Posted on 04/09/2026 9:13:55 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
ALS took Brad's voice, but with Neuralink, he's gotten it back. I was honored to join Brad in his home with his family to learn more about @neuralink and how it's completely changed his quality of life.
ALS Patient: How Elon Musk's Neuralink Has Given Him Purpose | 33:04
Ellie in Space and 2 more
Bradford Smith | Neuralink P3 | Future Link Pod
Neura Pod – Neuralink
4,966 views | April 8, 2026
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
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YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow, it's big.
About 40 years ago, there was an article in one of the Apple II mags about a guy trying to build a nerve-to-circuit interface to give mobility to amputees (and his own fiancé). That just attached to nerve endings, and if memory serves, was based on a Z80 chip (remember those?).
hope they cure this horrible disease/condition- Knew several people who died young from it- horrible horrible way to die
Selections from the ALS keyword, sorted:
One of my former employers was on a scooter and he and his wife were in the checkout line of one of the wholesale clubs. I'd not seen them in a while, and asked him what happened, he just said, "ALS". He knew I went to the beach a lot and they were asking about whether they could make it down to the water's edge, because they missed going there. Not sure what they decided. He passed within a year or so of that encounter. ALS sucks.
Transcript [first excerpt]
I felt trapped inside a body that just wouldn’t cooperate. And every day involved relying on Tiffany for almost everything.
It’s not the same as a spinal cord injury where the damage is usually static. ALS keeps progressing, affecting speech, swallowing, breathing, and eventually the whole body while your mind stays completely sharp. That’s why people sometimes misunderstand it. They see paralysis and think wheelchair, but they don’t realize how it slowly disconnects your brain from the world.
And Neuralink changed that overnight in the most dramatic way. The day we felt confident it would work, I still remember sending that message to family and friends right after testing. I could suddenly control a cursor with my thoughts. Fast, accurate, no eye strain.
I could type, navigate, communicate in real time again. It’s given me my voice back through the computer and let me reconnect with the people I love. The difference is night and day from feeling locked in to feeling like I’m back in the driver’s seat of my own life. We’re starting off with reducing human suffering. Our first product is called telepathy, and that enables someone who has lost the ability to command their body to be able to communicate with a computer and the ability to do conceptual consensual telepathy.
So I’m here in front of the Barrow Neurological Institute, one of the most important neurological centers in the entire world. This is where the first Neuralink surgery ever took place with Noland and, of course, many other Neuralink patients. In fact, even as I was flying here to Phoenix, Arizona, I saw patient 7, Jake, who I’ve interviewed on the plane because many Neuralink patients have to come back here for regular checkups.
This is probably one of the most highly concentrated areas that you will find people with a Neuralink chip at any given time. And Neuralink was founded in 2016 with the first actual implant in a human in 2024. That was Noland Arba, and he still loves his Neuralink today. But Noland is paralyzed, whereas Neuralink is also being used in patients with ALS like Brad and Jake. I like your shirt. He does too.
So, I have written out a few questions. I’m going to read them, and we are going to interview patient number three, Brad.
My first question is, I know you’ve given many talks about Neuralink and how it’s changed your life, but there are still people who are unaware it’s being used for patients with ALS. For example, when I interviewed P7 Jake, some of the comments didn’t understand why Jake would need Neuralink as opposed to a paralyzed person. Can you explain what life was like before Neuralink and how drastic of a difference it makes to have it as a person with ALS? What do most people misunderstand about ALS?
Thanks for the question. I’m really glad we’re talking about this because I know a lot of people still aren’t clear on what ALS actually does. Before Neuralink, ALS had already taken so much from me. As I shared in my Austin fireside, it’s this really weird disease that kills the motor neurons in my body. So, I lose the connections between my brain and my muscles. My mind is still running at the normal rate. I can understand everything you say to me, but I couldn’t move, speak clearly, or even type on my own anymore. Simple things like texting family or friends took forever with eye gaze technology. And in dim light, it didn’t even work well.
I felt trapped inside a body that just wouldn’t cooperate. And every day involved relying on Tiffany for almost everything.
It’s not the same as a spinal cord injury where the damage is usually static. ALS keeps progressing, affecting speech, swallowing, breathing, and eventually the whole body while your mind stays completely sharp. That’s why people sometimes misunderstand it. They see paralysis and think wheelchair, but they don’t realize how it slowly disconnects your brain from the world.
And Neuralink changed that overnight in the most dramatic way. The day we felt confident it would work, I still remember sending that message to family and friends right after testing. I could suddenly control a cursor with my thoughts. Fast, accurate, no eye strain.
I could type, navigate, communicate in real time again. It’s given me my voice back through the computer and let me reconnect with the people I love. The difference is night and day from feeling locked in to feeling like I’m back in the driver’s seat of my own life. I’m so grateful every single day.
Wow, you have such a great attitude, and I’m so glad that you were able to get Neuralink. Like, it really has changed your life. I think the biggest thing that it did was like just change... I don’t know, it gave Brad hope. There was a visible change; he was smiling more. He can’t smile very well, but he was happier. There was a light in his eye. It gave him purpose and something to do. It’s hard when you’re kind of locked in and you’re stuck; you can’t do anything. His brain’s working; ALS takes everything physical away from you. But his brain, he was a doer. He was, you know, a thinker. He was fixing people’s problems all the time. And then all of a sudden, he can’t move the computer. He can’t, you know, help people. It changes everything. But, you know, with the Neuralink, all of a sudden, it gave him purpose again. Like, he could be productive. He obviously can’t run a marathon; he can’t ride bikes with the kids, but you know, he can talk with somebody and help them, you know, set up a website or explain to them, hey, you want to give some business advice to people who are starting businesses. He’s still slow, but he can get those ideas out. And so I think having purpose is... you don’t realize how much your purpose, like being able to help people and do stuff, changes your quality of life.
I feel like he could be the first standup comedian with Neuralink. Our family love language is sarcasm, for better or worse. Our youngest at school gets in trouble a little bit, but she’s got Down syndrome and she’s in some special education classes, and she is a little sarcastic sometimes, and I just don’t know where she gets it. But, you know, humor is kind of important, too. So, he’s figured out ways to... he’s still slow. It’s hard to join in a conversation, but he’s figured out ways where he can jump into a conversation quickly and add his personality through some of those quick phrases...
Yes, the Z80 and Motorola 6502 powered most of the video games in the 1980s.
My good friend just died of ALS, 2 months after being diagnosed. Fortunately, she was still somewhat mobile and able to speak.
The Zilog Z80 had a faster clock available than did the 6502, and had CP/M, but got skipped over for the DOS platforms. I recall that it had pretty zippy performance on an old CP/M box (CPU boat anchor box with 8” floppy drives, separate terminal) that was still around the office, having been replaced by an IBM PC.
Microsoft made the Softcard (sez here, MS’ first hardware product) for the Apple II, ran CP/M. I remember the full page mag ads for that, and wondering what CP/M was. A lot of people (relative to that time) wanted to be able to run Wordstar. Heh.
The 6502 was popular in Apple, Atari, Commodore, and some game platorms. Apple pushed its 8-bit ProDOS OS and the Apple II hardware well past what any other 65-family manufacturers did. The Apple II continued to keep Apple afloat throughout the first six or seven years of Macs, which possibly explains why the IIGS using the 65C816 got made, but also explains why I watched John Sculley announce and hold up the 8-bit IIc+ at the last Applefest (1988).
Nintendo used a modified 65816 in the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
Sez here the Z80 was finally discontinued in 2024 (!).
Visicalc ran natively on the Apple II, as did MS Multiplan. The programmer for Visicalc used, hmm, I think backslash commands because it was easier to reach that key due to having lost part of his pinky. If memory serves.
Woz did a freeware knockoff of Visicalc called WozCalc.
Barney Stone wrote DBMaster for the II, but there were other DB programs, Quickfile II (same author as the later AppleWorks; he used to live down by Kalamazoo), the Incredible Jack office system, Magic Office system, others. Stone did a big revision to DBMaster and was present at a user group convention I attended. Nearby there was a table for a competing product, new at the time, I think it was called Foundation.
And thanks to the support for sparse files in ProDOS and Basic.system, dashing off a custom Applesoft BASIC based random access database program wasn’t that hard. 😊🍎
Seems like the subthread is getting way more interesting than the primary thread, even though it probably isn’t for most. 😆
I knew a man so large and strong he once picked up an engine block and loaded it in a pickup truck. I saw him one day with a cane, and he shook my hand with his left. He explained his ALS diagnosis. He died within 3 months. Very sad disease.
And it remains mysterious. My wild and quite uneducated guess is, it’s due to a gene that has to be rec’d from both sides to cause it, IOW, the body isn’t producing some precursor to another necessary process, something along those lines. But then, why does it take a seemingly random length of time to emerge?
A former coworker had Wilson’s Disease (I’d never heard of it either), which has a genetic basis I think, but the symptoms often result in misdiagnosis. It’s now easily treatable and addressed from then in in dietary restriction. Symptoms take some years to develop and worsen, but when undiagnosed results in shortened lifespans. I’d be surprised if ALS doesn’t get cracked in the next few years. Here’s hoping.
Must be 20 years ago now, I saw paraplegic with paralyzed legs on a stationary bicycle. They had tens units attached to her legs, and a computer program that fired each tens unit/muscle. Her legs looked very healthy. She still could not walk, but her overall health was greatly improved.
I've read that healthy, strong thigh muscles act as a second heart, improving circulation.
It’s better to keep ‘em moving. Hmm, I will follow that advice in a little while.
We have lost a cousin for one....but I have to say that this not a cure..the same paralyzed body remains...
it sure does suck- Saw a video of a man dying from it- he recorded the process- such a horrible thing- nothing worse than not being able to breath, but with ALS it is that feeling for a long time- He kept jerking awake with air starvation-
Would be better to die of pneumonia- they say it’s the ‘old man’s friend’ where at the end the person just falls asleep and doesn’t wake up-
Sorry for your loss- We too had a freind die of it 4 years ago- she was in her 40’s.
😆
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