: for the animals there.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty, Neuralink brought all of its animal testing
Speaker 2: and operation in house. And so this was the Remont
Speaker 2: facility and now the Austin facility. And so I'm the
Speaker 2: only reporter that has seen the stuff uphand I don't
Speaker 2: want to be an apologist for Neuralink. All I can
Speaker 2: say is that the animals that I have seen over
Speaker 2: these three years are incredibly well cared for, and in fact,
Speaker 2: Neuralink is doing many pioneering things in terms of animal
Speaker 2: care that you wouldn't never see at a contract research facility.
Speaker 1: So what is different about the way neuralink treats animals.
Speaker 2: Now, if you go into a contract research animal center,
Speaker 2: the something like monkeys are just going to be kept
Speaker 2: in rows of cages. They are not given really anything
Speaker 2: in their cage. The way that they're usually coaxed into
Speaker 2: doing a research experiment is by withholding their food and
Speaker 2: water until they do their work, and then it's given
Speaker 2: to them as a treat. At Neuralink, it's it's just
Speaker 2: very different. I've seen the same group of seventeen to
Speaker 2: twenty monkeys for the last three years. They've all had
Speaker 2: these brain implants. They, as far as my eyes indicate,
Speaker 2: are healthy and active. Neuralink has them in their kind
Speaker 2: of natural habitat, not like outside, but in their regular cages.
Speaker 2: Their cages are several times bigger than what you would
Speaker 2: find at one of these research organizations. The animals volunteer
Speaker 2: to do the testing. Neuralink wheels the laptops in front
Speaker 2: of them, and they're offered like a smoothie or some
Speaker 2: fruit to munch on while they do the experiment for
Speaker 2: a couple hours, and if they don't want to, they're
Speaker 2: free to leave. Neuralink doesn't bind them in any way.
Speaker 2: They just sit in their cage. Their cages are also
Speaker 2: full of toys. It looks like a child's playground. I mean,
Speaker 2: they have all the slides and things to play with.
Speaker 2: There's music playing through the whole room. There's TVs they
Speaker 2: can watch. It's just it's very, very different to anything
Speaker 2: you would see at a contract research center. The monkeys
Speaker 2: that have been at the Fremont facility for the last
Speaker 2: three years, seventeen of them that I've seen, totally fine.
Speaker 2: They've been implanted, They've even had the implants take it
Speaker 2: out and been upgraded. In some cases. There were two
Speaker 2: or three that did not take to doing the tests
Speaker 2: and just were not interested in doing the test, and
Speaker 2: so they were retired to a center that sort of
Speaker 2: takes care of retired animals, and there was one animal
Speaker 2: that was euthanized. Neuralink says it was part of a
Speaker 2: planned euthanization that happens at the end of some of
Speaker 2: these tests.
Speaker 1: What is Neuralink said about his animal testing when he
Speaker 1: asked them about it.
Speaker 2: To their credit, they go through detail by detail with me,
Speaker 2: and they've done some of this on their website as well.
Speaker 2: Each of the incidents that's been reported so Neuralink has
Speaker 2: been relatively upront they've been a very secretive company. Again,
Speaker 2: I'm the only reporter that's ever been allowed in there.
Speaker 2: I think they're very sensitive to the animal stuff. Elon
Speaker 2: adds to everything because he just brings this heightened scrutiny
Speaker 2: and he is this guy that is hard charging and
Speaker 2: wants to go fast, and people want to know if
Speaker 2: there's consequences as a result of that.
Speaker 1: And you've talked to him quite a bit about Neuralink
Speaker 1: in the project. What does he say about it when
Speaker 1: you talk to him about his aim for this company.
Speaker 2: Well, I've always found it confusing, just like I find
Speaker 2: his position on AI in general to be confusing. I mean,
Speaker 2: he's the doom and gloomer when it comes to AI,
Speaker 2: and yet he's funded two AI startups, one of them
Speaker 2: Open Ai, which is the world's leading AI company. Tesla
Speaker 2: has some of the best and highest number of AI
Speaker 2: engineers in the world. And then Neuralink is this huge gamble.
Speaker 2: When you talk to Elon about this, I mean he
Speaker 2: just does not see these two sides of the coin
Speaker 2: at all. I mean this very black and white issue
Speaker 2: for him. We will either become the AI's pets or
Speaker 2: we will evolve alongside of them.
Speaker 1: Ashley, you said that very soon Neuralink will begin it's
Speaker 1: very first trial of the device. What happens next? Where
Speaker 1: does the company and this product, I suppose you'd call
Speaker 1: it go from here?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the trial there isn't a specific date set yet,
Speaker 2: but it should happen within the next few weeks, or
Speaker 2: I would assume maybe early twenty twenty four. They've selected
Speaker 2: a couple of hospitals where they want to do this
Speaker 2: first implant in a human. They've opened up a call
Speaker 2: for participants, and so this first person is likely to
Speaker 2: be paralyzed in all four limbs, probably a pretty young patient,
Speaker 2: because you generally want to be as healthy as possible
Speaker 2: for these types of trials. So this first person would
Speaker 2: get this implant in the relatively near future. They've had
Speaker 2: thousands of people knocking on their door to take part
Speaker 2: in this trial. And then obviously the FDA will be
Speaker 2: looking very closely to make sure the device is not
Speaker 2: causing any physical harm. That's kind of step one. And
Speaker 2: then you have this process where you begin to read
Speaker 2: out the data and see how well the device is working.
Speaker 2: Like with primates and other animals, you have this amazing
Speaker 2: moment where a human can actually tell you what this
Speaker 2: thing feels like, how well it's performing, give you much
Speaker 2: more direct feedback if everything goes well. Elon turned out
Speaker 2: to be right about how the FDA was perceiving these things.
Speaker 2: They've already been given approval to it. Again, things have
Speaker 2: to go right, but to do another implant about three
Speaker 2: months instead of a year after this first one, and
Speaker 2: so the company is looking to do about eleven implants
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty four, get up to maybe around like
Speaker 2: fifty the next year. And then I saw a slide
Speaker 2: deck that talked about tens of thousands of surgeries about
Speaker 2: five years into the future.
Speaker 1: Ashley, I was great talking to you. This is just fascinating.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Thanks so much.
Speaker 1: By the way, if you want to keep up with
Speaker 1: the latest on Elin Musk, be sure to check out
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