The Jordan Harbinger Show - 810: Nita Farahany | Thinking Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Nita Farahany (@NitaFarahany) is a law professor at Duke University; a leading expert on the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies; and the author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology. What We Discuss with Nita Farahany: Consumer technology that can track, decode, and even manipulate what goes on in the brain is no longer just a plot device in some far-flung sci-fi novel — it's already beginning to come to market. An ALS patient recently set a record for communicating through a brain implant at 62 words per minute (in comparison, ALS-afflicted physicist Stephen Hawking was only able to communicate at about 15 words per minute by the time of his death in 2018). Though still in its infancy, consciously transmitted brain-to-brain communication has proven successful in the laboratory. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans can accurately sense political bias from subjects' unconscious thoughts. Brain scans reveal that a significant percentage of coma patients who can't speak or move are aware of the world around them and can communicate through electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/810 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Start your free trial today. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I'm inviting the reader. to imagine the possible ways in which, even with the current technology, right, not having to get into real decoding of complex thought in the brain, it still can interfere with freedom of contract. It still can be misused in the workplace. It still can be misused. But there's already actually a lot of use by governments worldwide of neurotechnology in ways that are good and ways that are bad and nefarious. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show,

we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional drug trafficker, money laundering expert, economic hitman, or tech mogul, and each episode turns our guest wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, our starter packs are how you do it. These are collections of favorite episodes organized by topic and they help new listeners get a taste of what we do here on the show, topics like persuasion and influence, crime

and cults, China, North Korea, abnormal psychology, and more, just visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Of course, you can use our AI chatbot, search thing of a jig to go and find anything from any episode of the show, including promo codes, feedback Friday, answers and advice, etc. Jordan Harbinger.com is where you can find it. Today on the show, we'll explore some new technologies that can actually read our brainwaves and see into us like nothing ever before. It sounds like science fiction. In fact, I thought it was many years away when I first started researching this,

but in fact, this technology is already here. The good news? Lots of medical innovations and new science on the horizon. The bad news. Social media companies, governments, and police are actually some of those on the forefront of adoption, development of these new discoveries. So, w'n-want-want, sad trombone. But today, we'll uncover how this tech works, what it can and cannot do,

and how we've got a special opportunity right now to shape how it's used before it's too late. I think the tech and conversation were fascinating in this one, and I know you'll be into it as well. So here we go with Nita Farahani. Your book almost starts off like science fiction. And I think we talked about this pre-show where I said, oh yeah, 10 years from now, and you're like, no, hold on, let me stop you right there. The idea that somebody can read our brainwaves and possibly see what we're thinking, I know it sounds impossible or so far in the future that it's not worth worrying about,

but here's some stuff to worry about, Jordan. First, I would say most people, when I start to talk about the coming age of consumer brain wearables, the fact that we can track and hack your brain, they're all like, oh, yeah, okay, I've got a lot of things to worry about, but that's not something I'm going to worry about because that's, you know, that's far off into the future. No, it's here. It's arrived. There are already consumer brain sensors.

I'll back up even a step further. Sure. People are very familiar with at this point having a heart rate sensor. in their watch. They're very familiar with a Fitbit that they wear, the tracks, their movements. I got a ring on right now that does that, right? No big surprise. Probably picks up like mood and changes and, you know, temperature. Mood. It's not a mood ring. This isn't 1991. No, no, no, no, no. But there are like the or the do you have the, the Oro ring. Yeah. So it's in the sponsor the show. So you can mention them by name. Shout out to Oro Ring.

I don't know if we have a code, but whatever. Check the deals page. Yeah, I think it does body temperature, whether I'm sleeping, although I'm always sort of like, how does it know if I'm actually asleep? Sometimes it's a little bit wrong, but it's kind of hard to complain. It's amazing. It's a ring, and it still knows that I'm moving around or that I have a fever. It's incredible. It's very small, and it tells a lot of information about you. And it's making inferences based on how much you're moving and, you know, what your temperature is and how its temperature changes when all of those things. It's making inferences, but it's pretty good.

People are used to GPS location being tracked pretty much at all times now through their phones and other devices that they carry around with them. But when I tell them that, okay, and now it's the era of brain sensors doing the same thing, they're startled. Like, it just hadn't occurred to them that we would soon have sensors that you could wear on your scalp and in your ears that would pick up your brain activity in much the same way that all of the rest of our bodily information is being decoded. And those sensors are already being used by millions of people worldwide in headsets that they wear and use for meditation. and they are already being used in workplaces where more than 5,000 companies worldwide are using even just one of these companies devices, a company called SmartCap, that uses these sensors that are in baseball caps or on a headband or inside of a hard hat that picks up brain activity. And here it's the electrical activity in the brain that it's picking up to try to

decode if a person is wide awake or asleep. And launching literally with a in the next few weeks and also in the next few months are a bunch of products that are now multifunctional ones. And by that I mean, you know, we both have in earbuds right now. And those earbuds can allow us to take conference calls and do podcasts and listen to music. And the next generation of them have brain sensors in them that also pick up the electrical activity in the brain and allow us to track a lot of what's happening there. Likewise, headphones, major headphone manufacturers have partnered with neuro tech companies so that the soft cups that go around your ears have a bunch of sensors that are put into them that pick up brainwave activity

as well. And so the era of tracking and decoding and even manipulating and changing the brain has arrived. And it's about to go mainstream as the huge tech companies like Meta and Google and Apple and Microsoft are all in on developing and integrating these devices into their devices. If I didn't know who you were and we hadn't talked and clicked in the way that we did, I would almost think like, this is one of those kooky. She's like reading into stuff. Like, oh my God, they're putting microchips in the vaccine. Right.

It's like almost like that sounding level of this is impossible. How is it possible? How are my brain waves coming out of my head into earbuds that don't exist yet and being read by somebody? It just sounds fake. Yeah. I know it's not because I read the book, but I can't wrap my tiny brain. around this yet. Yeah. Well, I mean, so first of all, I would say one of the challenges of being in the space that I'm in is that there are a whole bunch of people who believe that their brains are

being tracked, which they're not. They wear tinfoil hats. Like, are those people right now? Have we come that far? I mean, maybe in the future, right? But like, there are a whole bunch of people who have believed for a very long time that there have been chips placed in their brains and that their brains are being hacked and tracked by other people. I'm talking about a very mainstream, real technology that every major tech company is investing in, developing, and many are already on the market. So meta, for example, just had a big announcement a couple of weeks ago. You know, they've had huge layoffs across the board. Yeah. It's unclear exactly what's happening with the metaverse for them, but it's very clear that they are doubling down on their AR investment on augmented

reality. And one piece of reality labs, and probably the biggest acquisition, one of the earliest things that I write about in chapter one of the book, is their acquisition of this company called Control Labs. And Control Labs was like my aha moment. I've been thinking about neurotechnology forever, but it was hard to see how it could go mainstream, both because there wasn't like the killer app to make it mainstream, but also it was a separate device you'd have to wear. It wasn't a sensor that you could embed into everyday technology. And I saw this presentation. by control labs at the time where they were talking about taking neural sensors, brain sensors, and putting them into basically the form of a watch to pick up brain activity as it goes from your brain

down your arm and through motor neurons tells your hand to type or to move or to swipe. And they were like, this, this could be the universal control over all of the rest of our technology. We can integrate this into a watch. And I was like, wow, that blew my mind, first of all, the idea that you could type from your mind, that you could swipe from your mind, that you could interact with the rest of your technology, rather than just what was then niche applications, things like meditating with neural feedback. So I was like, okay, Apple's going to buy them because that's going to go right into the Apple Watch. Yeah.

And when a year later, Meta announced that they had acquired them for at least half a billion dollars, I was like, wow, this is about to get incredibly real because Meta has decided that this is part of its suite. And so a couple of weeks ago, they announced that they're launching in early 2025 with their neural interface watch together with AR and that it will be the way in which you'll navigate. It's the joystick, the controller. And that's a big deal. Other companies are already launching their earbuds and their headphones. But the fact that like the major tech players are all in on this, this isn't science fiction. I'm not some crazy person.

I'm telling people about technology that somehow. The mainstream has just missed that the target of all of the major tech companies, the next big thing in technology is the quantification, the decoding, the tracking and hacking of our brains. How accurate is this stuff? Because it seems like, okay, maybe I can turn a switch on and off or I can look at something and click on it. But it seems like how detailed are these things able to get? Am I able to, you know, like when I dictate on my phone, I'm talking out loud, do I just not have to do that anymore? Or is it more like, okay, no, you can open your web browser and click on something and that's pretty much yet. The rest of it is the same. Yeah, it's a great question. So it depends on the application. So first, EEG is what we're talking about right now. There are different kinds. And so EEG means electroencephalography. What that picks up is brain wave activity. So as you think,

as you do anything, you have neurons firing in your brain. They give off tiny electrical. electrical discharge, hundreds and thousands and millions of neurons are firing as you think and do things. And those happen in patterns, characteristic patterns that can be picked up from EEG, from these different sensors. And then AI, as it gets better and better and better, can decode what those patterns mean. So first, it depends on the sensors. Like, are we talking about one in each year, which is not picking up a huge amount of brain activity? Are we talking about 16, like the ones that are going to be in your headphones? so you're going to have more activity that's being picked up.

There's some noisiness, like interference with muscle movement and eye twitching and other things. Also, like, I have a lot of hair. The hair can interfere with the signal quality. And so I'd say, you know, these are not perfect in picking up data to begin with. But the AI has gotten much better. The sensors have gotten much better. And the ability to filter out noise and filter out muscle twitches have gotten much better so that at this point, brain states.

can be picked up. You can't literally decode complex thoughts. Like my inner monologue, simple EEG in my ears is not going to pick that up. But don't let that fool you into thinking, then there's nothing to worry about because there's a lot of information you can probe from. So simplest things you can pick up are, are you paying attention? Are you engaged? Are you bored? Are you happy? Are you sad? Are you tired? So brain states like that. But just as you described, like left, right, you can pick up and translating that kind of brain activity into moving around the screen or on, off for your light switches, those kinds of things you can already do. And then getting to more complex, you know, navigate around the screen, replace your mouse, replace your keyboard, that's coming and decoding your intention to type.

That's part of what Control Labs has been working on and seems to be making huge advances on, which is instead of typing on an actual keyboard, you can think about typing once you've trained. it. So like you practice a couple of times. It picks up what those signals are. Then it remembers those are the signals and you think about doing the same thing and it decodes that activity. See, that's really interesting just from a medical perspective. I'm terrified of getting something like ALS, you know, the one where your body just sort of slowly shuts down. It's just a nightmare. And I pray that they just fix this or figure out how to cure this. But in the meantime, if somebody can't tie, I mean, even if you just are quadriplegic or something like that, I mean, wouldn't it be

amazing if you could just look at your screen instead of having to say everything out loud, which must get exhausting after a while, you could just sort of look at something and you could swipe and the thing would move for you and then maybe you dictate a few things here and there, but the rest of the navigation is all done with your eyes. It might not even need that. It might just be able to know what you're looking at, but the less effort, the better, depending on your level of ability, I suppose. Even not necessarily depending on your level of ability. But yeah, first of all, I would say the possibilities for people who have locked in syndrome, who have ALS, who have the inability to communicate, who've lost their ability to speak, who've had a stroke,

who are suffering paralysis and no longer have the physical movements that they once had, to be able to regain their independence and ability to communicate with other people through brain computer interfaces extraordinary. And there's implanted technology. This is what people have most heard about. It's stuff like NeurLink or BlackRock NeuroTech. There's only about 40 people in the world right now who have those kinds of implanted. technology, and those are all part of clinical trials. But still, the advances are unbelievable in that group. I mean, just a couple of weeks ago, there was a report out of a research lab with an ALS patient who was able to communicate at 62 words per minute, who otherwise could not speak

just from brain computer interface technology. Wow. I mean, just by comparison, Stephen Hawking, at the end of his life, having the best technology available to him. He didn't have brain computer interface, right? But people were creating custom technology just for him to enable him to speak. He was only able to speak at 15 words per minute. For most of his life, he was at one word per minute. Oh, gosh. Like, that's extraordinary.

The possibility is amazing. But, I mean, think about it for you, too, Jordan. Like, you're driving. I know you would never text while driving. I actually don't do that. Good. You basically just need one close call. Yeah.

And you're like, oh, my God. Or you have to have kids and then you realize you probably shouldn't do that. Yeah. But suppose you need to send a quick message and you would never do that while driving. Some people would. They shouldn't. You just think about it. And you're like, oh, you know what?

I'm just going to think about sending off the message. Now, some people do that voice. You know, you have like my car has a little button you can push and it's really inaccurate. And most of the time I just get so frustrated I give up on trying to actually send the text message. But you can do that. You can type thinking about typing. And the average person, I think, will find that the friction of interacting with other technology that we haven't even realized as friction, it's a little weird that we have to use a mouse to move

around a screen. It is. It's weird that we're on a quirky keyboard. There are these, like, steps between what you're thinking and what you're communicating with the rest of the world that are actually a lot of friction in getting your thoughts and communication out. And so the, I think, idea of a lot of this is eventually it could make our interactions with other technology much more seamless.

You just think about moving and you move or you move your hand, you know, when you're in virtual reality and you end up just moving in exactly that same natural way. You don't have to use a joystick that says go left. You just think about going left or you go left or you swipe your hand left and you're there. I suppose the, I don't know if it's the inverse, but the other direction of this would be then it sort of follows that the technology would be able to speak back to you without you. Like I'm looking at you on a screen. So if I wanted to bring this computer setup with me, I have to bring.

a freaking screen, a keyboard, and a mouse. So if they figure out the keyboard in the mouse, great, but I still need this damn screen. So if the technology can communicate back into my brain without, in a very similar way, perhaps, then all I need is the computer, which essentially, I don't know what size the computer is in my phone, but it's at least the size of my phone or smaller, but there's a screen there too. And there's a lot of battery tech in there. So what if we didn't need the battery to be as big because we didn't need the screen, the touchscreen, and the display, and the lights and all that stuff, maybe the phone could be half the size or twice the power or whatever it is, and I'm just interfacing with it while it's in my pocket using my brain. Yeah, entirely possible.

I think the possibilities are limited only by our imagination for what could eventually be made possible. And there, you know, there are researchers. You know, I talk about in a chapter I called Beyond Human in the book, I talk about some of the research that's already been done to try to enable brain-to-brain communication. And I give this example of this experiment, which I, which, you know, kind of blew my mind. It's really, we're going to look back on it one day and think, like, oh, how primitive with that. But they wanted to see if they could put three different people in three different rooms and have them play a game of Tetris with each other, where the three different people would only communicate with each other brain to brain. And they would only communicate with the Tetris game by brain.

And so one person who was the receiver is what they called them would get messages from the two different senders. The two different senders would see the full screen. They'd see the block falling from the top. They'd see the bottom of the screen and whether or not the piece needed to be turned. And if it needed to be turned or, you know, turns left or right in order for it to fit at the bottom of the screen and clear the line. And so there would be one person who would send the message by brain using one of these EEG headsets. the person who was receiving it would have an EEG headset. And then they had something that writes to the brain called transcranial direct current

stimulation. So they'd get like a little flash in their brain, which would help them visualize and give them the kind of yes, no message to their brain directly. And they do this. They play it. They play for a while. They did this, I think, like 16 different times with a number of different groups. And the groups were able to do this winning at like a rate of 88% of the time just by this

brain-to-brain communication. And there's even been research studies where people have done brain-to-brain text communication. Like think of like a text message you want to send and then transmit it to the other person by brain-to-brain communication and then have them visualize it. And that's pretty extraordinary stuff too. So we might not need screens. But they're not looking at a screen. They're just seeing the text in their head. The person sees the text in their head, right? They have a screen in front of them. They see the message. And then, transmit it, not through the computer, but through brain computer interface to the other person. The other person sees a screen.

Oh, okay, because I was like, holy crap, that's even more incredible. Okay, no, they see a screen. That makes more sense. No, no, but the first experiment is more incredible because they are seeing the yes, no, in their brain, right, through a light. Yeah, that is cool. Like, it's literally like a flash of light that is helping, like giving them the message directly to their brains.

So this is already sort of happening. We're just at the level of smoke signals in some way or low resolution. For that part, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, brain to brain communication, we are at the earliest stages of it, right? We're in kind of infancy scratching the surface, but conceptually, people are already playing it out. Crazy. That's amazing. It is crazy. Does it only work for conscious thought? So I was thinking when we were talking about the medical stuff, okay, great, I can communicate when I'm unable to type or speak. That's amazing. Where are we if somebody's in a coma and it's like, what's going on in their brain? Can we do that yet? Or is that stuff? buried under layers that we aren't able to access. Yeah, I mean, that's such a good question. And it's such a hard question. So I'm going to break it down in two ways.

One is what we've just been talking about is consciously transmitted communication and thought. But you can pick up a lot of pre-conscious signals. And that's part of some of the scary stuff that I write about in the book is kind of probing the brain for information. So I could show you an image. Like, I really want to know if you react positively or negatively. to images of Republicans and Democrats.

And so I show you a bunch of pictures. And I say, I don't want you to tell me your political affiliation. I just want to guess it. Sure. And so I show you a bunch of different Democrats, and I show you a bunch of different Republicans. And then I look at the unconscious signals in your brain, both recognition, but also emotional responses that you have. And then I say, okay, I can tell with a pretty high degree of accuracy what your feelings

are with respect to these candidates and these parties. I can even do that with messages. That's interesting. Like the machine's broken. It says you can't stand any of these. people. Hmm, I don't know. I have to recalibrate it. Right. Well, that's why I then shipped and maybe I'm going to show you some messaging as well that like aligns better with the parties. That might help me too. But I can pick up that kind of unconscious information. But the second part you asked, which is the person

who's in a coma, this is really hard stuff because there was a long period of time where we thought people who are in a persistent vegetative state, meaning like that's a medical and diagnostic classification. There's no more conscious thought. Like that's gone. They can't there. There's nothing happening in that way there. And part of that was an inability to access their thoughts. And so there were researchers who started to take people who had been classified in a persistent vegetative state and put them into large neurotechnology machines called functional magnetic resonance imaging machines.

It's basically like an MRI, but it's looking at the brain instead. They would ask them a series of questions. And they would say, like, if the answer to the question is yes, so there were yes, no questions, think about walking through the rooms of your house. If the answers to the question is no, think about playing tennis. And this would engage different parts of the brain, motor activity or spatial kind of reasoning. And they found that for a few of the patients that they put in, they got responses and they got accurate responses. And they came to believe that, you know, somewhere between like 20 to 40 percent of the people who'd been diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state were actually minimally conscious or had locked insin.

Oh my God. That's such a nightmare. So they're trapped in an unconscious body, sort of? Oh, my God. That is like most of our, like, worst nightmare, right? A different project that I've been working on for the past few years. I've been working with something called the Uniform Laws Commission. And the Uniform Laws Commission has representatives from every state that have been appointed usually by the governor of that state to work on model laws where uniformity of laws is useful in the United States. And one of those laws that the Uniformity of Laws is useful in the United States. And one of those laws that the Uniform law, Commission has written is called the Uniform Determination of Death Act, which has two parts. The first part is death as most of us understand it or know it, which is when like the heart stops beating and you stop breathing, which we call circulatory and respiratory death. But for a limited number of people, maybe you have like a in-hospital heart attack or something like that. And you come into the hospital and your proton mechanical ventilation. Some of those people have had such catastrophic brain. injury that they have no more brain activity, right? They're never going to wake up again. They're never going to breathe on their own again. They have no brain stem reflexes. And those people are classified as being brain dead, is the kind of shorthand of it, right, or death by neurologic criteria. So we're working on updating that definition because it's kind of fallen out of step, the legal definition from the medical practice. And that's a tricky category if you think about the question you asked, because the more we learn about the brain, you know, the more questions are,

like how can you know for sure that, you know, there's complete loss of brain activity, that it's irreversible loss of brain activity. Those are some of the kind of complex questions that people grapple with in that. Oh, man, this is, it's so upsetting to think that there's people right now on breathing machines who are like, oh my God, wake me up or kill me. This is awful. I can't move. I can't do anything. But I know like the time is passing and they can't do. Oh, God, it's so absolutely a nightmare. We just don't know. We don't have access, right? I mean, so like, you're assuming all of that happening. The even more terrifying part just a layer on top of that is we don't know what's happening, right? We have no way to actually do code. Like, what are they thinking or feeling? Even if we can get to some basic yes, no answers. But even that, like, are they thinking like I wish you would turn off the machines? Are they able to think in that full way? Like, have they suffered so much brain injury that doesn't happen? And I should just distinguish that's different than the people who would be classified as brain dead. Those people. have literally no, I mean, it's all functions of the entire brain have stopped. They don't even have brainstem reflexes. The people who are in a persistent vegetative state don't satisfy

that classification. Yeah, just I'm thinking about somebody who like feels pain and can't do anything about it. It's just, oh, God, it's new nightmare unlocked, unfortunately. That's just awful. I do hear for some people, by the way, in reading the book that it is new nightmare unlocked for them in multiple ways. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Nita Farahani. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book these folks for the show, it's always about networks, warm introductions, and people sending them to me. And of course, I'm showing you how to build your network for free, whether you have a podcast or not, of course. It's for personal and business reasons, anything you want. Jordan Harbinger.com

slash course. It's all about improving your relationship building skills in a non-cransy, non-shmoosy way, very down to earth, nothing awkward in here, just practical exercises that are going to make you a better connector, a better friend, a better peer, a better copy. colleague, jordanharbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Nita Farahani. It is impressive, though, what we can see in the brain. I know you mentioned in the book, smart football helmets that can detect concussions. That's really incredible and sounds really useful. I know you kind of just mentioned before you can tell if somebody is a conservative or liberal or any number of, I guess, yes, no, kind of or emotional response questions. It seems like we're quickly heading to a place where people

in the government could maybe look inside our heads, depending on the resolution of the machinery here, and I think that's one of the scariest parts of all of this. You said that this is already happening in China. What's going on with it in China? That just doesn't surprise probably anybody that they're experimenting with this first. Right. There are smart helmets. There's possibilities of testing for epilepsy. There's all kinds of things that in our own hands, neurotechnology can enable us to do. It can help us to make brain health just as important as all of the rest of our health. It can help us to quantify and access it. But anything we can access, right, presumably other people can access as well. And if, you know, the devices are issued by a

company, then the company has access to that brain data as well. In many instances already, governments have gained access to the wearables that people are using from heart rate to your phone, to your email, to everything else that you use, all the rest of the technology that's quantifying and tracking things. And in China, they're already using neurotechnology to track workers and students. And it sounds like doing so in some dystopian ways, which should surprise no one, but, you know, was still startling to me because in the same way of, you know, oh, is this just some person who's talking about science fiction, you know, I would imagine it like, oh, gosh, imagine if an authoritarian government started to use this technology in ways that would

interfere with people's freedom of thought. And then boom. like news articles, it's happening in China. And so here's a couple of things that are happening there already. One is China has already required workers to wear brain sensors during their workday to track fatigue levels for a conductor, a commercial driver, workers on factory floors, their attention if their mind is wandering. There are even reports where if their emotional instability or just feeling show that they could be disruptive to the workplace, they're sent home, which is not a good thing

if you're in China and said, like, and told you're not doing your job, you need to go home. The Wall Street Journal, broke a report number of years ago about how in a province in China that there was an elementary school that was requiring all of the students to wear EEG headsets that was monitoring their attention levels during their school day. And then there was a console in the front of the classroom where the teacher could look at the students and see who was paying attention and whose mind was wandering. And that information was even sent to the parents and to the state. as well. And as you think about a system, like a social credit system that's built on, you know, are you paying attention enough in school or your mind wandering? That's terrifying enough. But you add on top of that, you know, we've been talking about what can the technology do. It almost doesn't matter what the technology can do if the government requires you to wear brain centers and says, we are tracking

your brain throughout the day. And if you think any thoughts that are divergent or dissident or we will know. And when you have that kind of informational asymmetry and power asymmetry, I worry about the chilling effect on the very ability to think freely, to dare to think freely, and the conformity and, you know, kind of inner silence that can result from that. And so, one, you can already decode a lot on a lot more than people think. And even if you couldn't, the mandated use of it is terrifying in an environment like that. It's like the TV that looks at you and listens in 1984, only it's in your brain, which is way worse. Yeah. Right. No, I agree.

I mean, like, I went back and read 1984 recently, and I was like, oh, wow. Like, yeah. We have this. Yes, we have this. Like, yes, exactly. The chapter where the TV was blocked by a bunch of stuff, they don't have to worry about that because it's in your head now. That's right.

It seems like this could be used to sell us things in the future. And I kind of assume that's where meta is going to start with this. Like, you think your ads are targeted now. Wait till it knows what you're thinking in that moment about how you're fat and you got wedgy and needed pants with a more comfortable waistline, which is a random example, people, just random. But, like, they're going to know. They're going to know, oh, man, I'm bored.

You know, I should go on a vacation. Look at the weather outside. And it's like, oh, are you bored? Do you want to go on vacation? Look how nice turkey is right now? I mean, how about this? Like, you're hungry as you're walking past a store. And, you know, between your.

phone and your brain sensors were able to pick up and give you real-time alerts of like, hey, 20% discount to walk into this store right here and get yourself a nice bar of chocolate. The precision will be startling. So companies are already using brain activity information to market to individuals. There's a whole field called neuromarketing, and I write about this as well, which is a field which is really designed to see how brains react to marketing. people are terrible about reporting their actual preferences. I shouldn't say terrible.

People report it. It just doesn't actually reflect what they do and what they buy. It's not right. They're very willing to report it. It's just not that helpful. And actually marketing to people is what marketers have found over time. And so instead, marketers started to wonder, could we look at how brains react to information instead?

So could we show them a marketing advertisement and see, do they show engagement? Do they show enthusiasm? do they show boredom? Does their mind start to wander in the middle of the commercial? And, you know, does mind wander to some different area? And none of this stuff happens in isolation. Eye tracking, all of the other metrics that have been used for a long time are added to brain activity. But it turns out brain activity adds a lot to the marketing information. It tells how engaged and at which point you're the most engaged. It tells, you know, how you feel when avatar, the original avatar was first launched. James Cameron was approached by a neuromarketing company who said he had said something in a magazine in an interview about how people he thought would be so deeply engaged by the Navi world and the imagery and the cinematography and their brains would light up or something. And a neuromarketing company was like, hey, look, we can actually show you the brains lighting up, can we offer you our services? So he partnered with them and they trial different trailers for Avatar using neuromarketing, seeing the extent to which people responded favorably.

or disfavorably and how engaged they were with the different ones and how emotionally charged they were in response to it. And they went with the trailer that had the strongest neuromarketing features. And I mean, you know, you could attribute it to the neuromarketing or many other things, but that was one of the most successful movies of all time, you know, hence it being remade and relaunched and everything that's happening with it right now. So that's already happening. But that's happening with volunteers who are choosing to go into labs or at home using headsets. to help marketers figure out how our brains react. Like who needs to ask subjects when we're all wearing brain sensors in our earbuds and in our,

headphones while we're at work, while we're scanning social media, and you come across an ad, which Facebook knows how long you're spending on that ad. They know whether or not you're looking at it. They know whether or not you've clicked on it. But now they know how your brain reacts to it as well. And they can commodify and sell that information to give much more precise feedback and targeted information to companies. So that is, I think, the reason meta is partly at least really interested in commodifying brain data. In an interview recently on their AR product launching

with the neural interface in 2025, they said as much, which is that, of course, the neural interface watch is going to be integrated with WhatsApp and social media and everything else, which, you know, not hard to connect the dots to figure out that that means the brains are going to be connected to all of that and our brain-based reactions to all the advertisement is going to be sold and commodified to target us. It's really incredible. I mean, you think clickbait is bad now. It's going to be really bad when AI can tailor it directly to you based on things that you are thinking that you don't necessarily even express. That's really creepy. You know, it's interesting. So I went on to chat GPT the other day. In my chapter on mental manipulation, I write about

brain heuristics, the shortcuts that put our brains in danger of misinformation and manipulation. And I was just curious, like, okay, well, Chad GPD, what are all of the brain heuristics that you know about? Like, what are all the shortcuts that make humans susceptible to disinformation or misinformation or manipulation? It was able to just spit them all out for me really quickly. And I said, okay, great. And how could generative AI be used to manipulate or tap into all of that to make disinformation worse. And it was very precise and being able to show me all the ways in which generative AI could do so. And I said, great. And so then how does Neurotech make that more profound and dangerous? And it had a very thoughtful response about the brain-based response to all

of the generative eye and how it could be a generative process, which is like, here's A-B-Testing, but A-B testing with your brain. Here is a sensational headline with false information that has pseudoscience attached to it, which taps into all of your shortcuts in your brain that make you think quickly, share information and not actually stop to really verify it. And you just put two side by side and see how the brain reacts to it based on the brain sensors and then push out the information that is the most likely to lead to the greatest spread. So it's a terrifying possibility. Yes. It's like a virus that's tailored to you that adapts to you. Like it lands on you and goes, this isn't going to work, but here's this other thing that's going to work.

And then it pushes out, you push it out to your family and friends, and it lands on them and does the exact same thing. Crazy. Yep. I know that employers can maybe monitor our brain data for productivity, might keep us honest at work. The truck driver example that you give, where they say, hey, this person's tired, they shouldn't be driving. That seems like a good use of this.

But of course, then we go all the way down the rabbit hole and we end up with our employers just knowing what we're thinking at work, which is really not what any of the, somebody signed up for. Yeah. I like to lull people into thinking like, yeah, that might be okay. And then, ow, no. Just kidding. Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. So the tricky thing is this stuff is nuanced, right? It's not all good. It's not all bad. And so one of the examples that I give in the book is fatigue management. So right now, truckers have, they're subject to long haul truckers are are subject to a whole lot of surveillance because of the cargo that they're carrying of the fact that they on the road are much more likely to be dangerous than you or I are in like a small car that is unlikely to pose as much damage to other people if we get into a car accident and if we're

tired and fall asleep at the wheel. So in order to monitor drivers, there's all kinds of information that's on the car, technology that's on the truck to track their driving and driving behavior. There's also in-cab cameras. that are trained on their faces to look and see if they're tired or if they're awake and other in-cab features to do that, which I say to say they have very little privacy right now on the workplace in their jobs. Brain activity monitors like brain sensors that monitor their fatigue levels, which have been shown to be really very accurate and maybe even more accurate than some of these other ways to try to see whether or not they're wide awake or asleep by checking

the steering wheel or the car, those types of sensors are already being used by thousands of companies to track truckers. And I don't think that's a particularly bad use of it. I actually think that picking up only fatigue levels from the brain that you don't have a strong interest in mental privacy if you are a truck driver and how sleepy you are while driving on the job. The challenge is just limiting it to that, right, which is if an employer is monitoring a person's brain for whether or not they're tired or awake, you could have access to a whole lot more of information about what's happening in the brain. And it shouldn't be, right? We should extract just the piece of information we want, override the rest of the brainwave data and not use it for those other purposes.

And so I show that as an example to say, there's a way we could do this, which could be beneficial to society with a minimum impact on individual privacy. And there may be some instances in which we think a person doesn't have an absolute right to keep other people out of their brains. But at the other end of that, probing a person's brain for, are they thinking about a startup? Are they thinking about unionization? Are they working with people that you want to try to find out if they're trying to collaborate and rise up against the unfair practices in the workplace? Are they happy or sad when you call them up and offer them a raise to try to, you know,

hijack the process of negotiation to make it more favorable to the employer? None of that should be on the table. this as a tool of widespread employee surveillance is, I think, a way to take workplaces that are already introducing far too much surveillance and making them truly dystopian, truly unpleasant places that kind of strip us of the humanity and dignity of work. Yeah, it seems like the negotiation example, which is in the book, is pretty simple to understand, right? Your boss offers you a crappy raise and sees your brain light up, and then you try to negotiate. negotiate and they're like, well, we already know that you're interested in the 2% raise we offered,

so you're going to take that. So we're just not going to budge. And you go, well, I need 5%. Well, we know you're lying because we saw your reaction from your brainwaves. You can't hide that. That super sucks. And I didn't realize that you could detect people who wanted collective action, but I suppose if we are doing some of the clunking around in the brain, you can sort of figure out what people want to do or what they're thinking about at work, even if it's not like, I want to start a union is emblazoned on your head, like the Sims game, they can still say, like, oh, when this person goes to these meetings, there's a ton of brain activity, or when they're meeting with other people who also have these preferences or stated or otherwise, their

brains collectively light up. Like, let's not allow them to work together. Or let's fire some of them or whatever. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, one of the ways in which I imagine, we could see that kind of unionization busting behavior happening. There's this really cool feature of working together when we're working collaboratively together, which is you start to see synchronization of brainwave activity between individuals. And that's great. It helps people collaborate better. It helps them literally get onto the same wavelength.

But, you know, if you were an entrepreneurial employer who was trying to figure out who is having synchronization of brain activity that shouldn't have synchronization of brain activity, right? So these people aren't working together on projects. They don't have any reason to actually be collaborating. And you start to see that kind of sync up between brains. You know, it gives you a tool of surveillance to look into and try to figure it out. And you start seeing that at scale. And you begin to wonder, you know, is there some kind of unionization? Is there some kind of collective action that's starting to start? I'm, you know, sort of inviting the reader to imagine the possible ways in which, even with the current technology, right, not having to get into real decoding of complex thought

in the brain, it still can interfere with freedom of contract. It still can be misused in the workplace. It still can be misused a lot by the government. And we haven't even touched on it. I mean, we talked about China, but there's already actually a lot of use by governments worldwide of neurotechnology in ways that are good and ways that are bad and nefarious. Yeah, I mean, okay, understanding that a truck driver is a sleep behind the wheel of an 18-ton rig, good. Being able to tell if employees are actually working or jerking around on the internet all day, medium to good. But the amount of stress added to a job because my employer can monitor my brain and I'm already, let's say an Amazon worker trying to put

a billion things into little pots at a speed that constantly is increasing. It's already miserable. Now I can't even freaking go to the bathroom without my boss monitoring what I'm thinking while I'm in there, while I'm on my 15-minute break, or even just while I'm walking between bins, no thank you. The tech does have to be made useful without being made totally oppressive. Yeah, I think that's incredibly well said, which is the real question for us right now is not whether the tech is here or not. It has arrived. It's not whether the tech is good or bad. It is both. It is how do we make it empowering for people and not introduce the most oppressive kind of Orwellian vision of what this could ultimately be.

And since I already give lots of examples of how seeds of that are starting to, you know, starting to be planted, how do we turn the tides to make this technology that does just become something that you're happy to have your ring on? You're happy to have your brain sensors on because you're able to, you know, focus on your own brain health and wellness and well-being and you're able to quantify and see things that you couldn't before. You're able to take your brain health as seriously as you take the rest of your physical health without worrying that your employer is, you know, trying to use it to make it a dystopian

workplace without worrying that the government's going to subpoena all of your brain data and use it against you in whatever context that they want to use it against you for. Yeah, that's a good point. And I'm just sort of in my head almost joking like, this place already sucks enough. I'm already walking between running between bins trying to put someone's stupid fidget spinner in the robot machine before I get dinged and demarited. Now I can't do, I can't even think about being somewhere else while I'm doing this. I mean, like, screw you, Bezos or whoever's in charge of that. Let me underscore that for you for a moment, which is I can't even think. So people have been willing to give up their privacy in so many ways. They say things like, well, I don't have

anything to hide so it doesn't really matter. Or I like getting the personal targeted advertisements. I bought something from my feed last week that was something I didn't even know that I needed. But I want people to really focus on I can't even think freely because it's not about whether or not you have something to hide or not. It's not whether or not there's something that could be used that is used against you by the government. It's whether or not you have a space of mental reprieve where you can think freely, whatever you want to think, anything, right? Imagine, fantasize, have a bad thought. We all have bad thoughts. have a safe space where that can happen. And that's the space I want us to make sure we preserve

and keep because we say that in jest, but that's what's at risk here, is that ability to actually think freely. Well, it seems like thought crime or whatever they had in Minority Report is not impossible. Again, it sounds dystopian, but okay, maybe I do want people planning to murder other people to be stopped and put into prison, but then again, they haven't actually done anything yet. So good luck drawing that line in the sand. Like I haven't thought about gutting somebody who's a terrible person and then, you know, but not really. I'm not really going to do it. I just sort of want you to get pushed into traffic right now because you're a terrible person.

I mean, maybe I'm the only one with intrusive thoughts like that, but I assume I'm not, right? Other people, you know, you've been pissed off before. Do I need to get arrested for that? You have a one-year-old and a three-year-old. I think you said something like that. Right. So, yeah, so I have a three-year-old and an eight-year-old. And, you know, I adore my children.

They are my life. Sure. But when they are both having temper tantrums at exactly the same time, I'm exhausted and want to go to sleep and they refuse to go to sleep, there are times where I think not the best thoughts about, you know, even my kids. And, you know, that's okay. We're human. That's part of what it means to be human is cursing out and imagining for a moment,

something terrible happening to the person who just honked in front of you or cut you off in line. Right. In line. I could make this look like an accident. Oh, my God. Well, I would never do that. Well, too late.

It's in the thought crime machine. Yes. I don't want us to have to censor our thoughts more than we already do. And I'll say this, which is I'm glad we filter our thoughts. I'm glad we don't act on our bad impulses. That's part of thinking freely is having that space where something pops up and you're just like, oh, God, you know, I'm a terrible person. Of course, like, I don't want anything terrible to happen to that person in front of me.

But wow, they really pissed me off. We go through all of this different kind of filtering. And that's part of us deciding what we want to share with the rest of the world and what we don't want to share with the rest of the world. I don't want those filters to be taken off involuntarily and unconsented to and interpreted where you have biases, but you're working actively to overcome them, but your biases can be picked up and detected through neurotechnology. Like, that's none of anybody's business. And how are they going to be able to tell the difference between a bias which you genuinely hold versus one that is an implicit bias that you are working

on overcoming. That's the kind of stuff that I just, I want people to have this space to work through being a better human, to being the best version of themselves they want to be to be, to be whoever they want to be, but to have the space that they can do that, figure that out for themselves. That's a really good point. Maybe you just have a strong aversion to Persian people because your neighbor growing up was a terrible human being and now every Persian you meet reminds you of them, but then you just pause and you realize that they're not. Yes. That little flaw being broadcast it every single time would not be definitely not be good in any way. It wouldn't be good and it would be it would change how other people perceive you. It would change your ability to work

on yourself, but also change your incentive. Like, yeah, you grew up next to somebody, that's how you felt. But every time you encounter somebody new like me who's person, you think like this is a human being I'm going to take on their own terms. I recognize I have that bias and I'm working against it. I'm working to put that away. That's part of the exercise of my growth as a human being. But instead, I encounter you and I see that little, you know, flash that says you're biased against me. And I just think, I want nothing to do with you. You have a bias against me. And you're like, no, no, no, I'm working on it.

It's like this was an early childhood exposure. I don't care. Right. Your brain tells me the objective truth. That's not the future we want to live in. That's not how we want to interact with one another. We want the space to continue to grow and change and have that space of mental reprieve. Also, just as a guy to have any sort of flash of anything.

I don't want every woman I talk to to be like, oh, he's one of those. It's like, I am, but I'm trying not to be. Yes, I am one of those, but really I'm trying not to be. At least not an inappropriate situation. I can't imagine it would be a good thing for most relationships either. You know, I think I give the example, the tamer version of that is you walk into your friend's house and they have, you know, an ugly. And this really happens to me, so, but not the brain part of it. Right.

You walk into a person's house and they bought a new couch that they're so proud of. and it is like a hideous mustard yellow. One of my friends is probably listening now, and they're like, oh, my God, she's talking about my couch. Yeah, you got to be careful. I got to be careful. And, you know, they said, do you like my new couch? And you say, oh, I love it.

And you were thinking, that is, wow. I mean, that is the worst couch I've ever seen. This would look great in a circus tent. You know, like. You are Persian, so we know. We know about y'all's decor. Well, listen, we like our gold and we like our bright yellows and things like that. But in any event, I walked in, and, you know, I think it's hideous.

But, you know, did I say that couch is hideous? Did I, you know, register my disgust? No, I said, oh, it's lovely. Yeah, would be right at home in one of Saddam Hussein's ballets. It's just, it's perfect. It's perfect. So, you know, and that's like those little white lies, those are okay to tell too. I mean, it's like we can have these thoughts of know your yellow couch is hideous.

And we don't need to have them broadcast against their will, you know, to other people. We don't need. And in that case, you wouldn't. hear through neurotechnology an output that said, no, Nita thinks that it is a hideous couch. But my disgust would register on these brain sensors, right? And if it's like we share location data, if we start to share emotional data. And so my friend says, what do you think of my couch? And then checks the emotion data that I've shared with everybody in her friend group. And she sees disgust that is register that, you know, that changes the nature of interactions

with other human beings. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Nita Farahani. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I would love it if you do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and figure out how you might support the show. I don't need your cash.

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Search for any promo code from anyone who's ever supported the show. Thank you so much for supporting those who support us. Now, for the rest of my conversation, with Nita Farahani. I know people are like, okay, well, I would just turn that feature off, but it's not about that. It's about brain hacking data leaks in the future. We thought the Equifax credit breach was bad. And for people who don't remember that, I think like 100 million social security numbers and credit scores or whatever were leaked from Equifax.

Maybe it wasn't quite that many, but it was a massive, massive breach. What would a hack or data leak of brain data look like? I mean, that could be much more damaging. So what, you have my social security number. That's annoying. but what if you know a bunch of stuff about me that even I don't necessarily realize? Yeah, so first, I mean, I should say there's some really interesting research that I talk about in the book on functional biometrics. So I'm going to start here with response to that because it's useful to know that brain data, just from brain data, can identify a person. So it's biometric or whatever that's called? Yeah, yeah.

So what's your, do you have a favorite song? I mean, you're probably listening to a lot of nursery school rhymes right now with like, Yeah, I was just thinking like the wheels on the bus go around and around. Exactly. So let's just, let's take, exactly. So take wheels on the bus, which I hear too often and you hear too often. And we could both just like sing that we are right now. We're both singing it in our head for a second.

It's playing in our head. So if you use a brain sensor while intentionally recording singing the wheels on the bus go around and round in your head, it creates a neural signature, a functional biometric. And then you could use that just like you. could use your face to unlock your phone, you could use singing the wheels on the bus go around in your head to unlock the phone, which means that if you have a whole bunch of data stored in the cloud, a whole bunch of brain data stored in the cloud, and you have people's functional biometric token, right, that has a unique neural signature, you can identify, re-identify, de-identified or aggregated data in the cloud to pick up, like if here's an individual storage

that this is all of Jordan's data, you can say that's Jordan's data, which you can re-identify. Okay, so we'll start there, which is it's not so easy to just keep everything anonymous. Re-identification of data has turned out to be very easy over time.

The second is there's what we can do today, and then there's the fact that AI is going crazy gangbusters fast and pattern recognition, and there is raw brainwave data. So the kind of data that we're collecting from brains is kind of like full resolution big data. It is, instead of extracting just that one little piece of information, are you fatigued or not,

I'm recording a lot of data and then I'm using, I shouldn't say I, scientists can record a whole bunch of data, companies can record a whole bunch of data, and then they can extract the piece of information that they want from it. So if you store all that data and then later want to go back and mine it, you can go back and mine it over time. And if a hacker gets access to it, they can mine it for all kinds of things, from simple things like if I want to figure out if you're suffering from cognitive decline over time to the scarier things like, you know, the fact that already researchers have shown that you can take brain sensors and probe a person's brain for information, like their PIN number or their address. Like you can put different images into the

environment, subliminal priming into their computer screen, for example, while they have brain sensors, and then probe for recognition of like, is this your PIN number? Is it this combination? Is it this combination is this combination. Wow. So you could actually accurately then get what the information is. That's sort of brain jacking as opposed to the information in the cloud, which you could mine for a bunch of insights about the person. Thoughts and emotions are definitely not unique. What about the data itself is unique? What's the fingerprint like part of my thoughts or brain? If you and I both put on a headset, we have to train the headset for a moment using software to our unique brain patterns. So every brain pattern and kind of the way, like the way your neurons fire exactly to sing the wheels on

the bus depends on your slight differences and wiring in your brain and your slight differences and who you are and all the environmental inputs that led to the slight differences in how your brain actually looks and acts. So you train the device and kind of pair the device to your brain. So the software has like a baseline program. You do the baseline program after a couple of minutes, it's then customized to you. And that's because while Wheels on the Bus has the same lyrics, how your brain processes it and how my brain processes it are just slightly different, right? So that we can see both people are singing a song in their head and decode that both people are singing a song in their head, but then pick out the differences based on how you're singing it versus how I'm singing

it based on how our neurons fire in the brain. And so that's why the best way to think about this is authenticating people rather than identifying people. And what I mean by that is, in order to match your face against you, at some point you gave an image of your face and then every future scan of your face is matching it to that original image. It's authenticating you. And the same is you would give a baseline recording of you singing a song and then every future attempt would try to match that song to the baseline of you singing the song. And that's how we authenticate people through biometrics and brain biometrics are unique in that way. That's really interesting and it makes sense. So somebody can identify me via my brain waves, even if I'm probably in the future, even if I'm not

trying to think about something specific as instructed. So will I someday be able to or be subject to identity checks, not with facial recognition or identification on a card, but because of my brain output, you know, do I go to the airport and then clear or TSA says, don't worry that Mr. Harbinger, we got you when you walked in. I think so. I mean, you know, You know, one of the things that I thought was crazy was it was more than a decade ago that TSA, that kind of precursor to that, plus what was Northwest Airlines at the time, were in a partnership to try to figure out if they could remotely pick up brain activity signals as a way to authenticate people in airports. And that didn't go anywhere as far as I know, because it's so noisy, right? remotely picking up brain activity is right now just sort of a science fiction idea because you need something, a sensor or something that's actually touching your head to pick. up that brain activity. But once you're wearing those sensors all the time, it should be a lot easier to do so. And governments from the U.S. to China worldwide are investing heavily in this idea of brain biometrics. And part of the reason why is that static biometrics are easier to fake.

Static meaning like they don't change over time. Your face that changes some, but it's still like other than like a facelift or something, you know, facial reconstruction, it's still static. functional biometrics, like how you move, you know, changes in your brain activity, those are a lot harder to fake. And so they're considered to be more secure ways of actually authenticating people. So I think passwords will be thing of the past. And at some point, I believe brain biometrics will be used at wide scale. It seems like that could also be misused. Like you mentioned, you can't really put a mask over your brain or now we're back to tinfoil hats. Maybe those are becoming actually useful, but you can't stop identify. Like, I don't have a choice but to identify myself

when I'm out and about. It reminds me of when China, this might sort of be apocryphal, but I guess China had this big concert from an artist, and they used facial recognition to capture a bunch of people who were criminals that just happened to attend this concert because they had every single person identified. And they're like, oh, here's this guy that's on the run. We knew he liked this artist and we were looking for it, or maybe they weren't. Maybe they just found a huge crowd of people and went, oh, here's three criminals. Let's go arrest these guys. Yeah. Look, anytime we give government access to the brain, I worry about it. And, you know, whatever the benefits that could be realized from government access to the brain, I think that the downside potential and the interference with

freedom of thought with government access of individual brains is too profound to make it worth it. Like, I'd rather a different kind of biometric. Like, I'm willing to take my insecure passwords, over giving government access to the brain because of the likelihood of interference. And, you know, we already see it happening. You mentioned Minority Report earlier. And I usually start my first day of criminal law class. I teach first year students criminal law. Usually start the first day by talking with them about Minority Report.

Most of them at this point haven't seen it and have never even heard of it. It came out before they were born or something. Yeah, exactly. But I'm like, okay, you got to go watch it because I'm going to make a lot of reference to it in this class because, you know, it is at least for a certain generation, a really, profound movie and making us think about the kind of concept of thought crime. And so I'm catching up at least a few in this generation and seeing the movie. But the idea of interrogating people's brains for crime, that was based on pre-crime. Now in a bunch of countries, there's brain fingerprinting technology that's being used to interrogate criminal suspect's brains to try to use what they find there to convict them. That's not minority report. That's real. It's happening. This like testing. for pre-conscious, unconscious signals in the brain of recognition of a murder weapon or a suspect who shouldn't be there or congruence between two different facts. Like, is the body in the lake?

Is the body in the river? Is the body in the house? Right. And then seeing if the brain shows the body is actually in the river because it responds in a particular fashion that can be probed and is being probed by law enforcement worldwide. I wonder if being Iranian or Persian has anything to do with your interest in this area because Iran, for people who don't know, one of the most oppressive countries in the world in terms of the Islamic regime over there. And any government having access to our brains is terrifying. But a government like Iran, which is authoritarian and a theocracy, is just unimaginably horrible because their power is unchecked. And they would absolutely misuse this technology at the first possible opportunity in order to cement their power

even further. I just have zero doubt about any government doing this, but especially ones where the power is concentrated into a handful of old dudes. Yeah, old religious. Old religious fanatics. Pseudo-religious, you know, zealots. So absolutely, the fact that I'm Iranian-American has such a huge influence in how I think about this. I grew up with parents who grew up in Iran, all of my extended family, 17 first cousins, aunts and uncles, all of them still live in Iran. My mother's brothers were in the Shah's military.

one of them was kept in prison and threatened with daily execution regularly after the revolution. My parents had intended to go back to Iran. They had just come here for my father to finish his schooling and were unable to go back because of the revolution. So I grew up in a household where the stories that I heard, the daily conversations were probably very unlike a lot of other Americans who aren't as attuned to what's happening in an authoritarian regime and don't have family members who are directly affected by it and don't firsthand both talk about it regularly and see it happening. As I've tried to talk with family members there over the years, you know, when the Green Revolution was happening, they are so afraid to talk about it for fear of censorship. And my mother's, brother's family literally are under surveillance,

almost all of the time still. But, you know, they're so afraid to talk about it that in the couple of times that I've been to Iran, even being in a car with them, like you'll bring up something political and they'll say, no, no, no, no, don't talk about it. Don't talk about it in here. On the assumption that at all times, in all places, they're being listened to, even when they're not, right? The chilling effect that that has on people is so much more profound than you can really understand and appreciate if you haven't been exposed to it because it doesn't matter how good the technology is. the control and the brutality and the randomness with which that control and power is exercised has such a psychological hold on people that it is chilling. And so when I think about a technology

like this, which somebody else might just look at and think like, oh, you know what, she's being sensationalist. Like this is all good. It's all exciting. We should just be looking at the upside of technology. You know, my mind instantly goes to how. how is Iran going to use it? And what is it going to do to the one space that people have? They're afraid to talk to me what's going to happen if their thoughts could be monitored as well or even if they just believe that their thoughts are being monitored. And so, you know, I think I've always approached technology with that greater degree of alarm and skepticism and concern of looking at the possibilities and then seeing them play out. And that doesn't mean that we in the

United States should kind of rest easily thinking like, well, okay, but we're not there. And so the government isn't going to misuse it against us. I give a lot of examples of bad misuses that have happened here in the United States, too. Well, plus the sort of 20 questions game you mentioned earlier with what sounds like neural spyware where you can show people images or numbers or something. I mean, yeah, you could get somebody's pin number. It seems like a long way to go to rob somebody. But what if you wanted to find out somebody's secrets? Like, there's sexuality and they weren't open about that or something they did, that all seems quite possible with this technology? Or what if you're a politician and you really want to know whether or not you can, you know, figure out who's going to vote and how you can push

them and what things push their buttons in order to do so? And we already saw an example of that with Cambridge Analytica. What if you have much more exacting information that you can buy and commodify? And if, you know, what's being sold by companies to politicians is brain-based reactions of information, it is not hard to imagine manipulation of campaigns and democracy in modern times here in the United States with misuse of this kind of data. Tell me about this P300 brainwave that seems like a lie detector almost. Yeah, it's not that, but it's certainly been touted as one. And so it's a great question. So this goes back a very long way in neuroscience research, which was the discovery that a person's brain reacts before they're consciously aware of it. And the example is that there was an experiment

where, you know, people were told like, here's a left click button and here's a right click button. Whenever you have the urge, click left or click right, but don't tell me when it is. Just whenever you have the urge to click, click the button and make a note of the time before, like, as you're clicking. So here's a little stopwatch in front of you, just mentally, like, make a note of that time. And what they found was before a person was consciously aware of their, like, urge to click and could record that time. About 200 to 400 milliseconds beforehand, their brain registered a response, this kind of wave, this P300 wave.

And so some entrepreneurial researchers thought, like, I wonder if we could use that for other things. And I wonder if we could use that kind of pre-conscious signaling to have it, like, light up in recognition to something. And so they showed people a series of images and saw across. a lot of different context that P-300 shows up. So there was a researcher by the name of Larry Farwell who decided that he wanted to figure out if he could create something called brain fingerprinting technology, which is to take that P-300 signal and apply it in the criminal context, like go to a

police file, find information that hadn't been shared with the public and shouldn't otherwise be known, and show a series of those images or words or prompts to a person and see whether or not their brain showed recognition or lack of recognition. And the signals look different. The amplitude of the wave that is kind of red out looks different if you recognize something or if you don't recognize something. And so the idea of using the P300 was to show, like, if I show you things that you shouldn't know from a crime scene and your brain shows recognition as opposed to lack of recognition, that tells us something about your likelihood of being guilty or being innocent. Right. Like if I've seen the body and nobody else but the police has seen the body, I might be the guy who put the body

there. Yeah, exactly. Now, I mean, if you've seen the body because it is somebody you know, you're going to have recognition of it regardless. And so you have to be careful about how you design the probe. And that's been part of the challenge is that it's kind of an art form, rather than a science form, to design those probes in ways that really show recognition that matters to us, recognition because you shouldn't know it otherwise. And so like something that's a unique piece of clothing at the crime scene that you shouldn't have seen. There's no reason you should recognize it or images of the crime scene, right? So you describe the body, like the mangled body that you should definitely not have any recognition of because you haven't seen it in that way.

If you have recognition of that, that may say, like, you were there or you did it. There's other signals like this in the brain. There's something called the N-400 signal. I mentioned congruence. This is the idea that like these two things go together or these two things don't go together. And so you could say, like, you know, I want to know if these two things go together. And so I say, you know, the body and dead or the body and alive or your wife and dead and the wife and alive. And you're trying to see like which things pair in the person's brain and which things don't pair in a person's brain and then make inferences again to try to probe the brain for information. And that is a technique that lots of places are investing a whole lot of money in. DARPA has a big program right now,

the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, which always, you know, is investing in like the cutting edge and sometimes really scary and sci-fi-seeming things. Like the internet. They have a program that's focused on that, like the internet. Yeah. So, yeah. So it's being used, that kind of that task, that P-300. He introduced it. Got a ton of funding here in the United States. It's happened in a few cases here, but hasn't taken off. And the scientists really have been very down on the P300. Nevertheless, he in what really could be like a movie of its own sold the technology to this company called Brainwave Sciences that had Michael Flynn and this like ex-KGB spy on the board of it and stuff. And they started selling it across the world to other law enforcement. And those, you know,

police, their reports of them regularly using this technique to, you know, convict people of murder. What should we expect in terms of how this tech deploys and unfolds over the next few years? How close are we to reality for stuff both like Neurilink or the earbuds that you mentioned actually being useful? And when can I upload my brain to the internet? All good questions. I'm going to do one thing first, which is I'm going to say, I think it's here and we can expect within the next two to five years it to be really just widespread, like as common as the other kinds of technology that we have. But we have a moment, like we have like a millisecond where I think we could do it differently. Like we've talked about a lot of the kind of more frightening aspects of this. And the biggest reason

I wrote this book besides helping people to really understand the technology and where it is and where it's going is to give a pathway forward, right? To say there is a pathway forward by recognizing what I call a right to cognitive liberty. And I lay out what that idea is and how we can use it in the book. And that pathway, I think, would change the terms of service and change our relationship with the technology in ways that could empower people

and make the kind of scary downside less likely to occur. But we only have a little bit of time because to your question of when is it coming, just this spring in the next few weeks, the earbuds, the multifunctional earbuds, are launching. headphones are launching this spring with major headphone manufacturers that have the brain sensors

embedded in it. You can already pick up a neurotac headset from, you know, dozens and dozens of companies. Neuro gamers are already playing video games using these headsets. It's just going to become more ubiquitous. Meta is launching their neural interface in early 2025. The question of when is it here, it's here. How widespread is it going to be in the next couple of years? It's going to be quite widespread by five years, I expected to be pervasive across society. As for uploading your brain, you got a little bit more time. We really have to have the likes of Neurrelink and other companies end up with their products being really safe and effective and people wanting to implant them in the brain to get to the point where we have such high resolution that you get to

upload the entirety of your brain. And then you got to ask the question, why would you possibly do so? Yes, exactly. What are you thinking? Well, we know what you're thinking. Well, we know what you're I guess at that point. Yeah, Nita, thank you so much. Really, really fascinating, really interesting. And I think in a few years, people will look back at this and say, wow, she was right about probably everything. And hopefully we do sort of miss, they miss us with the totalitarian control element of this and we stick to the good stuff. I guess time will tell. I hope that's right. I hope we move quickly toward adopting a right to cognitive liberty so that when we look back on this a few years ago, we say like, we like dodged a bullet and we're

We're all enjoying that, and we just share that with each other brain to brain. Thank you very much. Thank you for really thoughtful questions and a fun conversation and keeping it light and interesting and also really thorough and comprehensive. We've got a trailer of our interview with Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, and an investor in one of Silicon Valley's top VC firms. He drops by the show to discuss how we can tell when we're informing our intuition with the best available data or if we're just procrastinating to avoid making important

decisions. And why never give up is terrible advice and how to separate our winning instincts from our losing ideas. That's coming right up after the show. A piece of advice I most often give entrepreneurs is don't just work on the product, work on your go-to-market. It's a huge world. It's 8 billion people. How do you stand out against 8 billion people? Actually, in fact, that's kind of challenging. Yeah. That's a good, are we at 8 already? Yes. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Oh, I build this thing in a corner. No one sees it. It may be the best thing ever, but no one sees it, so it's never used. That's the problem on the entrepreneurship side.

So network, one key component. Another one is, which is you have a plan A, you have plans B, which is how to think about like, well, if A is not working out, maybe B will work, or maybe B will be a different path, or you know, that kind of thing. And then you have a Z plan, which is, it's not working out at all. What's my lifeboat plan? I'm going to row to a different set of plan A and plan B's.

There's always luck. There's always timing. The game is not so much, can I be one of the heroes, that's written about in the next hundred years, but the game is, can I do something that, where I started from, I can make something interesting. You're playing your own game. Yes, your passion's important, but you should be paying attention to market realities. You should say, well, what do the opportunities look like? What does competition look like? What's the best match for me to what the opportunity landscape looks like?

You could always say, well, more data is useful. The test is, what's the minimum set of data that you would actually in fact make this decision on. We need to separate our winning intuition or instincts from our losing ideas. More often than not, greater than 50% of time, you're going to have to give up on that idea. Everyone loves to tell these narratives of,

well, when I was two, I knew what I was going to do when I was 40. Yeah, it sounds good. And it was a straight line that was kind of smooth sailing. The wind was at our backs. It was kind of unproblematic. It's always fiction.

For more with Reed Hoffman in a two-part mashup that includes cameos by the founder of Spotify, the CEO of Yahoo, and more. Check out episode 207 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Really interesting, I did not lie in the intro when I said this is fascinating. Look, I'll say this right now. I will never willingly seed my brain data to corporations, but I have an addendum to this. What I just said is a big fat lie. I definitely want to be able to use the products and services that are going to require me to seed this data,

at least in parts, and it's going to be virtually unavoidable, unless I want to be the equivalent of the guy who refuses to use a freaking cell phone in 2023. What I'm saying is I think you're going to have to do this in some way in order to participate in modern society, because otherwise you're not going to be able to control or use devices or anything at some point. I mean, imagine you're watching TV and it's like, oh, you don't want to change the channel

with your brain, you want to use a remote, good luck. You have to buy one. It's aftermarket. It's going to be like that at some point. because it's going to be so much easier to just look at the TV and say, I want it louder, I want it quieter, I want to change the channel, I want to watch something else. It's going to be how you unlock your phone, you're going to log into your bank, you're going to pay for things like that.

Is this far-fetched? Maybe a little bit. I almost feel like it's certainly down the line. They already use facial recognition for payments in China, bank loans in China. This is also not rumor mill crap from Twitter. My Chinese teacher told me that she uses this herself. This is not a sketchy tabloid thing. this is a real thing that is very mainstream in China right now.

Now, what about the medical uses of this technology? Early disease detection? Yay! Companies finding out first and using that data against us? Boo! Detecting seizures beforehand and getting alerts? Up to an hour beforehand? This is all pretty amazing stuff.

I'm really looking forward to it. I just think the downside is very, very real. And probably, if social media is any indication, we're going to see the downside, almost more than we see the upside. And that's what we have to be careful of here. And remember, it's not just thoughts and cognition that can be read or monitored. It can also be emotions and other data that never quite reaches the level of consciousness for most of us most of the time.

It sounds like whoever has this data will actually know our brains better than we know our brains, which means they have a pretty distinct advantage when it comes to persuading or influencing us. That is a little bit worrisome as well. So we've got to figure out how to usher in this era, this inevitable era, in a way that doesn't result in total dystopia. And that is what Nita is on the forefront of with her work. We need a right to mental privacy. We need to store data locally, not on company servers. We need cognitive and mental privacy policies. And frankly, we should have a right to access and

keep and view our own data. Not only get it through the filter or lens of a company or a doctor, it's not something that should be left up to other people to decide for us, in my opinion. As for the work stuff, the employee monitoring, maybe the data for complex processing is done by a third party who does the brainwave collection and data processing, as opposed to just giving raw data to the employer who could misuse it or use it for things that are illegal or unethical. In other words, some random third party maybe sees that an anonymized employee has a gambling addiction and is doing it at work. As opposed to that person's manager knowing about that specific issue, they just get a report that the employee is distracted at work. And maybe they're

legally barred from asking exactly what that cause is, just like they are for medical issues right now. like HIPAA for your brain, kind of. Not that the supplier would never do anything unethical on behalf of a client, but they do have to go a little bit further to do so. And I'm old enough to remember the accounting scandal where one of the big four lied on behalf of, I think it was Enron. But, you know, adding a layer of accountability never really hurts, does it? The government stuff is really what should scare all of us. Even now, and here's a benign use of this, the government has used fitness tracker data to see if people were moving at the time of crimes were actually asleep. I mean, imagine somebody accuses you of murder and you can prove that you

were asleep because you were wearing your aura ring or an Apple Watch at the time and it said that you were out cold in your bed. This is just another step in that direction. So it's not wildly unprecedented that the government prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, et cetera, juries even would have access to our brain data in a trial. I also wonder, will there end up being a gap between those who have these devices and this technology and cognitive enhancement and those who cannot, those who can afford it. Is this fair? Is it unfair? Is this steroids in sports? Or is this kids who can afford to have an SAT tutor versus those that don't? And is that inherently unfair? Lots to chew on and this problem instead of issues? Certainly not going anywhere.

Big thank you to Nita Farahani. All things Nita will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. You can use our AI chatbot. Speaking of things that kind of want to look inside your brain, our AI chat bot can help you find anything we've ever done here on the show. Transcripts in the show notes, videos on YouTube, advertisers, deals, discount codes, all ways to support the show at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support us. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

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