November 13, 2023 • 26 mins
Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance joins this episode to talk about his exclusive reporting on Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup that’s gearing up for its first human clinical trial.
Read more: Elon Musk’s Brain Implant Startup Is Ready to Start Surgery
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
From electric cars to spaceships to social media. Elon Musk
is constantly getting into our heads, so maybe it shouldn't
come as a surprise that Musk now wants to actually
get into our heads. His company, called Neuralink, has been
racing to develop a brain implant that can convert a
person's thoughts into a range of commands a computer can understand.
(00:23):
After testing on animals, the company is now seeking a
volunteer for its first human clinical trial, and if the
product works as intended one day, it could conceivably improve
the lives of people suffering from paralysis, stroke, and hearing
and vision loss. Of course, Musk being Musk, he also
has a more out there motivation for racing to complete
(00:46):
this device.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Elon's vision this is a guy who's consumed by the
idea that AI might go a muck, might leave the
human race behind. And so in this very futuristic version
of this tech, we would be these human machine hybrids
where information could go into our brains sort of matrix style,
like you download Kung Fu, or you download Spanish, and
(01:09):
then information would go out. Maybe you could send your
thoughts directly to another person.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
That's Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter Ashley Vance. He's been covering Neuralink
for years, including ten trips to the company's facilities in
California and Texas. He's gotten to watch the place and
its founder in action. Ashley's here to tell us what
he found inside what's arguably Elon Musk's most ambitious and
controversial project.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Is this the most sort of stable, pragmatic, judicious guy
that you want to be in control of the world
of mind control devices? Probably not.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Is he the.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Person that will probably be the first to sort of
make this happen?
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yes, I'm Wes Kasova. That's today on the Big Take.
(02:13):
Hey Ashley, good, see.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Again, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
So you've had a pretty interesting time lately taking a
look at Elon Musk's big project, Neuralink, and you called
it the most consequential product launch of his career. That's
kind of like a big statement given everything that this
guy has done.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
You can read that in a few different ways. I yes,
in one sense, Neuralink is this brain implant, and so
it's a medical device. And look, I mean, rockets and
cars are serious business. But in the past these companies
have messed up on their first product launches. SpaceX had
rockets blow up, Tesla struggled for years and years and
(02:54):
years to mass produce its car. You had some room
for error to get these things right. The US Food
and Drug Administration is taking a very close look at Neuralink,
and so this is going to go into a human
for the first time after many years of animal trials,
and so you know, there's a lot of pressure. And
then for the rest of us, I mean, the sort
(03:16):
of exciting and possibly scary thing about all this is
this device really could be this incredible piece of technology
that one day in the near term, it's going to
help people with illness. One day maybe it makes us
all these human machine hybrids. And so there's a lot
of stake here. You know, maybe the future of the
human species.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Tell us about Neuralink exactly what it is and what
must hopes that the thing is going to do.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
This company started in twenty sixteen, it's always had pretty
much the same goal, which is basically to put a
computer chip into people's brains. And the reason you would
do this is to you essentially put a electrodes right
up against neurons in our brain and you can watch
brain activity is neurons fire. They fire in certain patterns
(04:08):
depending on what you're doing. And so the big idea
is to read this brain activity, put it through AI
algorithms and all kinds of other software, and come to
some insights about the brain. In the near term, this
would be things like people who are paralyzed or have
als or strokes and are having trouble speaking or having
(04:29):
trouble using a computer. This device would be able to
read their thoughts. They would think what they want to
do on a computer, think about navigating a web page
or typing what they want to say, and the brain
implant would send those signals out and it would get
translated onto a computer. So sort of amazing Elon's vision.
This is a guy who's consumed by the idea that
(04:51):
AI might go amuck, might leave the human race behind,
and so in this very futuristic version of this tech,
we would become these human machine hybrids. So Neuralink has
been working on an implant to make this happen. As
far as I follow all these companies, it's the most advanced,
powerful and invasive implant that anyone's ever built.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
In this space. I guess they call it the Brain
computer interfaces or BCIs has been pretty busy, and Neuralink
has a lot of competition that at the moment at
least seems like they're a little bit ahead of Musk.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
I follow this field closely, and there's two There's two
big competitors that at least Elon Musk has been most
concerned about in the meetings that I've watched. And one
company is called Synchron. They're headquartered in New York. They
have a brain implant. It does not require a crany
ectomy to have your skull cut open. They actually it's
like a stent, similar to a stent that would go
(05:50):
in your heart. They thread this stent through your arteries
into a blood vessel in the brain. And for years
now they started in Australia and are now New York.
They have many people, dozens of people who have had
the same plant. Essentially, the person kind of thinks it's
almost like a binary on or off as to what
you want to do on a computer. Do you want
(06:11):
to select this letter, do you want to select this word?
Do you want to click your mouse here? And that
people think and that happens.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
And some listeners might remember we went to visit Synchron
back in March and I spoke to the company's CEO,
Thomas Oxley. Here's a bit of that.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
On the Apple iPhone. There is a way in which
you can start to control the iPhone without having to
touch the screen if you have an ability to send
command clicks into the iPhone. So we have our patients
sending their command functions and we've integrated into the iPhone
where they're able to navigate their way and use the iPhone.
(06:49):
It's not as fast as what you and I can
do with our fingers, but Apple have created mechanisms of
accessibility control that allow these types of inputs to work.
So that's a really big deal with getting our patients
back control over the iPhone.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
And if you'd like to listen to that show, there's
a link in the episode nets.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
There's another company based in Switzerland called Onward. They are
not in the brain, they are on the spine. They
put an implant right on a person's spine and I
have seen in person in Switzerland. It's one of the
most amazing things I've ever seen. A fully paralyzed person.
This Italian gentleman named Michelle. He'd been paralyzed for three
years from a car accident, he walked again right in
(07:33):
front of me. It's not a totally natural gait, but
this is a person who's standing up walking across rooms.
Another young woman, Julie, she was paralyzed in a car accident.
And when you're paralyzed often you have trouble regulating your
blood pressure. And it used to take her seven hours
to get out of bed each day. She would pass
out so many times. And she had this implant and
(07:55):
it's totally changed her life.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
And so what is the difference between what these companies
that seem to be a bit ahead of neuralink or
doing and what Neuralink aims to do once they're able
to implant the device.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
So in a lot of ways, some of these startups
are tackling very specific problems. You know, synchron is giving
you this amazing but sort of limited access on your
computer Onward has about a dozen electrodes on the spine.
Neuralink is looking to put dozens, if not hundreds of
electrodes into the brain. So it's just this massive increase
(08:29):
in computing horsepower, and they want to be you could
think of it as like a general purpose computing system,
so it's not just doing words, it's not just the spine.
They want to link a brain implant with a spinal implant.
They want to do speech, they want to do movement,
they want to restore feeling to people's limbs, they want
(08:49):
to have people walk again, they want to you know,
restore vision, I mean sort of do everything. And it's
through having this extra computing horsepower that they would be
able to pull all these things off.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Can you describe exactly what it would take to get
one of these Neuralink implants into a person's brain.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
So from the start, Elon wanted this to be something
closer to like a consumer electronics device. And so the
way Neuralink does it, surgery is a human surgeon for
the moment, cut a hole in the skull, and the
Neuralink has built this rather amazing robot that has a tiny, tiny,
tiny needle and it grabs these threads is what Neuralink
(09:31):
calls them. They're wires with electrodes on them, and the
robot peers through this hole in the skull with all
kinds of computer visions, software and cameras and then it
pushes these threads into your brain. And after it's done
that with sixty four of these threads in this first
human trial that'll start in just a matter of weeks.
Then the hole in your skull is plugged up, for
(09:55):
lack of a better term, with Neuralink's computing device that
has a battery, wireless communications to send the signals out,
and then it has all of this computing systems to
read the signals in your brain, and that device goes
flush with your skull. When I've seen primates and pigs
that have had this implant, you couldn't tell which animal
has had the implant and which hasn't.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
How long does it take for the robot to implant
all of these wires in the device itself.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
The actual surgery would take two to three hours when
you take into account being anthesized and the surgeon's getting
ready to go into the r and prepping the patient.
Once the robot sets to work, it's about a twenty
five minute procedure. They've done it as quick as eighteen minutes.
The faster the better because it does less damage to
(10:44):
the brain and the recovery is quicker. And in the future,
you know, Elon's vision for this is that we all
show up at like a clinic or some sort of store,
and you go in and the robot does everything, and
it takes about ten or fifteen minutes, and you leave
with a chip in your head and a new more
(11:05):
advanced human.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
While you're waiting for your tesla to get charged in
right after the break. What's it like to work at Neuralink? Actually,
you've spent a lot of time at Neuralink. There are
two big facilities, I guess ones in California and ones
(11:29):
in Texas watching this operation and watching Elon musk. What's
it like there.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
I've been going for about three years. I'm the only reporter.
I'm pretty sure that's ever been allowed in there. It's fascinating.
As with all of Elon's companies, you know, he has
a gift for assembling very smart people and having them
charged toward a goal, and Neuralink is no different. I
mean that these are world class engineers in this room.
This company is a little odd in that Elon only
(11:57):
pops in about once a month come check out what's
going on. And it's ostensibly run by a triumvirate of people,
and so Elon will show up and everybody briefs him
on the latest of what's happening with the company. I
went to a couple meetings. I found them sort of funny. Typically,
Elon will stand at the head of this table and
(12:19):
eight to ten top engineers will be gathered around it,
and they start presenting on what's going on in Elon.
He's actually surprisingly adept. He knew a lot about brain science,
about the implant technologies, about the rivals. I was actually
quite surprised. I was, on one hand, kind of impressed
with his knowledge in this field, just as he did
(12:42):
with rockets in self driving cars. Elon seems to learn
by osmosis from talking to all of his engineers and
actually digest these facts and can talk in quite detail
about what's going on in the brain and with these implants.
On the other hand, you know, sometimes he comes up
with suggestions for the device that you could tell the
engineers aren't quite convinced that it's going to work or
(13:06):
that he knows what he's talking about it. So, you know,
in the story I described this as when I would
witness these moments, is Elon sort of having this like
PhD and self confidence. I mean, he's not afraid to
share his opinion, and the engineers kind of let it
wash over them. And nod and then go back to
whatever they're doing. But then Elon will jump in and
his commandment pretty much always is to move faster. And
(13:30):
this has made people nervous. Again, this is a biotech device,
this might be an area where you don't want to
move faster. So in one meeting I saw this firsthand.
The engineers had gone through a demo that Neuralink was
planning to do, and Elon says to them, we want
to get there with a maniacal sense of urgency, maniacal
(13:53):
like the world is coming to an end. We need
to get there before the AI takes over, or at
least try And this was not an unusual out of
the blue remark. I went to several meetings and this
was a common refrain.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Another big moment of friction that you describe is when
one of the people at Neuralink said it was going
to take a long time for the FDA to approve
this device.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Yeah, and it wasn't even just to approve the device.
It was once we get our first human trial, the
FDA wants us to wait a year before we do
another implant. And Elon just blurts out, unacceptable, that cannot happen.
We want to be going into more humans as quickly
as we can. And so he starts advising the engineers
(14:37):
on how this is going to play out in his mind,
and he says, look, I've been at SpaceX where we
battle against the Federal Aviation Administration to get permits to
launch our rockets and try new prototypes. And as long
as we can show that this works and make some progress,
the FDA will bend to our will and let us
do more these So, you know, he tells them, look,
(14:58):
we need to get this into a person, and that
person needs to be an advocate for the technology. If
need be, we'll start a letter writing campaign, and I'm
quite sure the FDA will let us move faster.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
The Elms you described in the story as always pushing
to move forward, always trying to be more ambitious than
any of the people who work for him think that
can be is very much the way he's operated as
other companies. But you also write about a kind of
tension about Musk himself that lately his reputation has been
a lot different than it was when he was sort
(15:34):
of the hero of SpaceX and the hero of Tesla
in those earlier days.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Yeah, I mean probably I might have watched this more
than anyone, being his biographer and writing my book during
kind of an earlier time in Elon's life. He's changed,
you know, he's kind of a professional troll on Twitter.
He seems to want to pick fights with people for sports.
He's obviously all over the map up politically and getting
(16:01):
involved in world affairs. And so he's this mercurial wild
card of a human with this particular technology. It's a
brain implant, if you want to joke around, I don't
even think it's joking. It's a mind control device that
they want to put into literally billions of people one day.
We've seen Elon in the war in Ukraine with his
(16:23):
Space Internet systems. You know, if he decides he doesn't
want the Ukrainians to be using the Space Internet systems
one weekend, he turns them off, and then so people
talk to him and he turns them back on. I mean,
there's a bit of very serious whimsy attached to all this.
And so is this the most sort of stable, pragmatic,
judicious guy that you want to be in control of
(16:46):
a world of mind control devices? Probably not. Is he
the person that will probably be the first to sort
of make this happen. Yes, And so this is always
the great conundrum with Elon, I think, and increasingly so.
I mean, this is a field that he should know
nothing about. Neuralinks should not work. I mean, you don't
just go into the biomedical field and start producing something
(17:08):
like this and have it work and sort of race
ahead of everyone when you've come from the car and
the rocket and the internet software industry. And yet it is,
it seems to be we're on the cusp of this working.
And so I think this is a great dilemma with
Elon that we all have to deal with, is this
guy gets stuff done, but we don't always want him
to be the one doing it when we.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Come back Neuralinks testing on animals, especially, maybe the most
controversial part of Neuralinks operations has been testing on animals.
And there's been a lot written about what's happened to
(17:51):
some of the animals who've been used in developing this product.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Absolutely, and just to give people a flavor for Neuralinks
set up and how these animals play in the company
started in California. It has a headquarters in Fremont, which
is on the edge of Silicon valley, and in that
facility they've got pigs, they've got monkeys, about almost twenty monkeys,
and so these animals do get implants. They live at
(18:18):
the NEURALA facility. Their watch their brain activity is red.
And then in Austin, Texas, which I think is going
to be the future home of Neuralink, they've bought thirty
seven acres of former ranch land and they already have
about one hundred sheep and pigs there in a barn.
The hope is to have sort of a primate set
up where the primates can be indoors and outdoors. That
(18:39):
facility also has operating rooms where they have the robots
to perform these surgeries, a lab to go over the
samples and everything.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
You know.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
The huge controversy around the animals has been that there's
been reports gathered from public documents from reporting that some
of these surgeries have gone wrong, that pigs and the
monkeys in particular have suffered as a result of the implant.
Some of these stories I have to give credit to
(19:09):
Wired and Reuter's they've done most of the reporting here.
They've suggested it was unnecessary suffering on parts of the animals,
and the stories are hard to read, really hard.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
You know.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
You hear about about monkeys being despondent, bleeding, scratching at
these things. It's a tough read.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
We should say that Neuralink has said it's made mistakes
during exploratory surgeries, but it says it was human error,
not issues with its equipment, and the company stresses that
the most troubling reports are from its early years before
it built its own testing facility in Fremont. Neuralink says
it's gone to great lengths to provide better living conditions
(19:49):
for the animals there.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
In twenty twenty, Neuralink brought all of its animal testing
and operation in house. And so this was the Remont
facility and now the Austin facility. And so I'm the
only reporter that has seen the stuff uphand I don't
want to be an apologist for Neuralink. All I can
say is that the animals that I have seen over
(20:13):
these three years are incredibly well cared for, and in fact,
Neuralink is doing many pioneering things in terms of animal
care that you wouldn't never see at a contract research facility.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
So what is different about the way neuralink treats animals.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Now, if you go into a contract research animal center,
the something like monkeys are just going to be kept
in rows of cages. They are not given really anything
in their cage. The way that they're usually coaxed into
doing a research experiment is by withholding their food and
water until they do their work, and then it's given
(20:49):
to them as a treat. At Neuralink, it's it's just
very different. I've seen the same group of seventeen to
twenty monkeys for the last three years. They've all had
these brain implants. They, as far as my eyes indicate,
are healthy and active. Neuralink has them in their kind
of natural habitat, not like outside, but in their regular cages.
(21:09):
Their cages are several times bigger than what you would
find at one of these research organizations. The animals volunteer
to do the testing. Neuralink wheels the laptops in front
of them, and they're offered like a smoothie or some
fruit to munch on while they do the experiment for
a couple hours, and if they don't want to, they're
free to leave. Neuralink doesn't bind them in any way.
(21:32):
They just sit in their cage. Their cages are also
full of toys. It looks like a child's playground. I mean,
they have all the slides and things to play with.
There's music playing through the whole room. There's TVs they
can watch. It's just it's very, very different to anything
you would see at a contract research center. The monkeys
that have been at the Fremont facility for the last
(21:54):
three years, seventeen of them that I've seen, totally fine.
They've been implanted, They've even had the implants take it
out and been upgraded. In some cases. There were two
or three that did not take to doing the tests
and just were not interested in doing the test, and
so they were retired to a center that sort of
(22:14):
takes care of retired animals, and there was one animal
that was euthanized. Neuralink says it was part of a
planned euthanization that happens at the end of some of
these tests.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
What is Neuralink said about his animal testing when he
asked them about it.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
To their credit, they go through detail by detail with me,
and they've done some of this on their website as well.
Each of the incidents that's been reported so Neuralink has
been relatively upront they've been a very secretive company. Again,
I'm the only reporter that's ever been allowed in there.
I think they're very sensitive to the animal stuff. Elon
adds to everything because he just brings this heightened scrutiny
(22:55):
and he is this guy that is hard charging and
wants to go fast, and people want to know if
there's consequences as a result of that.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
And you've talked to him quite a bit about Neuralink
in the project. What does he say about it when
you talk to him about his aim for this company.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Well, I've always found it confusing, just like I find
his position on AI in general to be confusing. I mean,
he's the doom and gloomer when it comes to AI,
and yet he's funded two AI startups, one of them
Open Ai, which is the world's leading AI company. Tesla
has some of the best and highest number of AI
(23:34):
engineers in the world. And then Neuralink is this huge gamble.
When you talk to Elon about this, I mean he
just does not see these two sides of the coin
at all. I mean this very black and white issue
for him. We will either become the AI's pets or
we will evolve alongside of them.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Ashley, you said that very soon Neuralink will begin it's
very first trial of the device. What happens next? Where
does the company and this product, I suppose you'd call
it go from here?
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Yeah, so the trial there isn't a specific date set yet,
but it should happen within the next few weeks, or
I would assume maybe early twenty twenty four. They've selected
a couple of hospitals where they want to do this
first implant in a human. They've opened up a call
for participants, and so this first person is likely to
be paralyzed in all four limbs, probably a pretty young patient,
(24:31):
because you generally want to be as healthy as possible
for these types of trials. So this first person would
get this implant in the relatively near future. They've had
thousands of people knocking on their door to take part
in this trial. And then obviously the FDA will be
looking very closely to make sure the device is not
causing any physical harm. That's kind of step one. And
(24:54):
then you have this process where you begin to read
out the data and see how well the device is working.
Like with primates and other animals, you have this amazing
moment where a human can actually tell you what this
thing feels like, how well it's performing, give you much
more direct feedback if everything goes well. Elon turned out
(25:15):
to be right about how the FDA was perceiving these things.
They've already been given approval to it. Again, things have
to go right, but to do another implant about three
months instead of a year after this first one, and
so the company is looking to do about eleven implants
in twenty twenty four, get up to maybe around like
fifty the next year. And then I saw a slide
(25:39):
deck that talked about tens of thousands of surgeries about
five years into the future.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Ashley, I was great talking to you. This is just fascinating.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Thank you, Thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
By the way, if you want to keep up with
the latest on Elin Musk, be sure to check out
Bloomberg's new podcast called elin Inc. Each week, he host
David Papadopoulos and a panel of Bloomberg journalists talk about Musk,
his companies and the surprising ways they intersect. Give it
a listen. You can find Elon Inc. Wherever you get
your podcasts. Thanks for listening to us here at the
(26:15):
Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio.
For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg
dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is
Vicky Bergolina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Zeneb Sidiki
(26:37):
and Frederica Romanello produced this episode. Kil de Garcia is
our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin.
I'm west Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take.
I'm
From electric cars to spaceships to social media. Elon Musk
is constantly getting into our heads, so maybe it shouldn't
come as a surprise that Musk now wants to actually
get into our heads. His company, called Neuralink, has been
racing to develop a brain implant that can convert a
person's thoughts into a range of commands a computer can understand.
(00:23):
After testing on animals, the company is now seeking a
volunteer for its first human clinical trial, and if the
product works as intended one day, it could conceivably improve
the lives of people suffering from paralysis, stroke, and hearing
and vision loss. Of course, Musk being Musk, he also
has a more out there motivation for racing to complete
(00:46):
this device.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Elon's vision this is a guy who's consumed by the
idea that AI might go a muck, might leave the
human race behind. And so in this very futuristic version
of this tech, we would be these human machine hybrids
where information could go into our brains sort of matrix style,
like you download Kung Fu, or you download Spanish, and
(01:09):
then information would go out. Maybe you could send your
thoughts directly to another person.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
That's Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter Ashley Vance. He's been covering Neuralink
for years, including ten trips to the company's facilities in
California and Texas. He's gotten to watch the place and
its founder in action. Ashley's here to tell us what
he found inside what's arguably Elon Musk's most ambitious and
controversial project.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Is this the most sort of stable, pragmatic, judicious guy
that you want to be in control of the world
of mind control devices? Probably not.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Is he the.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
Person that will probably be the first to sort of
make this happen?
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yes, I'm Wes Kasova. That's today on the Big Take.
(02:13):
Hey Ashley, good, see.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Again, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
So you've had a pretty interesting time lately taking a
look at Elon Musk's big project, Neuralink, and you called
it the most consequential product launch of his career. That's
kind of like a big statement given everything that this
guy has done.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
You can read that in a few different ways. I yes,
in one sense, Neuralink is this brain implant, and so
it's a medical device. And look, I mean, rockets and
cars are serious business. But in the past these companies
have messed up on their first product launches. SpaceX had
rockets blow up, Tesla struggled for years and years and
(02:54):
years to mass produce its car. You had some room
for error to get these things right. The US Food
and Drug Administration is taking a very close look at Neuralink,
and so this is going to go into a human
for the first time after many years of animal trials,
and so you know, there's a lot of pressure. And
then for the rest of us, I mean, the sort
(03:16):
of exciting and possibly scary thing about all this is
this device really could be this incredible piece of technology
that one day in the near term, it's going to
help people with illness. One day maybe it makes us
all these human machine hybrids. And so there's a lot
of stake here. You know, maybe the future of the
human species.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Tell us about Neuralink exactly what it is and what
must hopes that the thing is going to do.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
This company started in twenty sixteen, it's always had pretty
much the same goal, which is basically to put a
computer chip into people's brains. And the reason you would
do this is to you essentially put a electrodes right
up against neurons in our brain and you can watch
brain activity is neurons fire. They fire in certain patterns
(04:08):
depending on what you're doing. And so the big idea
is to read this brain activity, put it through AI
algorithms and all kinds of other software, and come to
some insights about the brain. In the near term, this
would be things like people who are paralyzed or have
als or strokes and are having trouble speaking or having
(04:29):
trouble using a computer. This device would be able to
read their thoughts. They would think what they want to
do on a computer, think about navigating a web page
or typing what they want to say, and the brain
implant would send those signals out and it would get
translated onto a computer. So sort of amazing Elon's vision.
This is a guy who's consumed by the idea that
(04:51):
AI might go amuck, might leave the human race behind,
and so in this very futuristic version of this tech,
we would become these human machine hybrids. So Neuralink has
been working on an implant to make this happen. As
far as I follow all these companies, it's the most advanced,
powerful and invasive implant that anyone's ever built.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
In this space. I guess they call it the Brain
computer interfaces or BCIs has been pretty busy, and Neuralink
has a lot of competition that at the moment at
least seems like they're a little bit ahead of Musk.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
I follow this field closely, and there's two There's two
big competitors that at least Elon Musk has been most
concerned about in the meetings that I've watched. And one
company is called Synchron. They're headquartered in New York. They
have a brain implant. It does not require a crany
ectomy to have your skull cut open. They actually it's
like a stent, similar to a stent that would go
(05:50):
in your heart. They thread this stent through your arteries
into a blood vessel in the brain. And for years
now they started in Australia and are now New York.
They have many people, dozens of people who have had
the same plant. Essentially, the person kind of thinks it's
almost like a binary on or off as to what
you want to do on a computer. Do you want
(06:11):
to select this letter, do you want to select this word?
Do you want to click your mouse here? And that
people think and that happens.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
And some listeners might remember we went to visit Synchron
back in March and I spoke to the company's CEO,
Thomas Oxley. Here's a bit of that.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
On the Apple iPhone. There is a way in which
you can start to control the iPhone without having to
touch the screen if you have an ability to send
command clicks into the iPhone. So we have our patients
sending their command functions and we've integrated into the iPhone
where they're able to navigate their way and use the iPhone.
(06:49):
It's not as fast as what you and I can
do with our fingers, but Apple have created mechanisms of
accessibility control that allow these types of inputs to work.
So that's a really big deal with getting our patients
back control over the iPhone.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
And if you'd like to listen to that show, there's
a link in the episode nets.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
There's another company based in Switzerland called Onward. They are
not in the brain, they are on the spine. They
put an implant right on a person's spine and I
have seen in person in Switzerland. It's one of the
most amazing things I've ever seen. A fully paralyzed person.
This Italian gentleman named Michelle. He'd been paralyzed for three
years from a car accident, he walked again right in
(07:33):
front of me. It's not a totally natural gait, but
this is a person who's standing up walking across rooms.
Another young woman, Julie, she was paralyzed in a car accident.
And when you're paralyzed often you have trouble regulating your
blood pressure. And it used to take her seven hours
to get out of bed each day. She would pass
out so many times. And she had this implant and
(07:55):
it's totally changed her life.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
And so what is the difference between what these companies
that seem to be a bit ahead of neuralink or
doing and what Neuralink aims to do once they're able
to implant the device.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
So in a lot of ways, some of these startups
are tackling very specific problems. You know, synchron is giving
you this amazing but sort of limited access on your
computer Onward has about a dozen electrodes on the spine.
Neuralink is looking to put dozens, if not hundreds of
electrodes into the brain. So it's just this massive increase
(08:29):
in computing horsepower, and they want to be you could
think of it as like a general purpose computing system,
so it's not just doing words, it's not just the spine.
They want to link a brain implant with a spinal implant.
They want to do speech, they want to do movement,
they want to restore feeling to people's limbs, they want
(08:49):
to have people walk again, they want to you know,
restore vision, I mean sort of do everything. And it's
through having this extra computing horsepower that they would be
able to pull all these things off.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Can you describe exactly what it would take to get
one of these Neuralink implants into a person's brain.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
So from the start, Elon wanted this to be something
closer to like a consumer electronics device. And so the
way Neuralink does it, surgery is a human surgeon for
the moment, cut a hole in the skull, and the
Neuralink has built this rather amazing robot that has a tiny, tiny,
tiny needle and it grabs these threads is what Neuralink
(09:31):
calls them. They're wires with electrodes on them, and the
robot peers through this hole in the skull with all
kinds of computer visions, software and cameras and then it
pushes these threads into your brain. And after it's done
that with sixty four of these threads in this first
human trial that'll start in just a matter of weeks.
Then the hole in your skull is plugged up, for
(09:55):
lack of a better term, with Neuralink's computing device that
has a battery, wireless communications to send the signals out,
and then it has all of this computing systems to
read the signals in your brain, and that device goes
flush with your skull. When I've seen primates and pigs
that have had this implant, you couldn't tell which animal
has had the implant and which hasn't.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
How long does it take for the robot to implant
all of these wires in the device itself.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
The actual surgery would take two to three hours when
you take into account being anthesized and the surgeon's getting
ready to go into the r and prepping the patient.
Once the robot sets to work, it's about a twenty
five minute procedure. They've done it as quick as eighteen minutes.
The faster the better because it does less damage to
(10:44):
the brain and the recovery is quicker. And in the future,
you know, Elon's vision for this is that we all
show up at like a clinic or some sort of store,
and you go in and the robot does everything, and
it takes about ten or fifteen minutes, and you leave
with a chip in your head and a new more
(11:05):
advanced human.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
While you're waiting for your tesla to get charged in
right after the break. What's it like to work at Neuralink? Actually,
you've spent a lot of time at Neuralink. There are
two big facilities, I guess ones in California and ones
(11:29):
in Texas watching this operation and watching Elon musk. What's
it like there.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
I've been going for about three years. I'm the only reporter.
I'm pretty sure that's ever been allowed in there. It's fascinating.
As with all of Elon's companies, you know, he has
a gift for assembling very smart people and having them
charged toward a goal, and Neuralink is no different. I
mean that these are world class engineers in this room.
This company is a little odd in that Elon only
(11:57):
pops in about once a month come check out what's
going on. And it's ostensibly run by a triumvirate of people,
and so Elon will show up and everybody briefs him
on the latest of what's happening with the company. I
went to a couple meetings. I found them sort of funny. Typically,
Elon will stand at the head of this table and
(12:19):
eight to ten top engineers will be gathered around it,
and they start presenting on what's going on in Elon.
He's actually surprisingly adept. He knew a lot about brain science,
about the implant technologies, about the rivals. I was actually
quite surprised. I was, on one hand, kind of impressed
with his knowledge in this field, just as he did
(12:42):
with rockets in self driving cars. Elon seems to learn
by osmosis from talking to all of his engineers and
actually digest these facts and can talk in quite detail
about what's going on in the brain and with these implants.
On the other hand, you know, sometimes he comes up
with suggestions for the device that you could tell the
engineers aren't quite convinced that it's going to work or
(13:06):
that he knows what he's talking about it. So, you know,
in the story I described this as when I would
witness these moments, is Elon sort of having this like
PhD and self confidence. I mean, he's not afraid to
share his opinion, and the engineers kind of let it
wash over them. And nod and then go back to
whatever they're doing. But then Elon will jump in and
his commandment pretty much always is to move faster. And
(13:30):
this has made people nervous. Again, this is a biotech device,
this might be an area where you don't want to
move faster. So in one meeting I saw this firsthand.
The engineers had gone through a demo that Neuralink was
planning to do, and Elon says to them, we want
to get there with a maniacal sense of urgency, maniacal
(13:53):
like the world is coming to an end. We need
to get there before the AI takes over, or at
least try And this was not an unusual out of
the blue remark. I went to several meetings and this
was a common refrain.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Another big moment of friction that you describe is when
one of the people at Neuralink said it was going
to take a long time for the FDA to approve
this device.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Yeah, and it wasn't even just to approve the device.
It was once we get our first human trial, the
FDA wants us to wait a year before we do
another implant. And Elon just blurts out, unacceptable, that cannot happen.
We want to be going into more humans as quickly
as we can. And so he starts advising the engineers
(14:37):
on how this is going to play out in his mind,
and he says, look, I've been at SpaceX where we
battle against the Federal Aviation Administration to get permits to
launch our rockets and try new prototypes. And as long
as we can show that this works and make some progress,
the FDA will bend to our will and let us
do more these So, you know, he tells them, look,
(14:58):
we need to get this into a person, and that
person needs to be an advocate for the technology. If
need be, we'll start a letter writing campaign, and I'm
quite sure the FDA will let us move faster.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
The Elms you described in the story as always pushing
to move forward, always trying to be more ambitious than
any of the people who work for him think that
can be is very much the way he's operated as
other companies. But you also write about a kind of
tension about Musk himself that lately his reputation has been
a lot different than it was when he was sort
(15:34):
of the hero of SpaceX and the hero of Tesla
in those earlier days.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Yeah, I mean probably I might have watched this more
than anyone, being his biographer and writing my book during
kind of an earlier time in Elon's life. He's changed,
you know, he's kind of a professional troll on Twitter.
He seems to want to pick fights with people for sports.
He's obviously all over the map up politically and getting
(16:01):
involved in world affairs. And so he's this mercurial wild
card of a human with this particular technology. It's a
brain implant, if you want to joke around, I don't
even think it's joking. It's a mind control device that
they want to put into literally billions of people one day.
We've seen Elon in the war in Ukraine with his
(16:23):
Space Internet systems. You know, if he decides he doesn't
want the Ukrainians to be using the Space Internet systems
one weekend, he turns them off, and then so people
talk to him and he turns them back on. I mean,
there's a bit of very serious whimsy attached to all this.
And so is this the most sort of stable, pragmatic,
judicious guy that you want to be in control of
(16:46):
a world of mind control devices? Probably not. Is he
the person that will probably be the first to sort
of make this happen. Yes, And so this is always
the great conundrum with Elon, I think, and increasingly so.
I mean, this is a field that he should know
nothing about. Neuralinks should not work. I mean, you don't
just go into the biomedical field and start producing something
(17:08):
like this and have it work and sort of race
ahead of everyone when you've come from the car and
the rocket and the internet software industry. And yet it is,
it seems to be we're on the cusp of this working.
And so I think this is a great dilemma with
Elon that we all have to deal with, is this
guy gets stuff done, but we don't always want him
to be the one doing it when we.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Come back Neuralinks testing on animals, especially, maybe the most
controversial part of Neuralinks operations has been testing on animals.
And there's been a lot written about what's happened to
(17:51):
some of the animals who've been used in developing this product.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Absolutely, and just to give people a flavor for Neuralinks
set up and how these animals play in the company
started in California. It has a headquarters in Fremont, which
is on the edge of Silicon valley, and in that
facility they've got pigs, they've got monkeys, about almost twenty monkeys,
and so these animals do get implants. They live at
(18:18):
the NEURALA facility. Their watch their brain activity is red.
And then in Austin, Texas, which I think is going
to be the future home of Neuralink, they've bought thirty
seven acres of former ranch land and they already have
about one hundred sheep and pigs there in a barn.
The hope is to have sort of a primate set
up where the primates can be indoors and outdoors. That
(18:39):
facility also has operating rooms where they have the robots
to perform these surgeries, a lab to go over the
samples and everything.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
You know.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
The huge controversy around the animals has been that there's
been reports gathered from public documents from reporting that some
of these surgeries have gone wrong, that pigs and the
monkeys in particular have suffered as a result of the implant.
Some of these stories I have to give credit to
(19:09):
Wired and Reuter's they've done most of the reporting here.
They've suggested it was unnecessary suffering on parts of the animals,
and the stories are hard to read, really hard.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
You know.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
You hear about about monkeys being despondent, bleeding, scratching at
these things. It's a tough read.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
We should say that Neuralink has said it's made mistakes
during exploratory surgeries, but it says it was human error,
not issues with its equipment, and the company stresses that
the most troubling reports are from its early years before
it built its own testing facility in Fremont. Neuralink says
it's gone to great lengths to provide better living conditions
(19:49):
for the animals there.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
In twenty twenty, Neuralink brought all of its animal testing
and operation in house. And so this was the Remont
facility and now the Austin facility. And so I'm the
only reporter that has seen the stuff uphand I don't
want to be an apologist for Neuralink. All I can
say is that the animals that I have seen over
(20:13):
these three years are incredibly well cared for, and in fact,
Neuralink is doing many pioneering things in terms of animal
care that you wouldn't never see at a contract research facility.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
So what is different about the way neuralink treats animals.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Now, if you go into a contract research animal center,
the something like monkeys are just going to be kept
in rows of cages. They are not given really anything
in their cage. The way that they're usually coaxed into
doing a research experiment is by withholding their food and
water until they do their work, and then it's given
(20:49):
to them as a treat. At Neuralink, it's it's just
very different. I've seen the same group of seventeen to
twenty monkeys for the last three years. They've all had
these brain implants. They, as far as my eyes indicate,
are healthy and active. Neuralink has them in their kind
of natural habitat, not like outside, but in their regular cages.
(21:09):
Their cages are several times bigger than what you would
find at one of these research organizations. The animals volunteer
to do the testing. Neuralink wheels the laptops in front
of them, and they're offered like a smoothie or some
fruit to munch on while they do the experiment for
a couple hours, and if they don't want to, they're
free to leave. Neuralink doesn't bind them in any way.
(21:32):
They just sit in their cage. Their cages are also
full of toys. It looks like a child's playground. I mean,
they have all the slides and things to play with.
There's music playing through the whole room. There's TVs they
can watch. It's just it's very, very different to anything
you would see at a contract research center. The monkeys
that have been at the Fremont facility for the last
(21:54):
three years, seventeen of them that I've seen, totally fine.
They've been implanted, They've even had the implants take it
out and been upgraded. In some cases. There were two
or three that did not take to doing the tests
and just were not interested in doing the test, and
so they were retired to a center that sort of
(22:14):
takes care of retired animals, and there was one animal
that was euthanized. Neuralink says it was part of a
planned euthanization that happens at the end of some of
these tests.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
What is Neuralink said about his animal testing when he
asked them about it.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
To their credit, they go through detail by detail with me,
and they've done some of this on their website as well.
Each of the incidents that's been reported so Neuralink has
been relatively upront they've been a very secretive company. Again,
I'm the only reporter that's ever been allowed in there.
I think they're very sensitive to the animal stuff. Elon
adds to everything because he just brings this heightened scrutiny
(22:55):
and he is this guy that is hard charging and
wants to go fast, and people want to know if
there's consequences as a result of that.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
And you've talked to him quite a bit about Neuralink
in the project. What does he say about it when
you talk to him about his aim for this company.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Well, I've always found it confusing, just like I find
his position on AI in general to be confusing. I mean,
he's the doom and gloomer when it comes to AI,
and yet he's funded two AI startups, one of them
Open Ai, which is the world's leading AI company. Tesla
has some of the best and highest number of AI
(23:34):
engineers in the world. And then Neuralink is this huge gamble.
When you talk to Elon about this, I mean he
just does not see these two sides of the coin
at all. I mean this very black and white issue
for him. We will either become the AI's pets or
we will evolve alongside of them.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Ashley, you said that very soon Neuralink will begin it's
very first trial of the device. What happens next? Where
does the company and this product, I suppose you'd call
it go from here?
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Yeah, so the trial there isn't a specific date set yet,
but it should happen within the next few weeks, or
I would assume maybe early twenty twenty four. They've selected
a couple of hospitals where they want to do this
first implant in a human. They've opened up a call
for participants, and so this first person is likely to
be paralyzed in all four limbs, probably a pretty young patient,
(24:31):
because you generally want to be as healthy as possible
for these types of trials. So this first person would
get this implant in the relatively near future. They've had
thousands of people knocking on their door to take part
in this trial. And then obviously the FDA will be
looking very closely to make sure the device is not
causing any physical harm. That's kind of step one. And
(24:54):
then you have this process where you begin to read
out the data and see how well the device is working.
Like with primates and other animals, you have this amazing
moment where a human can actually tell you what this
thing feels like, how well it's performing, give you much
more direct feedback if everything goes well. Elon turned out
(25:15):
to be right about how the FDA was perceiving these things.
They've already been given approval to it. Again, things have
to go right, but to do another implant about three
months instead of a year after this first one, and
so the company is looking to do about eleven implants
in twenty twenty four, get up to maybe around like
fifty the next year. And then I saw a slide
(25:39):
deck that talked about tens of thousands of surgeries about
five years into the future.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Ashley, I was great talking to you. This is just fascinating.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Thank you, Thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
By the way, if you want to keep up with
the latest on Elin Musk, be sure to check out
Bloomberg's new podcast called elin Inc. Each week, he host
David Papadopoulos and a panel of Bloomberg journalists talk about Musk,
his companies and the surprising ways they intersect. Give it
a listen. You can find Elon Inc. Wherever you get
your podcasts. Thanks for listening to us here at the
(26:15):
Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio.
For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen. And we'd love to hear from you.
Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg
dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is
Vicky Bergolina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Zeneb Sidiki
(26:37):
and Frederica Romanello produced this episode. Kil de Garcia is
our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin.
I'm west Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take.
I'm
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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