Why Silicon Valley Is Hiring Bird Experts
Foundering
Bloomberg
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2019
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A few years ago, reporter Sarah McBride noticed that a top engineer at Twitter was also an expert on the brains of birds. Then, more and more, she started seeing that many top tech companies have bird brain experts in their highest ranks—that includes Apple, Google, Intel and a secretive startup founded by Elon Musk. This week on Decrypted, Sarah and fellow reporter Ashlee Vance set out to understand why Silicon Valley is so interested in avian minds, and what they could tell us about tech’s ability to influence our own.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Join us in New York on November 29th for the Bloomberg Canadian Finance Conference, |
| 0:04.6 | proudly sponsored by National Bank of Canada Financial Markets. |
| 0:07.8 | 2023 marks the 11 year anniversary of our Canada focused event and continues the tradition of providing timely |
| 0:13.8 | insights and actionable strategies. We'll have senior government |
| 0:17.1 | officials from Saskatchewan, Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario as well |
| 0:21.9 | as speakers from Northland Power, World Bank, Transolta, and many more. |
| 0:26.0 | Register at Bloomberg Live.com slash Canadian Finance slash radio. |
| 0:30.0 | A few years ago, around the time of Twitter's IPO, I noticed what I thought was an odd coincidence. |
| 0:39.0 | Its chief engineer had studied birds. |
| 0:42.0 | Specifically, he'd studied the auditory cortex of |
| 0:45.2 | zebra finches. I thought that was pretty funny for an engineer, especially |
| 0:49.7 | because Twitter's mascot is that little blue bird. |
| 0:53.0 | I forgot about it until a couple of years ago |
| 0:55.0 | when I noticed another bird-brain scholar in the top echelons of tech. |
| 1:00.0 | This person had been hired by Elon Musk, |
| 1:02.0 | the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX to join his new company, Neurolink. |
| 1:07.0 | Neurlink is a very secretive futuristic company which is trying to supercharge the human brain. |
| 1:13.6 | This all sounds pretty obscure. |
| 1:16.0 | You'd think studying bird brains wouldn't be too relevant to studying human brains or figuring |
| 1:20.8 | out social media. |
| 1:21.8 | Right? |
| 1:23.0 | That's why I remembered it. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bloomberg, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Bloomberg and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.