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.

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