News
Neuralink shouldn’t solve Anxiety and Depression disorders
Neuralink aims to treat some of the most severe and damaging neurological diseases on Earth. In terms of Alzheimer’s, dementia, and epilepsy, a Neuralink device would be a great way to prevent these diseases from ruining everyday life for those who have been affected by them. With that being said, Neuralink needs not to treat anxiety and depression disorders, because those illnesses require human reaction and vulnerability to treat. Defeating anxiety and depression should be done without the help of a complete fix, and it is crucial not to look past the importance of humans being able to feel these two sensations.
This is something I feel very strongly about for several reasons.
Before I dive into those reasons, I want to explain why I feel qualified enough to take a stance that I think many supporters of Neuralink will disagree with.
I have dealt with clinical anxiety and severe depression for my entire life. I was clinically diagnosed in 2009 at the age of 14 with both of these disorders, and I would estimate that it took me around 11 and a half years of diligence on my part to begin living a normal life. My anxiety and depression disorders hindered me from doing a lot of things in my life: playing certain sports, moving away for college (on multiple occasions), keeping past jobs, committing to relationships, etc. It has affected me in the worst way for so many years, and I would never want anyone, even my worst enemy, to experience the things that I felt on a daily basis when I was under the control of these two diseases.
However, I don’t think that everyone should completely rid themselves of anxiety and depression. Why? Because they are two emotions, as humans, we need to have.
Anxiety, while painful and difficult to confront head-on, is necessary for some reasons. The first being the obvious, anxiety is an excellent way to sense when danger is near, and it is a crucial part of our fight or flight response. It can warn someone when there is an issue with what is going on near them and can be life-saving in certain circumstances.
Anxiety also is an opportunity to grow as a human being. Facing and confronting anxious thoughts is one of the best ways to test resilience and learn about what we are made of. Anxiety teaches us a lot about ourselves, and while frightening, facing it directly is one of the best ways to show that we can push through certain circumstances that we aren’t confident about.
-
This is a preview from our weekly newsletter. Each week I go ‘Beyond the News’ and handcraft a special edition that includes my thoughts on the biggest stories, why it matters, and how it could impact the future.
A big thanks to our long-time supporters and new subscribers! Thank you.
Depression, while more severe in my own experiences, also has its advantages. Without darkness, we wouldn’t know what light is. Without depression, we wouldn’t know about happiness. There are points where humans need to face adversity and challenging circumstances to feel the great things about life.
Now, the way I treated my anxiety and depression disorders was a clinically-focused approach. I regularly attended therapy sessions, took medication, and spoke to doctors as often as I could. While I wholeheartedly believe everyone should talk to a therapist at least three times a year, I disagree with taking medications. In my experience, they are a masking agent for anxiety and depression disorders, especially. They caused me more problems after I started taking them, and the side effects needed treatment on their own.
I believe the best way to treat disorders like anxiety and depression is solely up to the person who is dealing with them. When I started to make real progress with my issues, I began using Exposure Therapy to treat my problems. I did as many things as I could that scared me. This included long drives by myself, roller coasters, and doing more things independently. When I started doing these things, I had stopped taking medication, and my self-diligence started to solve the problems I was facing.
I am in no way condoning that medication is not a wrong way to initially treat these illnesses. However, I do not believe that the healthy dose of side effects that come as a result of taking these medications is helpful to anyone who is being treated for either disorder.
This is where my issue with Neuralink comes in.
-
I believe that Neuralink intends to completely remove these sensations from a person’s emotions, which I feel can be dangerous to the future. Taking away emotions from humans can be detrimental to the way people communicate with each other and respond to specific events. As hazardous and as stressful as dealing with any mental illness is, solving them requires a long and tiring fight. It is not easy, but anything in life that is worth doing rarely is.
I believe very strongly that removing emotions from humans is one of the most dangerous things that anyone could do. At what point will devices like Neuralink completely take over the human brain? When will emotions begin to disappear from people? Could it lead to a decreased amount of social interaction? How would that make us any different than robots?
It is dangerous, in my opinion, to remove core emotional responses from a human. Nobody wants to be depressed, and nobody wants to be anxious. But treating these diseases is done by finding out who we are as people. It requires us to go out of our comfort zones and grow, not put a chip in our heads or a pill in our throats that eliminates the possibility of feeling certain sensations.
There comes the point where our humanness needs to be preserved. The invention of Smartphones has taken away a lot of opportunities for face-to-face interaction, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that anxiety and depression disorders are caused by these devices, especially through social media use.
I am interested to hear other points on this matter because I know some people have different experiences with anxiety and depression than me. One thing I’ve always loved is hearing other people’s stories about how their anxiety or depression changed their lives. It usually starts with a valley and turns into a peak. While this can differ from case to case, two people rarely have identical stories when talking about their experiences. They also, frequently, are different from one case to the next because of how we obtained anxiety or depression. Some get it through abuse, and some get it from other forms of trauma when their brain is developing.
Neuralink is yet another brilliant idea from Elon Musk. It will hopefully change the way certain neurological diseases are treated and can provide some insight into what causes these medical conditions. However, there has to be boundaries and taking emotions and psychological responses away, in my opinion, is not the right thing to do. To quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.”
I use this newsletter to share my thoughts on what is going on in the Tesla world. If you want to talk to me directly, you can email me or reach me on Twitter. I don’t bite, be sure to reach out!
-
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
-
It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
-
News
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.
The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.
For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.
-
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
