Speaker 1: Over the last few years, Elon Musk has been a
Speaker 1: very busy guy, getting electric cars in the masses, making
Speaker 1: reusable rockets, digging these super high speed transportation tunnels, and
Speaker 1: you know, getting in trouble with government regulators. But he's
Speaker 1: also been funding a very secretive startup called Neuralink, and
Speaker 1: in July he promised to finally unveil what this project
Speaker 1: was up to. So he got on stage in San Francisco. Hello,
Speaker 1: everybody there, must announce that Neuralinks team has been inserting
Speaker 1: these tiny electrodes into the brains of rats to record
Speaker 1: their brain activity. He said, the near term applications are medical. Everyone.
Speaker 1: If they if you survive cancer and hot disease, odds
Speaker 1: are that you will have some brain related disorder, so
Speaker 1: I'll be like Alzheimer's or demand trip. Uh, we can
Speaker 1: solve that with a trip. Musk wasn't shy about what
Speaker 1: he hopes this technology will one day achieve. Yeah, those
Speaker 1: cana sound pretty weird, but um, we can effectively achieve
Speaker 1: a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence. So this is
Speaker 1: not a mandatory thing. This is the thing that you
Speaker 1: can choose to have if you want, and we can
Speaker 1: effectively have the option of merging with AI. This is
Speaker 1: extremely important. Ultimately we can do a full brain machine
Speaker 1: interface brain machine interface. This is what people are calling
Speaker 1: this technology away for us to control a computer with
Speaker 1: our thoughts, a form of telepathy that's actually real and
Speaker 1: it sounds crazy, like something straight out of science fiction,
Speaker 1: but it's actually already had real success in medicine in
Speaker 1: real life, even before Elon Musk came around. Today, in
Speaker 1: the show Bloomberg, reporter Sarah McBride takes us through this
Speaker 1: emerging and kind of terrifying field, introducing us to the
Speaker 1: doctors already putting implants into human brains, and a patient
Speaker 1: hoping to cure her seizures with this technology. Well, we
Speaker 1: one day walk around as the cyborgs and Elon Musk's dreams.
Speaker 1: I'm a ito. You're listening to Decrypted stay with us, Hey, Sarah,
Speaker 1: how's it going. I'm good. How are you? I think
Speaker 1: our listeners will recognize you from our episode last season
Speaker 1: about the brains of birds. You've become a resident near
Speaker 1: science expert. Yikes. That was a fun episode. It was
Speaker 1: it was so you. You started digging into this pretty
Speaker 1: much as soon as Elon Musk unveiled the details of Neuralink.
Speaker 1: Do you want to kick us off with a broad
Speaker 1: overview of this field of brain machine interfaces. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: really had no idea how wides that it was. But
Speaker 1: there are lots of companies working on this, lots of academics,
Speaker 1: and I started learning very quickly that perhaps the biggest
Speaker 1: debate in the industry is invasive or non invasive. So
Speaker 1: do you want to put electrodes deep into the brain,
Speaker 1: which involves signing through your skull, or just on the
Speaker 1: outside once I'm more dangerous than the other. Yes. For example,
Speaker 1: Facebook has a big program working on brain machine interfaces,
Speaker 1: and they've picked kind of the safer route just understandably, yes,
Speaker 1: just on the outside of your skull, but not Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: They made a big presentation in July and Elon Musk
Speaker 1: was talking about what they've been able to do, and
Speaker 1: he was talking about how they've implanted electrodes in rodent
Speaker 1: brains and they can read signals from those rodent brains now.
Speaker 1: And then it turns out that neuralink has also been
Speaker 1: working with monkeys, which we weren't supposed to know. That
Speaker 1: Ellen must kind of slipped up a little bit at
Speaker 1: his presentation and as he right, yeah, I mean, but
Speaker 1: we have made you know, monkey has been able to
Speaker 1: control the computer with his brain. Just yeah, why I
Speaker 1: didn't realize running that result today, But there goes the
Speaker 1: lony is going to come out of the bag. So
Speaker 1: I think he just got very excited and wanted people
Speaker 1: to know that. So he even surprised his own CEO
Speaker 1: of Neuralalink, a guy called Max Kodak, by mentioning that
Speaker 1: on stage at his big presentation. So tell me about
Speaker 1: these monkeys. So I hopped on a train to Davis,
Speaker 1: which runs a giant national primate Center. Melissa lets blew In,
Speaker 1: who runs media relations for the university, came and met me,
Speaker 1: drove me out to the primate center, introduced me to
Speaker 1: Jennifer Short, who had colony management for the primate center,
Speaker 1: and the two of them showed me around. We drove
Speaker 1: all over in a golf card. I saw thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands of monkeys. It was really fun. Seem more furious
Speaker 1: than the other one. Sure, So we have corrals for
Speaker 1: the monkeys. They're about half an acre and there are
Speaker 1: twenty four of them that are out here and in
Speaker 1: them we have anywhere from about eight monkeys, and they
Speaker 1: these are breeding groups of monkeys, so they are mating
Speaker 1: and then having babies. So would that be similar to
Speaker 1: families of monkeys. Yes, these are families of monkeys. And
Speaker 1: see the monkey bars, the monkey bars, they're blade um,
Speaker 1: that's so cute. So this is a little baby coming
Speaker 1: to look. Get us through the fence. Now see he
Speaker 1: walked right up and he's like he's standing. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So he's drink. He's drinking. He's drinking out of a
Speaker 1: water fountain up an So these are the monkeys that
Speaker 1: Elon Musk is experimenting on. Well not exactly. It turns
Speaker 1: out that the ones that get experimented on by neuralink
Speaker 1: get kind of secreted away into these buildings where nobody
Speaker 1: just driving around and a golf cart can see them.
Speaker 1: So I think it's more accurate to say this is
Speaker 1: the pool of monkeys from which one day a neuralink
Speaker 1: experiment monkey might be selected. The reason I heard about
Speaker 1: the center in the first place is because you work
Speaker 1: with neuralink, So what can you tell me about what
Speaker 1: you're doing with neural link here? Well as with many
Speaker 1: of our ongoing projects, um the research is proprietary and
Speaker 1: ongoing research. We really can't talk about because they're in
Speaker 1: the process of doing the research and it still needs
Speaker 1: to be looked at and to be you know, really
Speaker 1: vigorously reviewed before anybody says anything about the research. So
Speaker 1: this was Melissa again from you See Davis, and I
Speaker 1: tried so hard to get them to say anything about
Speaker 1: what Neuralalink was doing, and the closest I got was
Speaker 1: when I asked, so, are they working on really cool projects?
Speaker 1: And they said yes and left it there. So what
Speaker 1: did you do next? Well, I knew there were some
Speaker 1: people who have left neural Link, and I thought maybe
Speaker 1: I could find out a little bit more about what's
Speaker 1: going on. So I noticed that this guy, Vikash Gilja
Speaker 1: had worked at Neuralink and is now a professor at
Speaker 1: you See San Diego. So I actually went down to
Speaker 1: San Diego. Did you ever meet Elon? Yeah, they met
Speaker 1: him quite a few times, and we'll was that like,
Speaker 1: is he just very interested and everybody sward, Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: He signed all kinds of NDA's. He can't talk too
Speaker 1: precisely about what's going on at neural length, but he
Speaker 1: can talk about the state of play in brain machine
Speaker 1: interfaces and what he's doing and what the big breakthroughs
Speaker 1: in the field have been. So what do you tell you?
Speaker 1: So vication I talked a lot about the difference between
Speaker 1: invasive and non invasive technologies, and he came up with
Speaker 1: this great metaphor. He compared it to a cocktail party,
Speaker 1: and he said, non invasive is when you walk into
Speaker 1: a cocktail party and you just kind of put one
Speaker 1: microphone in the door of the room, so you hear
Speaker 1: everything that's going on. You know, everyone's having a great time.
Speaker 1: You hear the glasses clinking and the food being passed around,
Speaker 1: but you really only have those broad strokes, um say,
Speaker 1: if you have a room full of people. It's the
Speaker 1: different between having a few microphones on the ceiling versus
Speaker 1: having um my lapel microphones on on everyone's collars so
Speaker 1: that you can hear each person speaking. The precise level
Speaker 1: of detail you can get with all those different mics
Speaker 1: and different spots of the party is exactly the same
Speaker 1: as different electrodes deep inside different parts of the brain.
Speaker 1: So what neural link is doing is the individual mics
Speaker 1: on every single person's collar. Yes, exactly. And then thanks
Speaker 1: to vikash I met one of the doctors he works with,
Speaker 1: a brain surgeon called Sharona ben Him. She is a
Speaker 1: very impressive woman. She does tons of brain surgeries. She calculated,
Speaker 1: kind of off the cuff, about sixty a year, which
Speaker 1: is more than one a week putting these implants into
Speaker 1: human putting electrodes into people's brains. Yeah, so she got
Speaker 1: really interested in this specialty. In medical school, she has
Speaker 1: this aha moment where she knew she wanted to become
Speaker 1: this type of surgeon. She and her professor were operating
Speaker 1: on a patient with Parkinson's inserting an electrode into his brain,
Speaker 1: and that's when she knew. The patient was awake and
Speaker 1: the tremor was very really profound. Um, and we implanted
Speaker 1: the electrode and this the second we turned it on,
Speaker 1: like magic, the tremor just went away and the patient,
Speaker 1: you know, went from not being able to hold a
Speaker 1: cup to just like very coordinated, streamline fashion moving herd
Speaker 1: And uh, that's what I was sold that. So when
Speaker 1: I thought that that was one of the coolest things
Speaker 1: I've ever seen. That's incredible, that this is what the
Speaker 1: technology can do. Yeah, it really is. But I had
Speaker 1: to keep reminding myself that because she's so matter of
Speaker 1: fact and down to earth, and I had to keep
Speaker 1: telling myself, she's inserting electrodes into patients brains and it's
Speaker 1: actually a real art and we need to get the
Speaker 1: electrode really like perfectly in the right spot, you know,
Speaker 1: in the nucleus and exact right orientation. So it's actually
Speaker 1: quite a surgical challenge. That means she can't be off
Speaker 1: by more than two millimeters. I know, it is crazy.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. So Dr ben Him was kind
Speaker 1: enough to connect me to a couple of her patients,
Speaker 1: and one of them was this young woman, Lydia. My
Speaker 1: name is Lydia Budney. I have elefsy and it started
Speaker 1: when I was a freshman in high school. So at
Speaker 1: this point it's been about twenty years. She says, she's
Speaker 1: tried so hard to find rhyme or reason to them.
Speaker 1: Does it depend on how much she slapped or what
Speaker 1: she's eaten? And she just can't find a pattern, So
Speaker 1: she just never knows when a seizure might strike. Usually
Speaker 1: when I have them, I'll be going about my normal
Speaker 1: untain doing everything, and then for me, it's I usually
Speaker 1: wake up on the floor, I fall I hit things,
Speaker 1: and it's like all they can do is try and
Speaker 1: keep me in a safe position where I'm not kicking
Speaker 1: a lot of things or hitting a lot of things.
Speaker 1: But it's like they can't do anything to actually keep
Speaker 1: you from having them. She met me just days before
Speaker 1: her thirty four birthday, and she'd already had one surgery
Speaker 1: using electrodes to identify where in the brain her epileptic
Speaker 1: seizures were coming from. And the bad news she got
Speaker 1: after that surgery, which was earlier this year, was everywhere
Speaker 1: there were all different kinds of parts of her brain
Speaker 1: making seizures. Apparently, I am a tricky case because technically
Speaker 1: I have generalized epilepsy because my seizures do not all
Speaker 1: start from the same spot, like the irregular activity happens
Speaker 1: kind of all over. So the irregular activity comes all over,
Speaker 1: but the worst seizures come from just one part of
Speaker 1: her brain. So for her, the best strategy was to
Speaker 1: get permanent electrodes targeting just that one part, and once
Speaker 1: they get inserted into her brain, those electrodes can tell
Speaker 1: when she's about to have a seizure and hopefully zappa
Speaker 1: pulse right into that part of her brain to stop
Speaker 1: the seizure. Wow, that's amazing. What was she scared? I
Speaker 1: didn't even think about it. It was like hands down, like,
Speaker 1: I mean, do what you need to. Um. You know, because,
Speaker 1: like I said, the seizures have become more freak it,
Speaker 1: UM don't seem to be really controllable completely with my medicine. UM.
Speaker 1: It just got to the point where I was like,
Speaker 1: the seizures scared me more than anything that could be
Speaker 1: done in the hospital. She seemed really brave to me,
Speaker 1: but she had this great attitude. I'm going to turn
Speaker 1: thirty four and I already have a computer in my head.
Speaker 1: I'm going to be part robot, you know. It's kind
Speaker 1: of my joke, you know, thirty four root Like, it's
Speaker 1: an awesome time. So, Sarah, I think you said that
Speaker 1: you talked to Lydia just before her second surgery. How's
Speaker 1: she doing now? Well, I've been texting with her and
Speaker 1: it sounds like she's doing great. That second surgery lasted
Speaker 1: just six hours, which would be long for any other
Speaker 1: type of surgery, but for brain surgery, that's a lot
Speaker 1: less than I expected to It went well, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: went really well, and she's already back home. In fact,
Speaker 1: she just went back to work, so she's already a
Speaker 1: bionic woman, as she dreamed. But yeah, so do we
Speaker 1: know if her seizures have already stopped. Well, it's a
Speaker 1: longer process. So they've got all the gear in her
Speaker 1: brain now that can stop the seizures. They just have
Speaker 1: to monitor her for a couple of months and then
Speaker 1: they know exactly how to turn off those seizures. So
Speaker 1: she's in the part of the process which will last
Speaker 1: about two months, where they monitor her brain and then
Speaker 1: they can turn on the part of the technology that
Speaker 1: hopefully will stop the seizures just in time for the holidays.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. If the world of medicine has already come
Speaker 1: this far without Elon Musk, what is Nurling hoping to do.
Speaker 1: They're just hoping to take it much farther, so beyond
Speaker 1: the realm of medicine and into the realm of what
Speaker 1: could be considered by some people cosmetic brain enhancement, So
Speaker 1: things that aren't medically necessary but could enhance your quality
Speaker 1: of life, like having an excellent memory, or being able
Speaker 1: to calculate things very quickly, or being able to download
Speaker 1: a language overnight. Things like that. Did the people you
Speaker 1: talk to have a sense of how soon that was
Speaker 1: going to be ready. Probably fifteen or twenty years. That's
Speaker 1: not that long of a time. Wow, But maybe not
Speaker 1: glitch free, like maybe elements of it, Like take that
Speaker 1: learn a language example. Maybe the first thing would be
Speaker 1: you'd be able to download vocabulary or you'd be able
Speaker 1: to overnight learn some portion of that language. It might
Speaker 1: not be click in fifteen years you can learn French overnight.
Speaker 1: It might be in little stages. You know, the researchers
Speaker 1: you talked to are doing this for a very specific
Speaker 1: purpose of treating people with debilitating illnesses. Do they have
Speaker 1: any concerns about bringing this out to the broader public? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean the caution. I had a long conversation about
Speaker 1: ethics and could this worsen inequality? You could see a
Speaker 1: day where rich people can pay for all kinds of
Speaker 1: enhancements that will make it possible to learn things more
Speaker 1: easily and more thoroughly, and poor people won't. So what
Speaker 1: does Sharonna think about all this? Well, she was really
Speaker 1: focused on what is and isn't possible and how many
Speaker 1: misconceptions there are about the brain. Do you think people's
Speaker 1: expectations are getting out of whack with reality. I mean,
Speaker 1: you told me it'll be a long time before we
Speaker 1: have anything. Ellen nice makes things happen, So it's interesting. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know what people's expectations are. I
Speaker 1: think there's there's expectations and there's fears. Um. But um,
Speaker 1: there's so many interesting unfounded you know, concepts about the
Speaker 1: brain to begin with that, who knows? And she said
Speaker 1: she told me she'd been watching some TV program where
Speaker 1: they talked about how only ten of the brain was used,
Speaker 1: and I told her that before. Is that true? No,
Speaker 1: that's I mean, I don't know what that's based on.
Speaker 1: Ill we use all of our brain? Because I've heard
Speaker 1: we only use a small part of it. I didn't
Speaker 1: know we use all of our brain? Um. But do
Speaker 1: we have rum in our brain to download language? Probably? Really? Yeah?
Speaker 1: If um you could have some kind of cosmetic brain
Speaker 1: something done to augment your brain? What when you pick
Speaker 1: a I don't know, I don't really I don't think
Speaker 1: i'd be really excited about something like that. Really yea
Speaker 1: even memory? Um No, I can't say that I would
Speaker 1: really uh sire any augmentation? Um, guys that Um, I'm
Speaker 1: really happy with the way my brain works. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean there's enough noise in all our heads already and
Speaker 1: she didn't want to add to it. Well, she's a
Speaker 1: brilliant neurosurgence. She probably doesn't need it. Would you ever
Speaker 1: want that? I would absolutely? Yeah, if it were safe. Um,
Speaker 1: I would do it a a heartbeat if my wife
Speaker 1: lets me. How about you. I'm super cautious, so when
Speaker 1: I got lazick, I only got it in when eye,
Speaker 1: just in case. So probably no, I don't think I'm
Speaker 1: a good candidate, you know, Sarah. For all of Elon
Speaker 1: Musk's faults, everything he does is just so wildly ambitious.
Speaker 1: And I think the newest thing that he's trying to
Speaker 1: do our brains talking to computers, that's got to be
Speaker 1: the most outlandish one. It has to be the one
Speaker 1: that has the most potential to change the way that
Speaker 1: we live. It kind of changes what it means to
Speaker 1: be human itself. You could say that he talks about
Speaker 1: the philosophy. He says that in the future, when AI
Speaker 1: will be so predominant, we don't have to have this
Speaker 1: kind of enhancement, but things will go much about or
Speaker 1: for us if we do just to live in a
Speaker 1: world with so much AI when the robots takeover. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's talked in the past about how we need to
Speaker 1: fuse our brains with machines to survive in a world
Speaker 1: like that. He said that potentially we could just be
Speaker 1: housecats to our robot overlords, and the house cat would
Speaker 1: be a good outcome, but the brain implants will help
Speaker 1: us complete help us avoid that house cat fate. Yes, so,
Speaker 1: I don't know. He's not always the most philosophical. He
Speaker 1: asked at that presentation in July, well, what if our
Speaker 1: minds are just brains into vat and then he said, yes,
Speaker 1: that's what they are, brains in that romantic right. And
Speaker 1: what is it to be human? I mean, what is
Speaker 1: it to be anything? Our understanding of everything changes with
Speaker 1: every decade that goes by as we learn more and
Speaker 1: more science. So I'm not sure that we know what
Speaker 1: it is to be human now, and I'm not sure
Speaker 1: that these brain machine interfaces will help us in that regard,
Speaker 1: but they'll still change it whatever it is. Sarah, thanks
Speaker 1: for coming on the show today, Oh thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Decrypted is hosted by me Akito. Sean Ween is our
Speaker 1: executive producer. So for Foreheads and Ethan Brooks mix the
Speaker 1: show today and Francesca Levy is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts.
Speaker 1: We'll see next week. Put a Council, trans of secuted
Speaker 1: and subtrasted as conclusial councils, Bustin Council, sal coupsal MCLs, BRONC,
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