it's not sci-fi. mind-reading tech is here

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So this application was like Pac-Man moving around the screen. And you had to subtly move your thumb or your forefinger so that it was picking up the brain activity at your wrist. And then Pac-Man would move up or down or left or right. Nita Farahani is a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University. And she's written a book called The Battle for Your Brain. It was pretty cool. And within like a couple of minutes, it was calibrated to my signals just barely moving my fingers and my wrist. So you're getting very close to being able to play Pac-Man with your brain. You might know about Elon Musk's company, Neuralink. You might also know that you can't just go out and buy a Neuralink device yet. But what you might not know is that other companies already have stuff on the shelves and that more is coming. Like I'm sitting here at my desk. I've got a little cabinet next to me and it is filled with different ones of these devices. I have headphones that have like EEG sensors around them. I've got earbuds not from Apple that have EEG sensors in them. I've got forehead bands. I have like dozens sitting in this little cabinet next to me. And there are tons on the market already. Meadow was like the first, I'd say, major tech company launching everyday neurotechnology into the marketplace, right? Where you can go to Best Buy and you can buy a neural band. This stuff is here now and you don't need to drill a hole in your head to use it. People hear these stories from Neuralink and others and they're like, OK, that doesn't apply to me because that's some sci-fi future where like somebody who is in a wheelchair, who's unable to move or to speak, has something drilled into their brain. Like, that's not me. But go to Best Buy. That's you. Right. It's like me at this conference, you know, saying to Mehta, like, yeah, go ahead and take my brain activity while I interact with your Pac-Man on your device and then playing Pac-Man with my neural signals, not with a joystick or my finger or anything else. As a professor, Nita works on both law and philosophy, which makes sense because on the one hand, figuring out how the mind works, that's a philosophical question. If you're a philosopher of mind and you're trying to understand how the mind works, and then there's technology that could start to really decode it, like how could you ignore that as a philosopher and just continue to ask thought problems and thought questions when there's real technology that could help you answer some of those questions? And then there's the law, or we might say the lack of laws. Neurotechnology is blasting off right now. And Nita says that we need to figure out what's legal and what's not before it's too late. Every company, the last piece of you that they don't have access to is your brain. There is no trace of privacy left except for this, which is what you're thinking and what you're feeling inside of your own mind. Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast. This is Killswitch. I'm Dexter Thomas. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Goodbye. The field of neurotechnology itself has been around longer than most people realize. Even the term brain-computer interface, which we still use today, goes back to the 1970s. But since then, this stuff was mostly confined to research labs. There have been products here and there, but it's never really been practical enough for a mainstream audience to catch on. But the people who know the technology have always figured out that one day it would catch on. And Nita remembers the day that she was convinced back in 2018. I was at a conference at Borton and this guy stands up to give his presentation. And he says, like, why are we humans such clumsy output devices? OK, that got my attention. Clumsy output devices. You're a very clumsy output device. All right, Dexter. No, I've been insulted a lot of ways. That's a new one. So he says, we're really good at taking in information, but we're going backwards in time instead of forwards. And he's like, think about it. We're typing with two thumbs now instead of typing with like our full hand. So our rate of getting information out is going down, not up. What if we could operate octopus-like tentacles with our brains instead? What he was talking about was he had this very clunky early version of this armband that he was showcasing. And the company at the time was called Control Labs. and he was showing how you could type on a virtual keyboard by having like brain activity read here at the wrist. I was fascinated. I was like, there are two things that make this the pivotal acquisition in neurotechnology for this to go mainstream. One is the form factor. Like instead of it being a stupid forehead band, we're talking about something that could show up in your watch and be part of everyday wearable devices. But then second and more importantly, he was talking about it becoming the interface to technology, replacing your keyboard and your mouse as the way that you would interact with other technology. And I was like, I get it now. I see how this stuff becomes mainstream. And for everyone is, you know, whether it's augmented reality or the internet of things, like if you're laying in bed and you want to flick off your lights that are part of the internet of things in your home, like you either have to reach for your phone or maybe you could just imagine doing it. And then there's a device on your wrist that picks up your intention and turns off the light, right? And that's what he was talking about. He was talking about like our brain becoming the way we interface with other technology through a wearable device, whether that's our computer or any other internet of things. And I was like, I get it now. So how big is this industry now? Oh gosh, I haven't kept up with what the current numbers are because the numbers keep changing on a daily basis and the numbers are converging with AI. And we're talking billions to trillions of dollars is how people are thinking about it. Because, for example, I was at a conference last week that was this big pivotal conference in the field. And at that meeting, I learned about the kind of huge bets that Apple is making in this space. And it seems like they're getting closer to becoming like a big health platform kind of bet in the brain. And if that happens, then the size of the industry we're talking about is like the size of Apple and every Apple device that's out there that starts to become a brain health and a brain tracking device in addition to everything else that's out there. So I'd say I don't know exactly what the number is anymore because the number is as big as the economy. And I'm just going to paraphrase from one of your articles here. This is from a while ago. So there's Neuralink, which raised $650 million at a $9 billion valuation. That's Elon's project. Synchron, 145 million. Precision Neuroscience, 93 million. Paradromics, 87 million. Sam Altman from OpenAI is supposed to be co-founding Merge Labs. That hit close to a billion dollar valuation before launching. It hasn't even launched yet. There's a bunch of names, a lot of money. And these are just the implanted companies, right? So you listed a bunch of companies that are companies that are primarily going through regulatory approval with the Food and Drug Administration or other medical regulatory licensing organizations like within the governments, where the goal is for people who are suffering from ALS or suffering from like paraplegia. These are people who would be eligible to participate in clinical trials where they'd have a hole, you know, cut in their skull, an implant that would be implanted inside of the brain, which could read brain activity, and then it interacts with something outside the body, like an application that helps decode that brain activity and might enable them to interact with an iPhone or an iPad or smart things within their home so that they can interact with the outside world, which is an extraordinary possibility. So those companies are one set of neurotech companies. The other set of neurotech companies are companies like Meta and Apple, who instead of investing in technology that's implanted inside the brain, are looking at wearable devices. And so, you know, a lot of people have an Apple smartwatch. The Apple smartwatch already has inside of it sensors that pick up things like heart rate or smart rings that pick up things like temperature or movement. And for these companies, what they're looking at is putting sensors that pick up brain activity at a much lower signal rate than inside the brain. So you might have a few electrodes that are inside AirPods or in the soft cups that go around your ears or pick up what's called peripheral nervous system activity. So as your brain sends a signal down your arm to your wrist and picks up your intention to swipe or type or move, it can pick up that peripheral nervous system activity. So this is picking up noisier, like less sensitive brain data. And by less sensitive, I mean, it's not as fine tuned signals as being inside the brain, but can be really powerful for things like being able to interact with a device or being able to interact with augmented reality or virtual reality. So these are very different things, which is the numbers you were listing were for the implanted neurotechnology world for people who have serious diseases. The wearable world is for everybody else. Like instead of just tracking your like heart rate through your Apple Watch, you track your stress levels, you track your brain activity, you track for me, I'm a chronic migrainer, you track your likelihood of an impending migraine or your likelihood of an epileptic seizure or a lot of different brain signals that could give you brain health information and brain wellness information. And so when I say it as big as the economy it as big as every person who has a brain and wants insights into what happening with their brains or for every person who has a mouse or a keyboard and might come to replace the mouse or keyboard with interacting with those devices with a slight flick of their finger instead of moving around on a mouse. Okay. The one company that I think people may have heard of is Neuralink. Oh, sure. Yeah. Which is doing something fundamentally pretty different from some of the stuff that you were talking about, whether it's a headband or earbuds or whatever? And how is that different from, say, what Neuralink is trying to do? And the reason most people have heard of Neuralink, of course, is because Elon Musk runs Neuralink. And one of the very hard things about implanted neurotechnology is the limited number of neurosurgeons who can perform what is a very delicate operation to get a device into a person's brain. And Neuralink started to build basically robots that could do part of that surgery with the vision of being able to have clinics all over the country or all over the world that could implant what is a very tiny device. And then the very tiny device has basically like hair-like threads that are attached to it that reach through the brain and embed in the brain. So what a Neuralink device does that's very different than these wearable devices is it's reaching into lots of different parts of the brain. And it has many, many, many more electrodes than the couple of electrodes that you might have outside the brain that have to be read through the skull. So it bypasses like it's inside picking up brain activity where it's happening. Direct from the source. Direct from the source and at a scale that is nothing like what is happening outside the brain. And so he's been very clear that his vision is not that this is just for people who've suffered from ALS or paraplegia or things like that. He thinks everybody one day should have a brain implant that can read brain activity at that depth and potentially write to brain activity. And that he has said, like, he thinks this is the way that humans compete with AI, is essentially merging with AI, is how he's touted it. The merge scenario with AI is the one that seems like probably the best. For us. Yes. Like if you can't beat it, join it. That's Elon Musk talking to Joe Rogan back in 2018. So from a long-term existential standpoint, that's like the purpose of Neuralink is to create a high bandwidth interface to the brain such that we can be symbiotic with AI. Now, how close is that? How far is that? I have no idea. I think it's a ways out, right? There aren't even FDA approved implants yet, let alone for healthy people choosing to drill a hole in their skull and putting a device inside of it. But you don't necessarily have to drill a hole in your head. AI companies are looking at wearable devices that would allow you to get similar results. OpenAI has an entire division that is now dedicated to trying to build brain foundation models, where one day you would have a model, like instead of a large language model that just speaks in text and in video and other kinds of context, it also could go from brain signals to text to video to being truly multimodal. And they have this big investment in merge labs to create a brain-computer interface through a very different mechanism than other ones do. All of these trillionaires who have AI companies are investing in major neurotechnology because they see these as converging fields. People like Elon Musk see these as ultimately converging together, that you interact with AI through your neurotechnology, that you interact with the rest of the world through your neurotechnology, which also then decodes what's happening in your neurotechnology. It's this loop between the brain and AI that they're really building toward. So that's where we are. Brain implants for people who need them and neuro head straps at Best Buy for everybody else. And trillion dollar companies racing to be the first to make money off of a loop between you and AI. After the break, we'll find out if this stuff can actually read your mind yet. Because under certain circumstances, it kind of can. Thank you. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Balligan. I'm not worried about McKinney. My only concern is what happens in the back. The biggest decisions. You're going to look at stats and numbers. He has no shot at making this World Cup team. And the truth about the U.S. national team. It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarterfinals or potentially a great run into the semifinals. The World Cup is almost here. Experience it all with us. USA! USA! Listen to Inside American Soccer with Tom Bogart and Tab Ramos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us. The United States will not stand by and allow any power, however great, take over another country. From iHeart Podcasts, Saigon. Please allow me to introduce Joseph Sherman. You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam? I should stop talking so much. I like hearing you talk. One city, a divided country, and the war that tore America apart. This is for Vietnam. I've taken a hit from Japanese ground fire. Do you read me? They're pouring petrol all over him. He's holding matches. I'm on a landmine. For freedom. Let's get out. Freedom for Vietnam. Run. Saigon, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Rob Benedict. Sting hears madness. The world should hear about this. There's a fire coming to this country and it's going to burn out everything. Listen to Saigon on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, I mean, there's kind of two ends of this that you're talking about here, right? There's the being able to control Pac-Man with your brain. Cool. That's one part, right? And then there's somebody being able to read what is in your brain. I mean, effectively, you have to have that, right? If you're able to control something, something needs to be reading what, I suppose, what you're thinking. And that's the other end of this, right? Yeah. And then the question is, now we go back to the philosopher side of me, what does it mean to think? And what is it that you're really decoding? What does it mean to think? Okay. Well, I mean, it matters, right? Because when people hear mind reading, what they think of is like all of the thoughts in your head, the images, the feelings, this like really robust concept of what it means to be a thinking human. And what neurotechnology is decoding right now is like one stream of that, not everything that's in your head. Like most of the consumer neurotechnology, it's decoding basic brain states. So it's decoding, are you tired? Are you happy? Are you feeling like positive or negative. Are you paying attention or is your mind wandering? But it's not decoding like your full mental landscape. And increasingly what AI is being used to do is to train on weaker and weaker signals to be able to translate intentionally communicated speech. Now, what is that versus just thought? If I want to send a text message, I am formulating words that I intend to express out of my brain and into the world, as opposed to like the private ruminations, like the things like you're turning over an idea in your mind, you have a new crush and you're envisioning that crush. That's not something you mean to communicate outside of your brain. And so what neurotechnology so far has been trained to do is to pick up that kind of speech that you're trying to translate out of your brain, which shows up differently in your brain. How does this stuff actually work? A layperson, I think we have a general idea that, okay, there's something called synapses and there's like electric signals going on in your brain. But how does that get translated out to actually data that a computer could read or that could be useful? So it depends on what it is that's being decoded out. But let's start with consumer wearables. Let's imagine that like I have an AirPods right now. Let's imagine I have earbuds in that are picking up brainwaves. So what are brainwaves? As you think, as you are feeling anything, as you said, synapses, right? Neurons are firing in your brain, which give off tiny electrical discharges. And when you have any dominant mental state that you're experiencing, you'll have hundreds of thousands of neurons that are firing at the same time, giving off those little electrical discharges. and the sum of those electrical discharges are what can be picked up outside of the skull. What these kinds of AirPods or like other electrodes can pick up is they pick up the brain waves and the amplitudes of the different waves. And then AI has been trained on those patterns in the same way that AI has been trained to be able to look at breast mammograms and be able to say, this one is cancer, this one is not cancer. It's like pattern recognition, right? So same thing is happening with brainwaves and brainwave amplitudes is different patterns and different brainwave amplitudes have been associated with positive, negative, mind wandering, paying attention. So it's just taking what are brainwaves and then training AI to understand this is what it looks like at any particular moment. so there are gonna be some people who hear this and think this sounds amazing if i can play pac-man with my brain now yo i bet i can just run a call of duty lobby and maybe you know a couple years maybe like really truly play with my brain now granted there's gonna be some people who are thinking oh this you know this would be awesome for is like scrolling tiktok in bed without my hands like this would be amazing probably also that yes scroll like that is just oh it's painful to imagine. Truly, truly. Yeah. Actually, like in the most literal sense of the word possible, brain rot. But there's going to be some people who are super into this. Yeah. And honestly, sounds cool, right? You know, I'm able-bodied. I'm able to use the computer with my hands. But, you know, if I don't have to, if I can do it from across the room, that's kind of cool. And then the ability to, for somebody who has lost the ability or doesn't have the ability to do some of the things that I'm able to do, type or speak or whatever. if they can control a computer communicate with people directly amazing your book however is called the battle for the brain and i feel like there there you have some caveats i understand what should we be thinking about This is it This is your last stand for privacy All you got left at this point is what happening inside of your brain Right? At this point, people have given up their privacy of their everyday interactions. They carry a device around all the time that tracks their every movement, even their every movement throughout their house. They have listening devices in their bedrooms. They have smart refrigerators that know exactly how much food and other things that are going on. When you even start to type a search into Google, it auto completes. There are all kinds of predictions that are happening all day long about what you're thinking. That's why you have targeted advertisements and social media feeds that are tailored to what algorithm thinks that you will like. But it's still not perfect. and there is still a piece of you you hold back that you do not express. And that part of you is in your mind. And when you start to hook up sensors to that part of you, that's it. You've given that last stand of freedom, that last bit of privacy to companies that have shown themselves to be particularly bad at having your self-interest in mind. So let's back up even, because we're speaking about it as though it's something that will happen in the future. No, no, it's happening now. So yeah, tell me about it. What I did was I wrote the book really to say, like, here's what's happening right now. Not like here's some future sci-fi scenario, but here are misuses of the technology that are happening right now. Here are educational institutions in China that are forcing fifth graders to wear headsets that track their attention and their mind wandering in the classroom. Here are police across the world who are using wearable neurotechnology to interrogate criminal suspects. Here are employers who are tracking productivity and tracking whether their workers are fatigued or paying attention in the workplace. Like the kinds of abuses and misuses that you might imagine. I give example after example in the book of them happening right now. Just not at scale. That's the only difference. The employer monitoring thing, I think that one's like particularly because that really feels like something that could happen immediately anywhere if it's able to happen in one place. You know, it's funny because I my sister's an employment attorney. And when she read my chapter, Your Brain at Work, she was horrified. So here that has to be really interesting family. Oh, it's like fun family talks. But OK, so here's the basic idea. Like, especially since the pandemic, Bossware, the technology that tracks people through like using their webcams when they're working at home or software that's been installed onto their computers to track their productivity level, like Bossware is everywhere. Remember back when everybody was like buying those mouse jiggling devices on Amazon to make it look like you were still working? Yeah. But if they're in your brain. Yeah, exactly. We'll just start with the backdrop of people recognize employers are doing this, but there still is, to your point, like there's the jiggler on the mouse. There's the little cover on your webcam so that when you step away from your computer, it's not totally obvious that you're not at your computer or like the fake me that I can put into my chair to make it look like it's me or whatever else. Starting more than a decade ago, there was a company that, and I'll just say this company has done the right things privacy-wise, but they're a good example nevertheless. So the company is called SmartCap. And what they developed was this like forehead band, but it goes all the way around that picks up electrical activity from the brain. And it can be worn inside of a hard hat or a train conductor cap or a baseball cap. and what it tracks is fatigue levels of an employee, like on a scale of one to five, are they wide awake or are they falling asleep? And if you're a truck driver and you are driving down the highway, it could be useful for the employer to be able to track whether or not you're falling asleep if you're fatigued. So that was the purpose. It was for safety reasons that they launched this, but pretty quickly other companies around the world were like, well, cool, I can figure out who's coming to work when they stayed up all night partying. I could figure out like who's the productive and paying attention person versus the person who's mind wandering all day. And so these neurotech companies started selling to enterprises to say, why don't you just start monitoring brain activity? Why go through all these inefficiencies of downstream measurement of productivity? Just measure productivity at the brain. You know, so where you started for a lot of people would say, I want to make sure the truck driver is awake. But it's super interesting here because I think there is a way in which there's sometimes we're okay with certain people being monitored, especially if you're not a truck driver. It's okay if that person is being monitored because they need to be monitored. But hold on, hold on. You talk about monitoring me now. Right. And once you allow the one, the question is whether you're allowing the other. But also in my book, I give the example of the truck driver just so that people can grapple with it exactly for that reason, which is sometimes we are going to be OK with it. And the question is, with what limits? Is it OK for the employer at the same time that they're monitoring the truck driver's brain activity for whether they're wide awake or falling asleep to also decode their brain activity of the person that they're fantasizing about? Well, I hope everybody says no, right? like track if they're falling asleep at the wheel, but there's a whole bunch of other information that you could extract from the brain at the same time. And that should be off limits. So one really interesting question that I've seen come up a lot recently is what sort of privacy that law enforcement can expect. And there might be some people who would be interested in knowing what a police officer, what an ICE agent was thinking when they did something. Should we have access to police officers' brain data? That's interesting, right? I like the analogy because we've been dealing with this on police cameras, right? Does the public get to watch the body cam footage? The reason that body cam footage was originally developed was for the police force to have a second source of you know, kind of monitoring what the police officer was doing rather than just from their perspective. And then the public started to say, well, if you're recording that, we want access to that data as well, right? And there's no reason why there should be asymmetric access to that information. Asymmetries in power are part of how you end up with abuses of power. And checks on those asymmetries can be really powerful as a way to counteract it. But I'm going to start from a different place, which is I don't think that the government should have access to our brain data. So I don't think that there should be an asymmetry to begin with, because I don't think either side should have access to each other's brain activity data. I think the police should not be able to interrogate a person's mind and the public shouldn't be able to interrogate the police's mind that we should have a right to mental privacy on both sides that is symmetrical, not asymmetrical. And we can actually set those guardrails. And so how do you design your laws and how do you design your policies so that you get the upside without also having to accept the downside? Okay, so how exactly are we supposed to design these laws? Also, why hasn't anyone just made these laws already? Well, they have kind of, but it just isn't working out very well. We get into that and talk about how we could do better after the break. I'll see you next time. radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. American soccer is about to explode. The World Cup is coming. Ramos sending on the Army. Score at the chip. Score! I'm Ty Bramos. I'm Tom Boak. On our podcast, Inside American Soccer, you'll get the real storylines. I'm not worried about Pulisic. I'm not worried about Balogun. I'm not worried about McKinney. My only concern is what happens in the back. The biggest decisions. You're going to look at stats and numbers. He has no shot at making this World Cup team. And the truth about the U.S. national team. It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarterfinals or potentially a great run into the semifinals. The World Cup is almost here. Experience it all with us. USA! USA! USA! Listen to Inside American Soccer with Tom Bogart and Tab Ramos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us. The United States will not stand by and allow any power, however great, take over another country. From iHeart Podcasts, Saigon. Please allow me to introduce Joseph Sherman. You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam? I should stop talking so much. I like hearing you talk. One city, a divided country, and the war that tore America apart. This is for Vietnam. I've taken a hit from Japanese ground fire. Do you read me? They're pouring petrol all over him. He's holding matches. I'm on a landmine. For freedom. Land, get out. Freedom for Vietnam. Run. Saigon, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Rob Benedict. Sting, here's madness. The world should hear about this. There's a fire coming to this country and it's going to burn out everything. Listen to Saigon on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you take away nothing else from this episode, I hope you're able to take away the fact that Neurotech is here right now. It is not just sci-fi. It's not abstract. It's not something in the future. It already works. and there was already big money behind it. Okay, that established. Let's go back and think about what happened when social media got popular. So as a society, we all really got taken by surprise. We weren't prepared for the addiction, for the disinformation, for the 45th president of the United States, any of that stuff. And the same thing is happening with AI right now. We have slept walked our way into a society full of artificial intelligence. So how do we not repeat that same mistake? How do we prepare for neurotech? Nita says the answer is probably making some laws right now while we still have time. In this book, what I advocate for as a starting place is a set of norms. And the norm, like to name the norm, it's cognitive liberty, the right to self-determination over your brain and mental experiences. And then how that translates into law, it shows up in a lot of places, right? the easiest is imagine setting an international human right where the right is updating existing human rights to reflect the kind of modern threats. So privacy should explicitly include a right to mental privacy. The right to self-determination, which is a collective and political right, should also be an individual right to self-determination. So you have a right to access and change your brain Freedom of thought needs to include your right against manipulation and punishment for your thoughts And some states have started doing what she describing California and Colorado have both passed laws that treat your neural data as a new protected category of data There are some laws that are starting to be adopted, particularly in the United States, where the idea is to create a sensitive category of data. So in states that already have comprehensive privacy laws, like in California or Colorado, to recognize neural data as a category of data that's sensitive and requires special kinds of processing for that. And that gets us part of the way there in that the companies have requirements and limitations on how they actually address and use neural data. The problem largely is that the inferences about mental state don't happen in isolation. And so, for example, if you start to have electrodes that are picking up brain activity and those work together with, glasses that pick up through eye tracking data where your gaze is. It's the data together that starts to allow for really precise inferences. We didn't have to articulate these kinds of rights before because we just assumed we had them. But technology sometimes reveals to us what our limitations of law and philosophy are. They help us see, okay, law assumed you had it. We didn't have to name it. It assumed you had freedom of thought. It assumed you had mental privacy because there was no way to violate it before. And now there is. And so now you have to name it. So I think it's a good attempt. We're starting to see movement in this direction. That's what we would hope to see. The problem right now is in the execution. And I think we'll close that gap eventually. I think eventually we'll start to recognize that there is a right to mental privacy, that that right to mental privacy doesn't matter how you get at brain activity. It's getting at brain activity at all and that we need to create special protections that give people unique rights to do so. And hopefully we do that before the technology becomes widespread because it's almost impossible to claw back rights. It's a lot easier to protect rights in advance. How concerned are you that we're just going to get used to a company having access to our brain before we actually get the chance to do something about it preemptively? It is something unusual that I had to convince my editor of, which is when the paperback version of my book came out, which was a year after the hardback copy of my book came out, to let me write a new chapter, like a kind of postscript. And I titled that chapter Normalizing Neural Surveillance. But it shows that's kind of exactly how it happens, especially when you encounter new technology in settings that are unfamiliar, meaning like they're oftentimes paired with something that isn't the threat. You go to the perfume counter and you're offered the chance to wear a neural headset to tell what your favorite perfume is, how your brain reacts to perfume. Or you go to the Museum of Modern Art and you're invited to put on a neural headset to look at an extraordinary AI art installation and then become part of the art as your brain activity merges with the art in visual form. These are real examples. These aren't hypotheticals that I'm coming up with. These are real things that are happening. And what happens is people then have positive associations like, wow, that was so cool. Not, wow, that was so scary. I just gave up my brain activity data on the beach to meta. And it's how we normalize the technology and give up like a whole new category of data, our last passion of freedom without ever thinking about it. I'm inviting us to think about it. I'm begging us to think about it, right? And I am like, please, let's this time think about it and make the right choices so that the technology, which can be extraordinarily promising, which could transform brain health and wellness, which could be incredibly empowering, becomes a tool that does all of those things rather than a tool of surveillance and of stripping us of our last stand for freedom. And moving away from the privacy and the law side for just a second and going back to philosophy, the commercialization of neurotech and the outside access to that data also has some implications for your own sense of who you are. I think there has to be some space that we create for us to continue to be human. And I think that space is the space of mental reprieve, like it always has been. It's always been assumed. It's always been presumed that you would have it because there was never a way to access it before. And I think, like, think about this. Think about, like, your closest human relationships. Like, what makes them close for you? Well, I suppose you can tell them anything. Yeah. And you choose what to tell them, right? And that's different than what you choose to tell other people. There is an asymmetry of how much you're willing to be vulnerable with another person, how much you're willing to share with them. And you get to make those choices. and if that choice was taken away from you, right, the contents of your mind were something that other people had access to, like it would both change your relationship to the person that you're closest to, but also change your relationship to yourself because maybe you start to try to censor your own thoughts or you're worried in the same way that you're worried about your writing or what you do in public will lead to other people judging you. And the earlier that happens, like a kid, I have a fifth grader. You know, she's all self-conscious and awkward about, you know, and if she has to worry that people know what she's thinking and not just what she's expressing to the world, like does her mental world become smaller and smaller and smaller? And I worry about that, right? I worry that the more we allow intrusions into the private, like, thoughts of an individual, the less space they have for becoming. So what is it that we can do? I'm going to assume you're not telling me to wear a tinfoil hat. No, it's not that. It is this time actually demand better, right? There's legislation that's pending in the U.S. Congress called the MIND Act that was introduced by Senator Schumer, which asked the FTC, the agency that looks into like trade practices and consumer practices and figure out like what are the gaps in federal law that need to be filled to actually address and enable us to have neurotechnology be beneficial to us. support that. Pick up the phone, call your senator and say, like, I support the MIND Act and want there to be the right set of protections that are in place. Look at and read this time. And I know it's fine print. I know we all just scroll past it, but only choose the companies that are actually committing to protect your neural data and to not use or misuse it. It's a big ask, but maybe we'll get it right this time. We have to. Like this time we have to. We really do. And I get it that it's hard. It's easier to be the passive consumer who thinks that they don't have any say in all of this. But we do. We have a say in it. It is up to the it's like up to us. It's up to the choices we make for what direction this technology goes. so long-time listeners will know this but originally this podcast had a different name and it had different hosts back in 2019 the original hosts Oz and Kara were asking some pretty weird questions for the time like could AI one day be used by the cops or could AI take people's jobs or spread misinformation or crank out art and music so fast that it cheapens it Were we losing our last chance to make decisions about AI and were we just sleepwalking into a future of AI? These questions sounded abstract or like science fiction or at the very least so far out in the future that we could just deal with it or figure it out when or if the technology ever got here. Because that's how people looked at AI when they asked those questions as the season ended in 2019. Anyway, that's a long wind-up to say that this is the final episode of Killswitch. It has been a very weird ride making this, but it also feels fitting that seven years after that first season, we're ending on neurotechnology. Something that sounds abstract. It sounds like science fiction. Or at the very least, it sounds like it's so far out in the future that we can just figure it out when or if the technology ever gets here. Who knows what the next seven years looks like. But I'd like to go back briefly to 27 years ago, to something that the artist Prince said while he was handing out an award at the Yahoo Internet Life Awards back in 1999. Here's Prince. Don't be fooled by the Internet. It's cool. It's cool to get on the computer, but don't let the computer get on you. it's cool it's cool to use the computer don't let the computer use you you all saw the matrix there is a war going on the battlefield's in the mind and the prize is the soul so just be careful thank you The battlefield is the mind, so just be careful. One last time. Killswitch is hosted by me, Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sheena Ozaki, Darlick Potts, and Julia Nutter. Our theme song is by me and Kyle Murdock, and Kyle also makes the show. From Kaleidoscope, our executive producers are Oz Velashin, Mangesh Hachigadur, and Kate Osborne. from iHeart, our executive producers, our Katrina Norville and Nikki Etor. My name is Dexter Thomas, and it's been an honor to spend some time with y'all. Catch y'all out there somewhere. Goodbye. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. American soccer is about to explode. The World Cup is coming. Ramos sending on Ernie Stewart. The chip. Score! I'm Tab Ramos. I'm Tom Boak. On our podcast, Inside American Soccer, you'll get the real storylines, the biggest decisions, and the truth about the U.S. national team. It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarterfinals or potentially a great run into the semifinals. Listen to Inside American Soccer with Tom Bogart and Tab Ramos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Most people out here think that taking care of one another is important. and most people would step up for a neighbor going through a tough time. Most people around here help out friends and family when they need it. But the funny thing is, most of us won't look for help when we need it. Talk to someone if you're struggling with mental health because most people out here really care. Find more information at loveyourmindtoday.org. That's loveyourmindtoday.org. Brought to you by the Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council. This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us. From iHeart Podcasts, Saigon. You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam? One city, a divided country, and the war that tore America apart. This is for Vietnam. They're pouring petrol all over here. Freedom for Vietnam! There's a fire coming to this country and it's going to burn out everything. Listen to Saigon on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.