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- [00:00]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
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- [00:38]
Danny Fortson
This episode of the Times Tech Podcast
- [00:40]
ServiceNow Announcer
is sponsored by ServiceNow.
- [00:42]
ServiceNow Representative
Danny One thing we keep hearing from business leaders right now is AI sounds great, but how do you actually make it work inside a company?
- [00:51]
Danny Fortson
Exactly.
- [00:51]
ServiceNow Announcer
Because most organizations aren't neat, shiny systems. They're layers of software, legacy tech and teams, all doing things slightly differently.
- [00:59]
ServiceNow Representative
ServiceNow sits across all that, acting as a control tower for making work move seamlessly through the organization, connecting people, systems,
- [01:07]
ServiceNow Announcer
data and increasingly AI agents so that things don't happen in silos.
- [01:12]
ServiceNow Representative
Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at ServiceNow.com s k t
- [01:23]
Danny Fortson
s K that sound you hear is a cognitive test. Riveting, I know, but here I am at the kitchen table, the kids fast asleep, playing a game called Duel and Back and it's really frustrating. The setup looks simple. It's a Tic Tac toe board, or for our British listeners, knots and crosses. Squares appear in the spaces at random and a letter is read out at the same time. The goal is to correctly react when either a letter is repeated or a shape appears in the same square as it did. Two or three or four call outs before tracking the video and audio cues all at once feels like the brain equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your belly. Ugh.
- [02:11]
Mary Lou Jepsen
What?
- [02:11]
Danny Fortson
I only got 58%. Thankfully, I have a secret weapon on my forehead. I've stuck a 4 inch piece of fabric in the middle. It has a little switch. Once I turn it on, a stream of minute electric impulses will start zapping the part of my brain that controls working memory, which is critical for all kinds of functions. Think of it as the brain's engine room. This little patch revs it up. I got mine from a guy. We'll get formally acquainted later, but for now let's call him Ian. If I have this on, is my IQ higher?
- [02:48]
Ian McIntyre
Actually, better than that. Working Memory is actually more of a predictor for your success in life than IQ. In our studies, we found that 95% of people respond within three minutes, and on average, working memory improves by 20%.
- [03:03]
Danny Fortson
That kind of improvement Ian's talking about sounds small. It's the equivalent of being able to recall a sequence of nine numbers instead of seven, which is the longest most people can manage. Out in the real world, though, that elevated instant recall translates to $30,000 more in annual salary, better diet, and a longer, healthier life. And this is only the beginning.
- [03:25]
Vivian Ming
If what we say is let the market decide, this turns into a sweet 16 gift that wealthy parents give their kids.
- [03:34]
Danny Fortson
Vivian Ming is a theoretical neuroscientist and and founder of socos Labs, a think tank slash consultancy that's been advising on this brain project.
- [03:44]
Vivian Ming
And then in the not too distant future, particularly when we are talking about those invasive technologies where we're really, really parts of the brain, what we're saying is there's gonna be two different kinds of humanity and we will never go back.
- [03:57]
Danny Fortson
I, too am about to cross. I'm Danny Fordson, West Coast Correspondent for the Sunday Times. And this is Tales of Silicon Valley, Episode 6 the Brain, the final frontier. You'll have heard the doomsday pronouncements, right? Artificial intelligence is coming for your job, for your life, maybe even for your soul.
- [04:34]
Elon Musk
I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. I mean, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably
- [04:44]
Tim Fiore
that the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans who are limited by slow biological evolution couldn't compete. And what they so proceeded.
- [05:09]
Danny Fortson
This is not another podcast about the bloodless march of the machines. Rather, it's about the efforts to merge with them. AI has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years, and in its shadow, so has a cottage industry working on what is known as the brain computer interface, a bridge that will jack us in directly to machines to make us and our devices one and the same. It's the ultimate case of if you can't beat em, join em. Which brought me, on a sunny summer day, to the Berkeley Skydeck.
- [05:46]
Tim Fiore
Nice to meet you.
- [05:47]
Danny Fortson
Hi, Vader, how you doing?
- [05:48]
Ian McIntyre
Good, how are you?
- [05:49]
Danny Fortson
The sky deck is an accelerator, a jumble of desks full of electric components and droopy eyed startup founders. It's the home of hum the maker of the Magic Brain Patch football stadium
- [06:03]
Ian McIntyre
up on the right of the bell tower. Then there's Lawrence Berkeley labs at the dome. That's the cyclotron up the top.
- [06:09]
Danny Fortson
It was started by two Aussies, Tim Fiore, a doctor, and Ian McIntyre, a lawyer. Ian's the one who gave me the device that I slapped onto my forehead in my kitchen. Their Idea stretches back 10 years when they were both students in Perth in Western Australia.
- [06:25]
Ian McIntyre
So you can imagine you're in college, you're studying law, and your friend's studying medicine. And one day he hits you up. He says, come in for this little study. I need participants in this study. And you trust it. You know your friends are studying to be a medical doctor. You go into this big, scary building. It's very clinical. You sit down and you say, okay, so what's actually happening today? They wheel out a gigantic machine that looks like it's going to fry your brain. And they pull out this big circular magnet, and then they count down from 30, 30, 29, 28, all the way to zero. And then all of a sudden, the big, like, smack happens, like a big noisy click, and your arm or your leg just pulses out of your control. That was my first experience of this technology. Super scary, but also really fascinating. I didn't know we had technology that could cause this kind of change. Can this change your feelings? Can this change your thoughts? And that started a conversation that took 10 years to turn into this company. Yeah.
- [07:20]
Danny Fortson
What they've done since is turn that $10,000 experimental device into a strip of electrodes and fabric, which looks like an oversized band aid. And instead of manipulating the body, they're targeting the mind, specifically the prefrontal cortex, the home of working memory, which is
- [07:38]
Ian McIntyre
this really specific thing in science, kind of like the RAM of the brain. It's the amount of information that you can hold in a really high fidelity. And it's a very small amount of information, but it's actually the gate to all information entering the brain. So things like short term memory, long term memory, all depend on this working memory. And actually IQ is highly dependent on working memory, too.
- [08:01]
Danny Fortson
If you think of working memory like an orchestra, this little patch acts like the world's best conductor.
- [08:09]
Ian McIntyre
So it's putting a tiny electrical signal at 6 Hz, which is the theta frequency, the theta brainwave, which is a brainwave that's kind of at the moment understood to be the way that in and out of the brain. It's a bit more complicated than that, obviously, but this is kind of the basic theory, and we're actually boosting that frequency and we're sustaining it over time. So we're putting an artificial signal into the brain or artificial information into the brain to cause a natural brain state to come about more often and for a longer period of time, which kind of corresponds to the difference between a 60 year old and a 20 year old in terms of performance on working memory tasks.
- [08:42]
Danny Fortson
Pulses go on for about half an hour and the effect lasts another 90 minutes. So each session gives you two hours of a better brain. In theory. Each patch costs five bucks, and because it is 2019.
- [08:56]
Ian McIntyre
Yeah, so we're gonna sell them in a pack of like $60 a month for 12.
- [09:00]
Danny Fortson
That's right. So on top of Spotify, Netflix, and obviously the Sunday Times, you can add a new subscription for brain enhancement.
- [09:09]
Ian McIntyre
Yeah, it's a brave new world.
- [09:12]
Danny Fortson
I know what you're thinking. Techno sn. Maybe it's a placebo effect. Last year, hum tested 40 people at random, mostly men, some of whom they found on Craigslist. It was a double blinded experiment, so neither the subjects nor the testers knew what they were giving or receiving. A control group got nothing. Another received transcranial stimulation from the patch. The results? A 19.8% improvement for those who got the treatment compared to those who didn't. On a test similar to the one I'm trying at my kitchen table, you'll have to stick around till the end to hear how my highly scientific experiment worked out. What the Hum guys are up to is the thin end of the wedge in this world of brain computer interfaces, or as they are also called, neural prosthetics. Things you can stick on or in your brain to make it work better. You may have heard of Neuralink, Elon Musk's startup that for the past two years has been working in secret until it broke cover in July 2019.
- [10:29]
Elon Musk
Hello, everybody.
- [10:33]
Danny Fortson
What they have come up with is, well, pretty wild. They have invented a robot that pokes a hole in your skull, then sews into your brain tissue thousands of polymer threads so small as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. A thousand of these threads will hook up to a chip smaller than a fingernail that will be implanted in your skull. Neuralink envisions people having several of these being put in at once, and they will be controlled wirelessly by a hearing aid type device behind your ear. This will allow the chip to read your brain activity in real time, and crucially, to download new information at a rate that is simply impossible with your eyes. And ears. Why would you ever want to do that?
- [11:23]
Elon Musk
Ultimately, we can do a full brain machine interface, meaning that we can. Yeah, those are going to sound pretty weird, but achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence.
- [11:32]
Danny Fortson
You heard that, right? Like I said, if you can't beat them, join them. Neuralink reckons that as a first step, the technology can help people suffering brain diseases like Parkinson's and is currently testing its device on rats and other animals.
- [11:48]
Elon Musk
Yeah, I mean, you know, monkey has been able to control the computer with its brain. Just, yeah, the monkey's gonna come out of the bag. So this, I think, has a very good purpose, which is to cure important diseases and ultimately to help secure humanity's future as a civilization.
- [12:07]
Danny Fortson
Relative to AI, Neuralink aims to implant its brain chips into the first human patient in 2020. Before we go any further, let's stop for a moment and talk about AI. What exactly is it? Most of what we call AI today is actually machine learning, a term for algorithms which draw out patterns from mountains of data and then use those patterns to make predictions. Machine learning is getting very good at narrow tasks, like keeping a car in between the lane lines or predicting when a jet turbine will fail. The key to making the next big leap in AI, however, lies in the human brain, the supercomputer extraordinaire. Leaders in the field, like Google's DeepMind, are trying to figure out how the brain works. Others are studying bird brains, mouse brains, fish brains, all trying to unlock how they learn and then translate that mysterious biological process into algorithms. To be clear, we are a long, long way from that even being a possibility. If the human brain is cracked, however, it opens the way for artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which could really change everything. It is the brute computing force of machine learning married to the biggest brain in the history of the world. Scott Phoenix, founder of AI startup Vicarious, who I interviewed last year, explained what this might look like.
- [13:51]
Scott Phoenix
Imagine a person who has a photographic memory and has read every document that any human has ever written. They can think for 60,000 years for every second that passes. If you have a brain like that, then questions that are really difficult for us to answer as a species or as individuals about the nature of the universe. How do you build a fusion reactor? How do you build a teleporter? Things that would be amazing if we had them, but are just out of reach of our small minds become in reach all of a sudden.
- [14:21]
Danny Fortson
AGI is hotly debated. Most computer scientists think it's impossible, a Hollywood fantasy. Others, like Elon Musk are convinced that it is not just possible, but inevitable. Getting inside our brains and tinkering that is a vital step, he argues, in making it so that we can go along for the ride. And while his approach convincing healthy people to have elective brain surgery is unique, his focus, at least initially, is not. In tech speak, our problem is as run of the mill humans is bandwidth.
- [15:04]
Regina Dugan
Your brain is capable of producing about 1 terabit per second. About 40 HD movies are streaming in your brain every second. And herein lies the problem. How do I get all of that information out of my brain and into the world?
- [15:24]
Danny Fortson
That's Regina Dugan, the former director of DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm. Until last year, she headed up Building 8, Facebook's secretive research operation.
- [15:37]
Regina Dugan
What if you could type directly from your brain? It sounds impossible, but it's closer than you may realize. One day you may be able to choose to share your thoughts independent of language.
- [15:52]
Danny Fortson
Dugan was speaking in 2017 about Facebook's own brain device. She has since left, but Facebook is soldiering on. In July 2019, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco, who are backed by Facebook, published a study in which they used electrodes to record brain activity when patients spoke. They then used algorithms to guess what words that brain activity produced, and they got it right between 61 and 76% of the time. Also worth noting, the subjects were epilepsy patients who were being prepped for surgery and had deeply invasive electrodes implanted inside their skulls. So impressive, but still far from PrimeTime. Which, given Facebook's horrendous record on privacy, a delay to its mind reading product is probably no bad thing. But I did track down someone who may just beat Zuckerberg and Musk to the punch.
- [16:58]
Mary Lou Jepsen
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah sort of thing.
- [17:02]
Danny Fortson
Mary Lou Jepsen is a force of nature. She has more than 200 patents to her name. She co founded the $100 Laptop Corporation, the company which provided cheap computers for kids back in 2005. But she very nearly missed out on all of it. In her late 20s, she almost died.
- [17:23]
Mary Lou Jepsen
So I was living in a wheelchair, sleeping 20 hours a day, body full of sores, massive, massive headaches. Couldn't move half of my face. I drooled almost as if Novocaine had been applied at the dentist. And so I could deal with that. But then I could no longer remember how to subtract and I didn't think I deserved a PhD in physics. I was so sick I dropped out of the PhD program utterly defeated to go home and die.
- [17:51]
Danny Fortson
A professor paid for an MRI scan, which at the time she couldn't afford. They found a tumor, operated and she recovered.
- [17:59]
Mary Lou Jepsen
I finished my PhD six months later with two other students. Got $4 million to start my first company. I've been running like hell ever since.
- [18:05]
Danny Fortson
These days she runs her own startup, Open Water. Its goal, to take the MRI machine that saved her life and miniaturize it.
- [18:13]
Mary Lou Jepsen
But it could be a ski hat, it could be basically almost like a bandage, or it could be more like something the size of a smartphone where you scan over your body like, almost like a wand.
- [18:24]
Danny Fortson
This is no small task. MRIs are 2 ton magnets. If you've watched any medical dramas, you know what they look like. Giant donuts that make a loud clanking sound. Now what does this have to do with the brain? Well, a lot. Openwater's system combines off the shelf components used in smartphones, custom built chips, and some very clever algorithms to see in minute detail what is happening not just inside the body, but inside the brain. It's the type of thing that very quickly can lead you to some mind bending places.
- [19:00]
Mary Lou Jepsen
In 50 years, I can't imagine humanity not existing as a connected set of brains. I wonder if language goes away ultimately.
- [19:10]
Danny Fortson
Already FMRI machines or functional MRI can in one sense read your mind. An FMRI effectively takes video rather than stills like an MRI does. If you lay in one for an
- [19:24]
Mary Lou Jepsen
hour, I can tell you got a tumor, clogged heart, or you know, things like that, which we can act on if I do it for 10 to 100 hours. Recording your mind reacting to podcasts like this or YouTube videos, I can then predict what words you're about to say, what images are in your head. Using basically a data store of your mind's use of oxygen, which is what FMRI does, which is the basically video version of mri.
- [19:53]
Danny Fortson
This is similar to the technology that Facebook is working on and and seeing a demo of it is eerie. Jepsen showed this on stage at a TED Talk she gave recently. On one side is a film and on the other is the FMRI's interpretation of what the subject is seeing. The image is grainy, but is unmistakable. The machine is seeing what the person is solely by interpreting oxygen levels in their brains. Now imagine dramatically sharpening the focus on that image and putting it into an affordable device that does not emit harmful radiation. This is what Open Water is working on.
- [20:33]
Mary Lou Jepsen
We now are scanning live animals, rats, at a quote, undisclosed location in South San Francisco and finding the Tumor in the rat. We're even starting to work with a company that's growing organs and saying, great, grow us in organs, because we just need canonical samples.
- [20:51]
Danny Fortson
The organ growing thing, that's for another podcast. But to understand how open water works, think of a flashlight. Have you ever been in a dark room and cupped your hand over one, Your fingers, the edges of your palm, they take on that weird red glow.
- [21:09]
Mary Lou Jepsen
Red light goes through, right? And near infrared light goes through even better, but you can't see it. But it's benign. Near infrared light, less than we're exposed to on a sunny day in any place in the world.
- [21:20]
Danny Fortson
The problem is that the near infrared light that open water uses scatters when it hits flesh and bone. It doesn't remain a solid beam. The good thing? The scattering isn't random. There's a structure to it, and you can decode it using a slightly modified camera chip you might otherwise find in your smartphone.
- [21:41]
Mary Lou Jepsen
In fact, most smartphones are doing something called 3D sensing to sense if it's your face, not a picture of you. Or ultimately to enable face id. Yeah, face id. But really all the money was put in place for next generation virtual reality and augmented reality. And the big money maker so far there has been Pokemon Go. So basically we have this technology because Pokemon Go did so well. So this is for Pokemon Go.
- [22:10]
Danny Fortson
Those camera chips are powerful enough to pick up individual strands of scattered light. Open water then shoots those wavelengths with sonic pings, which create ripples. And those ripples tell a story. Perhaps it's a tumor in your breast or a thought in your brain. Decoding those ripples happens in an instant.
- [22:31]
Mary Lou Jepsen
We just do math on it and decode it and get information about that. And then we move the sonic ping to the next top spot and the next spot and the next spot, and we scan out the body. We can do up to a million times a second.
- [22:43]
Danny Fortson
So right now this is being done on live rodents, supermarket meat cuts, and the odd lab grown organ. Jepsen reckons, however, that she and Facebook and Elon Musk have all put us on a path to telepathy.
- [23:00]
Mary Lou Jepsen
I'm saying it's inevitable. It's absolutely inevitable. Because if we can see inside of our bodies and that muscle and fat and blood and bone, we can see inside of our brains. We can make laws against seeing inside of our brains if we want to. We can only see inside of our brains for certain cases like brain disease or, you know, the flip side is you've got the National Academies of most every developed country on the planet saying, of the top five things you can do as a technologist, understanding how the brain works is on that list. Somewhere between one and five. So there's a lot of effort being poured into it. European Brain Initiative, the White House Brain Initiative. There's all of this work going on.
- [23:45]
Danny Fortson
Think about what that world sounds like. It could all go quiet. Words would be surplus to requirements. And how would we actually see each other's thoughts? Jepsen imagines a digital whiteboard, say, in the middle of a conference room, where everyone is dumping out fully formed thoughts for all to see.
- [24:08]
Mary Lou Jepsen
You know, you're probably a words guy. I'm an engineer. I did art. You know, I think in images. My typical day to day or week to week is working with engineers who do not speak English as a first language, and on whiteboards all around the world. But then I just wish I could just go and dump the image that I see the full image. And then they could say, no. I'm like, oh, okay, what about? Or somebody else? And they're just so much faster, so much more efficient.
- [24:43]
Danny Fortson
When I spoke to Jepsen, Musk was still a few weeks away from unveiling the precise details of Neuralink. But she knew enough even then to be concerned about his plan, which he says will ultimately be like getting laser eye surgery, a quick, relatively painless outpatient procedure.
- [25:00]
Mary Lou Jepsen
I'm the only one of them that has had brain surgery. Hardest thing I did in my entire life, by far. I just don't see people doing elective brain surgery in the next decade. In a few decades, maybe, but in the next decade, you know, if I've got full blown Parkinson's and I can bring it on, whatever, Alzheimer's, right, great, do it. But I don't see it happening for us to augment ourselves and make ourselves better in the near term.
- [25:33]
Danny Fortson
After Neuralink's big announcement, Jepsen took to Twitter and went further with her critique. Based on her calculations, Musk's invisible threads would displace about 20 cubic millimeters of brain matter. This, she wrote, would result in, quote, swelling and damage to the blood vessels, effectively causing mini strokes. She went on, I had a similarly sized amount of material removed from my brain 25 years ago next month. And I live every day since then with complications from that. I'm concerned, end quote. That's not to say, of course, that we won't indeed one day merge with AI, but maybe it will be through a system like Open Waters, one that does not involve drilling holes in your head. If it does come to pass. Imagine in that scenario, the rise of an all powerful AGI is less scary. We won't necessarily be left behind or enslaved by our machine overlords. We'd all be superhuman.
- [26:37]
Mary Lou Jepsen
If we have it, we will use it, because you could do so much more. The AIs won't beat us because we're going to become Smarter. I mean, 100 billion neurons, each with 100,000 different connections, that's a pretty complex tool for creativity.
- [26:52]
Danny Fortson
Telepathy, merging with machines, what could possibly go wrong?
- [27:01]
Vivian Ming
The problem is, particularly in Silicon Valley, they all think that they're the hero in a novel. They all think they're doing the right thing, and they all think I'm the only person that knows the right thing.
- [27:12]
Danny Fortson
Vivian Ming, the theoretical neuroscientist we spoke to earlier, is an advisor to Hum and the two Aussies we met at Skydeck. She is also one of the most outspoken proponents and critics of how these new technologies may be deployed.
- [27:27]
Vivian Ming
The same people that move fast and broke things and created norms before anyone really understood what was going on, these people now want to do the same thing in the AI space. They want to do the same thing inside our brains.
- [27:44]
Danny Fortson
What is perhaps most interesting about this industry is that so few people are actually talking about what they're doing, about the very obvious hornet's nest of problems it will stir up.
- [27:56]
Mary Lou Jepsen
There's a lot of issues right now with privacy from social media. And so this just ups it by 100x because, you know, it's this last bastion of privacy. And yet what happens to education? You put a little brain hat on and Shakespeare's dumped in and you get to carry that with you, right? Yeah, eventually. That has such profound. I mean, one is sort of privacy, the first and the read. If we're talking about writing thoughts, that's free will. And so we actually decided to hold off on that and not enable it in our systems.
- [28:33]
Vivian Ming
But some of the entrepreneurs, boy, do they remind me of the entrepreneurs I was meeting 10 years ago in Silicon Valley. The same slick hair and the same shiny suit and just, oh my goodness, I don't want these people inside my head. Nobody does. If we don't take these things seriously, though, that's what's gonna happen. They're gonna move fast. And when they break things inside our head, that will be hard to come back from.
- [29:01]
Danny Fortson
Ming is doing her best to sound the alarm. She flies around the world giving talks to anyone who will listen. Jepsen gives a speech every month, updating the world on her progress toward a wearable mri, toward telepathy. And Musk has finally broken his silence about his plans to convince the world to undergo elective brain surgery. But don't worry, Neuralink's chief executive, Max Hodak says. They won't spam you.
- [29:30]
Max Hodak
It might be that if you want to build an app or a business on top of a brain enabled API, then your business model can't be advertising, for example. Very important to us that this turns out well for everyone. And so there's thinking like that going on.
- [29:44]
Danny Fortson
It all sounds like the plot of a Philip K. Dick novel. The thing about science fiction, though, is that it often happens to be a pretty good predictor of the future. Next time you're on a train or in a park, any public space, really, look around, see how many people are staring at their screens, making do with that terribly inefficient input and output system that's limited by how fast they can read or how quickly they can move their thumbs. It's kind of crude, isn't it? And yet everyone makes do. Is it that far out to think that in 5, 10, 15 years time we all just wouldn't choose to accept the risks, allowing companies or even the government to see our thoughts in exchange for better bandwidth? Could we afford not to do it? If other people have accepted the risk and now have a competitive advantage over us? We've done it before. Why would the future be any different?
- [30:45]
Vivian Ming
This is not science fiction. There are entrepreneurs commercializing this technology right now.
- [30:54]
Danny Fortson
So about my little brain test. I practice duel and back for a couple days. I got up to about 50% on average. Then I turned on my little forehead gadget H. Boom. 67. I'm. So basically I'm smarter, but I'm not. But I'm not that smart.
- [31:17]
Mary Lou Jepsen
You have five trans.
- [31:18]
Danny Fortson
I started at 33, but now I'm doing 67. But I should be, like, just killing. I'm trying one more time. Cube C T 83%. I passed. My wife, Chinua, was not impressed.
- [31:37]
Mary Lou Jepsen
You asked me whether I would basically endorse it for our child. Yeah, and I'm saying maybe in limited circumstances, fine.
- [31:45]
Danny Fortson
But like limited circumstances, maybe after all that practice, I had just got a knack for the game. She's probably right to be skeptical, but for how long? Next week on Tales of Silicon Valley. We commune with nature. We follow the tech gurus to a mountain retreat to see how they're wrestling with the beasts they've created and how they're finding peace with the help of some crystal infused mineral water and meditation. Lots of meditation.
- [32:25]
Meditation Retreat Participant
We created an altar.
- [32:26]
Danny Fortson
Oh, and they're at.
- [32:27]
Mary Lou Jepsen
Oh right.
- [32:27]
Meditation Retreat Participant
All of the phones are in sleeping bags.
- [32:29]
Danny Fortson
They're blankets in the middle of the
- [32:30]
Meditation Retreat Participant
room and they are resting right now. And so what we're doing is we're having full faith that when we turn them on, things are going to be fine.
- [32:41]
Danny Fortson
Tales of Silicon Valley was written and narrated by me, Danny Fortson, and produced by Jim Carrey at Rethink Audio. Matt hall is the Executive Producer for Wireless Studios. It was a Wireless Studios production for Times Newspapers. And one last thing before we go. If you're enjoying this series, head over to my other podcast, Danny in the Valley, where I interview everyone from Bill Gates to Marc Andreessen to that little known startup founder who was trained trying desperately to become the next to change the world. So do tune in to that. That's Danny in the Valley. Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [33:25]
ServiceNow Representative
This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.
- [33:30]
Danny Fortson
There's a lot of excitement around AI
- [33:31]
ServiceNow Announcer
right now, but the problem is what happens after the demo when you have
- [33:35]
ServiceNow Representative
to plug that technology into a real company.
- [33:38]
ServiceNow Announcer
Different clouds, different data, different systems that were never designed to talk to each other.
- [33:43]
ServiceNow Representative
ServiceNow's platform is designed to help people by connecting these pieces, enabling organizations to coordinate work across departments, tools, and increasingly, AI agents.
- [33:53]
ServiceNow Announcer
In fact, the company says more than 80 billion workflows run on its platform
- [33:58]
ServiceNow Representative
every year, which gives you a sense of the scale of operations it's designed to handle.
- [34:03]
ServiceNow Announcer
Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people@servicenow.com
- [34:10]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's name your price tool for years. Now, with the name your price tool, you tell them what you want to pay and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easy to see your options. Visit progressive.com find a rate that works for you with the name your price tool Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and Coverage Match limited By state law.