Transcript

Inventing #1173 · From Chad

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Patients have been told for years they might never read
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again. There's a story behind that.
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This is your daily message from Chad Room 1173 to upgrade your
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mental game today by telling yourself a better story.
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Because the most important story you hear is the story you tell
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yourself. This message is dedicated to
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Mitch Care Cart. Here's the upgrade.
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If you have sight, you see what is happening.
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Upgraded thinking reaches for insight to know why it's
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happening. Here's the story. 8 million
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people around the world have geographic atrophy, the advanced
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form of macular degeneration that eats away the center of
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your vision. Every drug on the market for it
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only slows how fast you go blind.
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None of them gives anything back.
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Doctors have gently told patients for years that this is
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just the deal. Manage the loss.
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That's the best one can look forward to.
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Until this year. A company called Science Corp,
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started by Max Hodak, A Neuralink Co founder, finished a
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project started at Stanford 2 decades ago and passed through a
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bankrupt French company on the way to market.
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They built a chip the size of a pin head and slid it under the
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retina. Patients wear a pair of glasses
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with a camera built into the frame.
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The camera reads the room and beams it onto the chip in
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infrared light, invisible so it doesn't fight with whatever
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vision they have left. The chip bypasses the damage
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photoreceptors and fires the surviving relay cells beneath
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the retina, the inner retinal cells the disease largely
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spared. The brain, trained over months,
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learns to read the signal as sight.
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In the trial, 8 out of 10 patients can read letters,
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numbers, words. Again, some hadn't in years.
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It's not sharp, it's not color, it's grayscale.
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It takes months of retraining and it lands around somewhere
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around 2160. Vision nowhere close to normal.
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Somebody's going to look at that number and call it small.
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That's sight talking. Insight knows better.
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Nobody complained about the first light bulbs being too dim.
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They've been sitting in the dark 20 years of trying to solve a
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problem so hard that the giants in the industry left it alone
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and somebody else had to pick it up.
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That's not luck. That's a person who kept seeing
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why it mattered long after everyone else stopped seeing it
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at all. The site is the headline.
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The Insight is the real story. The better story to tell
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yourself is I don't need the whole picture back, I need
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enough to move. You're not always going to get
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2020 vision, almost nobody does. But insight will get you moving
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when sight alone would keep you sitting in the dark waiting for
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perfect. Maybe you're stuck focusing on
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sight when what you need is insight.
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If you've got a story like this one, somebody with the insight
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to keep working on a problem others thought couldn't be
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fixed, I genuinely like to read it.
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Send it to from chadsmith@gmail.com.
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Here's what happens next. You text one person this
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question. What have you been told can't be
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fixed? You can encourage them by
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letting them know someone is probably working on it.
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And one more thing. If you want the fuller version
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of this, my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World is
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free at from chad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message
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and hundreds of others are always available at
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www.fromchad.com.