Speaker 1: Well, Elon Muski is now the richest person on the planet.
Speaker 2: More than half the satellites in space are owned and
Speaker 2: controlled by one man.
Speaker 1: Starting his own artificial intelligence company. Well, he's a legitimate,
Speaker 1: super genius. Legitimate, he says. He's always voted for Democrats,
Speaker 1: but this year it will be different.
Speaker 3: He'll vote Republican.
Speaker 1: There is a reason the US government is so reliant
Speaker 1: on him.
Speaker 4: Elon Musk is a scam artist and he's done nothing.
Speaker 3: Anything he does is fascinating the people.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to bonus episode of Elaning. I'm David Papadopolos,
Speaker 2: your host of the show, where we discuss Elon Musk's
Speaker 2: vast corporate empire, his latest gambits and antics, and how
Speaker 2: to make sense of it all. We are coming to
Speaker 2: you twice this week. Trust me. Now, this be a
Speaker 2: regular thing, but we have something really special to share.
Speaker 2: Elon Musk. Biographer and BusinessWeek reporter Ashley Vance has written
Speaker 2: a cover story for the magazine on Neuralink, Musk's biotech
Speaker 2: startup that makes SpaceX goal to go to Mars look pedestrian.
Speaker 2: This company aims to do nothing less than put chips
Speaker 2: in human brains. Here's how Musk explained the idea back
Speaker 2: in twenty nineteen at the Neuralink launch event.
Speaker 1: Meaning that we can ultimately.
Speaker 3: Yeah, those are gonna sound pretty weird, but achieve a
Speaker 3: sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence.
Speaker 2: Ashley has gotten exclusive access to Neuralink's labs and has
Speaker 2: done intensive reporting on what is and isn't happening inside
Speaker 2: one of Musk's most controversial companies. To discuss this and more,
Speaker 2: we've beamed him in from powel alto Welcome Ashley, Thanks
Speaker 2: for having me. We've also got with us Sarah McBride,
Speaker 2: who covers Neuralink for Bloomberg. Hello, Sarah, Thanks so Ashley.
Speaker 2: We'll start with you. You spent lots of time inside
Speaker 2: the lab these past few years for this story. You know,
Speaker 2: hit me with your with your main findings. I should
Speaker 2: I be, should I in humanity be more excited than
Speaker 2: scared about all this? Or vice versa?
Speaker 1: Well, I think you know.
Speaker 3: My big takeaway is that neuralinks a little bit different
Speaker 3: that Elon has been pitching it for the last couple
Speaker 3: of years. Elon always brings us as like this big
Speaker 3: leap forward and creating cyborgs between between humans and machines,
Speaker 3: and you know that that billions of people are gonna
Speaker 3: put their hand up to have this elective surgery to
Speaker 3: put a brain implant into their heads. The reality is,
Speaker 3: you know, for the foreseeable future, this device really will
Speaker 3: be aimed at people in the worst you know, suffering
Speaker 3: from very debilitating conditions like prows, the strokes, als, things
Speaker 3: like that, and this brain implant has the promise of
Speaker 3: helping them communicate with their loved ones, to use a computer,
Speaker 3: possibly even to when they're paralyzed, to get sensation and
Speaker 3: movement back in their limbs. And so, you know, this
Speaker 3: was my big takeaway from the story is that, in
Speaker 3: typical Elon fashion, he's kind of presented this thing in
Speaker 3: its most fanciful terms, but the actual reality of it
Speaker 3: is very exciting and just just more pragmatic and aimed
Speaker 3: at a different group of people.
Speaker 2: You also have Musk quoted in here talking about how
Speaker 2: down the road, the reason why this thing all has
Speaker 2: to happen super fast is to stave off and defeat
Speaker 2: artificial intelligence. The quote is, we need to get there
Speaker 2: before the AI takes over. We want to get there
Speaker 2: with a maniacal sense of urgency maniacal. I mean, Sarah,
Speaker 2: help me here.
Speaker 4: I'd say maniacal is on target. He's definitely reporting. He's
Speaker 4: just pushing those employees so hard to move fast. And
Speaker 4: you have to be a little bit maniacal to talk
Speaker 4: about putting implants in somebody's brain. One thing that surprised
Speaker 4: me when I started reporting on neuralink was how many
Speaker 4: thousands of people are walking around this earth with implants
Speaker 4: in their brains already. But what he wants to do
Speaker 4: is just far more ambitious than some of these other
Speaker 4: companies which are really specialized. These chips might fix episodes
Speaker 4: of epilepsy, for example, or help somebody with Parkinson's, and
Speaker 4: his ambitions are just so much broader than that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So talk to me for a second about what
Speaker 2: the rest of the industry looks like. There are companies
Speaker 2: out there that are ahead of neuralink, Sarah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in some ways. In some ways, there are companies
Speaker 4: that you know, for years have put implants in people's brains.
Speaker 4: They some of them have been very ugly and required
Speaker 4: you to only use them in lab settings. You might
Speaker 4: have some sort of protrusion from the back of your
Speaker 4: head while using these what Elan Musk has done has
Speaker 4: kind of raised the standards, so that now baseline for
Speaker 4: anybody who's trying to make an implant is it has
Speaker 4: to be invisible. It has to be hidden under the
Speaker 4: skin of your scalp at the very least. That's table
Speaker 4: stakes now. And because he's interested, hundreds and hundreds of
Speaker 4: millions of dollars have flown into this space.
Speaker 2: Yeah, to that point on the difference between what he's
Speaker 2: doing and what others have done so far already. You know,
Speaker 2: Ashley in the piece, you call it the world's most
Speaker 2: powerful and elegant brain implant.
Speaker 3: Why well, you know, to Sarah's point, the existing devices,
Speaker 3: if you look at some of their immediate competitors, just
Speaker 3: in terms of raw computer horsepower, the typical devices have
Speaker 3: about sixteen electrodes on these these thin wires that get
Speaker 3: embedded somewhere in your body, and neuralinksaplant will have more
Speaker 3: than a thousand, you know, I mean, this is just
Speaker 3: a huge leap forward in terms of computing. And then
Speaker 3: also to Sarah's point, you know, the other devices have
Speaker 3: a separate, very large hardware unit that contains the battery
Speaker 3: computing systems to amplify signals coming from your brain. Neuralink
Speaker 3: has baked everything into a quarter sized device that fits
Speaker 3: completely flush with your skull and is rechargeable wirelessly, So
Speaker 3: you know, it's much closer to like what you would
Speaker 3: think of with a consumer electrotronics product, whereas everything else
Speaker 3: really looks like it's come from a research laboratory of.
Speaker 4: The existing products. But there are also several companies in development.
Speaker 4: There's you know, at least one other precision neuroscience that's
Speaker 4: also working on over one thousand electrodes. So you can
Speaker 4: see a future where there'll be many companies with variations
Speaker 4: on this theme, and maybe Neuralink will have more of
Speaker 4: something and another company will have more of something else.
Speaker 2: So the ideas we're going to stave off as muscas,
Speaker 2: that we're going to stave off sci fi, and we're
Speaker 2: gonna defeat AI with this, and we're going to defeat
Speaker 2: the bots. I guess my question is if I'm having
Speaker 2: an implant put in my brain in which I am,
Speaker 2: information is being downloaded in my brain and so there's
Speaker 2: this flow back and forth, isn't there not the risk
Speaker 2: that I become essentially controlled, I become a bot myself.
Speaker 3: This is the central flow with most of Elon's AI.
Speaker 3: You know, shoebag I me he this is a guy
Speaker 3: who says AI might ruin the human species and send
Speaker 3: us all into doom. And yet you know he's He's
Speaker 3: funded now too. AI research startups. Tesla has as many
Speaker 3: AI researchers as you could possibly have.
Speaker 4: Remember when pacemakers came out and people predicted that those
Speaker 4: with pacemakers would die in their thousands when people took
Speaker 4: over their pacemakers and turned them off, and that just
Speaker 4: never happened. I mean not to say it won't, right,
Speaker 4: but I sometimes think the worst case scenarios are over dramatized,
Speaker 4: and then the medium and poor case scenarios, or I
Speaker 4: think there's far more chance that things will go mildly wrong.
Speaker 2: All right now, Sarah, they have not put any of
Speaker 2: these in any humans human heads yet, plenty of animal heads,
Speaker 2: no human heads. But Sarah, there is no shortage of
Speaker 2: Volunteers's right.
Speaker 4: You can go on to acts and see them people
Speaker 4: tweeting at Elon musk Hey I volunteer. Several years ago,
Speaker 4: when Neuralink was at a much earlier phase, somebody who
Speaker 4: worked there said they regularly got messages from people sometimes
Speaker 4: people standing outside the door of the offices then saying
Speaker 4: that they volunteer. And also there are lots of really
Speaker 4: sick people whose doctors are recommending they try various trials
Speaker 4: that are along these lines. So I think they can,
Speaker 4: through legitimate medical channels, find people who are willing to
Speaker 4: try one of these. And no, they haven't been in
Speaker 4: human brains yet, and some of the other companies started
Speaker 4: by people who used to work at Neuralink have already had,
Speaker 4: Like Precision Neuroscience was just in a human brain, albeit
Speaker 4: very briefly in a hospital surgical setting. But in some
Speaker 4: ways they're behind some of these other next generation companies
Speaker 4: all right now.
Speaker 2: But actually, if I remember correctly, they have been. Neuralink
Speaker 2: has been and is in the brains of monkeys, pigs,
Speaker 2: and sheep. And there have been a lot of reports
Speaker 2: out there from our competitors about cruelty to animals and
Speaker 2: how they've been excessive in many cases. At neuralink, what
Speaker 2: did you find during your reporting.
Speaker 3: I mean, animal testing is unpleasant. You know, we've sort
Speaker 3: of made a choice as a species that we're going
Speaker 3: to do this kind of thing, and there's no getting
Speaker 3: around that. The actual care that the animals had that.
Speaker 3: I saw the monkeys, the sheep, the pigs, they have
Speaker 3: things to play with. It's mostly volunteer, you know, So
Speaker 3: just so people understand, I mean, I was in a
Speaker 3: room with monkeys sitting in front of laptop screens while
Speaker 3: they were playing games using their their thoughts.
Speaker 2: I think you wrote Ashley that it's even it looks
Speaker 2: even weirder than it sounds. It sounds pretty weird.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's pretty strange to go to room with
Speaker 3: a bunch of bunkies on laptops and you know, sometimes
Speaker 3: they're using their their hands and sometimes they're just using
Speaker 3: their thoughts to move these cursors around the screen. They
Speaker 3: just kind of go and sit in front of the
Speaker 3: screen and they have a smoothie that they can pick
Speaker 3: from an iPad what kind of smoothie they want. Well,
Speaker 3: they while they do their test. When they're finished, they
Speaker 3: don't want to do it anymore. They just they just
Speaker 3: kind of leave.
Speaker 2: During the reporting over these several years, you saw some
Speaker 2: of the monkeys throughout that time, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean this has been one of the contentions,
Speaker 3: is that the neuralink, you know, was rushing these procedures.
Speaker 3: The stories make it sound like they were sort of
Speaker 3: dying all the time. All I can tell you is
Speaker 3: that I saw the same group of seventeen monkeys over
Speaker 3: three years, and they were always the same, and they
Speaker 3: appeared healthy and were doing their tests.
Speaker 1: And that's what I saw.
Speaker 2: And just to be clear, Neuralink stresses that the most
Speaker 2: troubling reports come from its early years before it built
Speaker 2: its own testing facility in Fremont, and it says it's
Speaker 2: gone to great lengths to provide better living conditions there.
Speaker 4: I went to the old UC Davis Neuralink facility and
Speaker 4: they drove me around the outside pens only. I was
Speaker 4: not allowed to go inside where the actual experiments and
Speaker 4: research was taking place. And I think that's telling that
Speaker 4: they just didn't allow reporters in that area at all.
Speaker 4: And it sounds like what you saw was very different.
Speaker 4: I think there's a big difference between how are the
Speaker 4: animals cared for and how is the surgery done? And
Speaker 4: a lot of the reporting indicated many of the mistakes
Speaker 4: were during the surgeries, unfortunately, and that's a whole different
Speaker 4: team from the people who actually take care of the animals,
Speaker 4: which is totally true, Ashley.
Speaker 2: There are in the story. There are scenes of what
Speaker 2: I call musk speed, where he just wants to go go, go.
Speaker 2: Back to the maniacal aspect of it. How does musk
Speaker 2: speed and that we got to go a million miles
Speaker 2: an hour square and jive with treeding the animals?
Speaker 3: Okay, well, you know, mostly at the point they're at now.
Speaker 3: I mean, he just wants to barrel forward with this
Speaker 3: clinical trial on the humans, and so musk speed is
Speaker 3: kind of a I don't just want to implant one person.
Speaker 3: I want to ride out of the gate implant as
Speaker 3: many as possible. And so I was in some meetings
Speaker 3: where you know, these poor lieutenants had the job of
Speaker 3: telling Elon that was not going to be possible, and
Speaker 3: I think, you know, as a quote in there age
Speaker 3: just as unacceptable, you know, when he's told that they'll
Speaker 3: only be able to implant one one human out of
Speaker 3: the get go. My overall impression is that, you know,
Speaker 3: these stories are hard to read. All I can tell
Speaker 3: you is that my overall impression is that people were
Speaker 3: looking out for the welfare of the animals, and they're
Speaker 3: all trying to sort of get to this place where
Speaker 3: they can help humans who are in pretty dire circumstances,
Speaker 3: and you know, Elon does add a lot of pressure,
Speaker 3: and so you know there's the chance for kind of
Speaker 3: irrational decisions to happen in that. But I did come away,
Speaker 3: you know, impressed overall.
Speaker 2: So at the same time, right, so moving away from
Speaker 2: the animals to the humans, right, you have musk speed
Speaker 2: on the one hand, and then on the other hand,
Speaker 2: you have all the risks that come with this as
Speaker 2: they start going, especially in the human brains. You have
Speaker 2: the director of Special Projects there at Neuralink, Shavonzilla, saying
Speaker 2: in your piece, we can't blow up the first three
Speaker 2: being brains. I e. This is not SpaceX putting rockets
Speaker 2: up into space. That's not an option here. You also
Speaker 2: go on to say, and this is in your own words,
Speaker 2: you say, you know, God, if you know chemicals started
Speaker 2: leaking into the brain, which is a frightening thought. I mean,
Speaker 2: how great is the risk here in terms of legal
Speaker 2: risks and so on.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean this is about as risky as it gets,
Speaker 3: you know, I mean, if something goes wrong. This is
Speaker 3: Historically Elon's companies have had false starts. SpaceX did blow
Speaker 3: up its first three rockets. It took Tesla almost a
Speaker 3: decade to be able to mass.
Speaker 1: Produce a car.
Speaker 3: You know, there's really not that same sort of room
Speaker 3: for error because this first person presumably will be able
Speaker 3: to communicate on some level, you know, with the outside
Speaker 3: where they're going to be paralyzed, but they likely can
Speaker 3: just talk and tell us their experience with this implant.
Speaker 3: They had to submit fifteen thousand pages of tests data
Speaker 3: and other data to the FDA, which is, you know,
Speaker 3: just even more than a rocket to get this. To
Speaker 3: get this approved, I saw some strange machines that they
Speaker 3: had built to put the implant through, you know, to
Speaker 3: simulate five ten years of use in this kind of
Speaker 3: synthetic brain fluid that been that.
Speaker 1: They had created.
Speaker 3: And so but you know, yeah, this I think it's
Speaker 3: kind of like a make or break moment in some ways.
Speaker 1: That was the point I was trying to get at.
Speaker 2: So Ashley, we quoted Shavon Zillis talking about the risk
Speaker 2: of blowing up brains here. Now, there is some funkiness
Speaker 2: here that's made some in the corporate governance world and
Speaker 2: in the investing world a little uneasy because she and
Speaker 2: Elon have twins together. What's that situation like they're inside
Speaker 2: inside the company, and how loud at this point are
Speaker 2: the critics speaking.
Speaker 3: You know, Historically, Chavon has been this special projects kind
Speaker 3: of person for Elon, jumping from from company to company
Speaker 3: to work on different things, although she did focus on
Speaker 3: Neuralink quite a bit for years. And Neuralink is essentially
Speaker 3: run by I mean, Elon's the CEO, but he only
Speaker 3: comes in and out every few weeks and it's basically
Speaker 3: run by three people. It used to be four, including Chavon.
Speaker 3: She's stepped away from the company a lot since she's
Speaker 3: had the twins.
Speaker 1: The company's shifted its base of.
Speaker 3: Operations from Fremont, California to Austin, Texas, where Elon and
Speaker 3: Chevon live, and so you know, that's kind of the
Speaker 3: heart in the future of the company. I think there's
Speaker 3: been a ton in the tabloids about Chavon and Elon's relationship.
Speaker 1: It's clearly unusual, I think for investors.
Speaker 3: I mean, Neuralinks had no problem raising money and it's
Speaker 3: a it's a private company, and you know, like I say,
Speaker 3: Chavon's kind of pulled away from a lot of the
Speaker 3: day to day stuff that she used to do.
Speaker 4: There.
Speaker 2: Sarah beck to you, you said, hundreds of millions of
Speaker 2: dollars have been invested in this company, largely by Musk.
Speaker 2: Any sense of its value now and where it stands
Speaker 2: in the constellation of elon companies in terms of its
Speaker 2: valuation and its place in that constellation.
Speaker 4: Lusk gave I think the first hundred million dollars for
Speaker 4: the company, and since then he has raised money from
Speaker 4: other legitimate venture capital firms. So it's very hard to
Speaker 4: tell what the actual valuation of the company would be.
Speaker 4: I think medical device makers have this issue in general,
Speaker 4: where their stock prices, if they're publicly traded, go up
Speaker 4: and down, and nobody really knows until the device or
Speaker 4: the jug of whatever it is they're trying to make
Speaker 4: its final approval, and then you see a dramatic rise
Speaker 4: in the valuation of the company. So it's sort of
Speaker 4: foolish to try to guess what the valuation of Neuralink
Speaker 4: would be at this point. Maybe there'll be a better
Speaker 4: idea after it does finally go into some human brains.
Speaker 4: And there is also a point I'd like to make
Speaker 4: about this school of thought in brain implants neuralinks, trying
Speaker 4: to get those electrodes as close as possible to neurons.
Speaker 4: But there are also a lot of very smart people
Speaker 4: who believe that's the wrong philosophy. That it's like, if
Speaker 4: you're looking at a painting and you go right up
Speaker 4: and look at the job of paint, you're going to
Speaker 4: have no idea what the painting's about. You need to
Speaker 4: step back a little bit. So there are a lot
Speaker 4: of people who think that the best place for the
Speaker 4: electrodes is on the surface of the brain rather than
Speaker 4: deep into the brain. And those companies have raised plenty
Speaker 4: of money as well, and some of them are founded
Speaker 4: by former neuralink people. So there are a lot of
Speaker 4: smart people who think very different techniques will work for
Speaker 4: the same ends.
Speaker 2: Yeah, to that end. Actually, there are also right in
Speaker 2: the industry, there is a sense a little bit related
Speaker 2: to musk speed. It doesn't publish scientific papers and journals
Speaker 2: that could be tested and verified by the scientific community
Speaker 2: the way others would. How much of that did you
Speaker 2: encounter and those sort of doubts creeping in.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, their only real form of communication with
Speaker 3: the outside world over these last few years has been
Speaker 3: these public demonstrations that they've done about three or four times,
Speaker 3: and you know, each time they've kind of been knocked
Speaker 3: for basically replicating science that had happened many years earlier
Speaker 3: in a laboratory and just kind of showing that they
Speaker 3: could do it as well. And so and then Elon
Speaker 3: gets on stage and it says, you know, we're going
Speaker 3: from this thing that's already been accomplished by somebody else
Speaker 3: to you know, but we're going to surpass the ball
Speaker 3: and by leaps and bounds.
Speaker 1: So you know, the proof is in the putting.
Speaker 3: I mean, the thing that I was most impressed by
Speaker 3: is the surgical robot, which is this like work of
Speaker 3: engineering arts, and nobody else really has.
Speaker 1: Something comparable to that. And the device itself really is
Speaker 1: like amazing.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's a it's got a battery in there,
Speaker 3: Neuralink makes their own semiconductors, it's got all these amplifiers
Speaker 3: to send this.
Speaker 1: Like the amount of equipment it's.
Speaker 3: Replacing would be like a refrigerator sized stack of computing
Speaker 3: hardware in this tiny thing. And so you know, to that,
Speaker 3: to that end, like they have accomplished something. The huge
Speaker 3: question is like what is this human actually going to
Speaker 3: be able to do? And is it more than what
Speaker 3: has come before?
Speaker 2: All right. So this brings me to my last question,
Speaker 2: which is on a scale of zero to ten, zero
Speaker 2: being no way, ten being hell yeah. Would you be
Speaker 2: up for having one of these things be put in
Speaker 2: your brain?
Speaker 1: Ashley Bands right now, no way.
Speaker 3: If you're a sero, I'll take my rocket, my rocket
Speaker 3: to the moon, first rocket.
Speaker 4: Sarah McBride, Absolutely not, unless I was paralyzed. Then we'd
Speaker 4: go from like zero right now to like seven. I
Speaker 4: would totally consider it.
Speaker 1: That's actually it's a fantastic boy.
Speaker 3: I know Sarah begel this before because I've talked to
Speaker 3: a couple of people who had spinal implants for the story,
Speaker 3: and I mean they're like begging to get this done,
Speaker 3: you know. So it does depend on your life circumstances
Speaker 3: quite drastically.
Speaker 4: Elon said at one point that if one of his
Speaker 4: own children needed this device, he wouldn't hesitate for one
Speaker 4: of his kids to have it if they needed it.
Speaker 2: All right, So, personally, I'm not having this thing put
Speaker 2: in my brain until I see the whites of the
Speaker 2: eyes of the AI bots coming at me. All right,
Speaker 2: that's it. Let's call it quits. Thanks for listening to
Speaker 2: Elon Inc. And thanks to our special guests and.
Speaker 4: Sarah, thanks so much, Thank you very much.
Speaker 2: You can read Ashley's article in this week's issue of
Speaker 2: BusinessWeek and at bloomberg dot com slash BusinessWeek. Our supervising
Speaker 2: producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and this episode was produced by
Speaker 2: Stacy Wan. Naomi Shaven and Rayhan Harmanci are our senior editors.
Speaker 2: The idea for this very show also came from Rayhan.
Speaker 2: Blake Maples handles engineering, and we get special editing assistants
Speaker 2: from Jeff Grocow thanks a bunch of BusinessWeek editor Joel
Speaker 2: Weber as well. The elin ing theme is written and
Speaker 2: performed by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiira. Sage Bauman is
Speaker 2: the head of Bloomberg Podcasts and our executive producer. If
Speaker 2: you have a minute, rate and review the show, it'll
Speaker 2: help other listeners find us. I am David Papadopoulos. See
Speaker 2: you next week.
Speaker 4: Stept still extant.