The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Promises and Perils of Neurotechnology – with Nita Farahany

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

Nita Farahany, a professor of law at Duke University and the author of “The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology,” joins Scott to discuss the threat to our privacy and freedom of thought, and the future of neurotechnology. Follow Nita on Twitter, @NitaFarahany. Scott opens by discussing the Biden Administration’s announcement that chip manufacturers that access $150M+ funding from the CHIPS Act must provide childcare. He then shares his thoughts on the bipartisan effort to take action against TikTok.  Algebra of Happiness: expressing love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Episode 240. 240 is the area code covering the western part of maryland in 1940 the 40-hour work week went into effect by amending the fair labor standards act and the very first mcdonald's restaurant opened in san bernardino california true story i was in a mcdonald's today i smiled at the guy and said can i have a small shake please please? The guy said, fuck off, and quickly zipped up his pants and walked away from the urinal. Go, go, go. That's good. Welcome to the 240th episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Nita Farahani,

a professor of law at Duke University and the author of The Battle for Your Brain, Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology. We discuss with Professor Farahani the threat to our privacy and freedom of thought and the future of neurotechnology. This is a very impressive professor. I think Professor Farahani, probably seeing her name everywhere. Obviously, the market is kind of coming to the professor because of all the focus on neuroscience and neurotechnology, but she is the real deal. Okay, what's happening? We've been thinking a lot about solutions we'd like to see in order for young people to feel encouraged to have more children, specifically around affordable childcare, housing, and education. And you think, well, okay, Scott, maybe not everyone wants a kid. I actually think there

are more people that would engage and be interested in a relationship, more people who would be interested in having kids. In a reliable relationship, more people would be interested in going to college. If all of these things were more accessible. It appears that some of our elected representatives in Washington are starting to think the same way. The Biden administration announced that any firm accessing $150 million or more from the funding of the CHIPS Act

will have to guarantee childcare options to its employees. The New York Times reported this could include options such as building daycare centers near the CHIPS sites, paying local childcare providers, or giving money directly to employees. As a reminder, the CHIPS Act includes a $39 billion initiative intended to supercharge semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. so that the nation can be less reliant on foreign providers. Other provisions of the Act state that chip makers receiving funding may not expand their businesses in China for at least 10 years. They must submit detailed financial

projections and share unanticipated profits with the federal government. Manufacturers are also encouraged to use union labor for construction. Even if they don't, workers pay will have to comply with local wages and engage in collective bargaining. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told the Times that these rules are intended to encourage companies to take only what they need, or put another way, prevent a PPP loan disaster from occurring again. So I think this is just, when you think about existential threats to our society, people talk about climate change. And I think that is a real threat. I think a bigger threat is the emissions from a rage economy where there's economic incentive to shitpost each other and to be

critical of the government, to be cynical about the future, to be less kind to your neighbor, to be less empathetic, to get awareness and a presidential nomination or become the wealthiest person in the world by being your own small mini coal fire plant constantly emitting noxious emissions of rage and divisiveness. I think that's actually the biggest threat to our society. But what also is a threat to our society? Population decline. And people say,

well, actually, it can't be an answer just to constantly increase the number of humans. And I agree with that. But until we hit what is supposed to be, I think,

the max of life expectancy, I think they believe just biologically it'll top out at about 110 or 120. We do want to do some, ensure we don't enter into the kind of not only population decline, but population denigration.

And that is an aging population where there are fewer people supporting the social services of older people. And as a result, we can't make forward-leaning investments that make us a more prosperous nation. So I think it makes sense to try and make the nation a more hospitable place for kids. A child now costs a third of a million dollars. And it's not trying to fit into some heteronormative, you know, philish-shaffley nuclear family notion that to be happy, you have to be a nuclear family and kids.

I think it's wonderful when people of all sexual orientations have kids. Kids need secure, loving households. And if you go super meta, and that is, okay, what is the forest for the trees here? It's that as mammals and as a species, the things that are most rewarding to us are sensations and feelings of reward, of love, of getting to love others, of maternal, paternal, platonic emotions, feelings of irrelevance. All of these things are rooted in one thing, and that is relationships. It doesn't have to be a romantic relationship. I think we emphasize or put too much emphasis on a energy with my parents, and that they paid off hugely. And I found a lot of emotional reward and had really wonderful, meaningful relationships. And we put too much pressure on that one thing. Having said that, I think that it is in the government's best interest to figure out a way to level up young people, specifically young men. I'm not talking about targeted investments in young men, but

targeted investments in vocational programming, targeted investments that expand freshman seats at colleges, that demand more of our universities in terms of efficiency and lowering costs. We should have taken half that money for the student loan bailout, which, by the way, is terrible legislation. The average student loan payment is $300 a month. It is affordable. Two-thirds of America didn't go to college, and they're now bailing out the third that got to go to college. And by the way, all we've done is shrink the tumor. We're not addressing the underlying cancer, and that is college is too goddamn expensive. Increase the child tax credit. We want happy, healthy families that are economically secure. And what makes households crumble on themselves? Mental illness, anxiety. And what is a huge stressor in terms of

mental health, emotional wellbeing, even obesity, it's economic stress. We have to invest. For God's sakes, when you think about investing, what is investing? Investing is taking your capital, your human and your financial capital, and delaying gratification such that you don't consume today, such that you might have a better world tomorrow. What could better define investing than motivating, than creating incentives, creating a context for people to meet one another and for people to create family?

Okay, what else is happening? There's an ongoing bipartisan effort in the Senate right now to give the Biden administration the authority to comprehensively address threats posed by technology from foreign adversaries. Well then. Senator Mark Warner, who is the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview with CNBC that the bill would grant Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo the power to go as far as banning tech

companies from the following six countries, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba. Is there a lot of tech coming out of Venezuela and Cuba? Anyway, a TikTok spokesperson said in the statement to CNBC that, quote, a U.S. ban on TikTok is a ban of the export of American culture and values to the billion-plus people who use our service worldwide. We hope that Congress will explore solutions to their national security concerns that won't have the effect of censoring the voices of millions of Americans. God, you're full of shit, TikTok spokesperson. All TikTok could do right now is ban your view,

your algorithm's view of what it means, of what American culture is. And by the way, you have the opportunity and you'd be stupid not to curate, manicure that view of America that makes us seem a little tiny bit incrementally one thousandth of a milligram shittier every day. What's going on here? What's going on here? We should not approach this from, well, you can't prove this, Scott. When it comes to national security from a bad actor, and let's be clear, China has evolved from a competitor over the last 10 years to a bad actor. The rise of Xi Jinping is the rise of a murderous autocrat. Again, let me repeat that. The rise of Xi Jinping is the rise of a murderous autocrat. It is regressing and halting and returning or rejecting a lot of reforms that were taking China

in the right direction. There are a massive number of people who have been jailed for peaceful protests in Hong Kong. There is nothing short of genocide taking place in China, and yet we're not supposed to think of them as an enemy? As an enemy? There's evidence they tried to fuck with our elections. Oh, but they're not our enemy. We have mutually shared interests, and hopefully those grow. Hopefully there's some sanity, and we decide to become a little bit more integrated on policy decisions. We decide, hey, why don't we have some uniform standards around protocols around research labs such that the next time a virus likely escapes one of your labs, I'm not saying it was intentional, but it is looking more and more like the novel coronavirus originated in a lab and jumped the lab. If that were not the case, wouldn't they be cooperating? Wouldn't they be the first ones who would want to prove that it's not happening? If you believe that China is not only our competitor, but possibly our enemy that has a strategic imperative around diminishing the geopolitical influence and power

of America, then what is their ultimate weapon right now? Is it their economy? Maybe, but our economy is still bigger and quite frankly, it's more robust. Is it their ideology? No, it's this tool called TikTok that is now hovering over the prefrontal cortex of the majority of our youth. We shoot things down when they're 60,000 feet above us. If they're 600,000 feet above us and they're a satellite, we're down with that. And if they're six millimeters above our prefrontal cortex in the form of TikTok, we're down with that.

Should we start from a position of let's wait 10 years, let's see what the data says, or should we start from a position of it is incumbent upon them to prove to us and give us certainty that we aren't raising vis-a-vis TikTok, a generation of civic, nonprofit, business and government leaders who every day just feel a little shittier about America. If America was a horror movie, the call is coming from inside of the house. So here's an argument, a valid argument. Wait, Scott, we're better than China. We believe in free speech, right? Well, I get that. I think that's

a powerful argument. Let's just go straight to multilateral trade policy. What would China do? Does China allow our media companies access to their homeland, to their markets? No. Well, shouldn't we just, in terms of straight trade policy negotiation mirror the same type of stance they have? Let me get this. Our media companies go over there. They let us go over there just long enough to steal our IP, and then they prop up a local entrepreneur such that they can capture all the value of a search engine, Baidu, an e-commerce company, Alibaba. But no, no, no. We should let TikTok onto our shores. And what's the Chinese version of TikTok? Do you

think they allow anyone talking about income inequality or systemic racism on their version of TikTok? Hell to the no. It's a series of videos about Chinese pianists and Chinese kids who want to become astronauts. So we get, as Tristan Harris says, we get the ding dong, big gulp, shitty for you, trans fat version of a video platform, and they get the spinach version. I mean, are we that? Are we this stupid? Should we allow this competitor?

Should we allow this Trojan horse to continue to operate? And here's the thing. It's like the movie, The Sting with Robert Redford and Paul Newman. The best sting, the best con is the con never knows they were conned. And here's one of our flaws as Americans. We're much easier to fool than convince we've been fooled. And guess what, folks? I think we're going to find out that we've been fooled.

We've been conned. TikTok should be spun to U.S. investors or it should be banned. Full stop. We'll be right back for our conversation with Nita Farahani. What differentiates their investment approach? What learnings have shifted their career trajectories? And how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc.

Hello, I'm Esther Perel, psychotherapist and host of the podcast, Where Should We Begin? Which delves into the multiple layers of relationships, mostly romantic. But in this special series, I focus on our relationships with our colleagues, business partners and managers. Listen in as I talk to co-workers facing their own challenges with one another and get the real work done. Tune into Housework, a special series from Where Should We Begin, sponsored by Klaviyo.

Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Nita Farahani, a professor of law at Duke University and the author of The Battle for Your Brain, Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology. Nita, where does this podcast find you? Durham, North Carolina. Durham. Such a great campus environment. I always thought I would one day either want to end up at UVA or Duke just based on such a beautiful campus. Anyways. It's gorgeous here.

Yeah. It is gorgeous. Let's bust right into it. In your book, your new book, The Battle for Your Brain, Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology, what do you see as the biggest threats to our privacy and freedom of thought? So I see it coming from a lot of different directions. I think the book and my focus is to put the finest point on the coming age of neurotechnology, which is when there's actually devices

that we'll be wearing, I think, most of the time, integrated into the headphones we're wearing or earbuds, that can start to actually decode rather than just make inferences from our actions in the world what's happening in our thoughts in our mind in our brains in our brain states and i see that as being both a future that has a lot of promise but also has a lot of risk and you know in kind of trying to define the biggest threat, it is to show, even though we've seen so many different ways that people are trying to decode, change,

manipulate what we're thinking, when you can actually breach the final frontier of privacy, which is to decode in real time what's happening in the brain, our last bastion of privacy is at risk. So bring it down to a practical level. Is it a minority report risk where you're thinking bad thoughts and you get arrested? What do you see as the practical dangers and risks to society or to individual citizens? So I think it's kind of threefold. One is the constant surveillance of brains in ways that reduce people to their brains, but also chill their ability to think freely. Neurotechnology, as it's coming out as wearable neurotechnology, I don't think we'll ever get to the point of decoding the real-time inner monologue that people are having, like truly their complex thought. What it does is it decodes brain states. If a person is tired, engaged, bored, but you can probe it to the brain for things like your political affiliation, your different

information that you might have stored there. So what I see is, one, the average person having their brain connected at all times in ways that can be accessed by corporations, by employers, by governments. And in the minority report side of things, the least bad case in many ways in that world is interrogating brains for crime, which is already happening. Neurotechnology is already being used by law enforcement in many countries to directly probe people's brains and memories. But it's more the chilling effect, the constant surveillance of brains, people trying to at all times stay focused and attentive rather than allowing their minds to wander. People in authoritarian regimes fearing that their very thoughts are being decoded and what that does to the ability to flourish, to truly have dissident thoughts, to have original thoughts, to enable your mind, allow your mind to wander to places that allow for human flourishing.

I mean, immediately think of facial recognition and some sort of neurological recognition where they create a series of case studies or use cases of these people are most likely to protest or start a revolution when they have this consistency of thought patterns so we're going to identify them for re-education. Is that?

Yeah. I mean, so there's already reports of things like that happening out of China where brain sensors are being regularly integrated into the workplace, into even educational settings. But there were reports last year that those same brain sensors are being used to probe people's political adherence to the communist party. And then, you know, what the consequences of that would be, I would assume would be not particularly good. It could be putting it into putting people into reeducation camps, or it could be, you know, worse still. There's more dystopian possibilities with that. I mean, there's a lot of interesting research that shows that when people collaborate together, you see synchronization of brain activity, and that can be a very positive thing.

It can help people literally get onto the same wavelength to be able to work together. But if you're looking for trying to figure out who is collaborating, who shouldn't be, who's coming together to rise up against a government, you can use movement. You can use GPS location data, you can track people's cell phone and other kinds of information that they are coordinating with one another. But when they're trying to have private conversations or secret meetings and you start to see patterns of brain synchronization, it's yet another piece of the puzzle that could be really problematic. And we have an ability to recognize threats faster than opportunities, you know, a mild depression becomes a severe depression, some sort of alerts such that you could have productive

intervention? Yeah, I'm glad you asked because for me, I think it's so important that we keep in mind the benefits. It's very easy to see how dark this could go, how quickly, but the approach that I'm advocating, this right to cognitive liberty, includes a right to self-determination, the right to access, the right to use technology, to know our own brains, to rev them up, to slow them down. And part of that is, just as you described, so already we're very good at quantifying so many other aspects of our health. People are increasingly taking charge of their health and well-being by tracking their footsteps, tracking their heart rates, their oxygen levels, quantifying through

blood tests. But our brain health has not been well characterized, well cared for, or well quantified or tracked over time. And brain data through electrical activity that can be monitored in real time through brain sensors could be put on par with all of the rest of our health. And the burden, the consequences of depression, of cognitive decline, of neurological disorder and disease is extraordinary. It is almost, you know, a proportion that is startling given how many advances we've made in other areas of medicine. And the ability for people to be able to see, quantify their stress levels, which has a huge impact on health, increased electrical activity or changes in electrical activity that suggest

the earliest stages of glioblastoma. Right now, a death sentence if it's diagnosed, but maybe in earlier stages through tiny changes, you could pick it up a death sentence of it's diagnosed, but maybe in earlier stages, through tiny changes, you could pick it up. You could detect it or depression, as you point out. There are electrical changes. Those electrical changes can not only be detected, but you could also use other neurotechnology and it has been to treat depression. So, it's the reason I think that developers are so focused on bringing these products to market. It's not for the dystopian vision of it. It's because of the positive changes it can afford to humanity if we get it right.

What do you think of Neuralink? I mean, I recognize people don't talk about Elon Musk very much, but we're going to go off script here and talk about Elon. He's a guy who started a car company and a rocket company. In my understanding, he also- I think I've heard of him. Have you heard of him? Yeah. I mean, he's deep into this stuff. Do you see this organization, do you see what he's doing as embodying some of the threats or that it's headed in a positive way? I think the fact that he's in the mix is pushing the field forward. And, you know, I think a lot of people have come down hard on what he's been doing at Neuralink. They just, you know, had a story that showed that

they've had a pretty significant setback in trying to get FDA approval. But I think both his rhetoric, his drive, but his past successes are driving people to innovate more quickly, are rising to the challenge. Or just attention to the category, right? Yeah. You know, his vision that you could have neural interface for everyone. I don't know if we'll see that in my lifetime in planted neurotechnology. I think we will see a lot more wearable technology, but that idea that human potential could be enhanced or that what connecting the brain to each other, to technology could do is revolutionizing the field. So

Neuralink itself, have they made huge strides and advances? The jury's a little bit more out on that. But the fact that he's in the mix, I think, is driving the field forward as well. So let's go back to what you were talking about, sort of brain spy or brain spyware. Give us an example of how it's being used now. Sure. So there's two categories. We can look at it from a corporate or an employment category, and we can look at it from a government category. So let's start with corporations. And I'd break that down further too, to say that there's employers and then there's

corporate use of it for other settings. And so for more than a decade now, there's been a company called SmartCap that has been selling a really basic version of neurotechnology. So it's sensors, brain sensors that pick up electrical activity in the brain. And they have them embedded in something they call a life band. It's like a headband. Or you can put it into a hard hat or a baseball cap that a person wears, a train conductor's hat. And it picks up basic brainwave activity. And through their software, it translates it into fatigue levels.

So it tries to give a predictive score of whether or not a person is wide awake or tired. And if a person is in mining or they're a commercial driver, a pilot, the idea is that this provides a more accurate way of being able to pick up fatigue levels than, for example, steering or the kind of algorithms that are looking at the micro movements that a person makes on the steering wheel or trained video cameras on the face. I have that in my car, Donna. I mean, I'm driving back from Disneyland. You have something like that. Yeah. Yeah, and when they've done head-to-head studies, what they find is that it is more accurate to have the sensor on your head than on your car.

And, you know, these things don't exist in isolation. They exist in combination. I don't think that that's a bad use of it. I think if we could get better accuracy without having to pick up all of the movement of your car and cameras, it may, first of all, be actually better for, for example, a trucker's privacy than having an in-cab camera that's picking up everything inside of the cab to try to figure out if they're tired or asleep. And it could prevent a lot of incredibly costly accidents because drowsy driving rather than drunk driving is actually one of the leading causes of accidents in the world. That's if we keep it narrow, right? You can pick up a whole lot of brain data and interpret it for a very small thing like fatigue levels.

And what SmartTap does is they overwrite on device all of the rest of the brain data and they just extract that one feature. Other companies are starting to use it for things like tracking attention levels in the workplace. So as a person focused or as their mind wandering, that can be useful if a person wants to improve their focus levels. I use different tricks and tools to try to focus better. I get distracted. I have five different screens up on my computer and I want to just dive into writing for a little while. Something that helps you improve your focus levels can be useful. When you use it as a productivity score, though, I think it's problematic. It starts to feel like creepy surveillance, undermines people's trust and morale. They start to try to avoid

periods of mind-wandering when actually mind-wandering is where a lot of innovation comes from. So it starts to feel more like big brother to people. There are other corporate uses like neuromarketing. A lot of companies have invested in neuromarketing to kind of decode how people react to products or movie trailers. Or there's some, I think, a little bit funny uses. Like L'Oreal has partnered with a neuromarketing company so that if you want a custom fragrance that's exactly what your brain loves, you go up to the counter, put on an EEG, electroencephalography headset, smell some custom perfumes, and they look at your brainwave data to tell you what your perfect scent is. And so this kind of idea of judging

what your preferences are based on what your brain says rather than what people reportedly say, because what people reportedly say oftentimes is very inaccurate. And looking at this geopolitically, who's winning this race? People say, oh, AI, the U.S. is ahead, but China's generally a close number two, and then everybody else is a distant three. That's kind of, I would say, consensus ranking, if you will. Where would you put geopolitically the race for neurotechnology? I think there is anxiety about that and that it's not clear. So I think if you talk to some of the leading neurotech manufacturers in the U.S., BCI, brain-computer interface for soldiers, to trying to use it at scale across society, to the number of companies and the amounts of investment they have in the space, it could be that China is leading the pack in this regard. There was a big export controls conference held with all of the BCI manufacturers in the U.S. just a few weeks ago to try to contemplate whether or not there should be export controls on anything

having to do with U.S. brain-computer interface. There were sanctions against a number of Chinese companies in December of 2021 by the Biden administration for purportedly creating brain-control weaponry. And there's been a lot of activity within the U.S. government focused on what China is doing in this space. So I'd say, you know, I don't know truly the state of affairs of who's ahead, but I can tell you that there's a lot of anxiety about it. So I want to go ask a couple of questions and go different parts of the age spectrum.

So you're imagine you're a 58 year old male who has spent his whole life trying to maintain some sort of physical fitness. And then as you get older, what you realize is that neurological for boomers or even Gen Xers now who think, you know, I've got the physical side mostly taken care of, but what you said really resonated with me. And that is, you know, I can tell you what my PSA is. I know my weight, my body, my BMI, I just, my T levels. I mean, I knew it all, but I don't even know the metrics around my neurological health. What advice would you have for us?

So, first of all, you know, there were a lot of brain training games that were out there a decade ago. You think frauds? I'm sorry to interrupt you. Many of which were utterly discredited, is what I was going to say, which is they didn't do much. There are a few now that have been validated that seem to actually do at least things like improve memory. And as you know, with cognitive decline, that's one of the things that people start to struggle with. Also, rate of response. Sometimes, you know, even just the firing, how quickly you're actually able to think through a problem, calculate a tip, things like that starts to get weakened over time. So some of it, I think there are some brain training games that actually have been validated. And I talk about that in my book and the chapter on kind of revving up. There are also supplements which are increasingly being shown to be depleted in

the brain and the aging brain. And some supplements that may in fact be beneficial. Exercise, right? I mean, we know this anecdotally, but it just turns out that brain health and exercise are so intricately connected. But your point, the kind of meta point on this, which is the metrics, right? We haven't been doing longitudinal testing of people's brains, and people don't have at their own fingertips the ability to track and see like, wow, actually my response time is slowing quite a bit. My memory is not as good as it was. kind of hormones in the brain, the different neurotransmitters in the brain that are starting to decline and starting to decay, which we see associated with things like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and other kinds of neurological decline, here's how you would best optimize brain health. I think if we start to put brain health and well-being and the ability to look

into our own brains on par with the rest of our physical health, a lot of what we're seeing in an aging population, which is about both cognitive decline, but also the rest of their physical decline, I think we'd start to address it. We'd start to take it more seriously. And from the earliest stages, you would start to say like, okay, I know that I need to get in this many steps a day, this much cardio per week. I know that's good for my physical body, including my brain. But here are the actual metrics, which I see require additional fitness, additional exercises for my brain to be able to stay strong. Let's go to the other end of the age. Do you have kids, Snuda? I do, yeah.

Do you, based on your domain expertise, is there anything you do that other parents might not know of? When you think about developing them emotionally, physically, what about neurologically? Are there certain things we should be thinking about as parents? Yeah, you know, a lot of it is about we do neurofeedback and biofeedback with our kids. And we're not putting headsets on them at this point, but we're using a lot of the learning from it, which is emotional regulation, the ability to understand your stress levels or anxiety levels are going up and how to manage that through active feedback and then being able to see that feedback. Like, for example, we have an eight-year-old and there are games that she will play because a lot of these things have been gamified now. And then she can see her heart

rate and how it responds to being able to implement different strategies when she gets stressed out or upset, breathing techniques, other physical techniques that she can use. And those skills, you know, as she goes into her teenage years, as a lot of people start to grapple with stress and anxiety and haven't learned the tips and techniques and tools to be able to self-regulate, I think they're going to serve her incredibly well, I hope. And something that I don't see a lot of other parents actively doing is they're definitely trying to help cultivate coping skills in their children, but giving them the quantifiable skills where they can see it, even gamify it. You know, for her, she plays a set of games where if she gets really, you know, excited or stressed out or something,

there will be a bunch of little monsters that'll show up on the screen. And then she has to bring her heart rate down and bring her relaxation levels down in order to have the monsters be defeated. She can't defeat them just by, you know, shooting them with thumbs or joysticks or something. And that's been really neat to see is how quickly she's able to do that and how much time she's able to spend in that kind of more meditative state. We'll be right back. Hey, it's Scott Galloway. We'll be right back. out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from P want it to be. The average U.S. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it.

So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. You have a PhD in philosophy of biology and jurisprudence, and I would love just to get

your top-line thoughts on if and how social media rewires the young brain, what is the manifestation of that rewiring? And what do you think the ethics are as a society in terms of whether it requires some sort of intervention? And I realize that's a leading question. So I'll say this, which is it's obviously rewiring the brain. Yeah. And, you know, whether it's, you know, social media, the effects on children and adolescents seems to be profound with both brain development, but in particular self-image and self-reflection and self-confidence. You know, it seems to be incredibly problematic for self-image and self-development. You know, I don't think we have the longitudinal data yet to know what that means. And, you know, we don't have a comparison set well to be able to look at, like, here's a child who grew up without social media. Here's

one who had an hour a day. And here's one who had none. And be able to look at their brain development over time to really understand what does that mean long term. There are people who are studying this to see what the detrimental effects are. I worry about children's ability to pay attention, to be able to enjoy the outdoors, to be able to get enough physical exercise, to be able to interact socially with other people. What I do know is that most people who are developing the technology seem to put their children in schools that are devoid of most of the technology. They seem to intentionally try to safeguard their children from using it. That to me is probably the most telling. And as for interventions, yes, I don't know what those interventions can look like. I don't think we can have, you know, banning or government

mandates on it. Attempts to restrict children based on platforms have led most of them to just lie or circumvent it or, you know, fake their age in order to get onto them. What I think is that we as a society need to be trying to find ways to not have children who are addicted to technology, to not have their brains entirely consumed by being interacting with and being on social media and other platforms. So you, in addition to research, you teach. When you look at the economy and you sit here on the consumer side, where do you see opportunity for investing your human and financial capital given the developments in neurotechnology?

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, so I think there is so much that's going to happen over the next decade in what we learn about the brain, how we treat it, addictions, mental health problems. They're getting worse, not better. But we're standing at a moment at which, you know, kind of ironically, technology could help us learn so much more about the brain, right? I mean, part of it is that we don't have access to a lot of what's happening inside the human brain. So we see these observationally, but we don't quantify it in the same way. And most studies on the human brain are based on limited laboratory environments of people going in under very artificial conditions, having very cumbersome neuroimaging done. But if you could literally see the effects on developing brains through wearable brain sensors. Like this is what

the brain looks like and the degree of engagement or the loss of attention or, you know, over time, the, you know, disengagement, whatever the metrics are, I don't know what they are yet, right? But I think the study of that about both what the effects of other kinds of technology are, seeing the impact on the brain, seeing the earliest stages of depression, of mental illness, seeing how different therapeutics and interventions can actually improve and change that. I think studying neuroscience today would be incredibly exciting because the possibilities over the next decade of being able to solve some of the greatest challenges facing humans, we're suddenly going to have the data to be able able to solve some of the greatest challenges facing humans, we're suddenly going to have the data to be able to study a lot of that. So I think that's one area.

You know, basic mental health is going to be transformed, I think, with all of the data that we're going to be able to develop. That also means that as AI and generative AI models continue to become better and better over time, they can be trained on individual brain data, right? Everybody's brain reacts a little bit differently, but with generative AI, you can start to develop custom therapeutics and custom understandings of what's actually happening inside a single person's brain. And have you, I mean, it's just so strange. It feels like the incentives have somehow figured out a way that the majority of efforts in America have been around exploiting neurological weaknesses as opposed to healing them. to take advantage of it. It just feels so tragic that we have all of these advances in this technology. We're so much more knowledgeable about it, and yet we're

getting less healthy mentally. No, I agree. I mean, so, you know, first, I have a colleague who has developed this research around this idea of collective cognitive capital. Like maybe what we need to be investing in is our collective cognitive capital. We're eroding it. And if we actually set that as a metric, right? So you have one of the welfare metrics that we're trying to maximize as a society is that collective cognitive capital.

It's an interesting idea. It kind of dovetails with a lot of the things I've been thinking about on cognitive liberty. Her name is Emily Murphy at UC Hastings. But I think the idea is that we should be recognizing that it's deeply intertwined, right? Our competitiveness as a country, our well-being as a global economy depends on how healthy our brains are, depends on whether or not we're able to maximize our potential as humans to be able to solve many of the problems that are facing humanity from neurological disease and suffering to climate. It requires healthy brains to be able to figure those things out and work

together. And what we're doing is we're actually addicting brains. We're making them sicker. We're making them weaker. We are distracting them to the point that they can't focus on anything and work together collectively and if we prioritize that right decide that this is going to be one of the metrics that society is going to maximize and then create incentives right funding around you know mental health apps and well-being funding around you know showing metrics that improve cognitive well-being there was an interesting study that was published about a year ago in Nature on the idea of brain benchmarking, which was that we go in right now in childhood and you've got these growth charts and, you know, we're measuring

weight and height, but we're not actually measuring brain health as part of that or brain development as part of that. And there's some basic tasks to make sure and figure out early screening for autism spectrum disorder. But other than that, there's some like, can you say yes? Can you say no? Do you identify colors? Do you play with toys? And we have really basic metrics of brain health and development. So their idea was we should be doing a lot more. We should be quantifying what's happening in brain health and metrics. And I don't know that they have figured out what the right benchmarks are, but that's, I think, one of the things that we could do to create incentives as well is medical societies

and organizations, as they think about what healthy growth and development looks like should be thinking about healthy brain growth and development as well in a much more robust way than just screening for spectrum disorders. So, last question, and it's sort of, it's off topic a little bit. It's an adjacent, but I'm just curious to get your views. So if you think that Biden, he is the leading Democratic candidate to be the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, and let's assume, I don't know if it's DeSantis or Trump, but let's assume it's Trump. We have two men who would be, I think, 82 and 86 if they were elected the last time Marine One left the West Lawn. Have you thought about what it means? And every year our elected representatives get older and older.

Yeah, it's really startling. Well, the average age is 64 now, meaning for every 40-year-old elected to Congress, there's an 88-year-old. And I've found generally biology is not politically correct. And I'm an ageist. I just think, I see to myself, there's just certain things I no longer have as strong a command around. And there's certain things I have a better command around. Have you thought at all about what it means in terms of governance, in terms of the decisions our leaders make, the fact that we just have, quite frankly, older and older brains running the country? Well, first of all, I hope that we can make those brains a lot more fit if we're going

to keep going in that direction. So that's one. Nikki Haley has an interesting proposal about requiring cognitive testing for people over 75. The problem is who does the testing? I just don't see where that goes. But I also don't think, so first, I don't think that's the right answer. Second, if we were to do cognitive testing, I don't think it should just be over 75 because some 75-year-old brains

or 80-year-old brains are super sharp and some 50-year-old ones are- There's batshit crazy 35-year-olds. That's absolutely right. That's absolutely right. But part of the problem is we don't have great, there's a lot of cognitive testing happening for hiring right now. Personality and cognitive testing is the new norm. There are neuroscience-based companies that have cognitive batteries of tests. And the problem is we don't know what we're measuring and if it's a good fit for what we're trying to match it to. So I'm not opposed to the idea of trying to figure out and have mental health and well-being as part of the assessment. I can't even imagine practically how you would get anything by both parties. Who designs the metrics? Totally agree. Totally agree

with that. But, you know, I think in general, whether it is elected officials or judges or pilots or people who are appointed for life or people there are fit ages and better ages for people who are in positions of governance. Have you thought, and I apologize, it just inspired so many questions, I could do this for hours. Have you thought about what it means for America when turn of the century, we're going to have eight times as many people over the age of 60 and half as many kids. Just the fact that we'll have fewer kids, fewer of that brain stimuli around caring for kids or seeing kids or just so many old people. Well, I mean, that's part of why, you know, there are people who, as I talk about the perils of

neurotechnology, their instant reaction is let's ban it. It's so scary. The idea of losing our last passion of privacy means we should just get rid of it. I don't think that's the answer. I think the answer is, again, we should be putting the tools in the hands of individuals to be able to enhance their brains, to be able to know their brains, to be able to quantify their brains. We just need to put it in place in ways that don't also become Orwellian and oppressive. And so as we have an aging population, if we are treating brain health and wellness as seriously as your PSA levels, your cholesterol levels, your CBC, but from the get-go, we're treating brain health development, wellness, mental wellness, just as seriously, not as some metaphysical concept we're not going to worry about because we can't see it. We can. We can start to see it and quantify it and improve it. And as we have an aging population, hopefully we have a sharper, healthier, mentally better off society because we're going to get there. We're going to get to

this place of having an aging population. And either we're going to have a lot of people who have very serious mental illnesses, who haven't kept up with their brain fitness, who haven't thought about the impact of exercise on their brains, or nutrition on their brains, or brain training games on their brains, or they think that the right answer is to play Wordle when that doesn't actually help them. Things like that. I think we need to make it concrete and realistic for people to know themselves, know their own brains. And hopefully then when we get to that place, we have healthier brains. We have a healthier society.

We have a competitive society. Nita Farahani is a leading scholar on the ethical, legal, and societal implications of emerging technologies. She is a Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law and Philosophy at Duke Law School and the author of the new book, The Battle for Your Brain, Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology. She joins us from her office in Durham, North Carolina at the great University of Duke. I really enjoyed this conversation, Professor Farahani. Thanks for your time. Likewise. Thank you so much for your thoughtful and thought-provoking questions. As for happiness, I wrote a post on affection this past Friday, and it's one of my favorite

posts. I revisited a post from 2018. And then I heard from someone at the Wall Street Journalist that I just wrote an article that's very similar to this on affection or on men providing emotional care. And her name's Jennifer Wallace. And she wrote a wonderful article. And essentially that, in often cases, the delta between, in many households, a child that has better emotional outcomes, better weight outcomes, better mental health, is a function of how emotionally engaged the father is. Not only engaged, but how supportive they are. And there's two things that get in the way of that.

I should say three things. The first is a lack of just having men around. There's just too much male abandonment. There's too many men that, for whatever reason reason don't stay involved in a child's life. So just a dearth of male role models that step up and have an irrational passion for the well-being of a child that isn't theirs, that is theirs or isn't theirs. I think at the end of the day, the number one signal of your manhood and your masculinity is you take a vested interest in the well-being of a child that isn't yours. I think that's the ultimate expression of masculinity

and manhood, that you have your shit sewed together. You are such a strong man that you can not only take care of yourself, you can not only take care of your family, you can begin to take care of children that aren't yours or people that need help or the real strong like bull move to take care of people you will never meet. That is not only the masculine thing to do. I think it is the kind of the most evolved human and most generous thing you can do. Anyways, back to this article. A couple of things that really struck me. The outcomes of kids who have better outcomes is actually more dependent upon or there's greater swing in how emotionally supportive or emotionally involved the father is. Why? Because it's more variable. The mother's emotional support is sort of a static thing. They're kind of there. And

that's a wonderful thing. That's like the baseline level of affection. And a couple of things get in the way. The first is men have this fucked up sense of what it means to be strong and masculine. I know how evolved do you think you are or how many subscriptions to the Atlantic or the New York Times you have. You can fall into this. I fell into this. I always thought my role when my kids were younger was to play the heavy, to be the disciplinarian, the wise guide, to be strong. And then what you realize is, yeah, there's some of that. Sure, there's some of that. But what you need to do, what you need to get in touch with as a father, now there's more and more evidence about how wonderful the outcomes

are, is to really lean into this notion of sometimes, or a lot of the time, you're not there to be a guide. You're not there to be a mentor. You're not there to be the disciplinarian. You are just there to love them, to just let them collapse into your arms, ask them how they are doing, empathize with them, no matter, you know, kind of how at the time seemingly ridiculous the issue might be. Don't coach them. Just love them and be that emotional support. And here's the thing, and I know you're out there, a lot of men, we have those instincts. We have that need to love our kids. We have that desire to want to let them collapse into our arms, to go into their room at night and ask them how they're doing and sit on the side of their bed

and hold their hand and just let them talk or just ask a series of questions and not judge them, but just be super supportive of them, of unexpected expressions of affection towards them, verbal affirmation, right? Little texts, right? I'm so proud of you. I think you're so wonderful.

You know, I love you so much. I know so many of us have those inclinations, those thoughts, and then bullshit gets in the way, some sort of preconceived notion that it would indicate weakness or that it's not the way you were raised or that they're somehow telepathic and they can just feel that with your

actions. And the second thing, and this is more controversial, and Jennifer Wallace in her great article brought this up, a lot of moms should bear some responsibility here. Why? Because they're better at emotional caregiving and they begin to sequester sometimes the father from emotional caregiving. Why? Because they're good at it and they kind of view us as Homer Simpson and sometimes disdainfully disdainfully disdainfully disdainfully disdainfully disdainfully disdainfully disdainfully stop. Any expression of love from the dad needs to be welcomed and encouraged and supported on both sides of the coin. But this is just such wonderful research. And the gift here is to all the men out there. We have those instincts. You have them. You have them. You want to grab your kid's hand and ask them how they're doing and just tell them they're wonderful and tell them you understand and be there for that support. That is something I'm leaning in later in life. I wish I'd leaned in earlier, and it is one of the most rewarding things any parent can do. And it's also more unique, and it's more needed from fathers. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer

and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Profiteer Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice as read by George Hahn and on Monday with our weekly market show. God, my talent was just on fire today. Just so much.

I was literally oozing talent from every orifice for the last 60 minutes. Just staggering the level of skill, domain expertise, creativity. Just bring it all together, bring it at home, fry it up in a pan, cooking with propane and gas. No spicy wings here, just hot wings. Support for this podcast comes from Klaviyo. You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you. Deliver that feeling to your customers every time.

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