Josh: So this is a different type of episode, but you got to stick with me because
Josh: one of the most interesting frontiers that I've been personally obsessed with
Josh: is brain computer interfaces, especially Neuralink, which is what I believe
Josh: to be the last personal device that will ever need to make.
Josh: As I went down this rabbit hole, I was fascinated at how awe-inspiring that
Josh: technology is, but also its inevitability.
Josh: This technology is here today and it's becoming sci-fi level great incredibly
Josh: quickly. So what you're about to listen to is a short video essay on just that.
Josh: It's most exciting to watch this visually, either through YouTube or you can
Josh: even watch the video straight from your Spotify feed.
Josh: Everything you need is at limitless.bankless.com or you can click the link in
Josh: the top of this episode description.
Josh: Thank you as always for the support and sharing these episodes with any friends
Josh: who might be interested in this cool frontier crazy tech stuff.
Josh: So with that said, let's get right into this mini episode on Neuralink.
Josh: Would you allow a developer you've never met to install software in your brain
Josh: that gives total access to all of your thoughts, your memories,
Josh: and everything that makes you, you, the same way you install an update on your iPhone?
Josh: The knee-jerk reaction is probably no. That's creepy. It's weird enough that
Josh: my phone knows everything about me.
Josh: The last thing I want is a company to see my literal thoughts and fears.
Josh: But what if I made you a few promises?
Josh: Like this chip can remember your dreams and memories and then play them back
Josh: as if you were reliving them for the first time, fully viscerally.
Josh: It'll hijack your senses and you'll feel everything you felt as if you were
Josh: right back there for the very first time.
Josh: It can give you super sight that allows you to see night vision or infrared rays.
Josh: It can teach you the language overnight before you get on that plane to Japan.
Josh: It could cure you of injuries, curing paralysis and blindness.
Josh: It can remove your depression, fix hearing loss, remove that annoying tinnitus you have.
Josh: It can stop your loved ones from suffering from Alzheimer's,
Josh: dementia, and strokes. Oh, and you'll be able to communicate with others totally telepathically.
Josh: Suddenly, this sounds a little more compelling, doesn't it?
Josh: If you're thinking this is just like an episode of Black Mirror,
Josh: you're right, but this technology is real, and just this week,
Josh: two more patients answered yes to that question.
Josh: They received the chip that will eventually do all these amazing things,
Josh: but for now, in these patients, it's doing just one job, and that's fixing people's paralysis.
Josh: The company is called Neuralink, and their first product is called Telepathy,
Josh: and just last week, they embedded the Telepathy chip into patients number eight and number nine.
Josh: These are some of the first people in the world to benefit from this technology,
Josh: and the results are pretty remarkable.
Josh: We'll get into that, but first let's peel back the skull figuratively and see
Josh: exactly how this thing works and why it matters.
Josh: So there's two reasons Neuralink is important, and they actually couldn't be more different.
Josh: The first is human liberation. If your spinal cord quits on you or you become
Josh: paralyzed, telepathy can give you digital hands, and this isn't sci-fi.
Josh: Patient number one is this guy named Nolan, who's already trash-talking friends
Josh: in the popular video game called Civilization VI, just by thinking about it.
Josh: And just recently, the Neuralink team gave this super cool demo of their patients
Josh: actually playing Call of Duty together using just their thoughts,
Josh: walking around the 3D world, pointing their gun, then actually shooting enemies.
Josh: And as a fellow Call of Duty player, seeing someone telepathically walking around
Josh: Nuketown, it's pretty freaking cool.
Josh: They also continue the demo with an example of how a person can telepathically
Josh: connect to an optimist humanoid robot.
Josh: Picture you're disabled, but want to interact with the physical world?
Josh: Well, with the chip, you can telepathically embody a humanoid robot and walk
Josh: and talk and one day even feel the sensory inputs that the robot also feels.
Josh: They gave an early demo of this playing rock, paper, scissors and the optimist
Josh: hand flipping off the audience, which, you know, nice touch.
Josh: The second reason Neuralink is important is for civilizational survival.
Josh: Elon's gamble is that when AI superintelligence levels up to god mode,
Josh: we'll need a bandwidth upgrade to stay co-pilots and not turn into passengers.
Josh: If artificial general intelligence keeps compounding, human decision-making
Josh: bandwidth becomes the bottleneck that turns us from stewards of the future into mere spectators.
Josh: Elon frames the link as a defensive and democratizing upgrade,
Josh: a direct cortical interface that scales our input-output rate.
Josh: So, to explain that simply, think of your body as a computer for a second.
Josh: Over the course of the day, how many operations per second, on average, can you do?
Josh: It's pretty low. You can say a couple of words, type a few things into your
Josh: phone, walk a step or two, and that's really it. we're pretty low bandwidth.
Josh: Like, think about it. You're using your two thumbs on a slab of glass that you
Josh: call a smartphone to communicate incredibly complex thoughts with this device.
Josh: There's a ton of compression of your big ideas reduced down to just a few keystrokes.
Josh: And the same is true about communication.
Josh: As I'm talking to you, I'm having this whole rich idea of how I want to describe this technology.
Josh: That idea then has to be compressed into words, then spoken to you, the listener.
Josh: I make my vocal cords vibrate. Those vibrations resonate against your eardrums,
Josh: where you interpret the words I'm saying and build your own model of what you
Josh: believe my message means.
Josh: Like right now, I'm imagining this world in which I'm telepathically connecting
Josh: to an optimist robot on Mars and walking around the planet as if it was my real body.
Josh: The visual I have is almost certainly drastically different than yours,
Josh: but if we had a neural link, well, you could just see it exactly how I see it.
Josh: So, to tie back to the civilizational survival thing, we're looking to go from
Josh: sluggish thumbs per second to megabits and then hopefully gigabits per second
Josh: of neural data, letting us collaborate with superintelligent systems instead
Josh: of being outmaneuvered by them.
Josh: In this view, the implant is less a medical device and more a civil engineering
Josh: project for the species, us.
Josh: It's a neural on-ramp that allows every individual brain to tap into the real-time
Josh: computational power that a frontier model AI enjoys.
Josh: By hardwiring humans into the loop, the argument is we keep moral judgment,
Josh: creativity, and lived experience inside the feedback cycle that guides the machines,
Josh: preventing a narrow elite or the AI themselves from monopolizing the layers
Josh: of economics, politics, or even kinetic forces like our military.
Josh: So in short, boost the bandwidth, merge the perspectives, and humanity maintains
Josh: a seat at the negotiation table instead of being placed on top of it.
Josh: And yeah, this is effectively the point at which we merge ourselves with the
Josh: singularity, defined as a hypothetical point in time at which technology growth
Josh: becomes completely alien to humans, uncontrollable, irreversible.
Josh: Resulting in unforeseen consequences for the human civilization.
Josh: Well, good news is Neuralink is trying to avoid just that. And in doing so,
Josh: opens up the door to an ideal called transhumanism, which is a philosophical
Josh: intellectual movement that kind of advocates for using technology to enhance
Josh: human capabilities and improve the human condition as a whole.
Josh: Remember earlier when I said neural link could cure blindness?
Josh: It can do a lot more than that. Think of your eyeballs as a camera and then
Josh: think of all the amazing things that cameras are capable of doing today. It gets pretty wild.
Josh: Blindsight could deliver high resolution vision that's equal to or better than
Josh: perfect 2020 eyesight but with even more fun features on top.
Josh: Imagine built-in telephoto capability to zoom in and see things further out,
Josh: or a macro ability, just like your iPhone, to see microscopic objects without
Josh: any external tools. But it gets even cooler.
Josh: It can let you perceive beyond normal human limits, like infrared for detecting
Josh: heat in the dark, spotting warm objects in the night, or ultraviolet for hidden
Josh: patterns, even radar to see through fog and walls.
Josh: And imagine augmented overlays too, with real-time info like navigation directions
Josh: projected right into your view. No need for glasses, just your eyeballs.
Josh: And for those born blind, your brain would just adapt these new signals creating
Josh: vision from scratch now that's for the advanced versions in the future but for
Josh: the initial versions well it still works.
Josh: It won't be like your natural crystal clear eyesight at first.
Josh: It'll be basic and low resolution, kind of like pixelated graphics from an old
Josh: video game on Atari or early Nintendo.
Josh: You'll perceive the world in blocky images, maybe grayscale or with simple colors,
Josh: spotting large objects, basic outlines, movement.
Josh: Think navigating a room, dodging obstacles, or noticing a door or a person nearby,
Josh: but not being able to make out the specific details just yet.
Josh: But it gets really good, really fast, and they've laid out a pretty cool timeline
Josh: for when we can expect these things to work.
Josh: So as of this month, which is July 2025, Neuralink has nine human implants,
Josh: patient one through patient nine, with patient eight and nine done in one day, which is a first.
Josh: Bandwidth is about nine and a half bits per second, with the team aiming for
Josh: 40 by end of year, so about a 5x, at which they will plan to have the chip implanted
Josh: in 30 patients, as well as roll out their blindsight and the robot arm controller
Josh: project they call Convoy.
Josh: From 2027 to 2029, they plan to increase the throughput of the chip to 25,000
Josh: channels, which basically means a full HD neural feed to the chip.
Josh: Also during this window, they want to release a pair link with spinal cord stim
Josh: to reanimate your limbs.
Josh: You can think of it like a digital bridge on steroids in the case that you've
Josh: actually damaged your spinal cord.
Josh: Then by 2030, things start to get pretty weird. We get elective cognitive coprocessor
Josh: for memory search and language translation,
Josh: which means real-time translate and searching through your past memories,
Josh: whether you are excited to do that or not.
Josh: This comes with always-on-cloud AI creating a true symbiosis for the first time between human and AI.
Josh: You are always connected all the time. As well as creating a chip mesh network.
Josh: This is also when we can expect to see what Neuralink is calling the telepathy party mode.
Josh: So humanity now has a USB-C port poking through the blood-brain barrier.
Josh: Today, it's letting nine paralyzed pioneers swipe, click, and maybe soon see again.
Josh: Tomorrow, it can beam Grok10 straight into our visual stream.
Josh: So ask yourself, when the install wizard pops up and you have to click the terms
Josh: of service, with the risk-adjusted return on investment of civilizational survival, do you click accept?
Josh: Because whether we're ready or
Josh: not, the age of downloadable upgrades for wetware has officially booted.
Josh: Our next grand task isn't actually inventing the tech, it's just deciding,
Josh: together, what it means to stay human while we use it. Thank you so much for watching.
Music: Music