Hacking Your Brain to Order Dreams On Demand
57:26 Share

Are you ready to move your career forward? Make your comeback with Purdue Global and get college credit for your work, school, life, or military experiences. With these credits, you may have already completed up to 75% of your undergraduate degree. You've worked hard to get where you are. It's time to get the recognition you deserve and earn a degree you'll be proud of, one that employers will trust and respect. When you take the next step in your life and career, make it count with Purdue Global, Purdue's

This is Holly Frey from Stuff You Missed in History Class. The national sales event is on at your Toyota dealer. Making now the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new SUV, like an adventure-ready RAV4. Available with all-wheel drive, your new RAV4 is built for performance on any terrain. Or choose a new RAV4.

check out a stylish and comfortable Highlander with seating for up to eight passengers and available panoramic moonroof. You can sit back and enjoy the wide open views with the whole family. Check out more national sales event deals when you visit buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places.

Holiday magic is in the air, and DSW's got all the shoes to make your season extra merry. Believe, you've got parties to attend and lists to check twice, so DSW is taking care of the details. Like gifts to make their eyes all aglow, styles that bring joy to your world.

Brands everyone wants, like UGG, Nike, Birkenstock, and more. And deals to make your budget bright. Find the perfect shoes for you and yours at a DSW store near you or DSW.com. First Contact with Lori Siegel is a production of Dot Dot Dot Media and iHeart Radio.

In the future, we could have these chips inside of our brains. Do you think they could be hacked? Once the chip is inside your brain, it's just a button press. So instead of changing the minds of one at a time, we can change the minds of everyone in Michigan and make them vote one way or the other. Suddenly, you know, creating a misinformation ad on Facebook looks like peanuts. What if we could order our own dreams? And could our thoughts be hacked?

Will technology make some of us superhuman? And if so, would we create a whole new species? Is death really the final step? Or could our brains answer vital questions once our bodies are gone? These are topics from a conversation with Moran Sir. He's a professor of neuroscience at the Kellogg School of Management. I'd also describe him as a creative. He's a brain hacker. At one point, he was also a bank robber. We'll get into that.

But really, he's a student of humanity. He likes to test the boundaries, see how far he can go, and challenge us to anticipate what's coming next, even the worst-case scenario.

Just talking to him is like living in an experiment. I can't help but question if he's manipulating my memory or changing my mind while we're doing the interview. But I think that's the point. We talk about disinformation and manipulation in this era of tech, but things get pretty personal when it comes to the type of research Moran does. He focuses on the brain. He focuses on your mind and your sense of self.

and how that sense of self is increasingly hackable in the modern era. I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is First Contact. This show is called First Contact, and I talk about my first contact with the folks that we have on, and I was trying to think back to our first contact.

And I think I want to say it was Ashley Madison, but let me caveat that. It wasn't like we met on the cheating website, Ashley Madison. We met because of a story I was doing on Ashley Madison for a show I did called Mostly Human. And you were explaining to me all this research on how people cheat and

and like when they're at their weakest moments. Can you just like explain that really quick? Yeah, so I think that there's by now a lot of scientists who look into that and they try to understand basically in big words, bad behavior. Why do people do bad stuff?

We know that it's a bad idea and somehow our brains allow us to do that. And it boils down to the fact that we use an equation in our mind to decide whether to do something bad. And the equation involves parameters like how likely I am to get caught. If I do get caught, how big is the punishment? And mostly the one that I found interesting is if I do all of that bad stuff,

Will it change my perception of myself as a good person? And the reality is that most people find ways to justify to themselves why they're great people, even if they do bad stuff. So most prisoners, if you take them and ask them, why did you do that? They say, yeah, I did steal the bread, but the reality was that it was stale and my family was hungry. And you kind of find a way to tell a story. And this is a property of the brain. The brain has to think that you're great when it does stuff and to frame the entire world around this thing. So when we ask why people cheat,

It's mostly because they can find a way to tell a story that they're not cheating. That's so crazy. And you know all this stuff because you study the brain. Yes.

Yes. Tell us a little bit about yourself. I mean, you have such a fascinating background. You're like a hacker turned neuroscientist. So I have, I guess, three different hats that I wear or used to wear at some point. One of them is the one of a hacker where I spent nearly 15 years breaking into banks and government institutes to try to find flaws in the security and teach them how to

better save themselves from villains. That's the first career. Then a second career that spends the last 15 years as neuroscientist trying to study the brain and understand how it works in a unique way that kind of borrows from my

traditional hacking techniques. And then the last five years, I've been working as a business professor as well, where I teach companies and MBA students how they can use the knowledge about our brain and about hacking to essentially understand customers better, to create value in a different way, to align desires of people with outcomes and mostly how other people are influencing us and whether we can stop it or not. And

And I mean, you used to hack into banks and whatnot. Yeah. So back in the early or I guess mid 90s is when I started as a kid up to about 10 years after to 2005, 2006.

I was working in a company that did what we call active marketing, which is we used to go to banks and first hack into the system and steal money and then go to the board and say, look, your bank is insecure. We were able to steal a million dollars yesterday by just doing this and that.

We're going to help you now secure yourself better from bad villains who wouldn't tell you that they did it, but also we'll take a cut of the money that we're saving you. And what we did was essentially just that. How'd you get into that? I started as a kid. So I kind of grew up in the 80s as computers did, and I basically knew how they worked.

And I started by hacking. You grew up in Israel? Yeah. Okay. I was born in France and I was raised in Israel. And in Israel, in the 80s, computers started to become a household thing. And if you wanted to add one life to a Mario game, the only way to do it was to hack. So I did that. And at some point, the only way to do it... What do you mean you added a life? Slow down. What are you talking about? So you play Mario, this like old game, and you're getting to level three where you can't pass...

some monster. You try and you try and you try and it doesn't work. And then someone teaches you that you can actually take a snapshot of the game before you die and just after you die and see what's the difference between the image of the computer before and after. And you see that one number changed from two to one. You say, I guess this is the lives. So if I just go

put it back to three, suddenly let the game run, and I suddenly have a third life. That's as simple as I can depict what we did back then, but it was enough to teach us how hacking works. It has changed a lot in the last 20 years, but the concepts are the same. You take a snapshot of before and after an event happens, and you see what changed, and you learn how you can manipulate that, not too far from what we do with the brain. We look at

to events and try to understand what happens in the brain. And so you went from being a kid who's hacking Mario games and then all of a sudden you're hacking, you decided to hack banks. Did you ever do any, I mean, you're very, I feel like you're very proper and you do like TED stuff now. And so like you have a good name about you now. Did you ever do anything like kind of illegal? Oh, tons. So first of all, between age, let's say 16 to age 21, I was a soldier in the Israeli army doing that.

What does that mean? So I was recruited to the Israeli army to be in a team of hackers who do the same things I did as a kid for Mario games, but now to...

big, you know, governments and nation states and really apply the same methods to large scale army stuff. Take us on a mission. Where are we going? I think that back then when I was a soldier, the most kind of controversial things were encrypted files. So files used to be encrypted with some codes that were not too hard to crack, but there was, of course,

a need for the Israeli intelligence to get access to those files. And they would bring a file to me and say, this file is encrypted. There's a password. Find out what the password is. And sometimes even not just the password, but the thinking of the person who created a password. So if I give you five passwords,

and you crack them, and I see that all five of them are the birthdays of your ex-boyfriends, I can start understanding how you actually think of passwords. So I can crack the system by which you create them. So this was my job as a soldier for many years. I mean, it sounds like you were a hacker, but you were always kind of very good with people too, right? Because it doesn't sound like you can be a hacker without the kind of hacker you were without being very astute to human beings. I would say that...

More than 90% of hacking is psychology. Tell me about the first time you broke into a bank. Did it give you a rush? So the first bank robbing was after I finished the army. We started this company and we were mostly hacking into banks virtually as in trying from home to get into it. But in our contract...

was some clause that allowed us to actually physically go and rob the bank. So not only were we supposed to just hack into the bank, but we're supposed to also, in theory, go to the banks and see if the cameras are pointing to the right direction or if someone left a post-it note with a password next to the computer, which are physical ways of hacking. And at some point, we decided that we're going to actually exercise the right to rob a bank, old-fashioned, you know, ski masks and...

What? Going to the safe. Wait, but can you like take me to the scene? Because it seems like you're just like talking casually about putting on ski masks and robbing a bank. Like, were you guys like in a cafe somewhere and you're like, we're going to rob this bank with ski masks? One of the people in my team said, you know, we are allowed to do that. We never tried. We should try. This is a small bank, a small contract. Nothing bad would happen if we tried. And we did. And we sat in the office on a Friday afternoon and, you know, took...

drawings of the bank, like every movie that you've seen, this was our life for a weekend. We decided if it's good to come from the entrance or from the back door, who should be in the getaway car, all of those things.

As you imagine a bank robbery, only that we picked a small one with only one teller. We had to do a lot of like preparations with the legal team to make sure that if we get caught, someone can call and say, "Hey, these guys are my people and don't put them in prison." They actually were allowed to do it. A lot of the behind the scenes that I think bank robbers don't spend time doing. But at the end of the day, we came to the bank and you asked me about the moment before kind of when you, you know, boys turn into men.

This was a moment, like I remember with all the legal precautions and with all the preparations, the moment you enter a bank, knowing that in 10 steps, you're going to go to a person who doesn't know anything and tell her that it's a bank robbery and ask her to give you the key to the vault. And that's going to be a stressful moment for everyone. It's scary. I don't know how people do it for a living, just for me.

A day was really hard. Did you practice before? Like, did you say those words out loud? What did you, tell me what you said. I think, I think we had a really, really kind of specific wording that we invited, but it was along the lines of this is a bank robbery. Please give us the key to the vault. Sounds really polite. I don't know. That sounds very, very polite. It was very polite. And it worked. It worked a few times. It failed as many. We ended up in prison multiple times. The police comes, takes you to prison. And then a couple of hours later you get arrested.

out of the prison because a lawyer called a lawyer and everything gets organized. But in the first few hours, imagine a police officer getting a call, showing up and being told by two kids, no, no, it's okay. We're allowed to rob the bank. Not a problem here. Sure. I'm sure you're allowed to rob the bank. But this is all kind of like this idea of hacking for good in some capacity. This is like early phases of white hat hacking. People don't understand what white hat hacking is. That's what it is. There was a lot of

a lot of kind of learning for the system around this. Like we didn't have exact names for what we did. It didn't have like how to hire people because no one knew what it was. Now it's a lot more organized. Now there's companies who do that and all the banks are required by law to have hackers try to get into our systems. I think once every quarter and report to the government how well it went, it became a lot more regulated.

Yeah. Our world is so vulnerable and there are good guys and bad guys and you actually need good guys like you at the time before you turned into like a neuroscientist. We're going to get into all that. But breaking into these places to show how vulnerable they are. I think it becomes even more complicated right now because now there's nation states involved. And I was just in D.C. a few weeks ago in a

conference where the big questions that were addressed had to do with when is hacking a whole step or not. So if one country hacks into their systems,

and say, shuts down the power grid, and in doing so maybe closes a hospital for a few days and maybe makes a few patients' life miserable, can you respond with a missile? The rules are not clear right now, so most countries decided it's not, and that hacking is its own thing, and you can hack back, but you can't respond with military equipment.

And I think that the US at least is trying to think right now whether it should change this policy. So I was there thinking about how hacking can be large-scale military operation. What do you think? Generally, I think that whether it is what everyone agrees on or not, I think at the end of the day, it will become the case because right now you can do real damage with hacking. So it's no longer confined to, okay, I stole your data. You can get into someone's

and shuts it down and kill them with a hack. So now I think that when the hacks lead to civilian casualties at that level, countries are going to start responding with kind of force, not just with hacks. That's crazy. And I want to get into...

brain hacking and all this stuff, because this is the stuff that you're doing, you're doing now. That's so fascinating to me. So for our listeners, it's like, you've always been my guy that I called and I'm like, Hmm, I'm working on this story and I know it's kind of weird, but what's the future of X? You're involved in like the weird, weird stuff. Um, it's like the stuff that people think is not going to happen, but it actually is. So like,

What is the craziest stuff that's coming down the pipeline when it comes to the future of our brain and our thoughts? So crazy things without still evidence that are actually going to be real have to do with connecting brains directly. So that's something that people talk about, but no one has proven that it actually would work. But this would mean that I somehow create a wire between my brain and your brain and connect them.

And in doing so, I'm not just allowing thoughts to flow between your and my brain, but actually the theory suggests create a new third entity that is the sum of the two of us. So what will happen if we do it is that immediately a third entity emerges. It doesn't think it's you or me. It thinks it's its own entity and it thinks of our brains as parts of it. Total science fiction in the sense that we don't know how to do it, but total science in the sense that it's

coming from real theory that looks at how brains look when they connect them. That's the most extreme I'm thinking about right now. Another as extreme and something that is being explored right now is the question of what we can do with a brain of a person who died.

So we think of death as the final step of a person. They're no longer there. But it turns out that when you're dead, your brain still has juice in it and the neurons can still work for a few minutes to a few hours. And the question that scientists are asking is, can you essentially ask a person's brain questions after the person is not there?

You know, you execute someone because you think they're the killer. And then in the few minutes after they're dead, you ask them, did you kill this person? And you get the true answer because there's no more boundaries. You can access the brain. No, that's crazy. Did that actually happen? So I think that right now we do a very, very limited version of that in that we take the tissue from the brains of animals who we call it sacrifice, but actually kill, put that in microscope and still inject currents into this tissue. And it still does things for us.

If you know exactly where to inject the current, such as it will activate a process that is exactly like the process that happens in the brain, you can essentially read the output and know what's going on. So think of the following simple but useful example. To look at a picture and tell if there's a cat or not in this picture is something that humans are...

perfect at and machines are getting really, really good at, but they still work much harder. If you take a baby and you tell it, tell me if there's a cat or not here, it would know how to point to the cat or not. So we are terrific at that and machines are terrible at that.

So at the very least, you can take a person who died at noon and for the few minutes while their brain is still alive until it decays, just show it pictures of images and ask it that if there's a cat or not. And you can now classify images using dead people's brain. And there's people dying in the millions every day. So you can just use the brains of people who died to do chores for you while they're not there to say, OK, I'm done with that.

We've got to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. But when we come back, the unintended consequences of technology meant to enhance our brains. Chips implanted in our brain could make us smarter. But could our thoughts become hackable? We'll dig in after the break.

Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere, from self-driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it is coming, fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? Time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI.

OCI is a blazing fast and secure platform for your infrastructure, database, and application development, plus all your AI and machine learning workloads. OCI costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking, so you're saving a pile of money. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to OCI, including Amazon.

Thank you.

That's oracle.com slash strategic. Hey guys, Rob Parker here to tell you that the national sales event is on at your Toyota dealer. Making now the perfect time to get the great deal on a dependable new truck like the rugged half-ton Tundra. Combining raw capability with premium comfort and advanced tech to fuel your wildest adventures. Or check out the Tacoma.

Delivering trail-dominating power and captivating style, the new Tacoma was born to make your off-roading dreams come true. Check out more national sales event deals when you visit buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. This is Danielle Robay from the bright side, because you're worth it.

Growing up, I remember hearing that famous L'Oreal Paris tagline and feeling empowered. With those four words, L'Oreal Paris broke the mold. Beauty was for all of us. For me, knowing my worth means being able to be my authentic self.

It's more than just getting that perfect lash. Knowing your worth is embracing the things that make you beautiful, inside and out. With a commitment to innovation and quality, L'Oreal Paris delivers groundbreaking products that help you take on the world.

Through their Women of Worth program, they recognize 10 exceptional female nonprofit leaders each year, offering grants, mentorship, and a platform to share their inspiring stories. Discover more about these extraordinary women and embrace your beauty with L'Oreal Paris. Because you're worth it.

I'm very interested in Neuralink technology. You know, everyone's talking about this idea of implanting chips in our brains to help enhance our brains, make us smarter, make us feel kind of limitless. Talk us through this. How close are we?

And what are some of the benefits? And then let's get into the unintended consequences, which is always kind of my, the part that I love to kind of jam on. So when you think about putting a chip in the brain or brain implant, there's kind of three things that you have to deal with. And the neuroscience is the easiest of the three. That's the one we pretty much solved. We still have to tweak it and it's still something that

We need to make sure it works chronically because it's in the brain forever. But that's actually the easiest part. We know how to stimulate brains. In fact, right now in the world, there's about 40,000 people in the US that already have brain implants in their heads for clinical purposes, something that helps them deal with Parkinson's or clinical depression or some other problems. So we know how to put a chip in your brain that speaks to your brain and controls it and works with it. That is the easy part, even though people think it's hard.

The two components of this endeavor that are still hard is one, how do you get a chip inside the brain? Right now, the only way to get inside the brain is to drill a hole in the brain and put the chip directly inside. How to get it inside is a big problem. Just swallowing a pill wouldn't work here. So we have to find a way to get into the brain, passing all the barriers that the brain created for chemicals to get in.

And it's not easy at all. So that's where most of the work is spent. And the other one is purely legal and regulatory. So even if tomorrow you find a person who agrees to have their brain exposed and says, put the chip inside my brain, I'm okay with that. It's still not allowed. Doctors wouldn't be allowed to do that. But also it's something that we're worried would have consequences that we don't know of right now. And that's the question you asked me.

We know in theory how to put a chip inside your brain and to give it the powers to help you.

But it's unclear if we want that as a society. Do we want people to have more IQ because we give it to them and leave us mortals behind? Is the question. Right. I mean, right now, some of this technology is being used to help people, right? People who need to move limbs that aren't moving. I mean, it's actually already in use, right? One person in France, in Grenoble, was given a brain implant that controls exoskeleton and allows him to move. So he was in a wheelchair all his life and now he walks.

With limbs controlled by his brain, the same way he controlled his biological ones, but now he controls robotic ones, but he, for all purposes, works now. That's where it goes clinically. We find ways to use it to help people. People who lost limbs, people who lost some functions, who lost sensations, we can give it to them. And those are the people who get the chip right now in the brain. The fear slash opportunity is that suddenly people would want it for pure enhancement. So...

When Elon Musk and his team talk about that, they're not talking about necessarily helping people who lost the function. They're talking about basically giving it to Elon Musk and making him smarter, better, having the entire world's information in his brain. And that is when we start to talk about things that are beautiful in what they give us, but also risky. So you can imagine that having all of Wikipedia in your brain at the

simple query, you can get all the data you want, would be remarkable. You don't have to study anything story-wise. You just have to ask the question, when was the first evolution? And the number 789 is going to appear in your mind the same way when you ask how much is 2 plus 5, the number 7 appears in your mind without having to process it. You don't have to kind of

You do the same thing you do with your phone, where you type the digits and kind of ask how much is 11 times 47, get the answer and now read it. It will just emerge. That's fantastic. What else? Let's do more. So it's like, if I hear a song, I can pick what's that song and it just tells me? Yes, you can probably immediately compare it to all the songs out there and see what it reminds you of. And like, you know, do this thing, like people like you also like that song. So it will immediately kind of have a playlist of things that you prefer because it also know that you enjoyed this song. So it will just choose the next one that you would enjoy.

It will tell you when you need to go to sleep. Humans are terrible in sleeping. They always delay sleep and it's hurting us. It will just shut down. It says like, it's time to go to sleep. I'm shutting the brain off. It will choose the best food for you out of the menu items. So you will eat the healthiest things for you. It will tell you how to be more concise in speaking. So it will pick the words that would help you like Tesseract in your brain.

It would probably do a better interview than I'm doing right now, right? It will do a better interview than I'm doing right now. Wow. It will be high frequency trading in your mind instead of having to rely on computers to tell you what stocks to invest in. So all the good stuff is great. I want it. Where do I sign up? So here's where you kind of ask yourself, do you want it? The question that you should ask is,

is let's say I do that, but so are all the other people around me. And suddenly there are like different chips in the market, but you can afford only the one that gives you 10 IQ points, but your friends can afford the one that gives them 100 IQ points. Suddenly all your friends become smarter and you're just a little bit smarter. What's going to happen? So right now we have this kind of understanding that there's inequality in the world, but it's only inequality at the level of money, pretty much, and resources. So one person is...

rich, affords to buy the best food out there. One person is poor, affords only some foods and maybe gets sicker. And that's the inequality. But at the end of the day, they both have to eat. They both speak the same language. They both live in the same, they breathe the same air. They kind of interact in the same world. Once you think about making superhumans, basically those limitless people, they might...

be totally different species than us. So the example that I sometimes give is us compared to apes. So the bonobos that are really, really clever animals, they basically are 98% us in terms of DNA. There's only 2% difference between us and them. And it leads to an enormous difference in practice. Like we treat them as animals and we're humans. You know,

you know, we put them in cages, we give them bananas, but we don't really try to interact with them. We don't really say, let's ask the bonobo what she thinks about this particular idea in politics. We treat them as animals.

If you think of the smartest ape out there that can communicate using symbols, we say, look at this one. It almost interacts like a two-year-old kid. How amazing is that? Now, skip to a world where you can put neural implants in the brain. Those superhumans with the 150 IQ points above us

will probably think of us like we think of the bonobos. They would say, look at this one. She's so smart. She can do differential equations in her mind, just like two-year-old Timmy here from our species. So beautiful. Let's put her back in the cage now. That's kind of the world that we can imagine if we start to create in this. And this means that there's going to be inequality at the level that we have not experienced where the rich and the poor in IQ really are two different species. They're not just like two people who eat a little better than the other. They're

you know, communicating differently. They might have technologies we don't understand. Really a different world. Do you think that this is part of the, because you hear folks like Elon Musk talking about this, which is with such enthusiasm. Is this part of the conversation, do you think, in Silicon Valley? I think that because it's not technologically something that we know how to build right now, people push it to the side and ignore it.

And they kind of deal with that later, is this thing. Same way we talk about AI. We kind of say, yeah, yeah, one day it's going to be smarter and better than us, but not right now. So let's push it to the side and let's not talk about it. And I think that that's a mistake. I think that in an ideal world, we should think about things before they become reality, once we start to explore them and prepare for them. So I think it's actually this larger issue of like,

well, the tech titans are building out this technology. If folks like Elon Musk talking about it, politicians don't quite understand anything about it. We have people like you who are talking about it in theory as it's being built out, but there's not one like larger entity that's saying, okay, wait, guys, we've got to figure this out. And then you have like China over here doing all this crazy stuff with different boundaries than we have. So it's,

It's kind of a whole stew of interesting problems that when put together could provide for a dystopian future if we're not careful. Yeah, so I think that you're absolutely right. There's a really big gap between

what Regula is talking about, what people talk about in bars in Silicon Valley versus what we talk about as scientists. I think that if we increase the bar by starting to ask politicians those questions, they would be required to learn about that and they would know. So I think that here is the job of society to just ask questions and embarrass them a few times and then they would do a better job. I think that's what's going to happen if we start asking that question

repeatedly in town halls. Well, so speaking of politics, let's talk about the future of disinformation. Because what I like, what I've always been interested is, well, everybody's kind of yelling about like one issue. And this is why I've always kind of related to you. You're kind of like 10 steps ahead being like... I'm blushing. Yeah, well, but it's like you're 10 steps ahead being like, no, no, no, like you've got to pay attention to this because this is like coming down the pipeline and no one's even looking.

And you said something about someone being able to write code into your brain and like change your mind.

This is where like it's like the emoji with like your head blowing up kind of thing. Should we go there and terrify people? So I think the bad news for people is it's already happening. This is one of the things that we're not talking about like far future. It's something that we do in the lab every day now, changing people's minds, writing small thoughts. And the technology to write big thoughts is already in the testing. So we should tell everyone about all of them. So in a way, first, let's start with the kind of baseline, which is marketing has been doing that for the last 80 years anyhow. Yeah.

people have been finding ways to get into your mind and change it in small deviations all the time. We're just not too worried about it because we think that we know how to do that. The reality is that we don't. The reality is that if a company decided that they want to target you and change your mind with all the might of their marketing team, they could do that. This is why all of the companies in Silicon Valley are hiring neuroscientists right now to help them in the marketing world, basically to kind of

apply addiction methods to get you to spend more time looking at their ads or clicking on their content. Wasn't that like very like 2014? Aren't they on to like at least publicly being like, we're not doing that anymore? No? I think that they are just more efficient and more clever about it. But I think that it's the same. My students, when they finish their PhD, have a competition between going to other universities and

the temptation to go to Silicon Valley and be hired by the same companies that we know from 2014.

as employers who want them to do the same thing that they did as neuroscientists in the service of those companies. So this is kind of the baseline that marketing has worked. You don't know if you like Coca-Cola or not. You have no idea if you really like it because your brain has been trained for 25 years to think that this is good and the value of sugar was kind of aligned with how much sugar is in Coca-Cola such that this is now what you think is good. You really have no idea. It's really hard to disentangle what you think from what you were trained. Okay, so that's level one. Level two,

We've been working in the last 15 years as scientists on changing memories. And what changing memories does is it creates a new narrative for your life. How do you do that? There are simple ways and complicated ways. The complicated ones involve taking your brain in moments where it's vulnerable, when the guards are down and changing things. One of those moments, for instance, is your sleep.

So right now, there are studies that show that when you're sleeping, we can find a specific moment where your brain is listening to the outside world and actually rewrite stuff into your brain. And you will wake up with a different memory, not knowing that someone changed it. That's the complicated one, but we're working on it in the lab right now. So it's something that's happening.

So are you like sneaking into your students' rooms while they're sleeping and messing with their brains? Essentially, we bring them to a study by telling them we're going to have a study on a sleep pattern, go to sleep for a couple of hours in the lab, but we're not telling them what this study is really about. And we listen to their brain and wait for it to get to the right moment where it's kind of listening to the outside world. And then we use olfactory cues, smells essentially, to explain.

inject ideas in their mind and change those ideas using other smells. And then when they wake up, they have different thoughts. The example that we do right now is smoking. That's not a bad thing because we're still a science lab. So we bring a smoker to the lab. We have him go to sleep. We wait for him to get to the right moment where his brain thinks about smoking or thinks about the past. And we

spray the smell of nicotine into their nose to make them think about smoking. Then we spray the smell of rotten eggs, which is a smell that's known to penetrate the brain, make you have bad thoughts, but not wake you up. The pairing of those two creates a connection in your brain between smoking and something bad, such that when you wake up, you don't want to smoke anymore for a few days, and you have no idea why. Like you just say, I don't feel like smoking. So this was me changing your brain behind your back in the course of a few hours to something that we think is positive.

But as an evidence, it suggests that we can do anything. We can change our brain to anything. What else could you do? So there's been studies that looked at trying to make you eat healthy. So you go to sleep, they kind of inject an idea into your brain about what you should eat when you wake up. When you wake up, they say, here's a buffet, choose what you want. And people are like,

choose healthier options because you injected the ideas. There's one group that looks at racism. They take people, they test how racist they are before they go to sleep, then they do something to their brain and when they... How do they test how racist they are? How do you get like a casual test of how racist you are before you go to sleep? By the way, the thing

that's so funny about you is you're just like, oh, and we just test how racist you are before you go to sleep. It's like, what? What do you mean? So this is a test that was invented, I think, at Harvard a few years ago called the IAT, the implicit association task, where you basically show people things like pictures of African-Americans and Caucasians. And you ask them to put the African-American in the bucket on the left

by pressing the left arrow and put the Caucasian on the back on the right by pressing the right arrow and do it as fast as you can without making mistakes. So a picture appears and you have to quickly put it left or right. And then they show you words. And some of the words are positive or negative. So love, beauty, perfection versus bad words like anger, disgust, and so on. And again, you have to put them on the back at left or right. And then they say, now I'm going to show you either a...

face of say a Caucasian person or a nice word, put them in the same basket, or we're going to show you a black African-American face or nasty word and put it in the right basket. And again, do it as fast as you can without making mistakes. People do it still very, very fast. And then you say, now we're going to reverse it. We're going to show you either African-American face or a good word and put those in the right basket or Caucasian and bad word and put those in the right basket. And suddenly people start making mistakes.

because they have an implicit association that black person is bad, white person is good. So it's harder for them to do the reverse association. They do it either slower or make mistakes. And that's showing that you have some kind of implicit bias against African-Americans, even if you don't

exercise it. You don't really do that. And it's true even for African-Americans. Even they fail the same test. And we do it with women and wages. It shows that people have a bias towards paying women less than men. They should do that at like tech companies too. Like, you know, when they need to hire more women or get more diversity, like in tech companies. So all of those studies show that most of us have these biases. We were kind of trained by society to have those. And whether you're a woman or a man, young, old, black, white, all of those, you still fail the same tests.

But up to now, this was the case and there was no way to change that. What they do right now is they take the test first. They show that you have the bias. Then when you go to sleep, they basically try to kind of use olfaction or the auditory cues to essentially remind you that you should break the bias in the right moment. And when you wake up, they take the same test. And what we show is that people actually change their biases. They become a little bit less likely to make a mistake when they see an African-American face and a good word and vice versa. Wow.

So all of those are in the realm of the hard things because they involve getting a person to the lab, putting stuff on their head, having them to sleep, get to the right moment.

someone has to look at your brain and sleeping to know that you're in the right moment and do stuff it's complicated it's still very clear what you need to do but it's a cumbersome process there's a much easier one that is done in a lot of labs right now we essentially convince a person that a memory is not what it was just in words we have a study that we're doing right now where we bring it to the lab and we ask you to make a simple choice we show you two pictures of two guys that you

that you don't know. And we say, tell me who do you find more attractive, the guy on the left or the guy on the right? And we have cards in our hands with those pictures. So you might point to the guy on the left. Is this Tinder you're doing? Basically, it's a version of Tinder or Hinge. You see a picture and you have to swipe left or right only that you see two guys and you have to choose which one is better. So you have to choose one.

So you show you two guys and we ask you who do you find more attractive and you say the guy on the right and then we give you the card that you selected and we ask you to hold it in your hand and explain to us why you picked this person. So you might hold it in your hand and you say, I really like his smile. We say, fantastic, let's pick another pair. So we pick two new cards, two different guys. You do that a hundred times. So every couple of seconds you get a new pair and you make a choice and you explain it. And here is the trick.

Every now and then, let's say every 20 trials, we give you the card you didn't choose. So the person who gives you the card is a magician and uses sleight of hand to give you the other options. So if you chose A, he would give you B. And what we see is that first, people rarely notice that they didn't receive what they chose.

It's already kind of step one in changing memory. And step two, when we ask them to explain, they can't be an answer. So they chose A, I give them B, they take B and they say, I chose B because I really like his... They just come up with it even though they didn't choose that person. And in that moment, what happens in their brain is that their brain now creates an association and a memory for something they didn't choose themselves.

So if you ask them more and more about why they chose option B, their brain is going to commit more and more to this choice, so much so that if they come back tomorrow and you give them the same options again and you say choose again, they're going to choose B now. So think about it in the context of business. You go to a supermarket to choose a toothpaste.

You debate between the Colgate on the left and the Crest on the right, and you run a complex analysis of the two, and in the end you choose Colgate. You put it in the basket and you go shop for other things. Somewhere between the moment you chose the Colgate and the checkout, I sneak into your basket and I replace the Colgate with Crest. Most likely you're going to buy the Crest, you won't know it. And if I stopped on the way outside and I say, I'm from Procter & Gamble and I'm running a marketing research campaign and I want to know why you chose Crest, you wouldn't say, I have no idea.

you wouldn't say, I chose Colgate and someone flipped them. You will defend the choice you didn't make. And in doing so, you convince yourself that you want that so much so that tomorrow you actually buy the crest. So I can now make you change your memories in a very, very simple way. And by asking you why, make your brain come up with a story that you will now believe and go forward with.

We've got to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors, but when we come back, try this one out. Imagine a future where companies could control the content of your dreams. More on that after the break.

It's Ray from the Bobby Bones Show here to tell you that the National Sales Event is on at your Toyota dealer, making now the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new SUV like an adventure-ready RAV4. Yeah! Available with all-wheel drive, your new RAV4 is built for performance on any terrain. Or check out a stylish and comfortable Highlander, seating up to eight passengers, an available panoramic moonroof. You can sit back, enjoy the wide-open views with the whole family.

Check out more of this national sales event. The deals are there when you visit buyatoyota.com. That's buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. This is Danielle Robay from the bright side, because you're worth it.

Growing up, I remember hearing that famous L'Oreal Paris tagline and feeling empowered. With those four words, L'Oreal Paris broke the mold. Beauty was for all of us. For me, knowing my worth means being able to be my authentic self.

It's more than just getting that perfect lash. Knowing your worth is embracing the things that make you beautiful, inside and out. With a commitment to innovation and quality, L'Oreal Paris delivers groundbreaking products that help you take on the world. Through their Women of Worth program, they recognize 10 exceptional female nonprofit leaders each year, offering grants, mentorship, and a platform to share their inspiring stories. To

Discover more about these extraordinary women and embrace your beauty with L'Oreal Paris. Because you're worth it. This message is sponsored by Greenlight. We all know that old saying about teaching a man to fish. And as parents, we want our kids to learn the things that will set them up for success.

So this holiday season, give kids money skills that will last well beyond 2024 with Greenlight. Greenlight is a debit card and money app made for families where kids learn how to save, invest, and spend wisely with parental controls built in. Sign up today at greenlight.com slash iHeart. greenlight.com slash iHeart.

So how could that be weaponized in the future for political uses? Because we're all talking about disinformation online and the fact that people don't really trust what they see anymore. And there's, you know, nation states who are manipulating social networks. But you're talking about something a little bit different. So the tagline for this research in our lab is don't believe everything you think.

And the point behind that is that evolutionary, we were raised to have a brain that manufactures reality for us. So everything that our brain comes up with is reality. We never doubt our own mind. So if you have a thought in your brain, it's real.

You might spend a lot of time vetting thoughts that come into your brain by being skeptical, by asking questions, by really exerting your might to make sure that nothing comes in that's not true. But once it's in, you trust it. If tomorrow someone asks you, what did you do yesterday? And your memory tells you that you were here with me in the studio recording this podcast. And this person says, no, no, yesterday you were playing golf with me. You say, no, I have a memory that says I was with Moran in this recording studio. And they say, no, you were in...

a golf course playing golf with me and they start showing you pictures of the two of you playing golf or brings 10 friends who would vouch for the fact that you were with them nothing will change your mind doesn't matter how many people would claim that you were not where you were you have a memory of reality and you think this reality and you would not change it and this is how we evolved because we had to trust our own brain now that someone can actually hack into our brain when we're sleeping

using experiments like the one I told you where we flip options and make people come up with answers for the choices and in that doing so change their mind, you wouldn't be able to trust your own mind anymore. So suddenly you really would have to doubt your own thinking and not know how you behave. And the world we live in right now relies on you having full understanding of your own brain for everything. But now this is no longer a fair game. Your brain is vulnerable. I think that the best answer I could give people when they ask me what they should do about it

is to think of themselves on April Fool's. So April Fool's is the one day of the year people are actually skeptical of anything. So if I tell you on April Fool's, you know, your mom called me, you would say, wait, normally I would trust him, but today's April Fool's, maybe he's lying. I would want to vet even this piece of information. And that's the only time we actually are skeptical of everything. You would have to play April Fool's every day with your own thoughts. So why now is every day like April Fool's?

So I think that the experiment that we did with politics, for instance, is just an example of how easy it is to flip a mindset. A person comes on the street and is told, we're going to do a political poll. We're going to ask you a few questions and we just want to kind of figure out who you are. So we asked them 10 questions and we sit with the paper and kind of mark the answers. And question one says something like, on a scale of 10, how for or against abortions are you? And the person says, I'm nine pro-choice. So that's their answer.

Then we ask them about climate change. How much do you believe climate change is real and man-made? They say seven. And we mark what they said. And we asked them many, many questions and they marked the answers. But the reality is that we don't mark what they said. We mark different things. So if they said nine to pro-choice, we put a six.

If they said seven to climate change is real and manmade, we put five. So we kind of changed their answers a little bit, not totally the other extreme, but just a little bit. And then we say, okay, let's tally all of your votes and see what you come up with politically. And we tally all the votes next to them, with them, they kind of score it. And what comes out is that they're actually right-leaning. They thought of themselves until this moment as like a very kind of liberal Democrat, but somehow the questions come up as if they're right-leaning kind of Republican. And then we ask, can you explain to me what this is like? Yes.

Sometimes, not always, depending on how many questions we ask and how good we are in doing this thing, they're going to start coming up with an answer that says, "Actually, now that you say it, yeah, I was raised a liberal, but when I see the world right now, the world becomes more polarized, and I think that we should be a little bit more proactive." They start coming up with an answer, and the more you ask them questions, the more they create associations in their mind that align with this story that's not true, and now

They go into the world, into the wild, we call it, with a different thought of themselves, a different story. And they will totally go with this story and they talk to their friends and convince them in that. And they go to an echo chamber that now there's a virus in the echo chamber, which is a person that comes into the echo chamber that's safe with a new thought and will start infecting others. So why are you doing that?

We're doing it because we need to prove that it works, because then I can tell your audience about that and they become a lot more aware. So once you know it, it already doesn't work as much. So this is all on a very human level. And then now when we look at the technical level of one day when there is actual technology inside of us, it could be hackable, right? You're someone who has a hacker background and now you're a neuroscientist. So in the future, we could have these chips inside of our brains. Do you think they could be hacked in any capacity? This just makes it easier.

much more efficient and at large scale. So up to now, we had to take a person, stop him or her on the street, ask question, do a 10 minutes process with them. Once the chip is inside your brain, it's just a button press. It becomes a lot easier.

and at scale. So instead of changing the minds of one at a time, we can change the minds of everyone in Michigan and make them vote one way or the other. That's the risk. And I think the reason we should talk about it right now is the proof of concepts that comes from labs just shows how it works, but that's where we stop. We write a paper that says, this is possible. You can hack into our brain and change a person's mind. That's it.

When we talk about disinformation and whatnot, do you think that's what's coming down that we're not talking about yet? So I think the biggest fear is that. So I think that suddenly, you know,

Creating a misinformation ad on Facebook looks like peanuts when you talk about, I can just change your mind as you go to the voting ballot and just make you vote what I want. You become a puppet and I'm the puppeteer is the biggest fear at scale. And I think that people speak right now mostly on the marketing version, on the thing that is still, I convince you by showing you the wrong ad and so on. That's the old fashioned thing. This is what we did since the 1930s. The fear is that it's going to be a lot worse.

bigger and it's going to be directly at your brain and you're going to welcome it. So I think the way I see it is that the Silicon Valley guys, they're going to see all the positives of a chip inside their brain. The high-frequency trading and the Wikipedia and the solving cure for cancer, everything that's great. And that's why they're going to put it in their brain and they're going to create the

entrance point for the villain who can now hang into their brain. And when they ask for a question on Wikipedia, when was the French Revolution, what they're going to get is also vote this way. And that's, I think, kind of when it's going to go. And the thing is,

It's a race to the bottom. So if someone in Silicon Valley does that and is able to say, think better and invest better than all of his friends, then the friends would have to do it as well. And suddenly there's inequality. So all of the people in not just Silicon Valley, but in Texas would want the same chip in their brain. And suddenly Alabama wants the same thing. And before long, China wants the same thing. And we're going to bring it ourselves because we can't afford to not have that. And this makes us all vulnerable.

Hmm. That's interesting. I sounded really dystopian. Yeah, that got really dystopian pretty quickly. I feel pretty depressed. Is there like any silver lining there? So I think that, yes, I think the silver lining is your audience. The good news is that we decide. So it doesn't have to happen. So historically, humans have not been great in taking technologies and not using them for bad things. Every time we had a technology that could be used in a negative way, it was used in a negative way. But we also have shown...

increasingly in the last 50 years, that we can also harness technologies. We have weapons that could kill a lot of people and we decided together that we're not going to use them. And this happened multiple times and it happened across the world by many countries. So in the same way, we can decide how we regulate those implants in the brain such that

one thing that's good happening without the bad sides. What about, so Facebook just bought Control Labs, which is like, you know, this mind technology. I'm kind of obsessed with this idea is like, is Facebook down the line or are these companies, are they going to buy ad space and our brains in the future? Is that, do you think that's sci-fi? I think that the... We should play this game like sci-fi or the future.

The CEO of Netflix a few years ago, I was in a conference and he said that on stage, he said that the biggest competitor for Netflix isn't Hulu or YouTube or any of those. It's sleep. He said people sleep for hours and they don't watch movies. Their brain is active and no one uses it.

Right now, we have studies in our lab where we try to manipulate dreams. We try to basically create movies in your mind that will come when you sleep and will be content for you. This means that suddenly Netflix and Hulu and YouTube and all of those are going to have one more canvas for content that they're going to start using. They're going to have dreams by Spielberg or dreams by, you know... What? So that's the kind of domain we're playing in right now. And I think that to your question, this really means that...

The competition is going to be welcomed. People are going to want that and they're going to bring in the bad sides with it. You know, there's an episode of The Simpsons that I watched long ago that is my kind of go-to when I talk about greed. Homer Simpson sits with Mr. Burns and they suddenly become friends for a minute. Mr. Burns, if the audience doesn't know, is the rich owner of the nuclear plant. It's kind of the depiction of the rich guy. And Homer Simpson tells him, Mr. Burns, you're the richest guy I know.

And Mr. Brand says, but I would give it all up for a little more. That's kind of how humans are. Every time there's a chance for a little more, we want that. And we have now a chance for a little more IQ, a little more control of our own mind, a little more thinking, a little more access to our own brains. No one's going to want to say no to that. We have access to more sleep. We have access to

control of our behavior, companies can control our dreams and give us the best content, we would welcome that. But in welcoming that, we're opening the floodgate for also bad things that we don't think about right now. I mean, that's crazy, the idea that you could order dreams. You really think that's happening? That could happen? Like we could have dreams sponsored by Spielberg? I mean, that's not the worst. I thought I loved like, you know, E.T. It's my favorite movie. I mean, so I think that it

It became, it was science fiction a few years ago. I want a dream by E.T. That would be such a great movie. If I could watch E.T. in my sleep because I just don't have time in a day. The big kind of question that you asked me is like, is it possible or not? Right now, the science is at the level of we can induce you having a good dream, not knowing what it's about, but just spray the right smell and your brain goes to a positive dream. That's it. We can make you have a bad dream. We inject the wrong smell and you have bad dreams.

We can sometimes control a little bit of the content. So if I do anything with water, if I spray water on you, or if I dip your hands in water while you're dreaming, you will incorporate water into dream. You will see waterfalls or the ocean or a boat. So we can kind of induce very basic ideas, which means that we can control your dream at a very, very crude level. But this

historically, is the gap between a proof of concept and engineering. So now, dreams are no longer something that is totally kind of black box for us. We know how to change them. And now it becomes an engineering problem, like finding the right smell for every particular concept, realizing what makes you dream of your mom versus your dad, stuff like that. It becomes a race by engineers rather than by neuroscientists. Neuroscientists have proven that it works, and now we leave it to others to kind of perfect it, which

Which means that you can get soon to a point where you at very least can choose what memory you want to reactivate in your dreams. So you go on a date, you come back home, you go to sleep and the date is over. Even if you're next to the person you were with, the sleep kind of separates you. So we can now at least at the very...

minimal thing make the dream go longer by finding cues from the awake self that will let you go into the sunset together in your sleep but in the future we're ordering up dreams so i would i am gambling on that because companies come to me every now and then and say we want to think about that and i help all of the companies do that what's the craziest thing like a company you i mean you hear it so like what's the craziest thing the companies ask you to do

So I think that dream manipulation is sitting somewhere on those things. Companies are asking you to do that? Famous companies. Like what? Like the Silicon Valley's companies that you know, one of them came to me a number of years ago when I gave a TED talk about dream manipulation.

manipulation. And one of them was sitting in the audience and said, like, we want to incorporate it in the next version of our big product. And I said, it's very, very unreal right now. It's just like a proof of concept. And our lab really is on the mission of just showing that something is possible, not in making a product. And at the time, they were ready to do anything. Like, they were ready to basically buy our lab and move us to California so we can develop that. And at the time, I mostly didn't believe it's possible to do it as fast as they thought. So I said,

not something in my life. But since then, a lot of companies are after that. So we're no longer talking about science fiction. There'll be companies who play with doing things to you when you sleep.

I mean, don't you feel like now Silicon Valley is going to be a little careful about that? Because now we figured they did a lot of things to us that we didn't even realize with addiction and mental health. And I don't know if I would trust Facebook or Twitter to do things to me in my sleep anymore. That's interesting kind of psychology. On the one hand, I think that things have not changed dramatically. We talked at the beginning about cheating. One of the things we learned about cheaters is that when they get caught...

at the moment they get caught, they immediately promise to themselves and to everyone else that they're going to do it again. But if they get forgiven, they actually go back to their bad behavior because now they have evidence that it works. Like they get caught and nothing happens and they do a better job in hiding it. So the second time they actually now know what ways they failed the first time so they do a better job in hiding it. So in that sense, I think that

I don't think that things have changed dramatically in Silicon Valley. I also, to defend our friends there, because we know many of them and we know that they're... No, no, no. I think no one is bad there. It's not a malicious or act of trying to do wrong. It's somehow the system and the structure of the world that suggests that good things are ahead and there are engineers who want to perfect them. So in that sense, I think that to just blame it on them is a little bit...

I think it's unfair to just say it's not black and white. What do you think is the most important ethical question we should be asking right now? So down to earth questions. I think technology and the brain implants and dream control and changing memories, they're in our life. But I think that...

They're far enough from the next electoral cycle so that we don't have to worry about that. I think the biggest effect of technology is totally outside of what we spoke about right now is how it affects relationships. I think that there are countries already that, you know, people have no sex. They have less relationships with humans. They spend a lot more time on their devices instead of relationships. So right now everyone speaks about screencasts.

screen time as just instead of social time. But I think specifically I would focus on relationships. There's just less and less people that find meaningful relationships with others. And I think this is the biggest kind of risk

to our world. As a neuroscientist, I say, our brain loves interaction. It loves communication. And if people are not doing that enough, they're actually hurting their brain. There really is a kind of negative consequence brain-wise to you not having a person to talk to, to interact with, to rely on, to have comfort with. And that's, I think, the biggest thing that if I were to choose one solution to advocate for, I would say, find a way to have

partners in your life that are meaningful. I mean, it certainly seems like a lot of people are utilizing their partner as kind of like the phone, right? You just did a study with Hinge. We were talking about it before we started. Tell me about the study. Like, what is the most interesting thing that you got from this study? The most practical thing that's never going to work is that

It turns out that you would probably do better in finding a partner if you outsource the search of a partner to someone else. Someone else could be a friend or an AI. So we are our worst enemies when it comes to making choices. We rely on the wrong cues. We're too fast in judging negatively stuff. When we judge positively, we immediately come up with answers why, and we're very critical of ourselves.

If you wanted to kind of get advice for dating, on online dating, I would say give your phone to your best friend and ask her or him to swipe for you. What we say in the paper is that in a way,

It could also be an AI, someone who learns a lot about your preferences and actually starts swiping for you and just says, Laurie, I found this person that's great for you. Don't look at him before. Don't read anything about him. Go to the date with him. But the big one that I want to leave your audience with is like start trusting others, even in choices that you think are very, very personal. I'm kind of obsessed with this idea that in the future we could have AI bots date for us. Is that like totally sci-fi or could that come down the pipe?

So no one does it right now. And I think they should. And I think that the interesting thing that drives that is that people don't really know themselves as well as they think. They have answers. If you ask them, like we said before, if you ask people, why did you choose this or that? They're going to come up with an answer. It's just that it's not true. For example, we know that a big driver of your preferences is smell.

There's a study that shows that people come to the lab and someone shakes their hands and have them sit down before the study begins. But actually, the study already began because the handshake is what they were looking at. And what they show is that within a few seconds from the moment someone shook your hands, you're going to bring your head down.

close to your nose and smell it. No one notices, it's unconscious, but people do it. I mean, they did it in a very controlled way. They had a heterosexual male shake the hand of a heterosexual woman and then they shake their hand. But if it's a man versus a man and they're straight, they're not doing it. When the person who shakes your hand wears a glove, no one smells it. But if they don't, they do it. Like they really did it in a controlled way. And the bottom line is that

smells are really critical to how we evaluate other people. We actually, you know, assess the mix of our chemistry together in a very practical way. No one's going to ever tell you that. No one's going to say, no, I really liked her because our mixture of smells after she didn't shower for two days and I didn't shower for three days is perfect alignment. Our bacteria in my body loves her bacteria and we're going to just have great babies together. People don't say that. They say she was really funny and interesting and we share the same love for sporting. And this is,

something that is driving our behavior that we don't know anything about, machines could do it for us. And they're going to actually know her biome, your biome, her little quirks that she doesn't tell anyone and yours and could match you in a way that really aligns with your interest. And if we go back to the beginning and say that relationships are one of the most important things that we're starting to lose because of technology, this will change a lot of how we see the world. It will actually make people

remove barriers, it will make people get new ideas in their mind, it would protect our stories better because as you share stories with other brains, you actually have better chance of having accurate memories rather than ones that you lose. Wow. But like you're sitting there inside people's brains essentially, I mean, and you're sitting here talking about dreams and whatnot, you could change people's minds already, right?

in ways that are, I mean, let's just be honest. You can make someone more racist in their sleep, right? What our lab does is proof of concept and we always do it positively. But when I give talks, I always tell people you can easily see how the same thing can be used to make a person wake up and eat more unhealthy food rather than healthy food or become immoral. The science doesn't tell you if it's good or bad. The science doesn't know. The science is just kind of an objective tool and

And my students, the MBA students I teach at the business school, often because they're young and they're kind of millennials, they ask questions about ethics and they say, wait, but this could be used for obviously terrible things. And I say, I'm glad you asked that because you're right, it can. And since you asked that, you have the moral obligation to remember your question 20 years from now when you're going to be the CEO of one of those companies and you're going to have this quarterly decision whether you're going to use those techniques to make someone buy more of your products

Captain Crunch, or stop it because you know that it's not what they wanted. Unfortunately, so far, the world doesn't look like it's embracing those ethical ideas as much as we want. But I think that the new generation is already doing a good job in putting it on the table again and again, like we do in this podcast is making people think and maybe change their behavior.

Spend enough time with Moran and you begin to question everything. But maybe that's the point of this. Maybe the next iteration of this messy phase of technology where truth has taken on its own meaning. The point is not to just question the tech companies, the lines of code we see in front of us. The next phase is questioning ourselves and our own thoughts. Understanding how malleable our own minds are is the first step in changing behavior.

Which is important because it's the first line of defense of what's coming down the pipeline in an era where the lines between true and false and real and fake have blurred.

I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is First Contact. For more about the guests you hear on First Contact, sign up for our newsletter. Go to firstcontactpodcast.com to subscribe. Follow me. I'm at Laurie Siegel on Twitter and Instagram. And the show is at First Contact Podcast. If you like the show, I want to hear from you. Leave us a review on the Apple Podcast app or wherever you listen. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

First Contact is a production of Dot Dot Dot Media, executive produced by Laurie Siegel and Derek Dodge. Original theme music by Xander Singh. Visit us at firstcontactpodcast.com. First Contact with Laurie Siegel is a production of Dot Dot Dot Media and iHeartRadio.

We've all got a thing, an obsession. For some of us, it's vintage fashion, our cars, anything we can collect. They all live under one roof, eBay. It's where closets get filled with statement pieces and vintage finds, where must-have sneakers wait for you, and designer handbags are the real deal. On eBay, doors open to stacks of the rarest trading cards and a garage stocked with all the car parts you need for any DIY job—

eBay's home to whatever thing you're into that keeps you up at night. eBay. Things people love. This

That's livenation.com slash gifts.

Y'all, I've got a great tech gift idea for you. Whether it's for yourself or a loved one, consider the Sonos Ace headphones. Sonos sent me a pair to try out, and they're incredible, with the highest quality sound you could ask for. They're gorgeous, and through the Sonos app, I can connect to all my music streaming services. And the noise cancellation feature is mind-blowing.

my favorite. It's so effective. Sonos has great gifts for everyone on your list. Visit Sonos.com forward slash tech stuff to save 20% on select products. That's Sonos.com slash tech stuff.