The Neuralink mafia fixing brains
- Stephen McBride
- May 23
- 8 min read
Building tech that alleviates human suffering
Brad Smith’s comeback story shook me to my core. You might remember Brad from our podcast—he’s a dad of three suffering from ALS, aka “Lou Gehrig’s disease.” It slowly steals your ability to move, speak, and eventually breathe, but your mind remains sharp.
As a dad of three myself, the thought of being trapped inside my body, unable to hug my kids or provide for them, is literally my worst nightmare. For 1984 fans, it has echoes of Room 101, your own personal hell.
Heavy stuff. Yet Brad’s story also flooded me with gratitude that I can hug my kids. You bet I’m squeezing them tighter these days.
Brad is also helping us glimpse the future, where technology rewrites the rules of what’s possible. Today, let’s talk about the next chapter for brain implants – including the companies making complimentary tech like bionic limbs, AI-cloned voices, and Tyler Hayes’ bold plan to eliminate paralysis. Forever.
Brad created and narrated an entire video with just his thoughts.
Well, his thoughts and a chip—he’s Neuralink Patient 3.
You already know about Patient 1: Noland Arbaugh, who was paralyzed from the neck down after a freak spinal cord injury. Noland couldn’t hold a book or get a job. Using the internet involved poking an iPad with a mouth stick.
Then neurosurgeons slid a chip about the size of a quarter under his skull, nestling it against his brain. It can read Noland’s thoughts and translate them into action, allowing him to control a computer with his mind. Now he can work online!
Brad Smith’s paralysis was even worse: he could only move his eyes. He was effectively confined to a dark bedroom. The eye-tracking software he depended on for limited communication didn’t work outside.
Even inside, he could barely “talk” to his wife or kids since it involved selecting individual letters or words by staring at a spot on a screen for several seconds. Then those eked-out words were “spoken” in a robotic voice.
Today Neuralink’s brain chip translates Brad’s thoughts into digital actions. He can move a cursor simply by thinking about doing it. The chip literally reads his mind.
That’s right: telepathy is real. Now he can go to his kids’ soccer games. He can play video games with them. As he says in the video he made himself, using only this thoughts to control a computer: “Going outside has been a huge blessing for me. And I can control the computer with telepathy. Life is good.”
I love sexy innovations like supersonic jets and skyscraper-sized rockets. More of that now, please! But when it comes to alleviating human suffering, Neuralink is next level. I hope they can scale up this life-altering tech fast.
Neuralink might be the most important startup of the next decade
Think of it as a whole new type of medicine. Noland and Brad’s stories are merely the first chapters in a revolution that will restore independence to millions of people.
The mechanics behind Neuralink’s chips are mind-bendingly cool. Its surgical robot precisely implants 1,024 microscopic electrodes on 64 threads, each thinner than a human hair, into the part of the brain that controls movement.
These threads listen to the electrical signals your neurons fire when you intend to move. Then AI decodes the signals to translate those intentions into cursor movement and clicks. Until recently this would have been reserved for Iron Man. Now it’s FDA-approved!
Neuralink’s part alone was revolutionary. But the real magic happened when Brad paired it with ElevenLabs' AI voice cloning.
It’s a prime example of Matt Ridley's "ideas having sex" concept. It explains the magical moment when two separate technologies mingle and create something more powerful than either could alone.
Using old recordings from WhatsApp messages and family videos, ElevenLabs created a digital replica of Brad’s pre-ALS voice. Get that R2-D2 voice out of here! Now Brad can "speak" in his own voice again.
Brad thinks about moving a cursor (Neuralink reads his mind) and types out what he wants to say. Then ElevenLabs converts that text into speech that sounds like the old Brad. A modern miracle!
The next frontier is direct neural decoding. This is where the chip detects speech intent from the brain, bypassing the typing step entirely. That’ll be some alien-level tech. And it’s going to unlock a new and wonderful future.
Today you can ask ChatGPT to take on the persona of famous dead people and chat with them. What would Elvis say about Taylor Swift’s music? Soon you’ll be able to chat with AI voices of the eminent dead thanks to ElevenLabs.
The (inner) space race
The most complex structure in the known universe sits right between our ears. Yet it’s largely uncharted. We mapped Pluto in high definition before we could reliably map a single cubic millimeter of the human brain. That seems wrong.
Neuralink, co-founded by Elon Musk, fired the starting pistol for what I’m calling the inner space race.
Once again, the "School of Elon" effect is in play. Elon starts some wild new project, hires exceptional talent, and after a few years learning from him, these folks create their own groundbreaking companies. We wrote about the "SpaceX Mafia." Now the "Neuralink Mafia" is building companies.
A brain surgeon who helped Elon build Neuralink went on to found Precision Neuroscience, which makes Layer 7, a cortical interface the size of a postage stamp and thinner than a single human hair. It contains 1,024 tiny metal sensors that pick-up brain signals. Unlike permanently implanted chips, doctors can remove it without leaving a trace.
Its first patient was a 63-year-old man with Parkinson's disease. When he thought about moving his trembling hand, he was able to move a nearby robotic arm.
Then there’s Science, founded by ex-Neuralink President Max Hodak. Science achieved what sounds like a Biblical miracle: giving sight to the blind. In clinical trials for its PRIMA retinal implant, it allowed legally blind patients to read.
PRIMA is a tiny solar panel placed under the retina. The wireless device works with special glasses to capture images and transmit them directly to an implant in the eye. It’s literally downloading sight. Incredible!
Science is also pioneering a way to “upgrade” your mind. It’s growing neurons in a lab that can directly connect to the brain and form new connections.
In animal testing trials, the man-made neurons gave the animals access to extra mental processing power. Super smart dog for sale!
If this technology really works, we’ll enjoy a future where brain injuries and ordinary age-related decline can be repaired. If you could live until 100 with a brain as sharp as a 25-year-old’s, would you want to? Sign me up.
"Our goal is to eventually eliminate paralysis.”
That’s what Atom Bodies founder Tyler Hayes recently told me over coffee in downtown San Francisco.
I get fired up when I hear a big audacious goal like that. Tyler asked for a 7am meeting. My man! I'm a fan of early conversations when the mind is fresh and the city is still waking up.
Neuralink lets you control a computer with your mind. Atom Bodies takes the next leap and allows you to move bionic limbs with your thoughts.
Its first device, the Atom Touch, connects to a wearable cuff with built-in sensors which read intentions directly from the nervous system. AI then interprets the signals and translates them into precise movements.
Unlike conventional prosthetics where movement is limited to basic gripping, Atom Touch enables control of each finger. This means users can type, pinch, or give a thumbs-up. The fingertips sense pressure so users can "feel" touch.
I asked Tyler: What’s the coolest thing users have said about the bionic arm? He told me about one guy who hadn't poured a drink in 11 years due to limb loss. He did it effortlessly with the Atom Touch. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room.
Even cooler: users begin to subconsciously gesture with their bionic arms during conversations. That’s so… human.
Bionic legs are next for Atom. Then possibly artificial spines. Eventually full-body augmentation. Tyler’s long-term ambition is to make paralysis a relic of history.
“For all human history, if you lost a limb, that was it. Now it might not be,” said Tyler.
Three cheers as wheelchairs are relegated to history.
The best of the Inner Space Race:
Restoring agency. We talk a lot about agency at ROS, the power to make choices and act. But diseases like ALS steal your freedom. With Neuralink Brad is grabbing it back. Every time he chooses to go outside, he reclaims a little bit of his humanity.
Software updates for the brain? Imagine getting a notification: "Your Neuralink has a new update available. New skills include Spanish proficiency, thought-to-text speed doubled, and compatibility with home automation systems."
That iconic "I know Kung Fu" scene from The Matrix could go from fiction to fact.
Imagine controlling your computer with your mind. Why bang on a keyboard when you could write at the speed of thought? This isn’t about becoming less human. It’s about building technology that unburdens humans of needless toil.
Tech is good again. We just lived through an innovation famine. Tech became synonymous with social media frying your brain. Now we're swapping pop-up dopamine hits for literal dopamine repairs.
Neuralink, ElevenLabs and Atom Bodies represent a massive shift in the locus of innovation. Tyler Hayes, the Atom Limbs founder I met at 7am, is Exhibit 1. He used to run social media site Bebo. Now he’s working on eliminating paralysis.
This shift back to building real stuff that matters makes me incredibly excited and optimistic for the next decade and beyond.
This is the worst this tech will ever be. We often repeat this at ROS. Remember the first cell phones? Clunky bricks with terrible battery life. Now we carry supercomputers in our pockets. The brain chip in Brad's head is primitive compared to what's coming.
From breakthrough to afterthought. This is the trajectory of every successful innovation. Electricity was once a jaw-dropping spectacle; now it's boring infrastructure. Brain chips will follow the same path.
Our kids’ kids will ask "Wait, you mean there was a time you couldn't just think at your computer? You mean people with paralysis were just… stuck?"
As Rational Optimists, our job isn't to blindly cheer from the sidelines. It's to understand these technologies and imagine how they might reshape our world for the better. And to restore hope by widely circulating all this good news.
You can participate by forwarding this letter to a friend and sharing it on social media.
Thanks for reading and sharing.
—Stephen McBride
Hey, real quick…
By Dan Steinhart
Brain computer interfaces are miraculous. But there’s all the difference in the world between getting one to overcome paralysis vs. getting one to gain superhuman abilities. Nobody’s opening up my skull anytime soon. What do you think? Tell us in the comments.
Lastly, in case you’re interested, I want to point out that our co-founder and the founding father of Rational Optimism, Matt Ridley, was recently published in The Telegraph, one of the UK’s biggest newspapers. This article linked to a scientific paper Matt co-wrote, posted on our Rational Optimist Society website.
It is on a controversial topic – the origin of Covid, which he has co-written a great book about. Why touch this topic? It would certainly be simpler for the ROS to only walk on the sunny side of the street.
It’s because as, Matt writes:
Although the world has largely moved on from Covid-19, a lot of trust was destroyed, including, unfortunately, in science itself, which is why I've made it something of a personal mission to get to the bottom of the origin of Covid-19. We need to rescue science’s mission of seeking the truth at all costs…
—Dan Steinhart
Stephen McBride and Dan Steinhart are co-founders of the Rational Optimist Society.
