SIO441: Elon Musk's Neuralink - Real Or Just Hype? Part 2

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 441. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Is part two, so make sure you've listened to part one. Wee -oo -wee -o -o. Alert. If you missed part one on Neuralink with Dr. Jenessa Seymour, go back an episode, catch that part one, In part two, we've got more about implantable technology. We've got mehr about what's going on at Neuralink a little bit. Some claims that don't hold up. Situations where other companies have under while doing this kind of thing. And consequences that has for people who have this technology inside them. Unfortunate stuff. Stuff. We're going to head on over right after this break. And this break is, of course, something that you do not have to hear if you are a patron on patreon.com/seriouspod. So please consider joining, get the bonus stuff, lose the ads, do the hangouts once a month. It's so fun and it supports the show. It brings us interviews like this in which I learned so much. Right afterthis, we'll get to part two with Dr. Jenessa Seymour.

0:01:18 Jenessa: There's a couple other ones I want to talk about real quick, and then I will get into what is, what, going on, why are we not sharing this? Um, claims were about, uh, how are we going to help people who are blind, um, either implants in the retina or or implants in the cortex. The first implant in the cortex was another company in 2021. This woman, Berna Gomez, had been blind for 16 years.

Implant in the visual cortex, and the title of this paper, "Visual Percepts Evoked with an Intracortical 96 -Channel Microelectrode Array Inserted in Human Occipital Cortex." They got her to be able to see. Um, implant removed after six months, part of the study protocol, um, to be, uh, and careful with this new experimental technology, um, you getting started. Um, give you an example of one of the reasons we might want to be careful. The first implants in a human retina happened in 2002. the retina, the back of the eye. Was mainly targeted at people with retinitis pigmentosa, which is, it's of the few diseases in the eye that can cause near total blindness. Like most people who are blind or deaf, they're not like totally blind or Deaf. Like they just limited vision or hearing. Retinitis pigmentosa leads really profound blindness. So I'm get these implants in eye because their visual cortex is working fine. And start sending signals and working. People are getting these implants. This is in 2002. And then in 2020, they went out of business.

0:03:03 Jenessa: One the patients, Ross Doerr, he do I do? I have these implants. I hear you might be going out of business. And he called and this woman told him, funny, you should call. We all just got laid off. By the way, you're not getting your upgrades. Were tons of patients who have this and the company's just pretty much gone. Else bought them up eventually, but they are focusing on the brain implant instead of the retinal implant. Are a number of people who are having to have them removed because it interferes with MRI, because it's causing medical problems. And eventually they run into the breaks, the wire breaks, and the company doesn't exist. So no one can fix it.

0:03:16 Thomas: Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow.

0:03:56 Jenessa: These people just have like an iPhone 8 in their eye. This tech is not supported.

0:03:59 Thomas: Yeah. Than that, though.

0:04:01 Jenessa: Yeah, stories are really rough. Principal investigator who ended up leaving, I believe, Ares Arditi, he said he didn't want to work there anymore more because they often develop a desperate hope for something that will help and are willing to try anything. I found it very disturbing that Second Sight sold so many of these devices to patients who were relying on hope rather than a proven performance.

0:04:29 Thomas: Hmm. Right.

0:04:30 Jenessa: Are a lot of people who were saying that like, yeah, it was good. It wasn't amazing. I was promised these upgrades. They never happened. Ended up needing an MRI because he started to get severe vertigo and his doctors were worried like you might have a brain tumor. But when you have an implant, usually what they'll do is they'll call the company who makes the implant to say, hey, is this MRI safe? And they they call and no one picks up the phone. And I still don't know if I have a brain tumor or not.

0:05:04 Thomas: Oh, wow.

0:05:05 Jenessa: He got a CT scan instead, and they think it's probably not, but an MRI would have been way better. And just, yeah, he doesn't know of his implant's MRI safe. People essentially of the company who got the brain implant. And I think the one that's the most tellling, Benjamin Spencer, one of the patients who got the brain implant said, it leaves you in a vulnerable spot, referring to hearing about this company closing. We were contemplating, are we going to get this removed now before there's no funding, before there's no assurance? Had I known three years ago what I know now, I probably wouldn't have signed up for it, these

0:05:43 Thomas: Yeah. I don't know what the solution to that is, you know, like it's, I so this is kind of a separate issue. This is other companies that aren't Neuralink, I guess, that are trying to do certain things.

0:05:53 Jenessa: This A different company, this is Second Site, um, I, I agree, I don't know what the solution is. I mean, on the one hand, like patients in this position where they have technology that is going to slowly stop working inside of their eye, that, patients are describing just leaving it in there because surgical removal is risky. And what is owed to these patients? You Of the doctors said like they never even thought to talk about this with patients because it didn't cross their mind, and like, I mean, there's no informed consent here essentially, like they didn't get to think about the possibility that this, tech, you, yes, it could break, the surgery, there could be all kinds of problems, but nobody talked to them about just like capitalism, you know, so I

0:06:15 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

0:06:48 Thomas: One of the handouts at the doctor's office. Oh yeah. Also capitalism. Uh, yeah, man, make sure to read that one.

0:06:55 Jenessa: Yeah, I don't know what's the answer here, like

0:06:58 Thomas: Yeah. I almost wonder if like, it's, if you're gonna do maybe in somewhere in any approval for this kind of thing, there's gotta be some plan of like, if you go under, you have to still have some sort of office group of people. That's enough to work on this like support for as long as these devices are going to be in people. And then maybe Maybe, I don't know if the government can, you help with that, but like, that's got to be part of the process somehow.

0:07:23 Jenessa: Like just one guy in an office somewhere takes takes these Phone calls Like

0:07:26 Thomas: No, I mean, I imagine there's got to Be, um, just should be requirements, you know, like you got to have the ability to maintain these things. If, you're going to get, like, I would think the way to do it is if you'RE going to get approval to do this, whatever you'RE getting approval for, you got TO have the ability to just long-term do that forever. And, and don'T know what, what kind of money that takes, but I, it can'T be that that expensive to like maintain something, even if you're not going to like keep making advances on it.

0:07:27 Jenessa: Yeah Like just literally spare parts, there are people like trying To get a hold of like spare parts to fix their broken implant, like, know what the answer is, but it can't be this, right? Like This Is unacceptable, yeah

0:07:55 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's in the capitalism pamphlet, by the way. We don't know what it can't be this something else.

0:08:08 Jenessa: Yeah Know, I, I think this is a cautionary tale, like before we move forward with, you, new startups I came across that are just, I'm probably exaggerating the number, but I came, many different companies that are putting these implants into human beings, and I don't see any assurances for you, is going to happen to them, if you, like, so many other startups go under, I Really feels like we should fix this before we move forward instead

0:08:22 Thomas: Oh, wow. Really?

0:08:45 Thomas: Well, it sounds like some of them had the like, this has to be taken out after six months thing. And it's just seems like, again, if that's the way to handle it early on, that makes sense. Like Like, that'll suck for people who are going to lose the ability that they have. But, like, once you get to some next level, there's got to be some requirements and some plan for what happens if things go wrong after that. There just has to be. Anyway.

0:08:53 Jenessa: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. I agree, and a lot of the people in those studies, like, when their implant had to come out, they quotes I read were people still expressing, like, "I'm glad I did this, I was part of advancing the science," you know, "it was fun while it lasted," like, I didn't see negativity of like "they took this from me, I'm angry." You It was done with informed consent, with understanding, um, yeah, think that is a really important cautionary tale of how this can go wrong, and that something to happen here, um, are some examples of, like, the devices' functions of these devices, um, how are we getting an implant into a brain, what is, like, like, physically, what is the implant, um, from Musk, in the beginning were all over the map of like, "oh, it's going to be like this net over your brain, but also we're going to inject it through the jugular," and, like, I don't know if you've heard of the blood -brain barrier, but That's

0:09:32 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I

0:10:05 Jenessa: Not possible, um, both inject it and have it then on top of your brain, um, keeps calling, calling it Neural Lace, which comes from a sci -fi novel, but in the sci -ci novel, it's like a horrible thing, like, it's, it's really bad and you shouldn't do it, and that is the message of the entire book, so, um, I don't know, I guess hopefully he didn't actually read it, um, may, first people to actually do an injectable, um, They did with Yes,

0:10:05 Thomas: Have.

0:10:34 Thomas: Oh, there was an injectable. Oh, okay.

0:10:36 Jenessa: It's so cool, this

0:10:37 Thomas: And you're saying it's Neuralink or this is a different company?

0:10:40 Jenessa: Is a different company called Synchron, who, uh, the stent, road, like a stent in your blood vessel, it never goes into the brain, um, think this could be a really big invention, uh, minimally invasive. You mean, it's still a stent in your blood vessel, but, like, we do kind of do that relatively often for like hearts and stuff. I don't know.

0:10:41 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

0:11:04 Jenessa: I'm not a medical doctor, I don't have any, of that works, in 2016, they started putting this into sheep, then in 2021, they put it into the first two humans in a trial, and they navigated a computer with electrodes in, in a blood vessel in the brain, never went into the brain, yeah, it's it's measuring it through the electrical activity through the blood vessel.

0:11:22 Thomas: Wow. In a blood vessel. That is interesting, oh, So it's still getting at that electric activity because it's got to have, like, otherwise, if it was just somehow, like, blood flow, there wouldn't, I imagine there wouldn't be enough to work with there, that's fascinating, hmm,

0:11:31 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah, instead, it's gone in and moved it up into the grain, and through the wall of the blood vessels are still picking up the brain's electrical signal, and that's enough, um, 2015, somebody did it in a mouse, so we went, like, mice, sheep, people, from 2015 to 2021, um, Neuralink didn't end up doing that, um, they talked about this, like, yeah, this neural lace idea. The closest thing I've seen other people doing is the flexible mesh idea. That came out in 2016. Totally different research group, like, 99% of the claims he's made are either things other people have done or sci-fi nonsense, sense, um, the one idea left that was pretty, pretty cool, um, idea for how do we get the electrodes in, a sewing machine device, a robotic surgery to get the electrons in, um, it's pretty cool, um, why, like you said, like, why aren't we giving this to everybody if this is so amazing and incredible, like, why, why don't we just put this

0:12:12 Thomas: Oh, the, a sewing machine, well, yeah the the who somehow was no longer paralyzed, I'm wondering what's going on there, why wouldn't everybody, why wouldn't a lot more people have that

0:12:53 Jenessa: Yeah yeah 2002, we got an implant into a monkey's brain that was able to control things, and in 2024, we're still in, like, experimental human trials, every once in a while someone gets one and then we take it back out, what, it turns out you can't just put needles in a person's brain, it's not good, good for you.

0:13:20 Jenessa: Yeah, what happens when we put things on the surface of the brain or, in particular, try to get these needle electrodes down into the brain? Biggest thing is this foreign body response, will happen to any implant, really, the immune system attacks it, and the brain's immune system, it works a little differently. Again, we're, you know, blood -brain barrier, you're in a different system here, but it glial cells will wrap themselves around the device and insulate it from the neurons. So it can't pick up the electrical, yeah, sorry, we can't take it off. So, you can't, you don't have to take it, by these blobs and the cells, cells around the needle will die, uh, they were stabbed, and you can't get them back because their central

0:13:11 Thomas: Hmm oh really yeah the big bear hug wow, oof,

0:14:13 Jenessa: Nervous system neurons, the

0:14:14 Thomas: All right, what the hell is in our evolutionary history that gave our brain the ability to do this, I don't understand this, the ability to do hand -to-hand combat with something, thing in your brain, some, you know, some, it's, that's like, do we get viruses in our brain, like, why do we even have an immune system for our brain, yeah,

0:14:21 Jenessa: Ability to, uh, the foreign body response or, oh, yeah okay, so this is super, uh, important, of your body, you're familiar with the immune system and white blood cells, and yada yada.

0:14:39 Thomas: We've done done some of that on here,

0:14:41 Jenessa: Yes, yeah, absolutely. So bladder infection, a lung infection, it's probably not going to kill you. It's going to be very unpleasant. If your brain ever stops It stops working. You're dead forever. There's nothing you can do. Your brain, being such an important part of your body, has to be protected. And it has the most protected protection, the -brain barrier, so um, instead of white blood cells, uh, the blood cannot actually touch and get into the neurons, uh, well, I guess it never gets into a cell, right, but it can't, like, physically get over to them the way that it's like, you know, bathing, your other, their cells, I don't fully understand how blood works, I gotta be honest.

0:14:54 Thomas: Yeah, I've heard of that, but I don't remember that being a cobra that can wrap around stuff, yeah, yeah, I, I've never thought of it until you just mentioned that, but that's crazy, yeah,

0:15:35 Jenessa: Yeah, but like, you have your capillaries spread all through your skin, right? And they're like right up against the cells for the transfer of nutrients. In your brain, you astroglia are serving as the the barrier. And instead of capillary straight to neuron, it goes capillary, astroglia, neuron. And it serves as this little intermediary, like a little firewall in your brain. And you are sick, every other organ's sick, but not your brain, brain's doing all right. When your brain gets sick, we call that meningitis, and it's super dangerous.

0:15:40 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah,

0:16:15 Jenessa: Um, when something finally manages to get past the blood brain barrier, you go to the emergency room, you're in bad shape. Um, the astroglia is acting as this little filtering step to get the nutrients over there and to, to stand in the way of any sort of toxic anything, anything bad, um, the brain then. And, well, that means a white blood cell can't get over here. What do I do? You have microglia. They're like the white blood cells of your brain. Perform a similar function. Just like a white -blood cell, they do that phagocytosis thing where they come over to goop and eat it up. Your brain, over the course of the day, just produces waste product like anything else. And the microglia come over and eat that goop up. And we actually think this could be one mechanism in Alzheimer's. We see in older adults, the micro glia don't work as well.

0:16:15 Thomas: That doesn't sound good.

0:17:12 Thomas: Yeah

0:17:13 Jenessa: They seem like they're not eating the goop as well as they should be and clearing things. Things.

0:17:13 Thomas: Gotta eat the goop.

0:17:20 Jenessa: You've got these microglia in there that are doing a white blood cell-like thingy to protect your brain. And yeah, basically this foreign body, this electrode in there, and the microglial are going to sound the alarm and attack it. And to protect your neurons, they're going to wrap around it and insulate your neuron from it. Really impressive, honestly, um,

0:17:45 Thomas: I don't fully understand what in nature would have given us that ability, like that rap, but whatever, I don't, would that be like physical objects just like getting stuck in your, you know, like

0:17:55 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah. Think like a, like a splinter, or um, I

0:17:55 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that makes sense. Whatever.

0:18:00 Jenessa: Think that happens in the rest of your body, like you can get like, um, if you get like something stuck in you it can get like calcified. I think it's pretty similar to that. Like anything that happens from the neck down, I have no idea how it works, um, I feel like I I learned about that happening, like scabs and calcification and like what happens when you get a splinter, like what white blood cells come over there and goop it up.

0:18:05 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it a big hug. Yeah so

0:18:26 Jenessa: Yeah, something like that, right? So it's a similar thing, this foreign body response that even call it that. Yes. So the microglia come over and coat this electrode and now it can't get the signal. And in the meanwhile, cells have died because of the pressure from this, because they were physically stabbed by a needle. If you break a blood vessel, you're going to get what's called hemorrhagic necrosis. As gross as it sounds. Hemorrhages in the brain causing cell death, edema, swelling. You can disrupt the blood -brain barrier, which is going to expose you to infection. It's dangerous. It's dangerous

0:18:32 Thomas: That's a barrier. Yeah yeah fine

0:19:11 Jenessa: To put needles in your brain. Brain surgery, fun. Not Yeah. Sorry. It is not to be taken lightly.

0:19:14 Thomas: I won't do it. Will you let us do anything fun? God, killjoy over here.

0:19:23 Jenessa: There is so much fun and non -implantable tech that I will be happy to tell you about. Um, basically, um, people have been trying to solve this problem for a while. Um, you know, one possibility is like, what can we make that's more biocompatible? How do we make the microglia not get upset? Um,

0:19:37 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. You would think there would be some way to borrow some of our own, like, tissue or something, some way to say, give it a little suit, give a little, uh, get a little jack. It's like the equivalent of the, like, uh, the trench coat. Like, you know, it's a, it's, it's, it's gonna infiltrate us, we'll give it little disguise, uh, from our own material somehow. There's got to be a way. No, I guess you just easily like it would just die and then, yeah, there's, I'm sure there's, uh, many smarter people than me trying to think of this, but it's surprising that it's that hard of a problem, you know. It's crazy.

0:19:48 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah. I like that.

0:20:10 Jenessa: Is. Yeah, this is what's so wild is, like, we've been working on this for decades and, I, are we getting closer? Excellent question. Self, um, don't know is the real answer. So, of the things that gets proposed here, one ofthe few papers that did come out that I thought, spoiler, um, was related to neural link was the title of this paper is "The Sewing Machine for Minimally Invasive Neural Recording." And authors on this, two of them are founders of Neuralink. One of them is a scientist who worked at Neural ink, two of them actually. And two of them are founders of Iota Biosciences, a separate company that makes this stuff called neural dust, these these little implants that, like, they're so tiny, and they go on, like, individual nerves all over the place. Super cool.

There's this one guy who seems to have never worked for Neuralink on here, but whatever, you know, people work across things, it's fine. It seems to be pretty clearly describing what we've NeuralINK heard in press conferences, Musk talking about and things like that. So what are they doing?

Um, idea would be instead of, like, here's the microchip and we're just gonna, like, stamp, shove it in there, or you sticking a netting on here, um, we're gonna do is just like how a sewing machine kind of the needle pushes in and it, um, the thread with it, and then when the needle comes out the thread stays. The design, I mean, it just, it just looks like a sewing machine honestly.

Um, the advantages that they are putting forward is they have a robot doing the surgery. Um, you have this machine precision, avoiding damage to the blood vessel, because we think that hemorrhaging is a huge part of the problem. So let's try really, really hard with this tiny micron level precision to stick these in without touching a blood vessel. Going to be these flexible little threads of electrode. So yes, a needle inserts it, but what's left behind is not a needle. It's this, this flexible little thread.

As opposed to a needle that is this hard thing that's then affixed to the skull, and now your little wiggly brain moves and the needle doesn't move and you get all the shearing damage. Yeah,

0:20:10 Thomas: Hmm. God.

0:22:40 Jenessa: It's gross, man.

0:22:39 Thomas: I didn't know about that. Yeah. Now,

0:22:43 Jenessa: Nice flexible little threads. Heads. They, was the idea. Paper, I went into a lot of detail of, like, this still caused damage. Oh, from this paper, this was better, that it was not getting that shearing damage where this.

0:22:45 Thomas: Does the brain cobras like that better for some reason? Yeah.

0:23:03 Thomas: Just this theoretical, or do they actually do the, you know, animal trials?

0:23:07 Jenessa: They was in rats. This paper was was published March of 2019. did this in the rats. And I think the thing that's unfortunate, they go through, they tell us all about, like, okay, we did this, this, this, and then, like, oh, there was still some damage, uh, whatever. Um, then the conclusion is one sentence that says, "We have demonstrated that the sewing machine approach is effective in recording extracellular neural activity in rodents and is worthy of further study and development."

I don't think they're wrong about that, um, but I wish they'd done a a little more of, like, um, me, a comparison of, like, how much damage is this relative to other, other of, implants, but it sounds like it's really promising, like, this is cool. So it's like, okay, there's, like, one thing left that Neuralink is doing that, like, other companies aren't doing, that's pretty cool. Um, so that's March of 2019, we also have in October of 2019, a paper comes out. Last one was published by some co-founders of Neuralink, some scientists at Neuralink. Paper, the first author is Elon Musk, and the second author is Neural Link, the corporation, and nobody else.

0:23:07 Thomas: Okay, okay.

0:23:38 Thomas: Corporations?

0:24:22 Thomas: Are scientists, my friend? Bizarre.

0:24:23 Jenessa: Apparently, I've literally never seen this in my entire career, a corporation, those are the two authors. No human scientist is credited as having written this scientific paper. Um, I found very strange. Um, it almost seems like a summary of that paper, but like way more optimistic. Um, called it a white paper, but as far as I can tell, that's normally like a, that, like, governments or businesses put out, like, from one business to another, and this is like clearly in a scientific journal. Yeah.

0:24:28 Thomas: Are.

0:24:55 Thomas: Oh, I've heard described as white papers, but that's weird. Huh.

0:24:59 Jenessa: I don't know, know, this one gets into, like, you inserted these electrodes using this sewing machine, blah blah blah, um, of 44 attempted insertions were, were successful, and I was like, what happens when it's not successful? Like, what does that mean? Um, a little sparse on the details. Um, somehow I doubt that Elon Musk wrote this, like, one of his lead scientists and a co-founder has this listed on his Google Scholar profile despite not being listed as an author. Um, I don't know, this seems, seems like a real dick move to not put people on this. Whatever. Okay, so I just assumed these two papers, couple of months apart, clearly describing the same sewing machine technology. That's got to be what that is, right? I figure the one place, if data, especially, you, what's going on in the humans, it's not getting published in the scientific papers. It's not being put on the FDA thing.

The press release, who knows how much you can trust that, but it's got to be in the patents. Um, not a practicing patent lawyer, but I did get an A-plus in patents, so whatever that sticker's worth to anybody. Um, fact about patents, in the specification section, you have to provide enough detail to enable a person having ordinary skill in the art to recreate the invention, with the idea that when your patent's up, anybody's going to be able to make this, uh, public information. Yeah.

0:25:29 Thomas: Interesting.

0:26:28 Thomas: Also, it's to know what you've patented, I imagine, right? Yeah. You don't want to have an unclear patent, and then it's like, well, oh, no, I actually own this. And it's got to be specific.

0:26:31 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah, how are you gonna Yeah, I Exactly. So this is the enablement clause. You must enable other people to make it. You must specify what the heck it is. Um, I find one and I go, "Oh, perfect, this has got to be it because the picture of the little sewing machine is the same as the picture in that other paper." And, of all, it has to be natural persons, human beings. Um, don't let you list corporations, uh, an inventor, um, there was Yeah.

0:27:06 Thomas: That's weird, huh? Oh, as an inventor. Okay. Because corporations

0:27:09 Jenessa: As an inventer, yes.

0:27:10 Thomas: Could hold patents. Yeah, okay, interesting.

0:27:12 Jenessa: Correct. So, um, what you do is the human inventors are listed, and then they assign their rights in the patent to the corporation. Oh, yeah, so you are probably used to, like, licensing an intellectual property, where, like, I retain my intellectual property right, but I I can like rent it to you. Think of assignment, like buying instead of renting. You're going to actually give up your intellectual property right to me. Usually, if, like, Google has a patent, the application, the inventors listed will be the software engineers who worked on the thing. And then the assignee will be Google, and goes to Google. Um, at this one that is clearly the patent for the sewing machine thingy, and the inventors listed are Timothy Hansen, a co -founder of Neuralink, a co-founder of Iota Biosciences who does not work for Neuralink, Sabies, a co-founder of Neuralink and it is assigned to the Regents of the University of California, and the provisional application was filed in December of 2014, before Neuralink existed.

0:27:20 Thomas: So, like Bell's dad, you, that axe chopping machine, and Beauty and the Beast, he yeah the hell

0:28:28 Jenessa: What that means is they conceived of this idea in 2014, and they had to have begun work on it in that time period. That was the provisional application. The So provisional can be a little sparse in the details. It's like planting your flag and you've got a year to get an official application in with the full details. And they did, sure enough, just under the wire, like most people do, get an actual application in. That was in December of 2015. They had their official application and to patent this thing. So the sewing machine is not owned by Neuralink. And it was invented before Neuralink existed.

0:28:29 Thomas: Does all that mean, they didn't acquire it somehow? Well,

0:29:17 Jenessa: Have to imagine that the University of California is licensing it to them. Have to be, because otherwise, what is in this man's brain? Like, how else did this work? But it definitely means this thing was conceived of before the company existed, and these guys started working there, and that technology was being implemented there, but they came up with it before they went there, and they've all since left. Yeah.

0:29:42 Thomas: Oh, They have? Oh, interesting.

0:29:45 Jenessa: Oh, I should tell you, so there were eight co-founders of Neuralink, uh, uh, in November of 2018. Kodak, the president, left in 2021. Rapoport left in March 2018, uh, the only one still there. Uh, Tolosa, the only woman who was a founder, left, left in February of 2020. Gardner, March 2019, he left. Sabies left in August 2020. And Merola left in June 2022. There is one of the eight founders other than Elon Musk who is still there, are dropping like flies. People who came up with the idea before Neuralink and got their patent for the idea long after they had left Neuralink have assigned their patent to the regents of the University of California.

0:30:35 Thomas: You? Got their patent after, after they left?

0:30:38 Jenessa: The patent patent was official granted May 30th of 2023. At point, Hansen and Sabies had both left already. There was a number of other steps where like they got their international patent filed in 2015. international patent was published in 2016. They got it in 2017. They published their new U.S. application in 2018. There's like all these steps involved. Um, I keep looking and I'm like, well, which, applications does Neuralink actually have? Like what patents does Neurolink have? Um, they have 40 patents assigned to them. Uh, of those are not yet granted, um, which makes sense. Normally Uh, you file your application, it gets published, which means publicly available, uh, about 18 months after you submit. And then it will be granted if you're going to get it granted one to three years after that. I'm looking and I see this thing that says cannula for grasping and setting lead with needle. And I open it up and the picture's

0:30:43 Thomas: Okay.

0:31:43 Thomas: Sounds like a sewing machine. Yeah.

0:31:45 Jenessa: It's super duper a sewing machine and It was filed April 1st of 2022, which I believe is uh after Sabies left or shortly before. Either one, the two inventors listed are Christine Odabashian, um, you'll find her listed as Odaba instead of Odabasian on the internet, I don't know why, um, has never published a paper or of any, anywhere, as far as I can find. And then Ian O'Hara, uh, worked for Neuralink until January of 2023, um, and has since left. Um, these are two people not at all associated with the other authors and a new kind of sewing machine thingy. So

0:31:47 Thomas: Yeah, who owns the fucking sewing machine, Jenessa? Does it work? Whose sewing machine is it? So many questions.

0:32:35 Jenessa: The Regents of the University of California, also known as the University of California, own the original sewing machine, and maybe they're licensing it to Neuralink, and Neuralink is also trying to invent their own, or maybe there's a patent war happening, I don't know. Both. Got this amazing tech. Got challenges with trying to make it safe and effective and last in a human brain. Have challenges with informed consent, making sure that people are aware of the risks and benefits.

Have a random billionaire making announcements about what this tech is capable of, with God knows how accurate it is or isn't. A lot of challenges in front of us. There's also a lot of opportunities. Do want to mention quickly that there is a lot of non-implantable tech. So I just think it's important to not frame this debate as like the risks of brain surgery versus the benefits of adaptive technology. It has to be the benefits of implanted adaptive technology over the benefits of the non-implanted tech.

So, for example, shout out to my friend Adele from grad school who made the Ability Hand. It's a prosthetic hand for amputees that does not require any surgery, and you can control it, uh, put this on and electrodes, no surgery whatsoever, electrodes detect the activity in your muscles, so you just flex, like, around your elbow,

0:34:15 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:15 Jenessa: Around your Bicep. And you can move the fingers and grab things and pick things up. Haptics in the hand will send vibrations back to the arm. So it also feels. You can feel touch and you can pick things up. For a lot of people who use prostheses like this, it will come to feel like your real hand, your Brain will, through neuroplasticity, map this all together, so, um, know, when you have something like that, I immediately think, I don't know why we would ever risk a surgery, especially with the technology we have right now, to like put an implant in your brain to control a prosthetic arm if you at could all eligible to use something like the the Ability Hand That Requires no surgery and like less than 500 bucks.

Yeah, it's truly incredible. You should check out the videos. Know, I promise I'm not biased just because I knew him. It's so, so cool. You know, there are blind people who learn to echolocate. No tech required. Are echolocation devices that help people do this. Don't have to jump straight to cutting somebody's brain open. Just think very carefully as we move forward in this really arena. It's also super cool. And there might be some amazing opportunities as well. Yeah.

0:34:16 Thomas: Yeah. Mm. -hmm Yeah.

0:35:45 Thomas: Wow. I, I, story short, what do, do we know of neural link has it made anything or done anything that we've seen that the people like, is it a black box? Hmm.

0:35:53 Jenessa: So we've seen, again, this is like all, almost all, like, YouTube demonstrations, um, release conferences, that kind of thing, uh, there is a guy who received one one on Februari of 2024, and in March of 2024 reports are, he is using it to navigate a computer. He sent a tweet, or I guess sent an X.

0:36:17 Thomas: So, There's A thing that's called a neural link then, like

0:36:23 Jenessa: The company Neuralink is making the N1 chip, and that is what this man has, think supposedly, would have been installed by that sewing machine device.

0:36:29 Thomas: Do we think that's the sewing machine, the stuff, oh Right, yeah, okay, that's just the installation method. Well, it's also a way to not have the needles in your brain, right, so some Amount Of That stays, or

0:36:43 Jenessa: Yeah, correct. Correct. The of the sewing machine would install the electrodes, and then only the electrodes would remain, not a needle, um That is what they are doing, that does appear to be a major innovation, um

0:36:53 Thomas: And One thing we can be certain of is every time Elon Musk brags about an innovation, it is 100 accurate and true and comes to pass very quickly. They

0:37:08 Jenessa: Clearly that is what has happened every one of these things he came up with it, um, so, oh, and the other day he announced, uh, their company Blindsight will be the next, uh, thing, um, N1 chip for the technology he calls telepathy where you control your computer, now they will have the new chip that will do blindsight for blind people, that's the next thing they're working on, even though they just had their first human trial of, uh, telepathy chip, uh, yeah, I don't know, man, it's all over the place, um, got monkeys moving computers, they got guy, people so far moving a computer, and we don't know much else because it's just not published, the

0:37:50 Thomas: Really ought to make monkeys type Hamlet or whatever, and that would be like the thing they do, that'd be funny, yeah.

0:37:56 Jenessa: Ultimate, uh, of that meme, yeah, don't know what's going on behind closed doors there, and I don's think almost anybody does, somebody

0:38:04 Thomas: Shit, okay, that's our, that's our deep dive on this company that we don't know anything about, that might has a cool tech but maybe doesn't, I don't, okay, it's very unclear, well But we don't even know what it, like if it works, do we, there are a bazillion patents that are stupid, nothing that don't work, I'm pretty sure. Isn't that normal?

0:38:13 Jenessa: Owns it, um We've got that one paper from 2019 by the owners of the sewing machine patent that does appear to show it worked in rats, and it might do less damage to the brain than other methods. And maybe those people are licensing it to Neuralink because they used to work there. Maybe.

0:38:46 Thomas: Weird. Why wouldn't they still work there then?

0:38:48 Jenessa: Left.

0:38:50 Thomas: Well, more on that as soon as we figure out what the hell is happening. Thanks so much for this deep dive. Is there anything, anywhere you want to point people? All right, fair enough.

0:38:51 Jenessa: Left. I don't really have anything going on. I got a job. I'm happy. Happy.

0:39:03 Thomas: Yeah, well, there you go. Dr. Jenessa Seymour, thanks so much for joining us! It's

0:39:08 Jenessa: Thanks for having me. It was fun talking about it.

0:39:27 Thomas: Eat the goop.