From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of I Heart Brading. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is matt Our. Comrade Noel is on an adventure, but we'll return shortly. They called me Ben and we're joined as always with our superproducer Ball. Mission control decands, most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. What better way to begin then a quote from a modern day Shakespeare, Oh my god, brain implants. They say, there's a slim chance I won't stay the same because they traded brains with the Chimpans. If you if you look it up on genius dot com, they go to spot for hip hop lyrics, you'll see that's Chimpans with an apostrophe. It's short for chimpan Z, so that slim Shady could put it into the correct cadence. Um, I love you love it. It's you know. I think that might be the only time we mentioned eminem on today's episode, But we're gonna see where it goes. We can't make any promises because Matt, Matt, you and Paul and I and our fellow conspiracy realists listening, even Doc, we are on the precipice of something that some people are telling us is going to be amazing, maybe even the next step in human evolution, and that other people are telling us will be terrible and dystopian. And I know you very well, and you know I hold you in such high esteem. I feel like I kind of have a sense of which camp you fall into on this one. Oh yeah, you think you think? I think I have a little, just a little spidy sense about this. Um. What do you think of when you think of brain implants? Mattuh, gosh, I think of our old house stuff works days when we did some research into the early brain implant stuff. I believe it involved a bull and showing that you could use electricity to stop a bull. And I think maybe that's excellent. Yes, yeah, that is uh that comes into conspiracy theories all their own, and we're gonna find them on the way to today's rabbit hole. But yes, that's excellent. That's something I wish more people knew about. I think we both do wish more people knew about that. We are talking about the idea that we have explored a little bit in the past in a much more theoretical way, which is, uh, the idea that you are closer and closer to a future wherein uh, your grandchildren or the generations that come after you will not believe you when you say you're all Back in my day, you had to use your hands on these things that call keyboards, and working with a computer was like playing a weird piano. It will be the new uphill both ways in the snow, right because there won't be any more snow also but but but yeah, this is this is a real thing. You've probably seen the news, folks. Uh, it's it's been in the news for a while, but it's getting a bit of a renaissance and reporting, uh due to some clever pr campaigns. Elon Musk you know him, you know, I'm uh kind of a modern day Tony Stark in some ways. Uh, he has garnered a lot of attention with something called neural Link. Neural Link is, according to its proponents, amazing. According to its critics and pundits, some ethicis, some academics, a bevy of people. It is not quite what we're being told it's supposed to be. How do we talk about that? First we got to talk about brain implants. Here are the facts. I love that you point out how old this idea is, and it's okay, dude. I was trying to figure out the very first example of the idea of a brain implant, you know, because this is the kind of stuff that happens in science fiction before it becomes science fact. And I guess really the starting thing is the definition, Like what what is what is a brain implant? Is it a prosthetic? Is it like a h surgery or is it like is it more like a TMS device where you just yeah, no, no, Well if if we're calling it a brain implant, then and it is not a helmet. It's not a device that you wear. It's a device that goes into you, into your skull, and then attaches to part of your brain. It's a direct communication pathway between the electrical electrical things that occur in your mind, right, the activity that happens in there when you're thinking, and some external device or internal device. Right. But in order to make that connection, you've got to have something in your mind that's translating those electrical signals of your brain to hit that other external device. Uh. And it's it's weird to think about. If you go on the web page of the thing we're talking about today, uh, it says specifically that it wants to be able to connect your brain to iOS, the operating system for an iPhone, And that is weird to me to think about, rather than it just being a connection to you know, anything, or using some kind of external proprietary device. No, it wants you to connected to your iPhone directly. I know, I feel like I should change the lighting on my on my web game. There we go naturistic. So yeah, this is spot on exactly what's happening. And it's a little worrisome because you are right now, if you're the way you're listening to this show, you have an effective air gap. You can take the headphones out. We'd love it if you don't, but you can right and you can push pause or you can fast forward, you can rewind, you can do a multitude of things. You can throw your iPhone into the c if you wanted to. You could throw your iPhone into the sea. Yes, yeah, you could. And this is something that is very easy for us to do. It's up until shortly after this point in history, that kind of that kind of emergency exit hatch was normal. People didn't really think of other alternatives. But so I was, I was looking through historical records, and I was thinking, I tried something a little trickier. Um not just when was the first thing made? But I was also thinking, when was an idea like this first conceived? And it took me all the way back to mythology, all the way back to folklore. Because while folks back then did not have the term brain implant, ancient societies did have multiple instances, multiple stories and legends of some sort of influence getting into the human mind right in um. In Abramaic religion, for instance, certain people are gifted with clairvoyance, with precognition, with visions through through God, right through divine intervention, and in other instances, like if you look at Grecian mythology or record Roman mythology, you see ideas of people getting influenced in terms of their behavior. Something goes into your mind and it kind of exists there and it compels you to or to do or to not do a thing. So people have been thinking about this way before computers, way before even the anti Cathera mechanism, which is a trip ye. But if it goes to concepts of possession of any sort and how that threat has continued on for centuries, if millennia, it really does, and so we know that this is something people thought about a lot, even before they have the language and the technology that human society uses today. But if we get into the science, the history of the science, it gets a little more murky. And part of the reason, not to sound too conspiratorial from the jump, but part of the reason, at least I think Matt is because some of these experiments were conducted in secrecy, I'm convinced. And then some were also uh not not so much applied science as just pure science, pure research. Like there's a guy who want to introduce Luigi Galvanni back in seventeen eighty. It's actually a winter a winter's day, which goes into the story back in sev he's dissecting a frog because he doesn't have netflix or whatever, and he uh, when he's dissecting this frog, he notices this ill fated anonymous little hopity guy is twitching even though he's dead and he's twitching because of static electricity is on the scalpel. And that little discovery pave the way for all sorts of amazing things, including this podcast episode. When he found out about this, you know, he ran with it and it's a it's a huge scientific contribution, and people kept returning to the idea. In the eighteen seventies, there were these scientists who figured out that you could through electrical stimulation of a dog's brain, a canine, you could induce physical movement in that canine's body. You could hold you could hold the uh uh, you can hold the Luciferian gift of electricity to something like part of the dog's brain. And then depending on which part you hit, which part you stimulated, then you might see Phido's paul go up, you might see the tail wag. But importantly, at this point you wouldn't be able to make them do anything that they were like physically incapable of doing. There's not a magic part of the dog's brain that given electricity, while all of a sudden results in the dog writing an operetta. You know, like that's that's an important thing, right, It is a shame, Yeah, I mean, how different would the world be if Luigi had found some part of a frog's brain that enabled it to communicate with people after death. What frogs think about in the afterlife? Yeah? Yeah, Well, you're bringing up a great point that connects deeply with the whole topic of this show. Using animals as test subjects to figure out how this whole thing works. Right Where where we used frogs, they were dead already, but they were test subjects, right, or science subjects at least being used by Galvani when he was dissecting them and then found out they could move. In this case, you're using dogs, like just some dogs, uh in your shooting electricity through their brain, and then it only goes on from there. There's a there's a history of human test subjects when it comes to this stuff where in the name of science, an individual doctor or scientist is attempting to figure this stuff out. There's one ben I think you probably read it too. There was a woman who had a problem with her brain which produced a hole in her skull. I think because of a whalebone hat she was wearing her some piece of clothing that had a whalebone attached to it cut a hole essentially in her skull and she had exposed section of her brain where a scientist applied electrodes to see what would happen, and it was not good. She she uh, he applied a lot of electricity, and she ended up going into a coma and then passing away several days after the experiment, and at least according to many places online, it said it was uncertain whether or not the experiment had anything to do with her passing. But but yeah, unfortunately, because there was still so much out there to learn about what an appropriate voltage would be. For example, you know, how how much electricity do you need to induce what you want to induce versus doing permanent damage. And this is not to say that any of these people were purposely acting in unethical way given the you know, the their societies at the time. They were just trying to figure stuff out. And that's why it like four years later e seventy four, guy named Robert H. Bartholow figures out that he figures out, Hey, look at that, the same principle that applied to these frogs and these dogs applies to humans as well. What a time and then if we if we fast barthlo is the guy barthlo is the guy he experiments woman named Mary Rafferty, right, and uh Rafferty made the ultimate sacrifice for science there um. And you'll you'll notice that in the case of Galvani, this is an accidental discovery, and in the case of Robert Bartholow, this is also like he didn't know exactly what would happen. Honestly, if if you fast forward, we're still in the ancient history of this stuff. If you fast forward, let's say you're in the nineties sixties, you're in a bullfight, because you know when are you going to be here again? You're in a bullfight, and you're thinking, Wow, these things are actually really dangerous. Are you gonna kill this bull? A bull might kill some other folks beforehand. I might even get him out of door or two. Uh. Then you see something crazy. He's a bull is really aggravated, because that's part of bullfights, right. They they're entirely made to anger. This this bull and this guy who looks maybe a little bookish, not your average matador, certainly not a rodeo clown or anything. He looks a little bookish. He walks out and he's staring down this bull. And you're thinking, well, your courage is inspiring, sir, but uh, maybe pick battles. And the bull does the regular you know, the grunt, snort, paw and the dirt and this guy doesn't move. But what he does is, right as the bull is barreling toward him, he takes out like a little a little remote control earlier generations called he's a switcher, and he hits his little button. What happens, the bull stops in its tracks and it loses the overall aggressiveness like all just like that, like the switch, like you said, a switcher, it just goes docile. And you can imagine if you were in the stands of that bullfight and you watch that occur, how magical that would seem. Yeah, bulls don't usually do that, you know, Uh, they have all of a sudden, This is this crowd at this bullfight see something they've never seen before, and the bull doesn't look intimidated. It just went from a hundred zero instant. And then if you are an astute member of the audience at that bullfight, you say, who is he? Who is this guy? And someone tells you that guy is actually a professor at Yale University. His name is Jose Delgado, and he has invented something to put in that bull's brain. He's not friends with this bull that like the bull didn't suddenly remember his old pal Jose. Instead, the bull was uh was subjected to a surgical procedure, and the bull was rocking something called a trans dermal simulator or steimo sever stemo sever. It was implanted in the brain as Delgado's invention, to transmit electrical impulses that could modify very basic behavior, so it could modify feelings of pleasure, modify in this case, feelings of aggression. And this implant that this bull had was an electrode array that was put in the neighborhood of its brain called the call date nucleus. And when this when he turned on this device, when he applied the simulation, it's shut down. It stopped the raging bull quite literally, even though that sounds like a metaphor. Well, and and he figured it out because science was real hip to this new surgical procedure or semi surgical procedure called a lobotomy, and he Delgado wanted to see if you could maybe not destroy part of the brain in order to achieve that passiveness that that exists with a lobotomy. What if you could use electrical stimulation to do that? And he figured it out. Yeah yeah, and it was the right thing to do ethically, because lobotomy is are horrific, right, they're very much They're barbaric, really, even with the best of intentions. So we know about the Goddo's thoughts in the matter because he went on to write a book called spooky title physical Control of the Mind, which has to be read in that accent. Yeah. Yeah, we have a quote from that in that book. Here it is the feasibility of remote control of activities and several species of animals has been demonstrated. The ultimate objective of this research is to provide an understanding of the mechanisms involved in the directional control of animals and to provide practical systems suitable for human application. That last part, the last part again, never does he mean animals being used for human application through the through direct mind control? Or does you mean direct mind control of humans? Right? Yeah, think about it. It feels weird to point in our heads during this episode, but okay, that so this stuff is real. Jose Delgado is the subject of a lot of conspiracy theories, and you'll run into arguments proposing or even alleging or claiming that he did a lot more research and it was much more nefarious, and they'll tie him to things like him Kay Ultra or to this CIA at the time. And you know there's a grain of truth in that, because the CIA was going absolutely hog wild. You know in this era that if you had gone to the CIA and you had reliable methods to create so called Manurian candidate to control someone's mind, then the CIA would be super down to cloud with you. They would be so on board. So it's understandable. But a lot of the allegations go far afield without evidence to support them. Still, it's already spooky stuff. It's just gonna get spookier, very much so. But before we get there, we're gonna hear a quick word from our sponsor, hopefully not Neuralink. Maybe if it's twenty thirty four, there will be an ad for neural Lincoln. Here. Uh, we'll see connect your brains to your iOS And here we go. We've returned for a bit of science. Look, our our basic point is that people have been trying to influence other people's brains and their behavior since forever, since the human definition of forever, and now technological breakthroughs may finally make this a new reality. Is where we introduce you to the neural link, a nice portmanteau brought to you by Elon Musk. It's the words neural and link together with one L, so it flows up. Is it neural link or neural link or neural ink? Which one is it. I haven't watched any videos on this, so I haven't heard anyone actually say it. I've just been a eating, so I honestly don't know. Yeah, yeah, it's a I've heard it pronounced neural link um. But also now that you say it, I realized I'm saying it quickly. He said, it's the neuralal um. Neural ink scares me. And well, but the idea like this is something in your brain. Is the page of the palam says here, So let's be clear, and a lot must will attest to this himself. He did not invent this idea. This is an older idea, but he definitely believes in it. He thinks it's the future, and that's why he helped co found this company. They are pretty recent they were launched in and we wanted to share with everybody some stuff from their website. From the proverbial uh matador's mouth. Here, we are creating the future of brain interfaces, building devices and now that will help people with paralysis and inventing new technologies that will expand our abilities, our community and our world, says everybody in the audience. Yeah uh, and they they have a pretty focused mission at this point. Their initial goal now is to quote help people with paralysis to regain independence through the control of computers and mobile devices. Our devices, they say, are designed to give people the ability to communicate more easily via text or speech synthesis, to follow their curiosity on the web, or to express their creativity through photography, art, or writing apps. And in a in an earlier press conference about this, which will we'll touch on in a bit, uh Musk made a lot of other claims. So he's saying, like, you know, this is the blue sky portion of this sort of progress. He's saying, like, you know, we could even be restored from physical movement because we could repair uh neurological injuries. We could maybe help people remove their fear of heights when they're rock climbing or something, or you could hear a symphony in your head. You wouldn't have to go to uh, you wouldn't have to type YouTube dot com into a keyboard with your hands like a caveman. But never again. And the source of all this, the technology that they're working on is something called the link link as in like the protagonist of Legend of Zelda. At this point, matt I proposed that we try to be utopian just for a second. It would be amazing, It will be astonishing. Can you imagine? There are people with paralysis problems around the world, and in many ways they don't have the opportunities. There is not as easy for them to do things that everybody likes to do. So this could free people in a very real way. I think agreed, agreed so much so. And if you've ever known anyone, or if you're listening now and you yourself has a have a medical condition that reduces or removes your mobility, you of course understand the and brain surgery has been used before, or electrical stimulation of the brain has been used with proven efficacy for some other medical conditions. But here's what you have to go through if you want to be on board with this. The link itself, you'll see it described as a chip about the size of a quarter. It's really more of a system. There are these ultra thin probes that are inserted into your brain, and they're inserted via what is often called a sewing machine looking robe. But that might make some people uncomfortable. This is invasive brain surgery. You might squig some people out. But again, what price would you put your own cocktnitive freedom at right? This is sacrifice is worth it for people. The actual thing called the link, that chip is small size of the quarter, maybe a silver dollar, and it compresses and wirelessly transmits signals recorded from those electrodes. It's sort of decoding them, you know, the same way that are in a way similar to the research done by scientists who learn to decipher images. When you're thinking about an image, there's been research that allows scientists to print out that image. It's amazing. What did everybody just think of? I'm so curious. Man, write to us and let you know, let us know what you thought of. When you realize your thoughts may not be as secret and safe as you had hoped. M Yeah, you don't want to hear mine. Nope. Okay, so nope, not yet, not until not until it must be released via my the hole they cut in my skull. Let's talk about how this device gets into you, because when when you go on the neuralink website neurolink dot com slash approach, that's where I would send you to right now if you want to follow along when you read it on a web page, like exactly the process of getting this thing into your body, and it makes me want to run away, like really really badly. Yeah, it's tied to an app. Should point that out part of the system, right. That's and weirdly enough, because I am so I am general m okay with human experimentation if it is consenting and it's ethical. Um, and I'm a fan of self experimentation as well. But oddly enough, the surgery doesn't bother me in itself. It's the connection to the cloud, and it's the fact that it's already tied to an app. I get it, I hear you. But we're talking about drilling a hole in everybody's skull that's going to use this trepen nation. Yeah, at the top two not like not like a thing in the at the back of you know, at the back of your neck, right the way it's always described the matrix FI. Yeah, it's it's at the top as the a little one of those one of those hats kids used to wear, like the fifties where they have the little de loop spin spinner on them. Yeah, they're just called spinners. It looks like you can stick a spinner in there. Um. Yeah, the ways described on the website. I'm just gonna jump to her really quickly. It shows you the link. It's got this cool futuristic looking thing that as you described it, Ben, It's got the neural threads that are flexible and very tiny. It's got a charger. Oh nice, you can charge it. Uh. And then you see where it says precision Automated neurosurgery, And it's the whole thing where they just insert it into your brain and they're gonna let an automated process do it. So a surgeon is gonna assist. Sure, sure, the same way that somebody assist in testing an autonomous driving vehicle. Right, they're sitting there in case something goes wrong. But in in neural links defense, these micro threads, you'll hear them called being called ultra Then and so on. They cannot be inserted by human hands. Humans don't have the dexterity to insert them, right, so they kind of have to They had to use this approach, Uh, the link that we're describing, folks in that. I love that you pointing this out. The really the best way to get a sense of this is to look at neuralink dot com slash approach. You'll see they break down the layers of the chip or the link they're calling it, because it contains these chips. Um, it's about as thick as the human skull, and l Musk says it can pop onto the surface of the brain through that drilled hole that you just describe, Matt, and then you can seal it with superglue what do they call it bioglue or bio bio basis or something. Yeah. Yeah, And and of course extensive research has been done to make sure that that won't have any the glue won't have any damaging effect X on the mind. But that's our that's what it does seem to have. Yeah. But okay, so yes, obviously we're not great at being utopian. That's all the show is about. So now we have to ask why are the critics so very worried. Here's where it gets crazy. Oh man, oh folks, friends and neighbors. Uh, robots and humans, whomever's tuning in, fellow conspiracy realist. All people are concerned, you know some Weirdly enough, one of the concerns they got me which I should have been expecting because this happens all the time scientists working in these fields. Obviously, Uh, neural link is not the only actor in this field. Scientists working in this area. We're kind of disappointed. They were like, Okay, sounds good. Can you do it? Uh? The mask The m i T Tech view out of Massachusetts Institute Technology didn't really hold back their punches at one of these presentations. I think it's the one with the pigs. Must describes the one of these devices as quote a fitbit for your skull, And a lot of neuroscientists didn't say you've gone too far this time a loan. They said this is the best, highly speculative. Even in the article from m i T they even called it neuroscience theater, and they pointed out big problems. They were saying, like, Okay, the brain is a living thing, how can you build these like one of the big concerns with any surgery, especially surgery that implants something, is how to avoid the body rejecting it? Right? And then how do you how do you make the wires last? You know what I mean? On the inside of a brain? Also, should humans be uh, should humans be putting out mods for a thing they don't yet fully understand. I don't like to do, but make Denero face face was so good, right there, it's Denero face. Dude. I don't know, you know, No, you don't know. But it's such a great point. Just that first one that you made been whatever components you insert into somebody's brain in this complicated surgery that you need an automated robotic system to perform. Ah, what's the life of those components? I mean you were talking about sensitive materials that are very tiny. Uh, it's no. It should be no surprise that the mind is a continually changing structure. It is. It is changing, especially depending on when you get a neuralink installed, which is a whole other issue that we haven't even thought about. If you consider lace I surgery and early on when lasic surgery became a thing, and I think this is still true. Look, I'm no scientists, no doctor. But if you get Lacey too early, if you as your eyes are continuing to develop, then you may find that you have vision problems after the corrective surgery, or you know, other issues that arise. It's one of those things where if you get a neuro implant early on, as your your skull is still forming, your your brain is literally still physically growing. Um, what happens. I don't like it, but but you're making a great point. So there may be not just an ethical quandary here about age of consent, but there may be a physiological Goldilock zone. Right, I don't know what happens. Maybe what happens. Yeah, yeah, it's a very good point. We know. However, while m I T Is right, it seems I'm based to us in saying that these problems will take years to solve in just terms of like the material science and how how you measure the safety of it before putting it into people. Um, the fact of the matter is that the foundational principles are there. The first the first cochlear implant, cochlear implant that you know allows people to hear, that dates back to nine and that is an implant, and then researchers started placing probes in the brains of paralyzed people in the late nine nineties to establish that, yes, with these probes, people could send signals through the power of thought alone to move robot arms, to move computer cursors. And we've seen other experiments, many other experiments actually with animals like mice can get these visual implants that let them see infrared. That's cool. That's something dark would definitely pay attention to if you're looking for funding. Uh, and then they're they're they're just the examples go on and on and on. Well, just one more, there's experimentation using instead of electricity to stimulate and read electrochemical signals in the brain. Their attempts to use what was it like fiber optic light to interface with the brain in a different way, and some of that is very promising. You can see, you can read about and see some experimentation done on mice specifically, like the White Lab mice with that type of neurosurgery. Yeah, exactly. And it's important to say, like what the doubters, or call them the haters if you must. What the haters are saying is we know the possibilities are there, but you're being a big glib about just how closer far away we are from from this actually rolling out in a scalable way, which Neuralink talks about on their websites scalable brain machine interfaces or b M I, the other b M I not body mass index. There's also I think a lot of people in the world of tech get burned by the idea of vapor wear, which our pal Jonathan Strickland has talked about at length. Products either like maybe it turns out to be all sound and fury signify nothing, or maybe something does come out a real product, real software, etcetera, but it falls short of what people felt they were promised. I mean, this happens everything. This happens with video games, right No man Sky, cyberpunk, you know, oh for sure. I think right now the most applicable version of this would be the Thoranos machines, the blood testing machines that were compact and revolutionary and didn't actually work. Yep, yep. That is probably the most infamous recent one. Good call, and we know that the claims may by neural Link are making positive ways to be clear at this time, if you were listening to this episode, where as like the same year, we've recorded in February twenty th Oh good, okay, in the right timeline. I'm in the right timeline, okay, because I think you are. But I don't know if anyone else is experience experiencing this. But since we've had this conversation, I'm having sensations at the top of my skull, like weird tingly sensations as though my neural link that I had installed sometime in the future is I'm having ghost neural link. I don't know. I don't know how to describe this. That's kind of cool. I mean, it's cool cool for me to hear because it's happening to you. Uh No, Now I can't think about it because I'll feel it too. And I guarantee you, folks, um Matt may have just hacked your mind because will probably also be very conscious of your tactile sensations at the tippy top of your of your skull. Uh you know what it is. It's the pressure from the headphones I'm wearing is directly on the spot where I imagine it would go in. Yeah, that's all. That's fine, because we're we recorded with headphones. So yeah, that's it. No, now I feel it, great, great, awesome. So so at this time, while we're recording this, in this timeline February, you cannot buy a neural link. A neural link. You can't buy something that does all of these things because it doesn't quite exist yet. But the research is ongoing, and that leads us to another controversy. Like Jose Delgado, like Professor Delgado, they started with animals, a couple of different kinds of animals, pigs, primates. There's a official statement that they issued. Well, we'll get to that and say here's what you need to know. So animal experimentation always been a controversial subject, mainly because animals do not possess the ability to consent. They don't have informed consent. And in this presentation, a lot of musk introduces the public to three pigs to show off the latest link prototype. He also held up version of the so a machine robot they're calling it, which you know, you put on your head and then you can just think yourself into the Internet. Now imagine that in the metaverse. By the way, check out that episode. Uh to be clear, that's the machine that puts the threads into your brain. Yes, yeah, yes, that that is the that is what threads the cognitive needle, now, the or the neurological needle, I should say. Now, the implant that Neurrolink is testing on on pigs has one thousand channels, and the thinking is that that means it's able to read from a similar number of neurons one thousand neurons. And this is very much a work in progress. Everybody at new or Link is confirming this. Ala Musk said. Essentially, so we want to increase that by a factor of a hundred, then a by a factor of a thousand, and by factor of ten thousand to read more completely from ultimately the human brain. People were mad about this, they said various nonprofits pet up group called PCRM, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. They said that this research was causing extreme suffering in the test subjects who quote had their brains mutilated and shoddy experiments and were left to suffer and die. That's bad press, man, not a good look. Yeah, and they're they're not wrong. There was information that's come to light comes from the institution, the school that was taking part in in these experimentations with neuralink, and there's some stuff that we're going to learn about that was happening that is um disturbing to say the least, even for someone who wouldn't consider themselves a full animal rights advocate. Yeah, I mean some of these it's almost s op at this point standard operating procedure for these kinds of experiments to begin on cadavers rather than on live animals and neuralink. In their official statement, which is available online at their blog, I don't want to say they clapped back. What what they were doing is trying to from their perspective at context to what they were doing. But in adding that context, do you see how some of the sausage is made? They said. In this type of medical research, novel surgeries are typically performed first in animal cadavers and then later in term and old procedures. Cadavers are deceased animals who have been humanely euthanized due to either a VETS decision for medical concern or they've been euthanized as part of a quote previous unrelated research study. And then terminal procedure, which the really controversial ones terminal procedure is euthanizing an animal under an aesthetic after the completion of a surgical procedure. And that's that's why. The way they say that is they're not just picking random animals either. What they're doing is consulting with a veterinary staff that essentially tells them, look, this animal is healthy enough to have go under anesthesia once and probably survive, but due to some pre existing medical condition, we don't know if we can bring them back. So this their mind, this is a great or good thing, because ultimately they say it's more ethical for us to do these terminal procedures so that the animal doesn't suffer after it, just in case whatever they're testing has an unexpected side effect or consequence, which I can see. I can see the reasoning behind that. No, I know, I can too. There's an article that you posted been from news channel eight I think it's eight on your Side from Tampa, Florida and uh in there it describes some of the information that was brought to light when some of these groups that you described began looking into neuralinks activities, and there is just some there's some disturbing stuff in here. Some of it has to do with that bioglue that we mentioned. Before where it's kind of a it's an experimental product, and it has been shown a couple of times to have prop thems when it interacts or is applied to neural tissue or to bring tissue and other tissues. And in this case, it apparently, at least according to some of the materials, it had a negative effect on some of these the macaque the Reese's monkeys that were tested on experimental poe uh. And there's some other issues where there just appears to have been i mean, like talking about this ben, but getting a Reese's macaque monkey to sit in a chair while and restrain its head while this type of surgical procedure is happening, and then while experiments are being done, you know, to get the monkey to actually control something with its mind and just sit there and do that and focus on it. It It apparently, according to the information here from UC Davis, it required strapping these monkeys down into chairs for like five hours at a time and then sometimes restraining their head in such a way that they had to like install something on their head. And that's a primate man, and it's that it's pretty grizzly, even though it's done in the name of science to you know, for a noble goal, at least on paper. It's rough. Yeah, agreed, and and they this a lot of that comes from their partnership with U. C. Davis, who is supplying some of the research animals for their part neuralink. Just to give you an excerpt of their statement, they said, this is the part that they emphasized when they went on Twitter and posted this. They said, animals at neuralink are respected and honored by our team. Without proper context, information from medical records and study data can be misleading. In this blog post, we want to provide an accurate statement of neuralinks commitment to animal welfare. And you can read the whole thing, but there's no denying it's a pickle like nobody digs needless suffering, or at least nobody should dig needless suffering. And but on the other hand, on the on the other side of the brain machine interface, there's no denying that animal experimentation has led to the improvement of human lives. It's even saved human lives in some cases. So what's to be done. We're gonna take a pause for a word from our sponsors, and then we'll dive into even murkier water. Okay, So currently, just to recap two of the big concerns hinge on the ethical treatment of animals one and figuring out whether or not Neurallink can actually follow through with what they would like to do, which is ambitious and is world changing, would be a watershed moment for humanity. But those current worries pale in comparison to possible future problems that people keep bringing up. And this is this is some of the really scary stuff. So this is one of the first ones that occurred to me, Matt. I don't know if there's the first thing you thought of, But let's say you're an early adopter. This is on the market, and you're an early adopter. You get the very first commercially available link. You pay an arm and a leg for it. But you're the coolest guy at parties. Uh, you are not allowed to play trivia because it's very easy for you just to just think of the answer. You might not be allowed on people's WiFi. You know, there's a lot of stuff, but you're not allowed to walk outside if it's raining. Okay, well yeah, okay, Well I guess I have it's raining, etcetera. There's right, there's a CME. It's over. But your productivities skyrockets because now you can work at the speed of your thoughts. You're not bottlenecked by your hands or or a keyboard or a you know, traditional machine interface. But then the next generation of the link comes out, and then the next generation of the link comes out, and the next comes out. Because corporations also ongoing science, you can update your software for a while, but what happens if your hardware becomes obsolete? What happens if you are a version one point o person living in a version four point five world. Uh. To their credit, Musk and Co anticipate this and they have envisioned the link system, the probes at least being easily removed or replaced as needed. But sure, there's yeah, there's no hard proof of that happening successfully in humans just yet and there you know how, Yeah, but you know it would work, And just imagine this, that would work. The threads would stay, The threads go in and they stay forever long that lifetime is the little the link itself that pops into that hole in your skull. That's what gets switched out and changed Um, that makes sense because I think about using the first cell phone you ever owned, if you're in your thirties or older. Um, you know, imagine doing just trying to create a text message when you have to actually type in the numbers, you know a certain number of times. Yes, uh, just just just send the message, Hey, I'll be home in ten minutes. Like how long that takes and what you have to do, the inputs you have to achieve, and then how quickly and easily you can do that now with your phone that you have. Probably the difference between those two actions. Wow, there's just such a gap there. I wonder if it will be that way. Everything I've seen online looks as though you'll be you'll be inputting like one character at a time. Right. This isn't a I think a word and then it gets put into the machine. It's I think about moving a cursor inside of an operating system, and now I can select an F, Now I can select a U and so on. Um, sorry, more spellings. I don't know message, but it's like furthermore second paragraph. Um. Yeah, and that's that's one for everybody who remembers trying to enter a sophisticated text on like a Nokia flip phone. You know, that's wild, But that's just one concern, and it is being anticipated supposedly. But secondly, and this is the one that should bother all the people in the audience who are called or consider themselves paranoid, especially I T professionals hacking forced behavior, encountering ads, or not being allowed to some parts of the Internet or the cloud because you haven't purchased the right package plan, like what if cable tiered pricing comes into play. These are just hypothetical, so there's been no declaration of this. But the thing is not to be too black mirror. You can turn off television. You can if you can't turn off the television you're stuck in the waiting room. You can close your eyes when an AD comes on, even put your hands in your ear and just la la la. You can't do that when it's going directly to your brain unless there's another mechanism that allows you to hit that switch. And then where you know you can do you know you can do what you could let the battery die. That's because yeah, yeah, because a neuralink. You know. One of the reasons I think some of those writers at m I T were making connections to the fitbit, because if you've ever had one of those, are used one of those, one of the one of the ways you can charge many of them is you just place it on this magnetic uh doc that charges it in that way. You just attach it to it basically through magnet. And I think that's what the charging system looks like. You you plug something into a USB and then it kind of is applied to the Maybe I'm wrong, that's what it looks like on their website. Um, if you just chose not to charge the thing, then maybe you're okay or would that be debilitating to your you know, right exactly? That's I mean, that's that's a huge problem. And then who watches the watchman? You know? We have to ask about the motivations, biases, and policies of the people running this system, of the for profit entities running a system like this owning the door h And by the way, other other groups are there are competitors in this field. Facebook is working on something similar and so on the shifting. Yeah, I thought you'd be particularly excited about that. Um So, like anybody who has been a part of a large social media or banking hack. They're almost normalized. Now. You know that's scary enough, But think about this. This is we're gonna take you to a horror movie for a second. What if you're just hanging out, you and Matt and Doc and Mission Control Nolman, we're all just hanging out, and then somebody starts gibbering, appear to be moving jerkily and seizing, and you realize it's not glass alalia that they're encountering this person. There's no knowledge of Russian or you know whatever, any language. Yeah, Mandarin, they have no knowledge. What if we have no knowledge us? Okay, so we'll go with Russian and we're going topical. What if they just start spouting like Russian catchphrases in propaganda. It would be like being possessed. It would be like watching one of your friends get possessed. And we don't know what kind of damage a hacked system could do to your brain. Remember anything with an online connection and theoretically be hacked. You don't have the air gap of the headphones or the keyboard. What what do you do? How do you do? I guarantee you this is a huge um, a huge focus of research for people in this field, I'm certain the only question is can the system send input into the body and cause the body to do things or is it just the the brain functioning the way it would to move a body part or thinking about moving a body part to then send signals out like right, can singles go into the neuralink and cause the body to do something or not? And right now I don't think that's possible. But we're talking about the future versions, right, the four point five, et cetera. Yeah, we're talking about way way in the future too, but not as far in the future as you might like to think. Because if I'm trying and failing yet again to be utopian, there is a cool flip side to that, which is, you know, you're at a dance party, you know, you want to impress some girl or some guy and making eyes and you're like, damn it, I don't know the dougie, I don't know how to square dance or whatever, and then you yes, okay, okay, sorry, I just know the one with the backpack kid. That's all I know. Yeah, the dougie is uh oh, I can't remember what era it's in, Okay, but yes, the dougie is a real thing. So all of a sudden, if if that technology is possible, it's feasible that you could say, you know, Alexa or Sirie or Google or whatever, or a LAN download Dougie. The next thing, you know, you just flip on the switch and you're doing it right. That's cool. That's a superpower basically. But if that, if that I tried and failed to be that would be a pleasant No, that was not the I would want to be standing. But but then third, you know, we we don't want to go too long on this because these are all hypothetical things, but the things ethicists are rightly concerned about, and security experts concerned about him, people in the field of any of the related academic and medical fields are concerned, and rightly so. I just read a fantastic sci fi novel emmy I mentioned earlier called bare Head. I don't want to spoil it too much, but in part of that it addresses the danger of large scale non consensual downloading or uploading. So, for instance, like a state level and there's like the nuclear version of a hack. But let's say let's say there's a developed or very tech forward country that has rolled out some kind of incentive or even a mandate, which would be scary for everybody to have something like this, something that is the descendant of something like the neural link. Then they get hacked and everybody. The funny version would be all of a sudden, everybody in Antwerp gets rick rolled at the same time. But that's that's immensely dangerous, you know, because there are other things that could happen. What happens if a virus of some sort goes into play, it would be a mimetic virus. You know. Um, this is this is all sci fi stuff, but it is possible now. And that's the question I think we have to end on that is, how will this affect humanity? We don't really know. We have a lot of really smart people who are thinking through the possibilities and the scenarios. But the one thing that sticks with me is the human brain is built where a radically different environment from the one in which most people live today. When's the last time you went foraging? Right, not not for fun, not not because you're curious about the mushrooms in your local area, but because you you had to be a hunter gatherer. When's the last time that happened to you. It's been a while for me. It's not a normal part of most people's lives if they live in a dense Serban environment and the majority of human beings live in urban environments. What I'm saying is, it's like, imagine you are somehow attaching a satellite link to an Atari. How does that affect the attari? Is it still in Atari? What is it? Is this? Are you know, are we getting towards that singularity that we've talked about so often reference and recommendation to everybody. The old Uh, it's fairly old at this point. Series called D S X Evolution, I believe. Yeah, that's the one that I've got over there. Um, the whole series deals with these kinds of questions that you're opposing, Ben, and it's it's worth it. It's a great series. Yeah, okay, yeah, because I've I think I've read the lower actually played the game, which I'm guilty of often. But but yes, like this is not to be alarm is these are things that people need to be aware of. And I did find one scare quote that I wanted to bring out, which comes from a philosopher and cognitive psychologist named Susan Schneider. She said merging human brains, not specifically with the neural link, but with the AI that would eventually accompany it. She said, it would be quote suicide for the human mind. Those are strong worry some words. Um, Now, what we are doing again is we're teetering on a precipice. We're looking at a horizon and trying to guess what's on the edge or what's on the other side. And it's kind of a won't We won't know for sure until we get their situation because this kind of thing, this way has not been done at this scale before. You know what, Yeah, you know what. The more I think about it and talk about it, the more I can feel my future neuralink, the ghosts somehow of it fourth dimensionally. But also it does feel like an amazing thing that we're going to need. I think we need a way to interact differently with technology, you know, more closely, more um streamlined. It's just I don't know, Maybe it's just our generation isn't ready for it. I'm not ready for it, like I will adopt it my my my son's generation. I think, um, I could see that growing up Internet native or cloud native. Um, yeah, absolutely, yeah, and I and I do think something like this is inevitable. It's absolutely true. If civilization continues, this research will continue because the potential there is so massive. But how how best to realize the positive potential while avoiding the negative potential? Right, the negative potential consequences, It just don't combine it with meta Well that's gonna happen. But that's that's suicide for the human mind right there that I'm trying. Wow. Yeah, So we have taken this. We we've highlighted some of the concerns, We've highlighted some of the enormous potential. We wanted to end on pointing out that something like this is highly likely to be on the way in some regard. Um, we want to know your thoughts because we can't quite yet get in your head to pull them from your mind. So you're gonna have to tell us. Use your hands, use your wonderful voices, use your eyes, let us know. Do you agree with the idea that this is inevitable? Do you believe that the potential benefits outweighed the potential risk. I don't know if we're I don't know if here on something much you know, I don't know if we're sure about that second one, but we are sure about that first one. We try to be easy to find online Facebook, Instagram, longtime listeners, you know the jam hop on over to Here's where it gets crazy. Tell us what's on your mind, and if you like my esteemed colleague real as the dangerous of sipping the social needs and you don't want to constantly be plugged into a social media platform, never fear. There's several other ways you could contact us. 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