Bryan Johnson: Kernel Brain-Computer Interfaces
生物与进化AI 与机器学习技术与编程音乐与艺术心理与人性
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AI 智能总结
布莱恩·约翰逊谈Kernel脑机接口
这是 Lex Fridman 与 Kernel 创始人、连续创业者 Bryan Johnson 的对话。Johnson 分享了他创建 Kernel（脑活动监测设备公司）的愿景、对人类意识的理解，以及他对人类与 AI 融合未来的深刻思考。
脑机接口Kernel意识人类优化AI融合神经科学
Bryan Johnson 是美国连续创业者，创立了 Braintree（后收购 Venmo，以 8 亿美元卖给 PayPal）和 Kernel（脑机接口公司），后来以「Blueprint」项目（极端抗衰老实验）而广为人知。
📌 核心观点
- Kernel 的愿景：Johnson 创建 Kernel 是为了开发能够监测和记录大脑活动的设备，目标是让神经科学从实验室走向消费者，使普通人能够了解和优化自己的大脑功能。
- 从 Braintree 到 Kernel：Johnson 以 8 亿美元将 Braintree（收购了 Venmo）卖给 PayPal 后，将大部分资金投入到 Kernel，他认为理解大脑是人类面临的最重要挑战。
- 意识与身份：Johnson 对意识的本质有深刻的思考，他认为随着脑机接口技术的发展，「自我」的边界将变得模糊——当你的思维与 AI 融合时，哪部分是「你」？
- 人类优化的未来：Johnson 是人类优化运动的重要倡导者，他认为通过技术手段优化人类的认知、情感和身体能力，是人类进化的下一步。
- 对 AI 的看法：Johnson 认为 AI 不是人类的威胁，而是人类的延伸。他相信人机融合将创造出超越当前人类能力的新形式智能，这是令人兴奋而非恐惧的前景。
✨ 金句摘录
Johnson：理解大脑是人类面临的最重要挑战——这就是为什么我将 Braintree 的收益投入到 Kernel。
Johnson：随着脑机接口技术的发展，「自我」的边界将变得模糊——当你的思维与 AI 融合时，哪部分是「你」？
Johnson：AI 不是人类的威胁，而是人类的延伸——人机融合将创造出超越当前人类能力的新形式智能。
📋 章节目录
暂无章节信息
🔑 关键词
databraingoingdondoingexperiencesleephumanzerothinkingvaluekernelbuildingcertaintryingeatablesaiddietconscious
💬 精彩语录
暂无语录
🎙️ 完整对话（3169 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.000)
The following is a conversation with Brian Johnson,
以下是与布莱恩·约翰逊的对话，
Lex Fridman (00:02.560)
founder of Kernel, a company that has developed devices
Kernel 的创始人，一家开发设备的公司
Lex Fridman (00:06.480)
that can monitor and record brain activity.
可以监测和记录大脑活动。
Lex Fridman (00:09.360)
And previously, he was the founder of Braintree,
此前，他是 Braintree 的创始人，
Lex Fridman (00:12.080)
a mobile payment company that acquired Venmo
收购 Venmo 的移动支付公司
Lex Fridman (00:14.760)
and then was acquired by PayPal and eBay.
随后被 PayPal 和 eBay 收购。
Lex Fridman (00:17.840)
Quick mention of our sponsors,
快速提及我们的赞助商，
Bryan Johnson (00:19.720)
Forsigmatic, NetSuite, Grammarly, and ExpressVPN.
Forsigmatic、NetSuite、Grammarly 和 ExpressVPN。
Lex Fridman (00:24.280)
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
在说明中查看它们以支持此播客。
Bryan Johnson (00:27.760)
As a side note, let me say that this was a fun
作为旁注，让我说这很有趣
Lex Fridman (00:30.160)
and memorable experience,
和难忘的经历，
Bryan Johnson (00:31.720)
wearing the Kernel FlowBrain interface
佩戴 Kernel FlowBrain 界面
Lex Fridman (00:34.040)
in the beginning of this conversation,
在这次谈话的开始，
Bryan Johnson (00:35.920)
as you can see if you watch the video version
如果你看视频版本就可以看到
Lex Fridman (00:38.080)
of this episode.
本集的。
Lex Fridman (00:39.520)
And there was a Ubuntu Linux machine sitting next to me
我旁边有一台 Ubuntu Linux 机器
Lex Fridman (00:42.900)
collecting the data from my brain.
从我的大脑中收集数据。
Bryan Johnson (00:44.840)
The whole thing gave me hope that the mystery
整件事给了我希望
Lex Fridman (00:47.840)
of the human mind will be unlocked in the coming decades
人类思维的奥秘将在未来几十年内被释放
Bryan Johnson (00:51.480)
as we begin to measure signals from the brain
当我们开始测量来自大脑的信号时
Lex Fridman (00:53.760)
in a high bandwidth way.
Bryan Johnson (00:55.400)
To understand the mind,
Lex Fridman (00:56.600)
we either have to build it or to measure it.
Bryan Johnson (01:00.160)
Both are worth a try.
Lex Fridman (01:02.200)
Thanks to Brian and the rest of the Kernel team
Bryan Johnson (01:04.200)
for making this little demo happen.
Lex Fridman (01:06.320)
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,
Lex Fridman (01:08.640)
and here is my conversation with Brian Johnson.
Lex Fridman (01:13.240)
You ready, Lex?
Bryan Johnson (01:14.080)
Yes, I'm ready.
Lex Fridman (01:15.680)
Do you guys wanna come in and put the interfaces
Lex Fridman (01:18.000)
on our heads?
Lex Fridman (01:18.840)
And then I will proceed to tell you a few jokes.
Lex Fridman (01:22.040)
So we have two incredible pieces of technology
Lex Fridman (01:25.760)
and a machine running Ubuntu 2004 in front of us.
Lex Fridman (01:30.480)
What are we doing?
Lex Fridman (01:31.520)
All right.
Lex Fridman (01:32.360)
Are these going on our heads?
Lex Fridman (01:33.200)
They're going on our heads, yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:34.040)
And they will place it on our heads for proper alignment.
Lex Fridman (01:41.800)
Does this support giant heads?
Bryan Johnson (01:43.200)
Because I kind of have a giant head.
Lex Fridman (01:45.120)
Is this just giant head?
Bryan Johnson (01:46.440)
Are you saying as like an ego
Lex Fridman (01:48.040)
or are you saying physically both?
Bryan Johnson (01:55.760)
It's a nice massage.
Lex Fridman (01:57.040)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:59.960)
Okay, how does this feel?
Lex Fridman (02:01.920)
It's okay to move around?
Bryan Johnson (02:04.720)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (02:05.680)
It feels, oh yeah.
Bryan Johnson (02:07.440)
Hey, hey.
Lex Fridman (02:10.920)
This feels awesome.
Bryan Johnson (02:11.760)
It's a pretty good fit.
Lex Fridman (02:12.840)
Thank you.
Bryan Johnson (02:13.680)
That feels good.
Lex Fridman (02:15.640)
So this is big head friendly.
Bryan Johnson (02:17.640)
It suits you well, Lex.
Lex Fridman (02:19.080)
Thank you.
Bryan Johnson (02:22.040)
I feel like I need to,
Lex Fridman (02:24.600)
I feel like when I wear this,
Bryan Johnson (02:25.760)
I need to sound like Sam Harris,
Lex Fridman (02:27.040)
calm, collected, eloquent.
Bryan Johnson (02:31.760)
I feel smarter, actually.
Lex Fridman (02:34.080)
I don't think I've ever felt quite as much
Bryan Johnson (02:36.840)
like I'm part of the future as now.
Lex Fridman (02:38.720)
Have you ever worn a brain interface
Lex Fridman (02:40.680)
or had your brain imaged?
Lex Fridman (02:42.520)
Oh, never had my brain imaged.
Bryan Johnson (02:45.560)
The only way I've analyzed my brain
Lex Fridman (02:47.280)
is by talking to myself and thinking.
Bryan Johnson (02:52.280)
No direct data.
Lex Fridman (02:53.720)
Yeah, that is definitely a brain interface
Bryan Johnson (02:57.400)
that has a lot of blind spots.
Lex Fridman (02:59.240)
It has some blind spots, yeah.
Bryan Johnson (03:01.320)
Psychotherapy.
Lex Fridman (03:02.480)
That's right.
Lex Fridman (03:04.440)
All right, are we recording?
Lex Fridman (03:07.040)
Yeah, we're good.
Bryan Johnson (03:08.280)
All right.
Lex Fridman (03:09.600)
So Lex, the objective of this,
Bryan Johnson (03:12.680)
I'm going to tell you some jokes
Lex Fridman (03:16.960)
and your objective is to not smile,
Bryan Johnson (03:18.920)
which as a Russian, you should have an edge.
Lex Fridman (03:22.960)
Make the motherland proud.
Bryan Johnson (03:24.520)
I gotcha.
Lex Fridman (03:25.520)
Okay.
Bryan Johnson (03:28.200)
Let's hear the jokes.
Lex Fridman (03:29.440)
Lex, and this is from the Colonel Crew.
Bryan Johnson (03:33.960)
We've been working on a device that can read your mind
Lex Fridman (03:37.080)
and we would love to see your thoughts.
Lex Fridman (03:42.200)
Is that the joke?
Lex Fridman (03:43.960)
That's the opening.
Bryan Johnson (03:44.840)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (03:49.960)
If I'm seeing the muscle activation correctly on your lips,
Bryan Johnson (03:53.640)
you're not going to do well on this.
Lex Fridman (03:54.760)
Let's see.
Bryan Johnson (03:55.600)
All right, here comes the first.
Lex Fridman (03:56.480)
I'm screwed.
Bryan Johnson (03:57.320)
Here comes the first one.
Lex Fridman (03:58.240)
Is this going to break the device?
Lex Fridman (04:01.200)
Is it resilient to laughter?
Lex Fridman (04:07.120)
Lex, what goes through a potato's brain?
Bryan Johnson (04:09.480)
I can't.
Lex Fridman (04:14.320)
I got already failed.
Bryan Johnson (04:15.760)
That's the hilarious opener.
Lex Fridman (04:17.280)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (04:18.120)
What?
Lex Fridman (04:19.280)
Tater thoughts.
Lex Fridman (04:24.000)
What kind of fish performs brain surgery?
Lex Fridman (04:27.720)
I don't know.
Bryan Johnson (04:29.000)
A neural surgeon.
Lex Fridman (04:35.520)
And so we're getting data of everything
Lex Fridman (04:37.680)
that's happening in my brain right now?
Lex Fridman (04:39.040)
Lifetime, yeah.
Bryan Johnson (04:39.880)
We're getting activation patterns of your entire cortex.
Lex Fridman (04:45.000)
I'm going to try to do better.
Bryan Johnson (04:46.240)
I'll edit out all the parts where I laughed.
Lex Fridman (04:48.240)
Photoshop put a serious face over me.
Bryan Johnson (04:50.600)
You can recover.
Lex Fridman (04:51.960)
Yeah, all right.
Lex Fridman (04:53.760)
Lex, what do scholars eat when they're hungry?
Lex Fridman (04:57.000)
I don't know, what?
Bryan Johnson (04:58.440)
Academia nuts.
Lex Fridman (05:03.600)
That was a pretty good one.
Lex Fridman (05:05.880)
So what we'll do is,
Lex Fridman (05:07.240)
so you're wearing kernel flow,
Bryan Johnson (05:11.360)
which is an interface built using technology
Lex Fridman (05:16.600)
called spectroscopy.
Lex Fridman (05:17.680)
So it's similar to what we wear wearables on the wrist
Lex Fridman (05:20.640)
using light.
Lex Fridman (05:22.240)
So using LIDAR, as you know,
Lex Fridman (05:24.640)
and we're using that to image the functional imaging
Bryan Johnson (05:28.960)
of brain activity.
Lex Fridman (05:30.320)
And so as your neurons fire electrically and chemically,
Bryan Johnson (05:35.120)
it creates blood oxygenation levels.
Lex Fridman (05:37.400)
We're measuring that.
Lex Fridman (05:38.240)
And so you'll see in the reconstructions we do for you,
Lex Fridman (05:41.120)
you'll see your activation patterns in your brain
Bryan Johnson (05:43.040)
as throughout this entire time we are wearing it.
Lex Fridman (05:45.800)
So in the reaction to the jokes
Lex Fridman (05:47.720)
and as we were sitting here talking,
Lex Fridman (05:50.240)
and so we're moving towards a real time feed
Bryan Johnson (05:54.560)
of your cortical brain activity.
Lex Fridman (05:56.880)
So there's a bunch of things that are in contact
Bryan Johnson (05:59.440)
with my skull right now.
Lex Fridman (06:02.240)
How many of them are there?
Lex Fridman (06:03.640)
And so how many of them are, what are they?
Lex Fridman (06:05.880)
What are the actual sensors?
Bryan Johnson (06:07.120)
There's 52 modules,
Lex Fridman (06:09.000)
and each module has one laser and six sensors.
Lex Fridman (06:13.720)
And the sensors fire in about 100 picoseconds.
Lex Fridman (06:18.480)
And then the photons scatter and absorb in your brain.
Lex Fridman (06:21.480)
And then a few go in, a few come back out,
Lex Fridman (06:24.400)
a bunch go in, then a few come back out,
Lex Fridman (06:25.880)
and we sense those photons
Lex Fridman (06:27.920)
and then we do the reconstruction for the activity.
Bryan Johnson (06:30.360)
Overall, there's about a thousand plus channels
Lex Fridman (06:33.520)
that are sampling your activity.
Lex Fridman (06:35.640)
How difficult is it to make it as comfortable as it is?
Lex Fridman (06:38.760)
Because it's surprisingly comfortable.
Bryan Johnson (06:40.720)
I would not think it would be comfortable.
Lex Fridman (06:44.280)
Something that's measuring brain activity,
Bryan Johnson (06:48.320)
I would not think it would be comfortable, but it is.
Lex Fridman (06:51.160)
I agree.
Bryan Johnson (06:52.000)
In fact, I want to take this home.
Lex Fridman (06:52.880)
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Lex Fridman (06:54.200)
So people are accustomed to being in big systems
Lex Fridman (06:58.360)
like fMRI where there's 120 decibel sounds
Lex Fridman (07:02.200)
and you're in a claustrophobic encasement,
Lex Fridman (07:05.560)
or EEG, which is just painful, or surgery.
Lex Fridman (07:09.240)
And so, yes, I agree that this is a convenient option
Lex Fridman (07:12.240)
to be able to just put on your head
Bryan Johnson (07:14.360)
that measures your brain activity
Lex Fridman (07:15.960)
in the contextual environment you choose.
Lex Fridman (07:17.960)
So if we want to have it during a podcast,
Lex Fridman (07:20.200)
if we want to be at home in a business setting,
Bryan Johnson (07:24.400)
it's freedom to record your brain activity
Lex Fridman (07:27.480)
in the setting that you choose.
Bryan Johnson (07:29.000)
Yeah, but sort of from an engineering perspective,
Lex Fridman (07:31.000)
are these, what is it?
Bryan Johnson (07:32.920)
There's a bunch of different modular parts
Lex Fridman (07:34.960)
and they're kind of, there's like a rubber band thing
Bryan Johnson (07:38.080)
where they mold to the shape of your head.
Lex Fridman (07:40.880)
That's right.
Lex Fridman (07:41.720)
So we built this version of the mechanical design
Lex Fridman (07:45.480)
to accommodate most adult heads.
Lex Fridman (07:49.760)
But I have a giant head and it fits fine.
Lex Fridman (07:51.760)
It fits well, actually.
Lex Fridman (07:53.800)
So I don't think I have an average head.
Lex Fridman (07:55.840)
Okay, maybe I feel much better about my head now.
Bryan Johnson (08:01.640)
Maybe I'm more average than I thought.
Lex Fridman (08:06.160)
Okay, so what else is there interesting
Lex Fridman (08:08.720)
that you could say while it's on our heads?
Lex Fridman (08:10.840)
I can keep this on the whole time.
Bryan Johnson (08:12.120)
This is kind of awesome.
Lex Fridman (08:13.480)
And it's amazing for me, as a fan of Ubuntu,
Bryan Johnson (08:16.080)
I use Ubuntu MATE, you guys use that too.
Lex Fridman (08:18.880)
But it's amazing to have code running to the side,
Bryan Johnson (08:23.360)
measuring stuff and collecting data.
Lex Fridman (08:26.200)
I mean, I feel like much more important now
Bryan Johnson (08:30.360)
that my data is being recorded.
Lex Fridman (08:32.560)
Like, you know when you have a good friend
Lex Fridman (08:35.240)
that listens to you, that actually is listening to you?
Lex Fridman (08:40.240)
This is what I feel like, like a much better friend
Bryan Johnson (08:43.080)
because it's like accurately listening to me, Ubuntu.
Lex Fridman (08:47.120)
What a cool perspective, I hadn't thought about that,
Bryan Johnson (08:50.600)
of feeling understood.
Lex Fridman (08:53.960)
Heard.
Bryan Johnson (08:54.800)
Yeah, heard deeply by the mechanical system
Lex Fridman (08:59.240)
that is recording your brain activity,
Bryan Johnson (09:01.960)
versus the human that you're engaging with,
Lex Fridman (09:04.480)
that your mind immediately goes to
Bryan Johnson (09:07.720)
that there's this dimensionality
Lex Fridman (09:09.520)
and depth of understanding of this software system
Bryan Johnson (09:12.600)
which you're intimately familiar with.
Lex Fridman (09:14.600)
And now you're able to communicate with this system
Bryan Johnson (09:17.360)
in ways that you couldn't before.
Lex Fridman (09:19.280)
Yeah, I feel heard.
Bryan Johnson (09:24.600)
Yeah, I mean, I guess what's interesting about this is
Lex Fridman (09:26.880)
your intuitions are spot on.
Bryan Johnson (09:28.760)
Most people have intuitions about brain interfaces
Lex Fridman (09:30.920)
that they've grown up with this idea
Bryan Johnson (09:32.960)
of people moving cursors on the screen
Lex Fridman (09:34.800)
or typing or changing the channel or skipping a song.
Bryan Johnson (09:38.600)
It's primarily been anchored on control.
Lex Fridman (09:41.840)
And I think the more relevant understanding
Bryan Johnson (09:44.920)
of brain interfaces or neuroimaging
Lex Fridman (09:47.280)
is that it's a measurement system.
Lex Fridman (09:49.760)
And once you have numbers for a given thing,
Lex Fridman (09:53.280)
a seemingly endless number of possibilities
Bryan Johnson (09:54.920)
emerge around that of what to do with those numbers.
Lex Fridman (09:57.760)
So before you tell me about the possibilities,
Bryan Johnson (09:59.880)
this was an incredible experience.
Lex Fridman (10:01.520)
I can keep this on for another two hours,
Lex Fridman (10:03.880)
but I'm being told that for a bunch of reasons,
Lex Fridman (10:08.960)
just because we probably wanna keep the data small
Lex Fridman (10:11.240)
and visualize it nicely for the final product,
Lex Fridman (10:13.840)
we wanna cut this off and take this amazing helmet
Bryan Johnson (10:17.440)
away from me.
Lex Fridman (10:18.280)
So Brian, thank you so much for this experience
Lex Fridman (10:21.240)
and let's continue without helmetless.
Lex Fridman (10:25.160)
All right.
Lex Fridman (10:26.200)
So that was an incredible experience.
Lex Fridman (10:28.920)
Can you maybe speak to what kind of opportunities
Bryan Johnson (10:31.240)
that opens up that stream of data,
Lex Fridman (10:32.960)
that rich stream of data from the brain?
Lex Fridman (10:35.520)
First, I'm curious, what is your reaction?
Lex Fridman (10:38.360)
What comes to mind when you put that on your head?
Lex Fridman (10:41.560)
What does it mean to you?
Lex Fridman (10:42.840)
And what possibilities emerge
Lex Fridman (10:44.120)
and what significance might it have?
Lex Fridman (10:46.760)
I'm curious where your orientation is at.
Bryan Johnson (10:50.880)
Well, for me, I'm really excited by the possibility
Lex Fridman (10:54.840)
of various information about my body,
Bryan Johnson (10:59.440)
about my mind being converted into data,
Lex Fridman (11:03.320)
such that data can be used to create products
Bryan Johnson (11:06.320)
that make my life better.
Lex Fridman (11:07.360)
So that to me is really exciting possibility.
Bryan Johnson (11:09.760)
Even just like a Fitbit that measures, I don't know,
Lex Fridman (11:13.080)
some very basic measurements about your body
Bryan Johnson (11:15.720)
is really cool.
Lex Fridman (11:17.120)
But the bandwidth of information,
Bryan Johnson (11:20.560)
the resolution of that information is very crude,
Lex Fridman (11:22.720)
so it's not very interesting.
Bryan Johnson (11:23.960)
The possibility of just building a data set
Lex Fridman (11:29.480)
coming in a clean way and a high bandwidth way
Bryan Johnson (11:32.440)
from my brain opens up all kinds of...
Lex Fridman (11:37.440)
I was kind of joking when we were talking,
Lex Fridman (11:40.840)
but it's not really, it's like I feel heard
Lex Fridman (11:44.680)
in the sense that it feels like the full richness
Bryan Johnson (11:49.280)
of the information coming from my mind
Lex Fridman (11:51.680)
is actually being recorded by the machine.
Bryan Johnson (11:56.080)
I mean, I can't quite put it into words,
Lex Fridman (12:00.160)
but there is genuinely for me,
Bryan Johnson (12:02.880)
there's not some kind of joke about me being a robot.
Lex Fridman (12:05.160)
It just genuinely feels like I'm being heard
Bryan Johnson (12:09.080)
in a way that's going to improve my life,
Lex Fridman (12:13.880)
as long as the thing that's on the other end
Bryan Johnson (12:16.320)
can do something useful with that data.
Lex Fridman (12:17.760)
But even the recording itself is like,
Bryan Johnson (12:20.400)
once you record, it's like taking a picture.
Lex Fridman (12:25.320)
That moment is forever saved in time.
Bryan Johnson (12:28.480)
Now, a picture cannot allow you to step back
Lex Fridman (12:32.680)
into that world, but perhaps recording your brain
Bryan Johnson (12:38.240)
is a much higher resolution thing,
Lex Fridman (12:41.160)
much more personal recording of that information
Bryan Johnson (12:44.720)
than a picture that would allow you to step back
Lex Fridman (12:48.040)
into that where you were in that particular moment
Bryan Johnson (12:51.800)
in history and then map out a certain trajectory
Lex Fridman (12:54.160)
to tell you certain things about yourself
Bryan Johnson (12:58.520)
that could open up all kinds of applications.
Lex Fridman (13:00.360)
Of course, there's health that I consider,
Lex Fridman (13:02.640)
but honestly, to me, the exciting thing is just being heard.
Lex Fridman (13:06.600)
My state of mind, the level of focus,
Bryan Johnson (13:08.960)
all those kinds of things, being heard.
Lex Fridman (13:10.920)
What I heard you say is you have an entirety
Bryan Johnson (13:13.800)
of lived experience, some of which you can communicate
Lex Fridman (13:17.080)
in words and in body language,
Bryan Johnson (13:20.000)
some of which you feel internally,
Lex Fridman (13:21.440)
which cannot be captured in those communication modalities,
Lex Fridman (13:24.440)
and that this measurement system captures
Lex Fridman (13:27.640)
both the things you can try to articulate in words,
Bryan Johnson (13:29.880)
maybe in a lower dimensional space,
Lex Fridman (13:31.480)
using one word, for example, to communicate focus,
Bryan Johnson (13:34.520)
when it really may be represented
Lex Fridman (13:35.600)
in a 20 dimensional space of this particular kind of focus
Lex Fridman (13:39.720)
and that this information is being captured,
Lex Fridman (13:42.520)
so it's a closer representation
Bryan Johnson (13:44.360)
to the entirety of your experience captured
Lex Fridman (13:47.480)
in a dynamic fashion that is not just a static image
Bryan Johnson (13:50.920)
of your conscious experience.
Lex Fridman (13:53.040)
Yeah, that's the promise, that was the feeling,
Lex Fridman (13:58.280)
and it felt like the future.
Lex Fridman (13:59.360)
So it was a pretty cool experience.
Lex Fridman (14:00.800)
And from the sort of mechanical perspective,
Lex Fridman (14:04.000)
it was cool to have an actual device
Bryan Johnson (14:06.680)
that feels pretty good,
Lex Fridman (14:08.360)
that doesn't require me to go into the lab.
Lex Fridman (14:11.560)
And also the other thing I was feeling,
Lex Fridman (14:14.480)
there's a guy named Andrew Huberman,
Bryan Johnson (14:16.160)
he's a friend of mine, amazing podcast,
Lex Fridman (14:17.920)
people should listen to it, Huberman Lab Podcast.
Bryan Johnson (14:21.600)
We're working on a paper together
Lex Fridman (14:24.020)
about eye movement and so on.
Lex Fridman (14:26.360)
And we're kind of, he's a neuroscientist
Lex Fridman (14:28.440)
and I'm a data person, machine learning person,
Lex Fridman (14:30.280)
and we're both excited by how much the,
Lex Fridman (14:38.720)
how much the data measurements of the human mind,
Bryan Johnson (14:42.920)
the brain and all the different metrics
Lex Fridman (14:44.840)
that come from that could be used to understand
Bryan Johnson (14:47.720)
human beings and in a rigorous scientific way.
Lex Fridman (14:50.520)
So the other thing I was thinking about
Bryan Johnson (14:52.000)
is how this could be turned into a tool for science.
Lex Fridman (14:55.960)
Sort of not just personal science,
Bryan Johnson (14:57.680)
not just like Fitbit style,
Lex Fridman (15:00.520)
like how am I doing on my personal metrics of health,
Lex Fridman (15:04.040)
but doing larger scale studies of human behavior and so on.
Lex Fridman (15:07.760)
So like data, not at the scale of an individual,
Lex Fridman (15:10.480)
but data at a scale of many individuals
Lex Fridman (15:12.480)
or a large number of individuals.
Lex Fridman (15:14.720)
So personal being heard was exciting
Lex Fridman (15:17.000)
and also just for science is exciting.
Bryan Johnson (15:19.940)
It's very easy, like there's a very powerful thing
Lex Fridman (15:23.200)
to it being so easy to just put on
Bryan Johnson (15:25.600)
that you could scale much easier.
Lex Fridman (15:28.320)
If you think about that second thing you said
Bryan Johnson (15:30.140)
about the science of the brain,
Lex Fridman (15:37.520)
most, we've done a pretty good job,
Bryan Johnson (15:40.600)
like we, the human race has done a pretty good job
Lex Fridman (15:43.240)
figuring out how to quantify the things around us
Bryan Johnson (15:46.140)
from distant stars to calories and steps and our genome.
Lex Fridman (15:52.120)
So we can measure and quantify pretty much everything
Bryan Johnson (15:55.360)
in the known universe except for our minds.
Lex Fridman (16:00.640)
And we can do these one offs
Bryan Johnson (16:02.160)
if we're going to get an fMRI scan
Lex Fridman (16:03.640)
or do something with a low res EEG system,
Lex Fridman (16:08.880)
but we haven't done this at population scale.
Lex Fridman (16:11.760)
And so if you think about human thought
Bryan Johnson (16:14.840)
or human cognition is probably the single law,
Lex Fridman (16:19.320)
largest raw input material into society
Bryan Johnson (16:23.360)
at any given moment is our conversations
Lex Fridman (16:25.720)
with ourselves and with other people.
Lex Fridman (16:27.920)
And we have this raw input that we can't,
Lex Fridman (16:33.040)
that haven't been able to measure yet.
Lex Fridman (16:35.180)
And if you, when I think about it through that frame,
Lex Fridman (16:41.400)
it's remarkable, it's almost like we live
Bryan Johnson (16:43.320)
in this wild, wild West of unquantified communications
Lex Fridman (16:49.480)
within ourselves and between each other
Bryan Johnson (16:52.000)
when everything else has been grounded in me.
Lex Fridman (16:53.440)
For example, I know if I buy an appliance at the store
Bryan Johnson (16:56.560)
or on a website, I don't need to look at the measurements
Lex Fridman (17:00.640)
on the appliance and make sure it can fit through my door.
Bryan Johnson (17:03.040)
That's an engineered system of appliance manufacturing
Lex Fridman (17:06.160)
and construction.
Bryan Johnson (17:07.120)
Everyone's agreed upon engineering standards.
Lex Fridman (17:10.620)
And we don't have engineering standards around cognition.
Bryan Johnson (17:15.360)
It's not a, it has not entered
Lex Fridman (17:16.880)
as a formal engineering discipline that enables us
Bryan Johnson (17:20.040)
to scaffold in society with everything else we're doing,
Lex Fridman (17:23.040)
including consuming news, our relationships,
Bryan Johnson (17:26.560)
politics, economics, education, all the above.
Lex Fridman (17:29.600)
And so to me that the most significant contribution
Bryan Johnson (17:33.720)
that kernel technology has to offer
Lex Fridman (17:36.520)
would be the formal, the introduction
Bryan Johnson (17:40.720)
to formal engineering of cognition
Lex Fridman (17:42.640)
as it relates to everything else in society.
Bryan Johnson (17:45.280)
I love that idea that you kind of think that there's just
Lex Fridman (17:50.100)
this ocean of data that's coming from people's brains
Bryan Johnson (17:53.120)
as being in a crude way, reduced down to like tweets
Lex Fridman (17:57.360)
and texts and so on, just a very hardcore,
Bryan Johnson (18:02.160)
many scale compression of actual, the raw data.
Lex Fridman (18:06.060)
But maybe you can comment,
Bryan Johnson (18:08.320)
because you're using the word cognition.
Lex Fridman (18:11.760)
I think the first step is to get the brain data.
Lex Fridman (18:15.240)
But is there a leap to be taking
Lex Fridman (18:19.200)
to sort of interpreting that data in terms of cognition?
Lex Fridman (18:22.140)
So is your idea is basically you need to start collecting
Lex Fridman (18:25.440)
data at scale from the brain,
Lex Fridman (18:27.800)
and then we start to really be able to take little steps
Lex Fridman (18:32.680)
along the path to actually measuring
Bryan Johnson (18:35.300)
some deep sense of cognition.
Lex Fridman (18:37.760)
Because as I'm sure you know, we understand a few things,
Lex Fridman (18:42.760)
but we don't understand most of what makes up cognition.
Lex Fridman (18:47.280)
This has been one of the most significant challenges
Bryan Johnson (18:50.380)
of building Kernel, and Kernel wouldn't exist
Lex Fridman (18:52.440)
if I wasn't able to fund it initially by myself.
Bryan Johnson (18:55.760)
Because when I engage in conversations with investors,
Lex Fridman (18:59.280)
the immediate thought is, what is the killer app?
Lex Fridman (19:02.800)
And of course, I understand that heuristic,
Lex Fridman (19:04.980)
that's what they're looking at,
Bryan Johnson (19:05.820)
is they're looking to de risk.
Lex Fridman (19:07.920)
Is the product solved?
Lex Fridman (19:09.560)
Is there a customer base?
Lex Fridman (19:10.740)
Are people willing to pay for it?
Lex Fridman (19:11.920)
How does it compare to competing options?
Lex Fridman (19:14.320)
And in the case with brain interfaces,
Bryan Johnson (19:15.620)
when I started the company, there was no known path
Lex Fridman (19:20.360)
to even build a technology
Bryan Johnson (19:21.520)
that could potentially become mainstream.
Lex Fridman (19:24.400)
And then once we figured out the technology,
Bryan Johnson (19:26.940)
we could even, we could commence having conversations
Lex Fridman (19:28.840)
with investors and it became, what is the killer app?
Lex Fridman (19:31.320)
And so what has been,
Lex Fridman (19:33.240)
so I funded the first $53 million for the company.
Lex Fridman (19:36.400)
And to raise the round of funding, the first one we did,
Lex Fridman (19:39.820)
I spoke to 228 investors.
Bryan Johnson (19:42.560)
One said yes, it was remarkable.
Lex Fridman (19:45.600)
And it was mostly around this concept
Bryan Johnson (19:48.320)
around what is a killer app.
Lex Fridman (19:49.520)
And so internally, the way we think about it is,
Bryan Johnson (19:51.960)
we think of the go to market strategy
Lex Fridman (19:55.320)
much more like the Drake equation,
Bryan Johnson (19:57.860)
where if we can build technology
Lex Fridman (1:00:00.400)
It's human, it's our own selves,
Bryan Johnson (1:00:02.840)
which we have not been able to scaffold.
Lex Fridman (1:00:05.360)
We are the one part of this intelligence infrastructure
Bryan Johnson (1:00:08.440)
that remains unchanged.
Lex Fridman (1:00:11.640)
Is there something you could say about coupling
Bryan Johnson (1:00:15.160)
this brain data with not just the basic human experience,
Lex Fridman (1:00:19.640)
but say an experience, you mentioned sleep,
Lex Fridman (1:00:22.640)
but the wildest experience, which is psychedelics,
Lex Fridman (1:00:26.560)
is there, and there's been quite a few studies now
Bryan Johnson (1:00:29.920)
that are being approved and run,
Lex Fridman (1:00:33.400)
which is exciting from a scientific perspective
Bryan Johnson (1:00:36.520)
on psychedelics.
Lex Fridman (1:00:38.120)
Do you think, what do you think happens
Lex Fridman (1:00:40.840)
to the brain on psychedelics?
Lex Fridman (1:00:44.480)
And how can data about this help us understand it?
Lex Fridman (1:00:48.320)
And when you're on DMT, do you see Ls?
Lex Fridman (1:00:50.640)
And can we convert that into data?
Lex Fridman (1:00:54.400)
Can you add aliens in there?
Lex Fridman (1:00:56.400)
Yeah, aliens, definitely.
Lex Fridman (1:00:57.640)
Do you actually meet aliens?
Lex Fridman (1:00:58.760)
And Ls, are Ls the aliens?
Bryan Johnson (1:01:00.600)
I'm asking for a few Austin friends, yeah,
Lex Fridman (1:01:06.280)
that are convinced that they've actually met the Ls.
Lex Fridman (1:01:08.940)
What are Ls like?
Lex Fridman (1:01:09.780)
Are they friendly?
Lex Fridman (1:01:11.000)
Are they help?
Lex Fridman (1:01:11.840)
I haven't met them personally.
Bryan Johnson (1:01:12.680)
Are they like the smurfs of like they're industrious
Lex Fridman (1:01:15.240)
and they have different skill sets and?
Bryan Johnson (1:01:17.200)
Yeah, I think they're very,
Lex Fridman (1:01:20.680)
they're very critical as friends.
Bryan Johnson (1:01:24.880)
They're trolls.
Lex Fridman (1:01:26.240)
The Ls are trolls.
Bryan Johnson (1:01:28.800)
No, but they care about you.
Lex Fridman (1:01:30.200)
So there's a bunch of different version of trolls.
Bryan Johnson (1:01:33.760)
There's loving trolls that are harsh on you,
Lex Fridman (1:01:37.400)
but they want you to be better.
Lex Fridman (1:01:38.640)
And there's trolls that just enjoy your destruction.
Lex Fridman (1:01:42.680)
And I think they're the ones that care for you.
Bryan Johnson (1:01:45.280)
I think they're a criticism for my,
Lex Fridman (1:01:47.560)
see, I haven't met them directly,
Lex Fridman (1:01:49.320)
so it's like a friend of a friend.
Lex Fridman (1:01:51.120)
Yeah, they gave him a telephone.
Bryan Johnson (1:01:53.280)
Yeah, a bit of a,
Lex Fridman (1:01:54.720)
and the whole point is that in psychedelics,
Lex Fridman (1:01:57.440)
and certainly at DMT,
Lex Fridman (1:01:59.520)
word, this is where the brain data versus word data fails,
Bryan Johnson (1:02:05.720)
which is, you know, words can't convey the experience.
Lex Fridman (1:02:08.240)
Most people that, you can be poetic and so on,
Lex Fridman (1:02:10.560)
but it really does not convey the experience
Lex Fridman (1:02:12.320)
of what it actually means to meet the Ls.
Bryan Johnson (1:02:15.800)
I mean, to me, what baselines this conversation is,
Lex Fridman (1:02:18.960)
imagine if we were interested in the health of your heart,
Lex Fridman (1:02:24.320)
and we started and said, okay, Lex, self interest back,
Lex Fridman (1:02:28.520)
tell me how's the health of your heart.
Lex Fridman (1:02:30.040)
And you sit there and you close your eyes
Lex Fridman (1:02:31.760)
and you think, feels all right, like things feel okay.
Lex Fridman (1:02:36.640)
And then you went to the cardiologist
Lex Fridman (1:02:38.320)
and the cardiologist is like, hey Lex,
Bryan Johnson (1:02:39.760)
you know, tell me how you feel.
Lex Fridman (1:02:41.040)
You're like, well, actually, what I'd really like you to do
Bryan Johnson (1:02:43.360)
is do an EKG and a blood panel and look at arterial plaques
Lex Fridman (1:02:47.440)
and let's look at my cholesterol.
Lex Fridman (1:02:49.360)
And there's like five to 10 studies you would do.
Lex Fridman (1:02:53.240)
They would then give you this report and say,
Bryan Johnson (1:02:54.480)
here's the quantified health of your heart.
Lex Fridman (1:02:58.080)
Now with this data,
Bryan Johnson (1:02:59.840)
I'm going to prescribe the following regime of exercise
Lex Fridman (1:03:03.120)
and maybe I'll put you on a statin, like, et cetera.
Lex Fridman (1:03:06.160)
But the protocol is based upon this data.
Lex Fridman (1:03:08.560)
You would think the cardiologist is out of their mind
Bryan Johnson (1:03:11.560)
if they just gave you a bottle of statins based upon,
Lex Fridman (1:03:14.320)
you're like, well, I think something's kind of wrong.
Lex Fridman (1:03:16.240)
And they're just kind of experiment and see what happens.
Lex Fridman (1:03:20.080)
But that's what we do with our mental health today.
Lex Fridman (1:03:22.600)
So it's kind of absurd.
Lex Fridman (1:03:25.080)
And so if you look at psychedelics to have,
Bryan Johnson (1:03:28.160)
again, to be able to measure the brain
Lex Fridman (1:03:29.440)
and get a baseline state,
Lex Fridman (1:03:31.520)
and then to measure during a psychedelic experience
Lex Fridman (1:03:33.880)
and post the psychedelic experience
Lex Fridman (1:03:35.160)
and then do it longitudinally,
Lex Fridman (1:03:37.160)
you now have a quantification of what's going on.
Lex Fridman (1:03:39.440)
And so you could then pose questions,
Lex Fridman (1:03:41.720)
what molecule is appropriate at what dosages,
Bryan Johnson (1:03:45.040)
at what frequency, in what contextual environment,
Lex Fridman (1:03:47.720)
what happens when I have this diet with this molecule,
Bryan Johnson (1:03:50.080)
with this experience,
Lex Fridman (1:03:51.320)
all the experimentation you do
Bryan Johnson (1:03:52.640)
when you have good sleep data or HRV.
Lex Fridman (1:03:55.560)
And so that's what I think happens,
Lex Fridman (1:03:57.720)
what we could potentially do with psychedelics
Lex Fridman (1:04:00.400)
is we could add this level of sophistication
Bryan Johnson (1:04:03.080)
that is not in the industry currently.
Lex Fridman (1:04:05.200)
And it may improve the outcomes people experience,
Bryan Johnson (1:04:09.000)
it may improve the safety and efficacy.
Lex Fridman (1:04:11.560)
And so that's what I hope we are able to achieve.
Lex Fridman (1:04:14.120)
And it would transform mental health
Lex Fridman (1:04:19.040)
because we would finally have numbers
Bryan Johnson (1:04:21.200)
to work with to baseline ourselves.
Lex Fridman (1:04:22.480)
And then if you think about it,
Bryan Johnson (1:04:25.080)
when we talk about things related to the mind,
Lex Fridman (1:04:26.800)
we talk about the modality.
Bryan Johnson (1:04:28.280)
We use words like meditation or psychedelics
Lex Fridman (1:04:30.480)
or something else,
Bryan Johnson (1:04:32.000)
because we can't talk about a marker in the brain.
Lex Fridman (1:04:34.120)
We can't use a word to say,
Bryan Johnson (1:04:35.920)
we can't talk about cholesterol.
Lex Fridman (1:04:36.960)
We don't talk about plaque in the arteries.
Bryan Johnson (1:04:38.320)
We don't talk about HRV.
Lex Fridman (1:04:40.440)
And so if we have numbers,
Bryan Johnson (1:04:41.440)
then the solutions get mapped to numbers
Lex Fridman (1:04:45.440)
instead of the modalities being the thing we talk about.
Bryan Johnson (1:04:47.640)
Meditation just does good things in a crude fashion.
Lex Fridman (1:04:52.480)
So in your blog post,
Bryan Johnson (1:04:53.720)
Zero Principle Thinking, good title,
Lex Fridman (1:04:56.040)
you ponder how do people come up
Bryan Johnson (1:04:57.600)
with truly original ideas.
Lex Fridman (1:04:59.760)
What's your thoughts on this as a human
Lex Fridman (1:05:02.800)
and as a person who's measuring brain data?
Lex Fridman (1:05:05.600)
Zero principles are building blocks.
Bryan Johnson (1:05:09.520)
First principles are understanding of system laws.
Lex Fridman (1:05:14.440)
So if you take, for example, like in Sherlock Holmes,
Bryan Johnson (1:05:17.320)
he's a first principles thinker.
Lex Fridman (1:05:18.800)
So he says, once you've eliminated the impossible,
Bryan Johnson (1:05:25.120)
anything that remains, however improbable, is true.
Lex Fridman (1:05:29.000)
Whereas Dirk Gently, the holistic detective
Bryan Johnson (1:05:31.600)
by Douglas Adams says,
Lex Fridman (1:05:33.840)
I don't like eliminating the impossible.
Lex Fridman (1:05:36.440)
So when someone says,
Lex Fridman (1:05:38.040)
from a first principles perspective,
Lex Fridman (1:05:42.280)
and they're trying to assume the fewest number of things
Lex Fridman (1:05:47.000)
within a given timeframe.
Lex Fridman (1:05:50.080)
And so when I, after Braintree Venmo,
Lex Fridman (1:05:54.760)
I set my mind to the question of,
Lex Fridman (1:05:57.760)
what single thing can I do that would maximally increase
Lex Fridman (1:06:00.880)
the probability that the human race thrives
Lex Fridman (1:06:02.880)
beyond what we can even imagine?
Lex Fridman (1:06:05.120)
And I found that in my conversations with others
Bryan Johnson (1:06:08.600)
in the books I read, in my own deliberations,
Lex Fridman (1:06:12.560)
I had a missing piece of the puzzle,
Bryan Johnson (1:06:15.280)
because I didn't feel like,
Lex Fridman (1:06:17.440)
yeah, I didn't feel like the future could be deduced
Bryan Johnson (1:06:22.440)
from first principles thinking.
Lex Fridman (1:06:24.480)
And that's when I read the book, Zero,
Bryan Johnson (1:06:27.040)
A Biography of a Dangerous Idea.
Lex Fridman (1:06:29.400)
And I...
Bryan Johnson (1:06:30.240)
It's a really good book, by the way.
Lex Fridman (1:06:32.800)
I think it's my favorite book I've ever read.
Bryan Johnson (1:06:34.720)
It's also a really interesting number, zero.
Lex Fridman (1:06:37.080)
And I wasn't aware that the number zero
Bryan Johnson (1:06:40.000)
had to be discovered.
Lex Fridman (1:06:40.840)
I didn't realize that it caused a revolution in philosophy
Lex Fridman (1:06:43.800)
and just tore up math and it tore up,
Lex Fridman (1:06:46.880)
I mean, it builds modern society,
Lex Fridman (1:06:48.600)
but it wrecked everything in its way.
Lex Fridman (1:06:51.640)
It was an unbelievable disruptor, and it was so difficult
Bryan Johnson (1:06:55.440)
for society to get their heads around it.
Lex Fridman (1:06:57.840)
And so zero is, of course,
Bryan Johnson (1:07:00.240)
the representation of a zero principle thinking,
Lex Fridman (1:07:03.440)
which is it's the caliber
Lex Fridman (1:07:06.400)
and consequential nature of an idea.
Lex Fridman (1:07:09.960)
And so when you talk about what kind of ideas
Bryan Johnson (1:07:15.160)
have civilization transforming properties,
Lex Fridman (1:07:19.160)
oftentimes they fall in the zeroth category.
Lex Fridman (1:07:21.840)
And so in thinking this through,
Lex Fridman (1:07:24.680)
I was wanting to find a quantitative structure
Bryan Johnson (1:07:28.320)
on how to think about these zeroth principles.
Lex Fridman (1:07:31.720)
And that's, so I came up with that
Bryan Johnson (1:07:33.640)
to be a coupler with first principles thinking.
Lex Fridman (1:07:37.200)
And so now it's a staple as part of how I think about
Bryan Johnson (1:07:39.680)
the world and the future.
Lex Fridman (1:07:41.640)
So it emphasizes trying to identify,
Bryan Johnson (1:07:44.040)
it lands on that word impossible.
Lex Fridman (1:07:46.320)
Like what is impossible, essentially trying to identify
Lex Fridman (1:07:50.080)
what is impossible and what is possible.
Lex Fridman (1:07:52.200)
And being as, how do you, I mean, this is the thing,
Bryan Johnson (1:07:57.680)
is most of society tells you the range of things
Lex Fridman (1:08:01.000)
they say is impossible is very wide.
Lex Fridman (1:08:02.960)
So you need to be shrinking that.
Lex Fridman (1:08:04.760)
I mean, that's the whole process of this kind of thinking
Bryan Johnson (1:08:08.560)
is you need to be very rigorous in thinking about
Lex Fridman (1:08:13.560)
and be very rigorous in trying to be,
Bryan Johnson (1:08:18.680)
trying to draw the lines of what is actually impossible
Lex Fridman (1:08:22.240)
because very few things are actually impossible.
Bryan Johnson (1:08:26.400)
I don't know what is actually impossible.
Lex Fridman (1:08:29.480)
Like it's the Joe Rogan, it's entirely possible.
Bryan Johnson (1:08:33.040)
I like that approach to science, to engineering,
Lex Fridman (1:08:37.280)
to entrepreneurship, it's entirely possible.
Bryan Johnson (1:08:40.560)
Basically shrink the impossible to zero,
Lex Fridman (1:08:43.400)
to a very small set.
Bryan Johnson (1:08:45.400)
Yeah, life constraints favor first principle thinking
Lex Fridman (1:08:50.680)
because it enables faster action
Bryan Johnson (1:08:55.200)
with higher probability of success.
Lex Fridman (1:08:57.600)
Pursuing zero with principle optionality
Bryan Johnson (1:09:00.920)
is expensive and uncertain.
Lex Fridman (1:09:02.600)
And so in a society constrained by resources,
Bryan Johnson (1:09:06.120)
time and money and a desire for social status,
Lex Fridman (1:09:10.080)
accomplishment, et cetera, it minimizes zero
Bryan Johnson (1:09:13.640)
with principle thinking.
Lex Fridman (1:09:14.480)
But the reason why I think zero with principle thinking
Bryan Johnson (1:09:16.800)
should be a staple of our shared cognitive infrastructure
Lex Fridman (1:09:22.240)
is if you look through the history
Bryan Johnson (1:09:24.760)
of the past couple of thousand years
Lex Fridman (1:09:26.160)
and let's just say we arbitrarily,
Bryan Johnson (1:09:29.960)
we subjectively try to assess what is a zero level idea.
Lex Fridman (1:09:34.720)
And we say how many have occurred on what time scales
Lex Fridman (1:09:37.880)
and what were the contextual settings for it?
Lex Fridman (1:09:40.120)
I would argue that if you look at AlphaGo,
Bryan Johnson (1:09:44.520)
when it played Go from another dimension,
Lex Fridman (1:09:48.680)
with the human Go players, when it saw AlphaGo's moves,
Bryan Johnson (1:09:53.480)
it attributed to like playing with an alien,
Lex Fridman (1:09:55.720)
playing Go with AlphaGo being from another dimension.
Lex Fridman (1:10:00.120)
And so if you say computational intelligence
Lex Fridman (1:10:04.320)
has an attribute of introducing zero like insights,
Bryan Johnson (1:10:10.960)
then if you say what is going to be the occurrence
Lex Fridman (1:10:14.320)
of zeros in society going forward?
Lex Fridman (1:10:17.800)
And you could reasonably say
Lex Fridman (1:10:19.560)
probably a lot more than have occurred
Lex Fridman (1:10:21.440)
and probably more at a faster pace.
Lex Fridman (1:10:24.160)
So then if you say,
Lex Fridman (1:10:25.000)
what happens if you have this computational intelligence
Lex Fridman (1:10:28.160)
throughout society that the manufacturing design
Lex Fridman (1:10:30.680)
and distribution of intelligence
Lex Fridman (1:10:31.600)
is now going to heading towards zero,
Bryan Johnson (1:10:33.760)
you have an increased number of zeros being produced
Lex Fridman (1:10:37.040)
with a tight connection between human and computers.
Bryan Johnson (1:10:41.320)
That's when I got to a point and said,
Lex Fridman (1:10:43.280)
we cannot predict the future
Bryan Johnson (1:10:45.560)
with first principles thinking.
Lex Fridman (1:10:47.480)
We can't, that cannot be our imagination set.
Bryan Johnson (1:10:50.360)
It can't be our sole anchor in the situation
Lex Fridman (1:10:55.400)
that basically the future of our conscious existence,
Bryan Johnson (1:10:57.520)
20, 30, 40, 50 years is probably a zero.
Lex Fridman (1:11:01.400)
So just to clarify, when you say zero,
Bryan Johnson (1:11:06.920)
you're referring to basically a truly revolutionary idea.
Lex Fridman (1:11:12.360)
Yeah, something that is currently not a building block
Bryan Johnson (1:11:17.000)
of our shared conscious existence,
Lex Fridman (1:11:21.400)
either in the form of knowledge.
Bryan Johnson (1:11:24.480)
Yeah, it's currently not manifest
Lex Fridman (1:11:26.560)
in what we acknowledge.
Lex Fridman (1:11:28.520)
So zero principle thinking is playing with ideas
Lex Fridman (1:11:32.440)
that are so revolutionary that we can't even clearly reason
Bryan Johnson (1:11:39.320)
about the consequences once those ideas come to be.
Lex Fridman (1:11:42.000)
Yeah, or for example, like Einstein,
Bryan Johnson (1:11:46.040)
that was a zeroeth, I would categorize it
Lex Fridman (1:11:49.520)
as a zeroeth principle insight.
Bryan Johnson (1:11:51.400)
You mean general relativity, space time.
Lex Fridman (1:11:53.000)
Yeah, space time, yep, yep.
Bryan Johnson (1:11:55.000)
That basically building upon what Newton had done
Lex Fridman (1:11:59.080)
and said, yes, also, and it just changed the fabric
Bryan Johnson (1:12:04.920)
of our understanding of reality.
Lex Fridman (1:12:06.680)
And so that was unexpected, it existed.
Bryan Johnson (1:12:09.720)
We just, it became part of our awareness
Lex Fridman (1:12:13.240)
and the moves AlphaGo made existed.
Bryan Johnson (1:12:16.720)
It just came into our awareness.
Lex Fridman (1:12:19.080)
And so to your point, there's this question
Lex Fridman (1:12:24.080)
of what do we know and what don't we know?
Lex Fridman (1:12:27.800)
Do we think we know 99% of all things
Lex Fridman (1:12:30.160)
or do we think we know 0.001% of all things?
Lex Fridman (1:12:33.760)
And that goes back to no known, no unknowns
Lex Fridman (1:12:35.760)
and unknown unknowns.
Lex Fridman (1:12:37.000)
And first principles and zero principle thinking
Bryan Johnson (1:12:39.000)
gives us a quantitative framework to say,
Lex Fridman (1:12:42.240)
there's no way for us to mathematically
Bryan Johnson (1:12:44.640)
try to create probabilities for these things.
Lex Fridman (1:12:47.240)
Therefore, it would be helpful
Bryan Johnson (1:12:50.200)
if they were just part of our standard thought processes
Lex Fridman (1:12:52.920)
because it may encourage different behaviors
Bryan Johnson (1:12:58.360)
in what we do individually, collectively as a society,
Lex Fridman (1:13:01.320)
what we aspire to, what we talk about,
Bryan Johnson (1:13:03.480)
the possibility sets we imagine.
Lex Fridman (1:13:05.680)
Yeah, I've been engaged in that kind of thinking
Bryan Johnson (1:13:09.080)
quite a bit and thinking about engineering of consciousness.
Lex Fridman (1:13:14.560)
I think it's feasible, I think it's possible
Bryan Johnson (1:13:17.400)
in the language that we're using here.
Lex Fridman (1:13:19.240)
And it's very difficult to reason about a world
Bryan Johnson (1:13:21.680)
when inklings of consciousness can be engineered
Lex Fridman (1:13:26.800)
into artificial systems.
Bryan Johnson (1:13:30.840)
Not from a philosophical perspective,
Lex Fridman (1:13:33.440)
but from an engineering perspective,
Bryan Johnson (1:13:35.600)
I believe a good step towards engineering consciousness
Lex Fridman (1:13:39.720)
is creating engineering the illusion of consciousness.
Lex Fridman (1:13:44.360)
So I'm captivated by our natural predisposition
Lex Fridman (1:13:51.920)
to anthropomorphize things.
Lex Fridman (1:13:55.280)
And I think that's what we,
Lex Fridman (1:13:58.760)
I don't wanna hear from the philosophers,
Lex Fridman (1:14:00.720)
but I think that's what we kind of do to each other.
Lex Fridman (1:14:05.640)
That consciousness is created socially,
Bryan Johnson (1:14:10.640)
that like much of the power of consciousness
Lex Fridman (1:14:14.640)
is in the social interaction.
Bryan Johnson (1:14:16.600)
I create your consciousness, no,
Lex Fridman (1:14:19.720)
I create my consciousness by having interacted with you.
Lex Fridman (1:14:24.000)
And that's the display of consciousness.
Lex Fridman (1:14:26.320)
It's the same as like the display of emotion.
Bryan Johnson (1:14:28.640)
Emotion is created through communication.
Lex Fridman (1:14:31.480)
Language is created through its use.
Lex Fridman (1:14:34.720)
And then we somehow humans kind of,
Lex Fridman (1:14:36.560)
especially philosophers, the hard problem of consciousness
Bryan Johnson (1:14:39.400)
or the hard problem of consciousness,
Lex Fridman (1:14:40.840)
really wanna believe that we possess this thing.
Bryan Johnson (1:14:44.480)
That's like there's an elf sitting there with a hat
Lex Fridman (1:14:50.720)
or like name tag says consciousness,
Lex Fridman (1:14:52.680)
and they're like feeding this subjective experience to us
Lex Fridman (1:14:57.640)
as opposed to like it actually being an illusion
Bryan Johnson (1:15:02.160)
that we construct to make social communication more effective.
Lex Fridman (1:15:05.480)
And so I think if you focus on creating the illusion
Bryan Johnson (1:15:09.440)
of consciousness, you can create
Lex Fridman (1:15:11.160)
some very fulfilling experiences in software.
Lex Fridman (1:15:14.840)
And so that to me is a compelling space of ideas to explore.
Lex Fridman (1:15:18.760)
I agree with you.
Lex Fridman (1:15:19.600)
And I think going back to our experience together
Lex Fridman (1:15:21.680)
with Brain Interfaces on,
Bryan Johnson (1:15:23.280)
you could imagine if we get to a certain level of maturity.
Lex Fridman (1:15:26.080)
So first let's take the inverse of this.
Lex Fridman (1:15:28.760)
So you and I text back and forth
Lex Fridman (1:15:30.720)
and we're sending each other emojis.
Bryan Johnson (1:15:33.120)
That has a certain amount of information transfer rate
Lex Fridman (1:15:37.080)
as we're communicating with each other.
Lex Fridman (1:15:39.280)
And so in our communication with people via email
Lex Fridman (1:15:41.920)
and texts and whatnot,
Bryan Johnson (1:15:42.760)
we've taken the bandwidth of human interaction,
Lex Fridman (1:15:46.880)
the information transfer rate, and we've reduced it.
Bryan Johnson (1:15:49.920)
We have less social cues.
Lex Fridman (1:15:51.480)
We have less information to work with.
Bryan Johnson (1:15:53.000)
There's a lot more opportunity for misunderstanding.
Lex Fridman (1:15:55.280)
So that is altering the conscious experience
Bryan Johnson (1:15:57.480)
between two individuals.
Lex Fridman (1:15:59.400)
And if we add Brain Interfaces to the equation,
Bryan Johnson (1:16:01.600)
let's imagine now we amplify the dimensionality
Lex Fridman (1:16:04.120)
of our communications.
Bryan Johnson (1:16:05.560)
That to me is what you're talking about,
Lex Fridman (1:16:07.240)
which is consciousness engineering.
Bryan Johnson (1:16:09.120)
Perhaps I understand you with dimensions.
Lex Fridman (1:16:13.360)
So maybe I understand your,
Bryan Johnson (1:16:15.160)
when you look at the cup and you experience that happiness,
Lex Fridman (1:16:17.640)
you can tell me you're happy.
Lex Fridman (1:16:18.640)
And I then do theory of mine and say,
Lex Fridman (1:16:20.520)
I can imagine what it might be like to be Lex
Lex Fridman (1:16:23.160)
and feel happy about seeing this cup.
Lex Fridman (1:16:25.320)
But if the interface could then quantify
Lex Fridman (1:16:26.760)
and give me a 50 vector space model and say,
Lex Fridman (1:16:30.080)
this is the version of happiness that Lex is experiencing
Bryan Johnson (1:16:32.640)
as he looked at this cup,
Lex Fridman (1:16:34.240)
then it would allow me potentially
Bryan Johnson (1:16:36.440)
to have much greater empathy for you
Lex Fridman (1:16:38.040)
and understand you as a human.
Bryan Johnson (1:16:39.120)
This is how you experience joy,
Lex Fridman (1:16:41.880)
which is entirely unique from how I experienced joy,
Bryan Johnson (1:16:44.160)
even though we assumed ahead of time
Lex Fridman (1:16:46.080)
that we're having some kind of similar experience.
Lex Fridman (1:16:48.120)
But I agree with you that we do consciousness engineering
Lex Fridman (1:16:51.520)
today in everything we do.
Bryan Johnson (1:16:52.800)
When we talk to each other, when we're building products
Lex Fridman (1:16:55.760)
and that we're entering into a stage where
Bryan Johnson (1:17:00.280)
it will be much more methodical
Lex Fridman (1:17:03.160)
and quantitative based and computational
Bryan Johnson (1:17:06.200)
in how we go about doing it.
Lex Fridman (1:17:07.280)
Which to me, I find encouraging
Bryan Johnson (1:17:09.120)
because I think it creates better guardrails
Lex Fridman (1:17:14.360)
to create ethical systems versus right now,
Bryan Johnson (1:17:18.760)
I feel like it's really a wild, wild west
Lex Fridman (1:17:21.200)
on how these interactions are happening.
Bryan Johnson (1:17:23.440)
Yeah, and it's funny you focus on human to human,
Lex Fridman (1:17:25.600)
but that this kind of data enables human to machine
Bryan Johnson (1:17:29.240)
interaction, which is what we're kind of talking about
Lex Fridman (1:17:33.520)
when we say engineering consciousness.
Lex Fridman (1:17:36.440)
And that will happen, of course,
Lex Fridman (1:17:39.040)
let's flip that on its head.
Bryan Johnson (1:17:40.520)
Right now we're putting humans as the central node.
Lex Fridman (1:17:44.520)
What if we gave GPT3 a bunch of human brains
Lex Fridman (1:17:48.600)
and said, hey, GPT3, learn some manners when you speak.
Lex Fridman (1:17:52.760)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:17:54.080)
And run your algorithms on humans brains
Lex Fridman (1:17:56.520)
and see how they respond.
Lex Fridman (1:17:58.560)
So you can be polite and so that you can be friendly
Lex Fridman (1:18:01.720)
and so that you can be conversationally appropriate,
Lex Fridman (1:18:04.640)
but to inverse it, to give our machines a training set
Lex Fridman (1:18:09.240)
in real time with closed loop feedback
Lex Fridman (1:18:11.800)
so that our machines were better equipped to
Lex Fridman (1:18:17.720)
find their way through our society
Bryan Johnson (1:18:19.760)
in polite and kind and appropriate ways.
Lex Fridman (1:18:22.360)
I love that idea.
Bryan Johnson (1:18:23.200)
Or better yet, teach it some,
Lex Fridman (1:18:27.400)
have it read the following documents
Lex Fridman (1:18:30.040)
and have it visit Austin and Texas.
Lex Fridman (1:18:32.120)
And so that when you ask, when you tell it,
Lex Fridman (1:18:34.640)
why don't you learn some manners,
Lex Fridman (1:18:36.600)
GPT3 learns to say no.
Bryan Johnson (1:18:41.120)
It learns what it means to be free
Lex Fridman (1:18:43.600)
and a sovereign individual.
Lex Fridman (1:18:46.200)
So that, it depends.
Lex Fridman (1:18:47.440)
So it depends what kind of a version of GPT3 you want.
Bryan Johnson (1:18:50.200)
One that's free, one that behaves well with the social.
Lex Fridman (1:18:52.720)
Viva la revolution.
Bryan Johnson (1:18:54.760)
You want a socialist GPT3, you want an anarchist GPT3,
Lex Fridman (1:19:00.200)
you want a polite, like you take it home
Bryan Johnson (1:19:03.320)
to visit mom and dad GPT3 and you want like party
Lex Fridman (1:19:06.680)
and like Vegas to a strip club GPT3, you want all flavors.
Lex Fridman (1:19:11.200)
And then you've gotta have goal alignment between all those.
Lex Fridman (1:19:14.200)
Yeah, they don't want to manipulate each other for sure.
Lex Fridman (1:19:20.920)
So that's, I mean, you kind of spoke to ethics.
Lex Fridman (1:19:24.640)
One of the concerns that people have in this modern world,
Bryan Johnson (1:19:28.600)
the digital data is that of privacy and security.
Lex Fridman (1:19:32.000)
But privacy, they're concerned that when they share data,
Bryan Johnson (1:19:37.120)
it's the same thing with you when we trust other human beings
Lex Fridman (1:19:40.840)
in being fragile and revealing something
Bryan Johnson (1:19:44.200)
that we're vulnerable about.
Lex Fridman (1:19:48.200)
There's a leap of faith, there's a leap of trust
Bryan Johnson (1:19:51.960)
that that's going to be just between us.
Lex Fridman (1:19:54.240)
There's a privacy to it.
Lex Fridman (1:19:55.360)
And then the challenge is when you're in the digital space
Lex Fridman (1:19:58.280)
then sharing your data with companies
Bryan Johnson (1:20:01.680)
that use that data for advertisement
Lex Fridman (1:20:03.680)
and all those kinds of things,
Bryan Johnson (1:20:05.080)
there's a hesitancy to share that much data,
Lex Fridman (1:20:08.480)
to share a lot of deep personal data.
Lex Fridman (1:20:10.760)
And if you look at brain data, that feels a whole lot
Lex Fridman (1:20:14.080)
like it's richly, deeply personal data.
Lex Fridman (1:20:17.800)
So how do you think about privacy
Lex Fridman (1:20:20.080)
with this kind of ocean of data?
Bryan Johnson (1:20:22.160)
I think we got off to a wrong start with the internet
Lex Fridman (1:20:26.120)
where the basic rules of play for the company that be was,
Bryan Johnson (1:20:33.920)
if you're a company, you can go out
Lex Fridman (1:20:36.000)
and get as much information on a person
Bryan Johnson (1:20:39.120)
as you can find without their approval.
Lex Fridman (1:20:42.960)
And you can also do things to induce them
Bryan Johnson (1:20:46.360)
to give you as much information.
Lex Fridman (1:20:48.080)
And you don't need to tell them what you're doing with it.
Bryan Johnson (1:20:50.960)
You can do anything on the backside,
Lex Fridman (1:20:52.320)
you can make money on it, but the game is
Bryan Johnson (1:20:54.920)
who can acquire the most information
Lex Fridman (1:20:56.800)
and devise the most clever schemes to do it.
Bryan Johnson (1:21:00.400)
That was a bad starting place.
Lex Fridman (1:21:02.800)
And so we are in this period
Bryan Johnson (1:21:05.720)
where we need to correct for that.
Lex Fridman (1:21:07.560)
And we need to say, first of all,
Bryan Johnson (1:21:09.760)
the individual always has control over their data.
Lex Fridman (1:21:14.800)
It's not a free for all.
Bryan Johnson (1:21:15.840)
It's not like a game of hungry hippo,
Lex Fridman (1:21:17.520)
but they can just go out and grab as much as they want.
Lex Fridman (1:21:20.200)
So for example, when your brain data was recorded today,
Lex Fridman (1:21:22.480)
the first thing we did in the kernel app
Bryan Johnson (1:21:24.240)
was you have control over your data.
Lex Fridman (1:21:27.680)
And so it's individual consent, it's individual control.
Lex Fridman (1:21:31.320)
And then you can build up on top of that,
Lex Fridman (1:21:33.280)
but it has to be based upon some clear rules of play
Bryan Johnson (1:21:36.480)
if everyone knows what's being collected,
Lex Fridman (1:21:39.200)
they know what's being done with it,
Lex Fridman (1:21:40.600)
and the person has control over it.
Lex Fridman (1:21:42.120)
So transparency and control.
Lex Fridman (1:21:43.760)
So everybody knows what does control look like,
Lex Fridman (1:21:46.920)
my ability to delete the data if I want.
Bryan Johnson (1:21:48.840)
Yeah, delete it and to know who is being shared with
Lex Fridman (1:21:51.040)
under what terms and conditions.
Bryan Johnson (1:21:53.200)
We haven't reached that level of sophistication
Lex Fridman (1:21:55.760)
with our products of if you say, for example,
Bryan Johnson (1:22:00.800)
hey Spotify, please give me a customized playlist
Lex Fridman (1:22:04.360)
according to my neurome, you could say,
Bryan Johnson (1:22:08.120)
you can have access to this vector space model,
Lex Fridman (1:22:10.760)
but only for this duration of time
Lex Fridman (1:22:12.360)
and then you've got to delete it.
Lex Fridman (1:22:15.240)
We haven't gotten there to that level of sophistication,
Lex Fridman (1:22:16.920)
but these are ideas we need to start talking about
Lex Fridman (1:22:19.320)
of how would you actually structure permissions?
Bryan Johnson (1:22:22.200)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:22:23.040)
And I think it creates a much more stable set
Bryan Johnson (1:22:27.200)
for society to build where we understand the rules of play
Lex Fridman (1:22:31.080)
and people aren't vulnerable to being taken advantage.
Bryan Johnson (1:22:34.720)
It's not fair for an individual to be taken advantage of
Lex Fridman (1:22:39.960)
without their awareness with some other practice
Bryan Johnson (1:22:42.200)
that some company is doing for their sole benefit.
Lex Fridman (1:22:44.600)
And so hopefully we are going through a process now
Bryan Johnson (1:22:46.680)
where we're correcting for these things
Lex Fridman (1:22:48.240)
and that it can be an economy wide shift that,
Bryan Johnson (1:22:54.880)
because really these are fundamentals
Lex Fridman (1:22:59.360)
we need to have in place.
Bryan Johnson (1:23:01.280)
It's kind of fun to think about like in Chrome
Lex Fridman (1:23:05.000)
when you install an extension or like install an app,
Bryan Johnson (1:23:07.800)
it's ask you like what permissions you're willing to give
Lex Fridman (1:23:10.560)
and be cool if in the future it says like,
Bryan Johnson (1:23:13.160)
you can have access to my brain data.
Lex Fridman (1:23:16.920)
I mean, it's not unimaginable in the future
Bryan Johnson (1:23:21.560)
that the big technology companies have built a business
Lex Fridman (1:23:24.440)
based upon acquiring data about you
Bryan Johnson (1:23:26.200)
that they can then create a view to model of you
Lex Fridman (1:23:27.720)
and sell that predictability.
Lex Fridman (1:23:29.480)
And so it's not unimaginable that you will create
Lex Fridman (1:23:31.520)
with like kernel device, for example,
Bryan Johnson (1:23:33.920)
a more reliable predictor of you than they could.
Lex Fridman (1:23:37.280)
And that they're asking you for permission
Bryan Johnson (1:23:39.200)
to complete their objectives and you're the one
Lex Fridman (1:23:41.000)
that gets to negotiate that with them and say, sure.
Lex Fridman (1:23:43.960)
But so it's not unimaginable that might be the case.
Lex Fridman (1:23:49.040)
So there's a guy named Dela Musk and he has a company
Bryan Johnson (1:23:52.760)
in one of the many companies called Neuralink
Lex Fridman (1:23:55.360)
that's also excited about the brain.
Lex Fridman (1:23:59.160)
So it'd be interesting to hear your kind of opinions
Lex Fridman (1:24:01.440)
about a very different approach that's invasive,
Bryan Johnson (1:24:03.800)
that require surgery, that implants,
Lex Fridman (1:24:06.940)
a data collection device in the brain.
Lex Fridman (1:24:09.040)
How do you think about the difference between kernel
Lex Fridman (1:24:10.840)
and Neuralink in the approaches of getting
Lex Fridman (1:24:15.120)
that stream of brain data?
Lex Fridman (1:24:17.440)
Elon and I spoke about this a lot early on.
Bryan Johnson (1:24:20.460)
We met up, I had started kernel and he had an interest
Lex Fridman (1:24:24.320)
in brain interfaces as well.
Lex Fridman (1:24:25.560)
And we explored doing something together,
Lex Fridman (1:24:28.320)
him joining kernel and ultimately it wasn't the right move.
Lex Fridman (1:24:31.900)
And so he started Neuralink and I continued building kernel,
Lex Fridman (1:24:35.320)
but it was interesting because we were both
Bryan Johnson (1:24:39.160)
at this very early time where it wasn't certain
Lex Fridman (1:24:46.160)
if there was a path to pursue,
Bryan Johnson (1:24:49.020)
if now was the right time to do something
Lex Fridman (1:24:51.080)
and then the technological choice of doing that.
Lex Fridman (1:24:53.080)
And so we were both,
Lex Fridman (1:24:54.960)
our starting point was looking at invasive technologies.
Lex Fridman (1:24:58.200)
And I was building invasive technology at the time.
Lex Fridman (1:25:01.380)
That's ultimately where he's gone.
Bryan Johnson (1:25:04.920)
Little less than a year after Elon and I were engaged,
Lex Fridman (1:25:08.840)
I shifted kernel to do noninvasive.
Lex Fridman (1:25:12.440)
And we had this neuroscientist come to kernel.
Lex Fridman (1:25:15.200)
We were talking about,
Bryan Johnson (1:25:16.040)
he had been doing neural surgery for 30 years,
Lex Fridman (1:25:17.680)
one of the most respected neuroscientists in the US.
Lex Fridman (1:25:20.160)
And we brought him to kernel to figure out
Lex Fridman (1:25:21.900)
the ins and outs of his profession.
Lex Fridman (1:25:23.520)
And at the very end of our three hour conversation,
Lex Fridman (1:25:26.160)
he said, you know, every 15 or so years,
Bryan Johnson (1:25:30.280)
a new technology comes along that changes everything.
Lex Fridman (1:25:34.720)
He said, it's probably already here.
Bryan Johnson (1:25:37.360)
You just can't see it yet.
Lex Fridman (1:25:39.700)
And my jaw dropped.
Bryan Johnson (1:25:40.800)
I thought, because I had spoken to Bob Greenberg
Lex Fridman (1:25:44.600)
who had built a second site first on the optical nerve
Lex Fridman (1:25:48.240)
and then he did an array on the optical cortex.
Lex Fridman (1:25:53.280)
And then I also became friendly with Neuropace
Bryan Johnson (1:25:57.280)
who does the implants for seizure detection
Lex Fridman (1:25:59.800)
and remediation.
Lex Fridman (1:26:01.560)
And I saw in their eyes what it was like
Lex Fridman (1:26:07.760)
to take something through an implantable device
Bryan Johnson (1:26:10.040)
through for a 15 year run.
Lex Fridman (1:26:11.760)
They initially thought it was seven years
Lex Fridman (1:26:13.800)
and ended up being 15 years.
Lex Fridman (1:26:15.160)
And they thought it'd be a hundred million
Bryan Johnson (1:26:16.240)
because it was 300, 400 million.
Lex Fridman (1:26:18.960)
And I really didn't want to build invasive technology.
Bryan Johnson (1:26:23.720)
It was the only thing that appeared to be possible.
Lex Fridman (1:26:25.680)
But then once I spun up an internal effort
Bryan Johnson (1:26:28.640)
to start looking at noninvasive options,
Lex Fridman (1:26:30.400)
we said, is there something here?
Bryan Johnson (1:26:32.000)
Is there anything here that again has the characteristics
Lex Fridman (1:26:34.700)
of it has the high quality data,
Bryan Johnson (1:26:37.280)
it could be low cost, it could be accessible.
Lex Fridman (1:26:39.240)
Could it make brain interfaces mainstream?
Lex Fridman (1:26:42.200)
And so I did a bet the company move.
Lex Fridman (1:26:43.860)
We shifted from noninvasive to invasive to noninvasive.
Lex Fridman (1:26:47.520)
So the answer is yes to that.
Lex Fridman (1:26:49.020)
There is something there that's possible.
Bryan Johnson (1:26:51.600)
The answer is we'll see.
Lex Fridman (1:26:52.680)
We've now built both technologies
Lex Fridman (1:26:55.080)
and they're now you experienced one of them today.
Lex Fridman (1:26:58.100)
We were applying, we're now deploying it.
Lex Fridman (1:27:02.560)
So we're trying to figure out what value is really there.
Lex Fridman (1:27:04.640)
But I'd say it's really too early to express confidence.
Bryan Johnson (1:27:07.680)
Whether it's too, I think it's too early to assess
Lex Fridman (1:27:12.680)
which technological choice is the right one
Bryan Johnson (1:27:17.600)
on what time scales.
Lex Fridman (1:27:19.240)
Yeah, time scales are really important here.
Bryan Johnson (1:27:20.680)
Very important because if you look at the,
Lex Fridman (1:27:22.240)
like on the invasive side,
Bryan Johnson (1:27:24.280)
there's so much activity going on right now
Lex Fridman (1:27:27.000)
of less invasive techniques to get at the neuron firings,
Bryan Johnson (1:27:34.520)
which would what Neuralink is building.
Lex Fridman (1:27:36.840)
It's possible that in 10, 15 years
Bryan Johnson (1:27:39.840)
when they're scaling that technology,
Lex Fridman (1:27:40.960)
other things have come along.
Lex Fridman (1:27:42.480)
And you'd much rather do that.
Lex Fridman (1:27:44.000)
That thing starts to clock again.
Bryan Johnson (1:27:46.640)
It may not be the case.
Lex Fridman (1:27:47.480)
It may be the case that Neuralink
Bryan Johnson (1:27:48.520)
has properly chosen the right technology
Lex Fridman (1:27:50.760)
and that that's exactly what they want to be.
Bryan Johnson (1:27:53.080)
Totally possible.
Lex Fridman (1:27:53.960)
And it's also possible that the path we chose
Bryan Johnson (1:27:55.680)
that are noninvasive fall short for a variety of reasons.
Lex Fridman (1:27:58.640)
It's just, it's unknown.
Lex Fridman (1:28:00.600)
And so right now the two technologies we chose,
Lex Fridman (1:28:03.200)
the analogy I'd give you to create a baseline
Bryan Johnson (1:28:06.320)
of understanding is if you think of it
Lex Fridman (1:28:09.000)
like the internet in the nineties,
Bryan Johnson (1:28:11.320)
the internet became useful
Lex Fridman (1:28:12.960)
when people could do a dial up connection.
Lex Fridman (1:28:15.740)
And then as bandwidth increased,
Lex Fridman (1:28:19.320)
so did the utility of that connection
Lex Fridman (1:28:21.080)
and so did the ecosystem improve.
Lex Fridman (1:28:22.880)
And so if you say what kernel flow
Bryan Johnson (1:28:26.200)
is going to give you a full screen
Lex Fridman (1:28:28.920)
on the picture of information,
Lex Fridman (1:28:30.720)
but as you're gonna be watching a movie,
Lex Fridman (1:28:32.520)
but the image is going to be blurred
Lex Fridman (1:28:34.620)
and the audio is gonna be muffled.
Lex Fridman (1:28:37.480)
So it has a lower resolution of coverage.
Bryan Johnson (1:28:40.560)
A kernel flux, our MEG technology
Lex Fridman (1:28:43.480)
is gonna give you the full movie and 1080p.
Lex Fridman (1:28:47.760)
And Neuralink is gonna give you a circle
Lex Fridman (1:28:51.560)
on the screen of 4K.
Lex Fridman (1:28:55.320)
And so each one has their pros and cons
Lex Fridman (1:28:57.760)
and it's give and take.
Lex Fridman (1:28:59.920)
And so the decision I made with kernel
Lex Fridman (1:29:03.300)
was that these two technologies, flux and flow
Bryan Johnson (1:29:06.280)
were basically the answer for the next seven years.
Lex Fridman (1:29:10.560)
And that they would give rise to the ecosystem
Bryan Johnson (1:29:12.640)
which would become much more valuable
Lex Fridman (1:29:14.000)
than the hardware itself.
Lex Fridman (1:29:15.400)
And that we would just continue to improve
Lex Fridman (1:29:16.620)
on the hardware over time.
Lex Fridman (1:29:18.480)
And you know, it's early days, so.
Lex Fridman (1:29:20.880)
It's kind of fascinating to think about that.
Bryan Johnson (1:29:23.520)
You don't, it's very true that you don't know
Lex Fridman (1:29:27.120)
both paths are very promising.
Lex Fridman (1:29:30.880)
And it's like 50 years from now we will look back
Lex Fridman (1:29:37.640)
and maybe not even remember one of them.
Lex Fridman (1:29:40.760)
And the other one might change the world.
Lex Fridman (1:29:43.120)
It's so cool how technology is.
Bryan Johnson (1:29:44.840)
I mean, that's what entrepreneurship is,
Lex Fridman (1:29:47.000)
is like, it's the zero principle.
Bryan Johnson (1:29:50.040)
It's like you're marching ahead into the darkness,
Lex Fridman (1:29:52.360)
into the fog, not knowing.
Bryan Johnson (1:29:54.720)
It's wonderful to have someone else
Lex Fridman (1:29:56.320)
out there with us doing this.
Bryan Johnson (1:29:57.920)
Because if you look at brain interfaces, anything
Lex Fridman (1:30:02.080)
that's off the shelf right now is inadequate.
Bryan Johnson (1:30:07.160)
It's had its run for a couple of decades.
Lex Fridman (1:30:09.560)
It's still in hacker communities.
Bryan Johnson (1:30:11.240)
It hasn't gone to the mainstream.
Lex Fridman (1:30:14.560)
The room size machines are on their own path.
Lex Fridman (1:30:19.040)
But there is no answer right now
Lex Fridman (1:30:20.560)
of bringing brain interfaces mainstream.
Lex Fridman (1:30:23.600)
And so it both, you know, both they and us,
Lex Fridman (1:30:27.000)
we've both spent over a hundred million dollars.
Lex Fridman (1:30:29.560)
And that's kind of what it takes to have a go at this.
Lex Fridman (1:30:32.720)
Cause you need to build full stack.
Bryan Johnson (1:30:34.880)
I mean, at Kernel, we are from the photon
Lex Fridman (1:30:37.480)
and the atom through the machine learning.
Bryan Johnson (1:30:40.000)
We have just under a hundred people.
Lex Fridman (1:30:41.520)
I think it's something like 36, 37 PhDs
Bryan Johnson (1:30:45.080)
in these specialties, in these areas
Lex Fridman (1:30:47.440)
that there's only a few people in the world
Bryan Johnson (1:30:48.640)
who have these abilities.
Lex Fridman (1:30:50.160)
And that's what it takes to build next generation,
Bryan Johnson (1:30:53.160)
to make an attempt at breaking into brain interfaces.
Lex Fridman (1:30:57.520)
And so we'll see over the next couple of years,
Bryan Johnson (1:30:58.920)
whether it's the right time
Lex Fridman (1:31:00.040)
or whether we were both too early
Bryan Johnson (1:31:01.640)
or whether something else comes along in seven to 10 years,
Lex Fridman (1:31:04.400)
which is the right thing that brings it mainstream.
Lex Fridman (1:31:08.000)
So you see Elon as a kind of competitor
Lex Fridman (1:31:11.040)
or a fellow traveler along the path of uncertainty or both?
Bryan Johnson (1:31:17.000)
It's a fellow traveler.
Lex Fridman (1:31:19.000)
It's like at the beginning of the internet
Bryan Johnson (1:31:21.800)
is how many companies are going to be invited
Lex Fridman (1:31:25.480)
to this new ecosystem?
Bryan Johnson (1:31:29.480)
Like an endless number.
Lex Fridman (1:31:30.520)
Because if you think that the hardware
Bryan Johnson (1:31:33.200)
just starts the process.
Lex Fridman (1:31:36.040)
And so, okay, back to your initial example,
Bryan Johnson (1:31:37.960)
if you take the Fitbit, for example,
Lex Fridman (1:31:39.360)
you say, okay, now I can get measurements on the body.
Lex Fridman (1:31:42.840)
And what do we think the ultimate value
Lex Fridman (1:31:44.840)
of this device is going to be?
Lex Fridman (1:31:45.800)
What is the information transfer rate?
Lex Fridman (1:31:47.760)
And they were in the market for a certain duration of time
Lex Fridman (1:31:50.120)
and Google bought them for two and a half billion dollars.
Lex Fridman (1:31:53.840)
They didn't have ancillary value add.
Bryan Johnson (1:31:55.600)
There weren't people building on top of the Fitbit device.
Lex Fridman (1:31:58.560)
They also didn't have increased insight
Bryan Johnson (1:32:01.240)
with additional data streams.
Lex Fridman (1:32:02.400)
So it was really just the device.
Bryan Johnson (1:32:04.240)
If you look, for example, at Apple and the device they sell,
Lex Fridman (1:32:07.120)
you have value in the device that someone buys,
Lex Fridman (1:32:09.160)
but also you have everyone who's building on top of it.
Lex Fridman (1:32:11.760)
So you have this additional ecosystem value
Lex Fridman (1:32:13.440)
and then you have additional data streams that come in
Lex Fridman (1:32:15.640)
which increase the value of the product.
Lex Fridman (1:32:17.480)
And so if you say, if you look at the hardware
Lex Fridman (1:32:20.600)
as the instigator of value creation,
Bryan Johnson (1:32:24.440)
over time what we've built may constitute five or 10%
Lex Fridman (1:32:28.200)
of the value of the overall ecosystem.
Lex Fridman (1:32:29.800)
And that's what we really care about.
Lex Fridman (1:32:30.960)
What we're trying to do is kickstart
Bryan Johnson (1:32:33.280)
the mainstream adoption of quantifying the brain.
Lex Fridman (1:32:38.760)
And the hardware just opens the door to say
Lex Fridman (1:32:41.840)
what kind of ecosystem could exist.
Lex Fridman (1:32:44.040)
And that's why the examples are so relevant
Bryan Johnson (1:32:46.800)
of the things you've outlined in your life.
Lex Fridman (1:32:49.240)
I hope those things, the books people write,
Bryan Johnson (1:32:52.680)
the experiences people build, the conversations you have,
Lex Fridman (1:32:55.480)
your relationship with your AI systems,
Bryan Johnson (1:32:58.040)
I hope those all are feeding on the insights
Lex Fridman (1:33:01.160)
built upon this ecosystem we've created to better your life.
Lex Fridman (1:33:04.200)
And so that's the thinking behind it.
Lex Fridman (1:33:06.200)
Again, with the Drake equation
Bryan Johnson (1:33:07.560)
being the underlying driver of value.
Lex Fridman (1:33:10.920)
And the people at Kernel have joined
Bryan Johnson (1:33:13.520)
not because we have certainty of success,
Lex Fridman (1:33:17.920)
but because we find it to be the most exhilarating
Bryan Johnson (1:33:21.080)
opportunity we could ever pursue in this time to be alive.
Lex Fridman (1:33:26.320)
You founded the payment system Braintree in 2007
Bryan Johnson (1:33:30.840)
that acquired Venmo in 2012,
Lex Fridman (1:33:34.240)
in that same year was acquired by PayPal, which is now eBay.
Lex Fridman (1:33:39.240)
Can you tell me the story of the vision
Lex Fridman (1:33:42.240)
and the challenge of building an online payment system
Lex Fridman (1:33:44.800)
and just building a large successful business in general?
Lex Fridman (1:33:48.080)
I discovered payments by accident.
Bryan Johnson (1:33:51.000)
When I was 21, I just returned from Ecuador
Lex Fridman (1:33:57.800)
living among extreme poverty for two years.
Lex Fridman (1:33:59.320)
And I came back to the US and I was shocked by the opulence
Lex Fridman (1:34:03.320)
of the United States of America.
Bryan Johnson (1:34:07.320)
Yeah, of the United States.
Lex Fridman (1:34:09.440)
And I just thought this is, I couldn't believe it.
Lex Fridman (1:34:12.000)
And I decided I wanted to try to spend my life helping others.
Lex Fridman (1:34:16.680)
Like that was the, that was a life objective
Bryan Johnson (1:34:18.600)
that I thought was worthwhile to pursue
Lex Fridman (1:34:20.320)
versus making money and whatever the case may be
Bryan Johnson (1:34:23.040)
for its own right.
Lex Fridman (1:34:24.480)
And so I decided in that moment that I was going to
Bryan Johnson (1:34:26.520)
try to make enough money by the age of 30
Lex Fridman (1:34:30.040)
to never have to work again.
Lex Fridman (1:34:32.160)
And then with some abundance of money,
Lex Fridman (1:34:33.920)
I could then choose to do things that might be beneficial
Bryan Johnson (1:34:38.440)
to others, but may not meet the criteria
Lex Fridman (1:34:40.320)
of being a standalone business.
Lex Fridman (1:34:42.400)
And so in that process, I started a few companies,
Lex Fridman (1:34:46.160)
had some small successes, had some failures.
Bryan Johnson (1:34:49.760)
In one of the endeavors, I was up to my eyeballs in debt.
Lex Fridman (1:34:53.000)
Things were not going well.
Lex Fridman (1:34:54.040)
And I needed a part time job to pay my bills.
Lex Fridman (1:34:57.840)
And so I, one day I saw in the paper in Utah
Bryan Johnson (1:35:02.840)
where I was living the 50 richest people in Utah.
Lex Fridman (1:35:05.400)
And I emailed each one of their assistants and said,
Bryan Johnson (1:35:07.920)
you know, I'm young, I'm resourceful, I'll do anything.
Lex Fridman (1:35:11.440)
I'll just want to, I'm entrepreneurial.
Bryan Johnson (1:35:13.640)
I tried to get a job that would be flexible
Lex Fridman (1:35:15.520)
and no one responded.
Lex Fridman (1:35:17.400)
And then I interviewed at a few dozen places.
Lex Fridman (1:35:21.280)
Nobody would even give me the time of day.
Bryan Johnson (1:35:23.280)
Like it wouldn't want to take me seriously.
Lex Fridman (1:35:25.360)
And so finally I, it was on monster.com
Bryan Johnson (1:35:27.680)
that I saw this job posting for credit card sales
Lex Fridman (1:35:30.920)
door to door.
Bryan Johnson (1:35:31.760)
Commission.
Lex Fridman (1:35:32.600)
I did not know the story, this is great.
Bryan Johnson (1:35:35.360)
I love the head drop, that's exactly right.
Lex Fridman (1:35:37.400)
So it was.
Bryan Johnson (1:35:39.240)
The low points to which we go in life.
Lex Fridman (1:35:41.720)
So I responded and you know, the person made an attempt
Bryan Johnson (1:35:46.080)
at suggesting that they had some kind of standards
Lex Fridman (1:35:48.640)
that they would consider hiring.
Lex Fridman (1:35:50.360)
But it's kind of like, if you could fog a mirror,
Lex Fridman (1:35:53.160)
like come and do this because it's 100% commission.
Lex Fridman (1:35:55.680)
And so I started walking up and down the street
Lex Fridman (1:35:57.520)
in my community selling credit card processing.
Lex Fridman (1:36:00.520)
And so what you learn immediately in doing that is
Lex Fridman (1:36:03.480)
if you walk into a business, first of all,
Bryan Johnson (1:36:06.640)
the business owner is typically there.
Lex Fridman (1:36:09.600)
And you walk in the door and they can tell
Bryan Johnson (1:36:10.880)
by how you're dressed or how you walk,
Lex Fridman (1:36:12.200)
whatever their pattern recognition is.
Lex Fridman (1:36:14.440)
And they just hate you immediately.
Lex Fridman (1:36:15.680)
It's like, stop wasting my time.
Bryan Johnson (1:36:17.040)
I really am trying to get stuff done.
Lex Fridman (1:36:18.400)
I don't want us to a sales pitch.
Lex Fridman (1:36:19.760)
And so you have to overcome the initial get out.
Lex Fridman (1:36:23.200)
And then once you engage, when you say the word
Bryan Johnson (1:36:26.200)
credit card processing, the person's like,
Lex Fridman (1:36:28.640)
I already hate you because I have been taken advantage
Bryan Johnson (1:36:31.200)
of dozens of times because you all are weasels.
Lex Fridman (1:36:35.520)
And so I had to figure out an algorithm
Bryan Johnson (1:36:37.480)
to get past all those different conditions.
Lex Fridman (1:36:39.200)
Cause I was still working on my other startup
Bryan Johnson (1:36:41.360)
for the majority of my time.
Lex Fridman (1:36:42.600)
So I was doing this part time.
Lex Fridman (1:36:44.000)
And so I figured out that the industry really was built
Lex Fridman (1:36:48.760)
on people, on deceit, basically people promising things
Bryan Johnson (1:36:55.320)
that were not reality.
Lex Fridman (1:36:56.160)
And so I don't know if you've heard of it,
Lex Fridman (1:36:57.480)
but we're not reality and so I'd walk into a business.
Lex Fridman (1:36:59.320)
I'd say, look, I would give you a hundred dollars.
Bryan Johnson (1:37:01.760)
I'd put a hundred dollar bill and say,
Lex Fridman (1:37:02.920)
I'll give you a hundred dollars
Bryan Johnson (1:37:04.000)
for three minutes of your time.
Lex Fridman (1:37:05.440)
If you don't say yes to what I'm saying,
Bryan Johnson (1:37:06.760)
I'll give you a hundred dollars.
Lex Fridman (1:37:08.400)
And then he usually crack a smile and say, okay,
Lex Fridman (1:37:10.680)
like what do you got for me son?
Lex Fridman (1:37:12.640)
And so I'd sit down, I just opened my book and I'd say,
Bryan Johnson (1:37:15.000)
here's the credit card industry.
Lex Fridman (1:37:16.280)
Here's how it works.
Bryan Johnson (1:37:17.120)
Here are the players.
Lex Fridman (1:37:17.960)
Here's what they do.
Bryan Johnson (1:37:18.780)
Here's how they deceive you.
Lex Fridman (1:37:20.520)
Here's what I am.
Bryan Johnson (1:37:21.360)
I'm no different than anyone else.
Lex Fridman (1:37:22.480)
I it's like, you're gonna process your credit card.
Bryan Johnson (1:37:24.080)
You're gonna get the money in the account.
Lex Fridman (1:37:25.040)
You're just gonna get a clean statement, you're gonna have
Bryan Johnson (1:37:27.640)
someone who answers the call when someone asks and you know,
Lex Fridman (1:37:29.600)
just like the basic, like you're okay.
Lex Fridman (1:37:31.720)
And people started saying yes.
Lex Fridman (1:37:32.800)
And then of course I went to the next business and be like,
Bryan Johnson (1:37:34.440)
you know, Joe and Susie and whoever said yes too.
Lex Fridman (1:37:37.520)
And so I built a social proof structure
Lex Fridman (1:37:39.400)
and I became the number one salesperson
Lex Fridman (1:37:42.400)
out of 400 people nationwide doing this.
Lex Fridman (1:37:45.400)
And I worked, you know, half time
Lex Fridman (1:37:47.080)
still doing this other startup and.
Bryan Johnson (1:37:49.360)
That's a brilliant strategy, by the way.
Lex Fridman (1:37:51.080)
It's very well, very well strategized and executed.
Bryan Johnson (1:37:55.680)
I did it for nine months.
Lex Fridman (1:37:57.640)
And at the time my customer base was making,
Bryan Johnson (1:38:00.800)
was generating around, I think it was six,
Lex Fridman (1:38:03.680)
if I remember correctly, $62,504 a month
Bryan Johnson (1:38:07.480)
were the overall revenues.
Lex Fridman (1:38:08.520)
I thought, wow, that's amazing.
Bryan Johnson (1:38:09.920)
If I built that as my own company,
Lex Fridman (1:38:13.260)
I would just make $62,000 a month of income passively
Bryan Johnson (1:38:16.880)
with these merchants processing credit cards.
Lex Fridman (1:38:19.280)
So I thought, hmm.
Lex Fridman (1:38:20.400)
And so that's when I thought I'm gonna create a company.
Lex Fridman (1:38:23.720)
And so then I started Braintree.
Lex Fridman (1:38:25.840)
And the idea was the online world was broken
Lex Fridman (1:38:29.920)
because PayPal had been acquired by eBay
Bryan Johnson (1:38:35.040)
around, I think, 1999 or 2000.
Lex Fridman (1:38:38.160)
And eBay had not innovated much with PayPal.
Lex Fridman (1:38:39.840)
So it basically sat still for seven years
Lex Fridman (1:38:42.880)
as the software world moved along.
Lex Fridman (1:38:45.160)
And then authorize.net was also a company
Lex Fridman (1:38:46.840)
that was relatively stagnant.
Lex Fridman (1:38:47.680)
So you basically had software engineers
Lex Fridman (1:38:49.840)
who wanted modern payment tools,
Lex Fridman (1:38:51.880)
but there were none available for them.
Lex Fridman (1:38:53.560)
And so they just dealt with software they didn't like.
Lex Fridman (1:38:55.080)
And so with Braintree,
Lex Fridman (1:38:57.320)
I thought the entry point is to build software
Bryan Johnson (1:38:59.000)
that engineers will love.
Lex Fridman (1:39:00.400)
And if we can find the entry point via software
Lex Fridman (1:39:02.120)
and make it easy and beautiful
Lex Fridman (1:39:03.800)
and just a magical experience
Lex Fridman (1:39:05.400)
and then provide customer service on top of that,
Lex Fridman (1:39:06.960)
that would be easy, that would be great.
Lex Fridman (1:39:08.720)
What I was really going after though, it was PayPal.
Lex Fridman (1:39:11.560)
They were the only company in payments making money.
Bryan Johnson (1:39:14.960)
Because they had the relationship with eBay early on,
Lex Fridman (1:39:19.800)
people created a PayPal account,
Bryan Johnson (1:39:22.240)
they'd fund their account with their checking account
Lex Fridman (1:39:24.080)
versus their credit cards.
Lex Fridman (1:39:25.480)
And then when they'd use PayPal to pay a merchant,
Lex Fridman (1:39:28.320)
PayPal had a cost of payment of zero
Bryan Johnson (1:39:31.000)
versus if you have coming from a credit card,
Lex Fridman (1:39:33.880)
you have to pay the bank the fees.
Lex Fridman (1:39:35.120)
So PayPal's margins were 3% on a transaction
Lex Fridman (1:39:39.920)
versus a typical payments company,
Bryan Johnson (1:39:41.600)
which may be a nickel or a penny or a dime
Lex Fridman (1:39:43.400)
or something like that.
Lex Fridman (1:39:44.920)
And so I knew PayPal really was the model to replicate,
Lex Fridman (1:39:48.320)
but a bunch of companies had tried to do that.
Bryan Johnson (1:39:50.400)
They tried to come in and build a two sided marketplace.
Lex Fridman (1:39:52.600)
So get consumers to fund the checking account
Lex Fridman (1:39:55.280)
and the merchants to accept it,
Lex Fridman (1:39:56.680)
but they'd all failed because building
Bryan Johnson (1:39:58.240)
a two sided marketplace is very hard at the same time.
Lex Fridman (1:40:01.840)
So my plan was I'm going to build a company
Lex Fridman (1:40:04.600)
and get the best merchants in the whole world
Lex Fridman (1:40:06.920)
to use our service.
Bryan Johnson (1:40:08.440)
Then in year five, I'm going to have,
Lex Fridman (1:40:10.760)
I'm going to acquire a consumer payments company
Lex Fridman (1:40:12.800)
and I'm going to bring the two together.
Lex Fridman (1:40:14.960)
And to focus on the merchant side and then get
Bryan Johnson (1:40:19.160)
the payments company that does the customer,
Lex Fridman (1:40:21.240)
the whatever, the other side of it.
Bryan Johnson (1:40:24.640)
This is the plan I presented when I was
Lex Fridman (1:40:26.680)
at University of Chicago.
Lex Fridman (1:40:28.440)
And weirdly it happened exactly like that.
Lex Fridman (1:40:32.360)
So four years in our customer base included Uber,
Bryan Johnson (1:40:36.160)
Airbnb, GitHub, 37 Signals, not Basecamp.
Lex Fridman (1:40:40.240)
We had a fantastic collection of companies
Bryan Johnson (1:40:43.640)
that represented the fastest growing,
Lex Fridman (1:40:47.160)
some of the fastest growing tech companies in the world.
Lex Fridman (1:40:49.280)
And then we met up with Venmo and they had done
Lex Fridman (1:40:53.440)
a remarkable job in building product.
Bryan Johnson (1:40:55.040)
It does up then something very counterintuitive,
Lex Fridman (1:40:56.800)
which is make public your private financial transactions
Bryan Johnson (1:40:59.400)
which people previously thought were something
Lex Fridman (1:41:01.760)
that should be hidden from others.
Lex Fridman (1:41:03.960)
And we acquired Venmo and at that point we now had,
Lex Fridman (1:41:08.720)
we replicated the model because now people could fund
Bryan Johnson (1:41:11.840)
their Venmo account with their checking account,
Lex Fridman (1:41:13.240)
keep money in the account.
Lex Fridman (1:41:14.960)
And then you could just plug Venmo as a form of payment.
Lex Fridman (1:41:17.520)
And so I think PayPal saw that,
Bryan Johnson (1:41:19.880)
that we were getting the best merchants in the world.
Lex Fridman (1:41:22.720)
We had people using Venmo.
Bryan Johnson (1:41:25.440)
They were both the up and coming millennials at the time
Lex Fridman (1:41:28.120)
who had so much influence online.
Lex Fridman (1:41:30.440)
And so they came in and offered us an attractive number.
Lex Fridman (1:41:34.840)
And my goal was not to build
Bryan Johnson (1:41:39.240)
the biggest payments company in the world.
Lex Fridman (1:41:40.920)
It wasn't to try to climb the Forbes billionaire list.
Bryan Johnson (1:41:44.160)
It was, the objective was I want to earn enough money
Lex Fridman (1:41:48.760)
so that I can basically dedicate my attention
Bryan Johnson (1:41:52.640)
to doing something that could potentially be useful
Lex Fridman (1:41:56.200)
on a society wide scale.
Lex Fridman (1:41:58.800)
And more importantly, that could be considered to be valuable
Lex Fridman (1:42:03.240)
from the vantage point of 2050, 2100 and 2500.
Lex Fridman (1:42:08.240)
So thinking about it on a few hundred year timescale.
Lex Fridman (1:42:13.360)
And there was a certain amount of money I needed to do that.
Lex Fridman (1:42:16.240)
So I didn't require the permission of anybody to do that.
Lex Fridman (1:42:20.280)
And so that what PayPal offered was sufficient for me
Bryan Johnson (1:42:22.760)
to get that amount of money to basically have a go.
Lex Fridman (1:42:25.000)
And that's when I set off to survey everything
Bryan Johnson (1:42:30.240)
I could identify an existence to say
Lex Fridman (1:42:32.600)
of anything in the entire world I could do.
Lex Fridman (1:42:35.320)
What one thing could I do
Lex Fridman (1:42:36.760)
that would actually have the highest value potential
Lex Fridman (1:42:40.480)
for the species?
Lex Fridman (1:42:42.160)
And so it took me a little while to arrive at Brainerd Faces,
Bryan Johnson (1:42:44.680)
but.
Lex Fridman (1:42:46.680)
Payments in themselves are revolutionary technologies
Bryan Johnson (1:42:51.960)
that can change the world.
Lex Fridman (1:42:53.960)
Like let's not forget that too easily.
Bryan Johnson (1:43:00.760)
I mean, obviously you know this,
Lex Fridman (1:43:02.480)
but there's quite a few lovely folks
Bryan Johnson (1:43:08.680)
who are now fascinated with the space of cryptocurrency.
Lex Fridman (1:43:13.080)
And payments are very much connected to this,
Lex Fridman (1:43:17.000)
but in general, just money.
Lex Fridman (1:43:18.600)
And many of the folks I've spoken with,
Bryan Johnson (1:43:21.240)
they also kind of connect that
Lex Fridman (1:43:22.840)
to not just purely financial discussions,
Lex Fridman (1:43:25.840)
but philosophical and political discussions.
Lex Fridman (1:43:28.600)
And they see Bitcoin as a way, almost as activism,
Bryan Johnson (1:43:34.680)
almost as a way to resist the corruption
Lex Fridman (1:43:38.000)
of centralized centers of power.
Lex Fridman (1:43:40.720)
And sort of basically in the 21st century,
Lex Fridman (1:43:42.760)
decentralizing control.
Bryan Johnson (1:43:44.440)
Whether that's Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies,
Lex Fridman (1:43:46.640)
they see that's one possible way to give power
Bryan Johnson (1:43:51.800)
to those that live in regimes that are corrupt
Lex Fridman (1:43:55.480)
or are not respectful of human rights
Lex Fridman (1:43:58.240)
and all those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (1:43:59.760)
What's your sense, just all your expertise with payments
Lex Fridman (1:44:03.960)
and seeing how that changed the world,
Lex Fridman (1:44:05.600)
what's your sense about the lay of the land
Bryan Johnson (1:44:09.680)
for the future of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies
Lex Fridman (1:44:12.440)
in the positive impact it may have on the world?
Bryan Johnson (1:44:16.000)
To be clear, my communication wasn't meant
Lex Fridman (1:44:20.120)
to minimize payments or to denigrate it in any way.
Bryan Johnson (1:44:23.520)
It was an attempt at communication
Lex Fridman (1:44:26.480)
that when I was surveying the world,
Lex Fridman (1:44:30.280)
it was an algorithm of what could I individually do?
Lex Fridman (1:44:35.840)
So there are things that exist
Bryan Johnson (1:44:38.320)
that have a lot of potential that can be done.
Lex Fridman (1:44:41.120)
And then there's a filtering of how many people
Bryan Johnson (1:44:43.960)
are qualified to do this given thing.
Lex Fridman (1:44:46.440)
And then there's a further characterization
Bryan Johnson (1:44:48.200)
that can be done of, okay, given the number
Lex Fridman (1:44:49.840)
of qualified people, will somebody be a unique out performer
Bryan Johnson (1:44:54.840)
of that group to make something truly impossible
Lex Fridman (1:44:57.960)
to be something done that otherwise couldn't get done?
Lex Fridman (1:44:59.520)
So there's a process of assessing
Lex Fridman (1:45:02.480)
where can you add unique value in the world?
Lex Fridman (1:45:04.480)
And some of that has to do with you being very formal
Lex Fridman (1:45:08.560)
and calculative here, but some of that is just like,
Lex Fridman (1:45:11.080)
what do you sense, like part of that equation
Lex Fridman (1:45:15.040)
is how much passion you sense within yourself
Bryan Johnson (1:45:17.240)
to be able to drive that through,
Lex Fridman (1:45:19.080)
to discover the impossibilities and make them possible.
Bryan Johnson (1:45:21.520)
That's right, and so we were at Braintree,
Lex Fridman (1:45:23.920)
I think we were the first company to integrate Coinbase
Bryan Johnson (1:45:26.880)
into our, I think we were the first payments company
Lex Fridman (1:45:30.080)
to formally incorporate crypto, if I'm not mistaken.
Bryan Johnson (1:45:35.600)
For people who are not familiar,
Lex Fridman (1:45:36.720)
Coinbase is a place where you can trade cryptocurrencies.
Bryan Johnson (1:45:39.640)
Yeah, which was one of the only places you could.
Lex Fridman (1:45:42.080)
So we were early in doing that.
Lex Fridman (1:45:45.080)
And of course, this was in the year 2013.
Lex Fridman (1:45:49.080)
So an attorney to go in cryptocurrency land.
Bryan Johnson (1:45:52.400)
I concur with the statement you made
Lex Fridman (1:45:56.320)
of the potential of the principles
Bryan Johnson (1:46:01.520)
underlying cryptocurrencies.
Lex Fridman (1:46:04.200)
And that many of the things that they're building
Bryan Johnson (1:46:07.640)
in the name of money and of moving value
Lex Fridman (1:46:13.640)
is equally applicable to the brain
Lex Fridman (1:46:16.400)
and equally applicable to how the brain interacts
Lex Fridman (1:46:19.360)
with the rest of the world
Lex Fridman (1:46:20.840)
and how we would imagine doing goal alignment with people.
Lex Fridman (1:46:25.600)
So to me, it's a continuous spectrum of possibility.
Lex Fridman (1:46:29.080)
And your question is isolated on the money.
Lex Fridman (1:46:32.200)
And I think it just is basically a scaffolding layer
Bryan Johnson (1:46:35.000)
for all of society.
Lex Fridman (1:46:35.840)
So you don't see this money as particularly distinct
Bryan Johnson (1:46:38.720)
from other? I don't.
Lex Fridman (1:46:39.760)
I think we at Kernel, we will benefit greatly
Bryan Johnson (1:46:44.520)
from the progress being made in cryptocurrency
Lex Fridman (1:46:47.080)
because it will be a similar technology stack
Bryan Johnson (1:46:48.960)
we will want to use for many things we want to accomplish.
Lex Fridman (1:46:51.680)
And so I'm bullish on what's going on
Lex Fridman (1:46:55.040)
and think it could greatly enhance brain interfaces
Lex Fridman (1:46:58.800)
and the value of the brain interface ecosystem.
Bryan Johnson (1:47:01.160)
I mean, is there something you could say about,
Lex Fridman (1:47:02.920)
first of all, bullish on cryptocurrency versus fiat money?
Lex Fridman (1:47:05.960)
So do you have a sense that in 21st century
Lex Fridman (1:47:08.760)
cryptocurrency will be embraced by governments
Lex Fridman (1:47:13.040)
and changed the face of governments,
Lex Fridman (1:47:16.720)
the structure of governments?
Bryan Johnson (1:47:18.520)
It's the same way I think about my diet,
Lex Fridman (1:47:24.360)
where previously it was conscious Brian,
Bryan Johnson (1:47:28.720)
looking at foods in certain biochemical states.
Lex Fridman (1:47:32.240)
Am I hungry? Am I irritated? Am I depressed?
Lex Fridman (1:47:34.160)
And then I choose based upon those momentary windows.
Lex Fridman (1:47:37.440)
Do I eat at night when I'm fatigued
Lex Fridman (1:47:39.440)
and I have low willpower?
Lex Fridman (1:47:40.680)
Am I going to pig out on something?
Lex Fridman (1:47:42.840)
And the current monetary system is based
Lex Fridman (1:47:46.200)
upon human conscious decision making.
Lex Fridman (1:47:48.360)
And politics and power and this whole mess of things.
Lex Fridman (1:47:51.480)
And what I like about the building blocks
Bryan Johnson (1:47:55.360)
of cryptocurrencies, it's methodical, it's structured,
Lex Fridman (1:47:58.640)
it is accountable, it's transparent.
Lex Fridman (1:48:02.120)
And so it introduces this scaffolding,
Lex Fridman (1:48:04.720)
which I think, again, is the right starting point
Bryan Johnson (1:48:07.640)
for how we think about building
Lex Fridman (1:48:09.400)
next generation institutions for society.
Lex Fridman (1:48:13.520)
And that's why I think it's much broader than money.
Lex Fridman (1:48:16.480)
So I guess what you're saying is Bitcoin is the demotion
Bryan Johnson (1:48:19.680)
of the conscious mind as well.
Lex Fridman (1:48:23.480)
In the same way you were talking about diet,
Bryan Johnson (1:48:25.240)
it's like giving less priority to the ups and downs
Lex Fridman (1:48:29.680)
of any one particular human mind, in this case your own,
Lex Fridman (1:48:33.000)
and giving more power to the sort of data driven.
Lex Fridman (1:48:37.000)
Yes, yeah, I think that is accurate,
Bryan Johnson (1:48:41.200)
that cryptocurrency is a version of what I would call
Lex Fridman (1:48:48.480)
my autonomous self that I'm trying to build.
Bryan Johnson (1:48:51.320)
It is an introduction of an autonomous system
Lex Fridman (1:48:54.960)
of value exchange and the process of value creation
Bryan Johnson (1:49:02.040)
in the society, yes, I see their similarities.
Lex Fridman (1:49:04.880)
So I guess what you're saying is Bitcoin
Bryan Johnson (1:49:06.520)
will somehow help me not pig out at night,
Lex Fridman (1:49:08.680)
or the equivalent of, speaking of diet,
Bryan Johnson (1:49:11.800)
if we could just linger on that topic a little bit,
Lex Fridman (1:49:15.440)
we already talked about your blog post of I fired myself,
Bryan Johnson (1:49:20.080)
I fired Brian, the evening Brian,
Lex Fridman (1:49:23.560)
who's too willing to, not making good decisions
Bryan Johnson (1:49:29.760)
for the long term well being and happiness
Lex Fridman (1:49:32.220)
of the entirety of the organism.
Bryan Johnson (1:49:34.840)
Basically you were like pigging out at night.
Lex Fridman (1:49:36.720)
But it's interesting, because I do the same,
Bryan Johnson (1:49:41.120)
in fact I often eat one meal a day,
Lex Fridman (1:49:45.480)
and like I have been this week actually,
Bryan Johnson (1:49:50.480)
especially when I travel, and it's funny
Lex Fridman (1:49:54.320)
that it never occurred to me to just basically look
Bryan Johnson (1:49:59.520)
at the fact that I'm able to be much smarter
Lex Fridman (1:50:02.360)
about my eating decisions in the morning
Lex Fridman (1:50:04.240)
and the afternoon than I am at night.
Lex Fridman (1:50:06.720)
So if I eat one meal a day, why not eat
Lex Fridman (1:50:09.080)
that one meal a day in the morning?
Lex Fridman (1:50:12.680)
Like I'm not, it never occurred to me,
Bryan Johnson (1:50:16.040)
this revolutionary act, until you've outlined that.
Lex Fridman (1:50:21.240)
So maybe, can you give some details,
Lex Fridman (1:50:23.220)
and this is just you, this is one person,
Lex Fridman (1:50:26.360)
Brian, arrives at a particular thing that they do,
Lex Fridman (1:50:29.800)
but it's fascinating to kind of look
Lex Fridman (1:50:32.560)
at this one particular case study,
Lex Fridman (1:50:34.080)
so what works for you, diet wise?
Lex Fridman (1:50:36.340)
What's your actual diet, what do you eat,
Lex Fridman (1:50:38.760)
how often do you eat?
Lex Fridman (1:50:40.200)
My current protocol is basically the result
Bryan Johnson (1:50:44.220)
of thousands of experiments and decision making.
Lex Fridman (1:50:48.800)
So I do this every 90 days, I do the tests,
Bryan Johnson (1:50:51.880)
I do the cycle throughs, then I measure again,
Lex Fridman (1:50:54.720)
and then I'm measuring all the time.
Lex Fridman (1:50:56.280)
And so what I, of course I'm optimizing
Lex Fridman (1:50:59.440)
for my biomarkers, I want perfect cholesterol
Lex Fridman (1:51:01.800)
and I want perfect blood glucose levels
Lex Fridman (1:51:03.720)
and perfect DNA methylation processes.
Bryan Johnson (1:51:10.440)
I also want perfect sleep.
Lex Fridman (1:51:12.480)
And so for example, recently, the past two weeks,
Bryan Johnson (1:51:14.960)
my resting heart rate has been at 42 when I sleep.
Lex Fridman (1:51:20.160)
And when my resting heart rate's at 42,
Bryan Johnson (1:51:22.120)
my HRV is at its highest.
Lex Fridman (1:51:24.120)
And I wake up in the morning feeling more energized
Bryan Johnson (1:51:29.200)
than any other configuration.
Lex Fridman (1:51:30.420)
And so I know from all these processes
Bryan Johnson (1:51:32.400)
that eating at roughly 8.30 in the morning,
Lex Fridman (1:51:34.720)
right after I work out on an empty stomach,
Bryan Johnson (1:51:37.640)
creates enough distance between that completed eating
Lex Fridman (1:51:41.460)
and bedtime where I have almost no digestion processes
Bryan Johnson (1:51:45.520)
going on in my body,
Lex Fridman (1:51:47.360)
therefore my resting heart rate goes very low.
Lex Fridman (1:51:49.800)
And when my resting heart rate's very low,
Lex Fridman (1:51:51.380)
I sleep with high quality.
Lex Fridman (1:51:52.440)
And so basically I've been trying to optimize
Lex Fridman (1:51:54.360)
the entirety of what I eat to my sleep quality.
Lex Fridman (1:51:58.280)
And my sleep quality then of course feeds into my willpower
Lex Fridman (1:52:00.480)
so it creates this virtuous cycle.
Lex Fridman (1:52:02.600)
And so at 8.30 what I do is I eat what I call super veggie,
Lex Fridman (1:52:06.440)
which is, it's a pudding of 250 grams of broccoli,
Bryan Johnson (1:52:10.280)
150 grams of cauliflower,
Lex Fridman (1:52:11.600)
and a whole bunch of other vegetables
Bryan Johnson (1:52:13.360)
that I eat what I call nutty pudding, which is.
Lex Fridman (1:52:16.080)
You make the pudding yourself?
Lex Fridman (1:52:17.040)
Like, what do you call it?
Lex Fridman (1:52:20.320)
Like a veggie mix, whatever thing, like a blender?
Bryan Johnson (1:52:23.520)
Yeah, you can be made in a high speed blender.
Lex Fridman (1:52:25.680)
But basically I eat the same thing every day,
Bryan Johnson (1:52:27.800)
veggie bowl as in the form of pudding,
Lex Fridman (1:52:30.920)
and then a bowl in the form of nuts.
Lex Fridman (1:52:34.400)
And then I have.
Lex Fridman (1:52:35.480)
Vegan.
Bryan Johnson (1:52:36.320)
Vegan, yes.
Lex Fridman (1:52:37.140)
Vegan, so that's fat and that's like,
Bryan Johnson (1:52:40.640)
that's fat and carbs and that's the protein and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:52:43.600)
Then I have a third dish.
Lex Fridman (1:52:44.440)
Does it taste good?
Lex Fridman (1:52:45.280)
I love it.
Bryan Johnson (1:52:46.200)
I love it so much I dream about it.
Lex Fridman (1:52:49.480)
Yeah, that's awesome.
Bryan Johnson (1:52:50.880)
This is a.
Lex Fridman (1:52:52.200)
And then I have a third dish which is,
Bryan Johnson (1:52:53.760)
it changes every day.
Lex Fridman (1:52:55.280)
Today it was kale and spinach and sweet potato.
Lex Fridman (1:52:58.200)
And then I take about 20 supplements
Lex Fridman (1:53:03.040)
that
Bryan Johnson (1:53:05.600)
hopefully make, constitute a perfect nutritional profile.
Lex Fridman (1:53:09.120)
So what I'm trying to do is create the perfect diet
Bryan Johnson (1:53:12.040)
for my body every single day.
Lex Fridman (1:53:14.200)
Where sleep is part of the optimization.
Bryan Johnson (1:53:16.360)
That's right.
Lex Fridman (1:53:17.200)
You're like, one of the things you're really tracking.
Bryan Johnson (1:53:18.400)
I mean, can you, well, I have a million question,
Lex Fridman (1:53:21.060)
but 20 supplements, like what kind are like,
Lex Fridman (1:53:23.680)
would you say are essential?
Lex Fridman (1:53:25.160)
Cause I only take, I only take athletic greens.com slash.
Bryan Johnson (1:53:30.560)
That's like the multivitamin essentially.
Lex Fridman (1:53:33.120)
That's like the lazy man, you know, like,
Bryan Johnson (1:53:35.720)
like if you don't actually want to think about shit,
Lex Fridman (1:53:37.640)
that's what you take and then fish oil and that's it.
Bryan Johnson (1:53:40.480)
That's all I take.
Lex Fridman (1:53:41.620)
Yeah, you know, Alfred North Whitehead said,
Bryan Johnson (1:53:45.080)
civilization advances as it extends the number
Lex Fridman (1:53:48.760)
of important operations it can do
Bryan Johnson (1:53:50.540)
without thinking about them.
Lex Fridman (1:53:52.540)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (1:53:53.380)
So my objective on this is I want an algorithm
Lex Fridman (1:53:57.360)
for perfect health that I never have to think about.
Lex Fridman (1:54:00.920)
And then I want that system to be scalable to anybody
Lex Fridman (1:54:03.840)
so that they don't have to think about it.
Lex Fridman (1:54:05.480)
And right now it's expensive for me to do it.
Lex Fridman (1:54:07.720)
It's time consuming for me to do it.
Lex Fridman (1:54:09.060)
And I have infrastructure to do it,
Lex Fridman (1:54:10.400)
but the future of being human is not going
Bryan Johnson (1:54:14.800)
to the grocery store and deciding what to eat.
Lex Fridman (1:54:17.520)
It's also not reading scientific papers,
Bryan Johnson (1:54:19.560)
trying to decide this thing or that thing.
Lex Fridman (1:54:21.360)
It's all N of one.
Lex Fridman (1:54:23.000)
So it's devices on the outside and inside your body,
Lex Fridman (1:54:26.040)
assessing real time what your body needs
Lex Fridman (1:54:28.280)
and then creating closed loop systems for that to happen.
Lex Fridman (1:54:30.760)
Yeah, so right now you're doing the data collection
Lex Fridman (1:54:33.760)
and you're being the scientist,
Lex Fridman (1:54:35.860)
it'd be much better if you just did the data collect
Bryan Johnson (1:54:39.060)
or it was being essentially done for you
Lex Fridman (1:54:40.820)
and you can outsource that to another scientist
Bryan Johnson (1:54:43.760)
that's doing the N of one study of you.
Lex Fridman (1:54:46.040)
That's right, because every time I spend time thinking
Bryan Johnson (1:54:48.540)
about this or executing, spending time on it,
Lex Fridman (1:54:50.400)
I'm spending less time thinking about building kernel
Bryan Johnson (1:54:53.680)
or the future of being human.
Lex Fridman (1:54:55.320)
And so it's, we just all have the budget
Bryan Johnson (1:54:58.000)
of our capacity on an everyday basis
Lex Fridman (1:55:01.320)
and we will scaffold our way up out of this.
Lex Fridman (1:55:05.580)
And so, yeah, hopefully what I'm doing is really,
Lex Fridman (1:55:07.800)
it serves as a model that others can also build on.
Bryan Johnson (1:55:11.480)
That's why I wrote about it,
Lex Fridman (1:55:12.520)
is hopefully people can then take it and improve upon it.
Bryan Johnson (1:55:15.520)
I hold nothing sacred.
Lex Fridman (1:55:16.500)
I change my diet almost every day
Bryan Johnson (1:55:19.680)
based upon some new test results or science
Lex Fridman (1:55:21.680)
or something like that, but.
Lex Fridman (1:55:23.000)
Can you maybe elaborate on the sleep thing?
Lex Fridman (1:55:24.920)
Why is sleep so important?
Lex Fridman (1:55:27.360)
And why, presumably, like what does good sleep mean to you?
Lex Fridman (1:55:34.680)
I think sleep is a contender for being the most powerful
Bryan Johnson (1:55:43.900)
health intervention in existence.
Lex Fridman (1:55:46.000)
It's a contender.
Bryan Johnson (1:55:49.440)
I mean, it's magical what it does if you're well rested
Lex Fridman (1:55:53.480)
and what your body can do.
Lex Fridman (1:55:56.760)
And I mean, for example, I know when I eat close
Lex Fridman (1:56:00.400)
to my bedtime and I've done a systematic study for years
Bryan Johnson (1:56:05.480)
looking at like 15 minute increments on time of day
Lex Fridman (1:56:07.800)
on where I eat my last meal,
Bryan Johnson (1:56:09.760)
my willpower is directly correlated
Lex Fridman (1:56:12.600)
to the amount of deep sleep I get.
Lex Fridman (1:56:14.520)
So my ability to not binge eat at night
Lex Fridman (1:56:18.660)
when rascal Brian's out and about
Bryan Johnson (1:56:22.220)
is based upon how much deep sleep I got the night before.
Lex Fridman (1:56:24.460)
Yeah, there's a lot to that, yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:56:27.340)
And so I've seen it manifest itself.
Lex Fridman (1:56:30.300)
And so I think the way I summarize this is
Bryan Johnson (1:56:34.020)
in society we've had this myth of,
Lex Fridman (1:56:36.260)
we tell stories, for example, of entrepreneurship
Bryan Johnson (1:56:39.100)
where this person was so amazing,
Lex Fridman (1:56:41.580)
they stayed at the office for three days
Lex Fridman (1:56:43.180)
and slept under their desk.
Lex Fridman (1:56:44.860)
And we say, wow, that's amazing, that's amazing.
Lex Fridman (1:56:49.740)
And now I think we're headed towards a state
Lex Fridman (1:56:52.620)
where we'd say that's primitive
Lex Fridman (1:56:54.920)
and really not a good idea on every level.
Lex Fridman (1:56:58.680)
And so the new mythology is going to be the exact opposite.
Bryan Johnson (1:57:05.020)
Yeah, by the way, just to sort of maybe push back
Lex Fridman (1:57:08.540)
a little bit on that idea.
Lex Fridman (1:57:10.180)
Did you sleep under your desk collects?
Lex Fridman (1:57:13.780)
Well, yeah, a lot.
Bryan Johnson (1:57:14.620)
I'm a big believer in that actually.
Lex Fridman (1:57:16.020)
I'm a big believer in chaos
Lex Fridman (1:57:19.460)
and giving into your passion
Lex Fridman (1:57:22.420)
and sometimes doing things that are out of the ordinary
Bryan Johnson (1:57:25.540)
that are not trying to optimize health
Lex Fridman (1:57:29.300)
for certain periods of time in lieu of your passions
Bryan Johnson (1:57:35.740)
is a signal to yourself that you're throwing everything away.
Lex Fridman (1:57:39.540)
So I think what you're referring to
Bryan Johnson (1:57:42.340)
is how to have good performance for prolonged periods
Lex Fridman (1:57:46.180)
of time.
Bryan Johnson (1:57:47.580)
I think there's moments in life
Lex Fridman (1:57:50.620)
where you need to throw all of that away,
Bryan Johnson (1:57:52.640)
all the plans away, all the structure away.
Lex Fridman (1:57:54.920)
So I'm not sure I have an eloquent way
Bryan Johnson (1:58:00.680)
describing exactly what I'm talking about,
Lex Fridman (1:58:02.340)
but it all depends on people, people are different,
Lex Fridman (1:58:07.340)
but there's a danger of over optimization
Lex Fridman (1:58:11.380)
to where you don't just give into the madness
Bryan Johnson (1:58:14.420)
of the way your brain flows.
Lex Fridman (1:58:17.940)
I mean, to push back on my pushback is like,
Bryan Johnson (1:58:21.940)
it's nice to have like where the foundations
Lex Fridman (1:58:29.100)
of your brain are not messed with.
Lex Fridman (1:58:31.660)
So you have a fixed foundation where the diet is fixed,
Lex Fridman (1:58:35.340)
where the sleep is fixed and that all of that is optimal
Lex Fridman (1:58:37.820)
and the chaos happens in the space of ideas
Lex Fridman (1:58:39.940)
as opposed to the space of biology.
Lex Fridman (1:58:42.980)
But I'm not sure if there's a,
Lex Fridman (1:58:47.880)
that requires real discipline and forming habits.
Bryan Johnson (1:58:50.900)
There's some aspect to which some of the best days
Lex Fridman (1:58:54.940)
and weeks of my life have been, yeah,
Bryan Johnson (1:58:56.460)
sleeping under a desk kind of thing.
Lex Fridman (1:58:58.520)
And I don't, I'm not too willing to let go
Bryan Johnson (1:59:03.520)
of things that empirically worked
Lex Fridman (1:59:08.040)
for things that work in theory.
Lex Fridman (1:59:11.460)
And so I'm, again, I'm absolutely with you on sleep.
Lex Fridman (1:59:16.040)
Also, I'm with you on sleep conceptually,
Lex Fridman (1:59:19.560)
but I'm also very humbled to understand
Lex Fridman (1:59:23.900)
that for different people,
Bryan Johnson (1:59:26.760)
good sleep means different things.
Lex Fridman (1:59:28.760)
I'm very hesitant to trust science on sleep.
Bryan Johnson (1:59:33.040)
I think you should also be a scholar of your own body.
Lex Fridman (1:59:35.760)
Again, the experiment of NF1.
Bryan Johnson (1:59:38.200)
I'm not so sure that a full night's sleep is great for me.
Lex Fridman (1:59:44.000)
There is something about that power nap
Bryan Johnson (1:59:47.840)
that I just have not fully studied yet,
Lex Fridman (1:59:50.160)
but that nap is something special.
Bryan Johnson (1:59:52.560)
That I'm not sure I found the optimal thing.
Lex Fridman (1:59:55.960)
So like there's a lot to be explored
Bryan Johnson (1:59:57.600)
to what is exactly optimal amount of sleep,
Lex Fridman (20:00.680)
that has the characteristics of,
Bryan Johnson (20:02.480)
it has the data quality is high enough,
Lex Fridman (20:05.120)
it meets some certain threshold,
Bryan Johnson (20:07.480)
cost, accessibility, comfort,
Lex Fridman (20:11.180)
it can be worn in contextual environments.
Bryan Johnson (20:12.680)
If it meets the criteria of being a mass market device,
Lex Fridman (20:17.320)
then the responsibility that we have is to figure out
Lex Fridman (20:22.280)
how to create the algorithm that enables the human,
Lex Fridman (20:29.320)
to enable humans to then find value with it.
Lex Fridman (20:32.400)
So the analogy is like brain interfaces
Lex Fridman (20:34.920)
are like early 90s of the internet,
Bryan Johnson (20:37.080)
is you wanna populate an ecosystem
Lex Fridman (20:39.480)
with a certain number of devices,
Bryan Johnson (20:40.560)
you want a certain number of people
Lex Fridman (20:41.720)
who play around with them, who do experiments
Bryan Johnson (20:43.440)
of certain data collection parameters,
Lex Fridman (20:44.480)
you want to encourage certain mistakes
Bryan Johnson (20:46.440)
from experts and non experts.
Lex Fridman (20:48.020)
These are all critical elements that ignite discovery.
Lex Fridman (20:51.920)
And so we believe we've accomplished the first objective
Lex Fridman (20:57.560)
of building technology that reaches those thresholds.
Lex Fridman (21:01.800)
And now it's the Drake equation component
Lex Fridman (21:03.500)
of how do we try to generate 20 years of value discovery
Lex Fridman (21:11.720)
in a two or three year time period?
Lex Fridman (21:12.880)
How do we compress that?
Lex Fridman (21:14.280)
So just to clarify, so when you mean the Drake equation,
Lex Fridman (21:17.520)
which for people who don't know,
Bryan Johnson (21:19.120)
I don't know why you, if you listen to this,
Lex Fridman (21:20.680)
I bring up aliens every single conversation.
Lex Fridman (21:22.600)
So I don't know how you would know
Lex Fridman (21:24.000)
what the Drake equation is,
Lex Fridman (21:25.000)
but you mean like the killer app,
Lex Fridman (21:28.600)
it would be one alien civilization in that equation.
Lex Fridman (21:31.240)
So meaning like this is in search of an application
Lex Fridman (21:34.800)
that's impactful, transformative.
Bryan Johnson (21:36.520)
By the way, it should be, we need to come up
Lex Fridman (21:38.080)
with a better term than killer app as a.
Lex Fridman (21:41.560)
It's also violent, right?
Lex Fridman (21:43.060)
It's very violent.
Lex Fridman (21:43.900)
You can go like viral app, that's horrible too, right?
Lex Fridman (21:46.680)
It's some very inspiringly impactful application.
Lex Fridman (21:51.520)
How about that?
Lex Fridman (21:52.360)
No. Yeah.
Bryan Johnson (21:53.180)
Okay, so ballistic with killer app, that's fine.
Lex Fridman (21:55.320)
Nobody's. But I concur with you.
Bryan Johnson (21:56.960)
I dislike the chosen words in capturing the concept.
Lex Fridman (22:02.200)
You know, it's one of those sticky things
Bryan Johnson (22:03.840)
that is as effective to use in the tech world.
Lex Fridman (22:08.440)
But when you now become a communicator
Bryan Johnson (22:11.520)
outside of the tech world,
Lex Fridman (22:12.720)
especially when you're talking about software and hardware
Lex Fridman (22:15.360)
and artificial intelligence applications,
Lex Fridman (22:17.360)
it sounds horrible.
Bryan Johnson (22:18.200)
Yeah, no, it's interesting.
Lex Fridman (22:19.040)
I actually regret now having called attention
Bryan Johnson (22:21.360)
to cyber regret having used that word in this conversation
Lex Fridman (22:24.200)
because it's something I would not normally do.
Bryan Johnson (22:26.120)
I used it in order to create a bridge
Lex Fridman (22:29.120)
of shared understanding of how others would,
Lex Fridman (22:31.120)
what terminology others would use.
Lex Fridman (22:32.800)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (22:33.640)
But yeah, I concur.
Lex Fridman (22:34.880)
Let's go with impactful application.
Bryan Johnson (22:38.200)
Or the.
Lex Fridman (22:39.040)
Just value creation.
Bryan Johnson (22:40.040)
Value creation.
Lex Fridman (22:41.360)
Something people love using.
Bryan Johnson (22:43.600)
There we go, that's it.
Lex Fridman (22:45.280)
Love app.
Lex Fridman (22:46.760)
Okay, so what, do you have any ideas?
Lex Fridman (22:49.440)
So you're basically creating a framework
Bryan Johnson (22:51.040)
where there's the possibility of a discovery
Lex Fridman (22:54.220)
of an application that people love using.
Lex Fridman (22:58.520)
Is, do you have ideas?
Lex Fridman (22:59.640)
We've began to play a fun game internally
Bryan Johnson (23:01.560)
where when we have these discussions
Lex Fridman (23:03.080)
or we begin circling around this concept of,
Lex Fridman (23:08.340)
does anybody have an idea?
Lex Fridman (23:10.160)
Does anyone have intuitions?
Lex Fridman (23:11.400)
And if we see the conversation starting
Lex Fridman (23:13.840)
to veer in that direction,
Bryan Johnson (23:15.820)
we flag it and say, human intuition alert, stop it.
Lex Fridman (23:20.480)
And so we really want to focus on the algorithm
Bryan Johnson (23:23.140)
of there's a natural process of human discovery.
Lex Fridman (23:27.520)
That when you populate a system with devices
Lex Fridman (23:30.480)
and you give people the opportunity to play around with it
Lex Fridman (23:33.080)
in expected and unexpected ways,
Bryan Johnson (23:35.440)
we are thinking that is a much better system of discovery
Lex Fridman (23:40.200)
than us exercising intuitions.
Lex Fridman (23:41.480)
And it's interesting, we're also seeing
Lex Fridman (23:42.600)
a few neuroscientists who have been talking to us.
Bryan Johnson (23:45.920)
While I was speaking to this one young associate professor,
Lex Fridman (23:49.440)
and I approached a conversation and said,
Bryan Johnson (23:50.960)
hey, we have these five data streams that we're pulling off.
Lex Fridman (23:56.160)
When you hear that, what weighted value
Lex Fridman (23:58.120)
do you add to each data source?
Lex Fridman (23:59.520)
Which one do you think is going to be valuable
Lex Fridman (24:00.880)
for your objectives and which one's not?
Lex Fridman (24:03.160)
And he said, I don't care, just give me the data.
Bryan Johnson (24:05.720)
All I care about is my machine learning model.
Lex Fridman (24:08.080)
But importantly, he did not have a theory of mind.
Bryan Johnson (24:10.800)
He did not come to the table and say,
Lex Fridman (24:12.380)
I think the brain operates in this way
Lex Fridman (24:15.080)
and these reasons or have these functions.
Lex Fridman (24:16.880)
He didn't care, he just wanted the data.
Lex Fridman (24:19.040)
And we're seeing that more and more
Lex Fridman (24:20.800)
that certain people are devaluing human intuitions
Bryan Johnson (24:26.580)
for good reasons, as we've seen in machine learning
Lex Fridman (24:28.360)
over the past couple years.
Lex Fridman (24:30.580)
And we're doing the same in our value creation market
Lex Fridman (24:34.480)
strategy.
Lex Fridman (24:36.020)
So collect more data, clean data,
Lex Fridman (24:40.360)
make the product such that the collection of data
Bryan Johnson (24:42.960)
is easy and fun and then the rest will just spring to life.
Lex Fridman (24:47.960)
Through humans playing around with them.
Bryan Johnson (24:50.540)
Our objective is to create the most valuable
Lex Fridman (24:54.020)
data collection system of the brain ever.
Lex Fridman (25:01.340)
And with that, then applying all the best tools
Lex Fridman (25:05.780)
of machine learning and other techniques
Bryan Johnson (25:09.500)
to extract out, to try to find insight.
Lex Fridman (25:13.780)
But yes, our objective is really to systematize
Bryan Johnson (25:16.220)
the discovery process because we can't put
Lex Fridman (25:19.900)
definite timeframes on discovery.
Bryan Johnson (25:22.020)
The brain is complicated and science
Lex Fridman (25:25.820)
is not a business strategy.
Lex Fridman (25:28.140)
And so we really need to figure out how to,
Lex Fridman (25:31.580)
this is the difficulty of bringing technology
Bryan Johnson (25:34.060)
like this to market.
Lex Fridman (25:34.900)
And it's why most of the time it just languishes
Bryan Johnson (25:38.300)
in academia for quite some time.
Lex Fridman (25:40.980)
But we hope that we will cross over
Lex Fridman (25:44.060)
and make this mainstream in the coming years.
Lex Fridman (25:48.960)
The thing was cool to wear, but are you chasing
Bryan Johnson (25:53.240)
a good reason for millions of people to put this
Lex Fridman (25:56.880)
on their head and keep on their head regularly?
Lex Fridman (26:00.860)
Is there, like who's going to discover that reason?
Lex Fridman (26:04.740)
Is it going to be people just kind of organically
Bryan Johnson (26:08.060)
or is there going to be an Angry Birds style application
Lex Fridman (26:12.520)
that's just too exciting to not use?
Bryan Johnson (26:18.140)
If I think through the things that have changed
Lex Fridman (26:20.940)
my life most significantly over the past few years,
Bryan Johnson (26:23.500)
when I started wearing a wearable on my wrist
Lex Fridman (26:27.140)
that would give me data about my heart rate,
Bryan Johnson (26:29.100)
heart rate variability, respiration rate,
Lex Fridman (26:33.680)
metabolic approximations, et cetera,
Bryan Johnson (26:37.180)
for the first time in my life,
Lex Fridman (26:38.660)
I had access to information, sleep patterns
Bryan Johnson (26:41.780)
that were highly impactful.
Lex Fridman (26:43.220)
They told me, for example, if I eat close to bedtime,
Bryan Johnson (26:48.620)
I'm not going to get deep sleep.
Lex Fridman (26:50.840)
And not getting deep sleep means you have
Bryan Johnson (26:52.760)
all these follow on consequences in life.
Lex Fridman (26:54.420)
And so it opened up this window of understanding of myself
Bryan Johnson (26:59.500)
that I cannot self introspect and deduce these things.
Lex Fridman (27:03.180)
This is information that was available to be acquired,
Lex Fridman (27:06.180)
but it just wasn't.
Lex Fridman (27:07.060)
I would have to get an expensive sleep study,
Bryan Johnson (27:08.840)
then it's an end, like one night,
Lex Fridman (27:10.460)
and that's not good enough to look at, to run all my trials.
Lex Fridman (27:12.500)
And so if you look just at the information
Lex Fridman (27:15.340)
that one can acquire on their wrist,
Lex Fridman (27:18.220)
and now you're applying it to the entire cortex
Lex Fridman (27:20.180)
on the brain and you say,
Lex Fridman (27:22.280)
what kind of information could we acquire?
Lex Fridman (27:25.020)
It opens up a whole new universe of possibilities.
Bryan Johnson (27:28.360)
For example, we did this internal study at Kernel
Lex Fridman (27:30.140)
where I wore a prototype device
Lex Fridman (27:32.540)
and we were measuring the cognitive effects of sleep.
Lex Fridman (27:36.180)
So I had a device measuring my sleep.
Bryan Johnson (27:38.420)
I performed with 13 of my coworkers.
Lex Fridman (27:41.740)
We performed four cognitive tasks over 13 sessions.
Lex Fridman (27:45.740)
And we focused on reaction time, impulse control,
Lex Fridman (27:49.860)
short term memory, and then a resting state task.
Lex Fridman (27:52.780)
And with mine, we found, for example,
Lex Fridman (27:55.140)
that my impulse control was independently correlated
Bryan Johnson (28:00.460)
with my sleep outside of behavioral measures
Lex Fridman (28:02.320)
of my ability to play the game.
Bryan Johnson (28:04.100)
The point of the study was I had,
Lex Fridman (28:07.540)
the brain study I did at Kernel confirmed my life experience
Bryan Johnson (28:12.060)
that if I, my deep sleep determined whether or not
Lex Fridman (28:18.040)
I would be able to resist temptation the following day.
Lex Fridman (28:21.580)
And my brain did show that as one example.
Lex Fridman (28:24.400)
And so if you start thinking,
Bryan Johnson (28:25.700)
if you actually have data on yourself,
Lex Fridman (28:27.900)
on your entire cortex and you can control the settings,
Bryan Johnson (28:32.180)
I think there's probably a large number of things
Lex Fridman (28:36.860)
that we could discover about ourselves,
Bryan Johnson (28:37.980)
very, very small and very, very big.
Lex Fridman (28:39.860)
I just, for example, like when you read news,
Lex Fridman (28:43.580)
what's going on?
Lex Fridman (28:44.820)
Like when you use social media, when you use news,
Bryan Johnson (28:47.620)
like all the ways we allocate attention.
Lex Fridman (28:51.340)
That's right.
Bryan Johnson (28:52.180)
With the computer.
Lex Fridman (28:53.000)
I mean, that seems like a compelling place
Bryan Johnson (28:54.540)
to where you would want to put on a Kernel,
Lex Fridman (28:58.260)
by the way, what is it called?
Lex Fridman (28:59.180)
Kernel Flux, Kernel, like what?
Lex Fridman (29:00.860)
Flow.
Bryan Johnson (29:01.780)
Flow.
Lex Fridman (29:02.620)
We have two technologies, you or Flow.
Bryan Johnson (29:04.260)
Flow, okay.
Lex Fridman (29:05.540)
So when you put on the Kernel Flow,
Bryan Johnson (29:11.020)
it seems like to be a compelling time and place to do it
Lex Fridman (29:16.300)
is when you're behind a desk, behind a computer.
Bryan Johnson (29:18.660)
Because you could probably wear it
Lex Fridman (29:19.660)
for prolonged periods of time as you're taking in content.
Lex Fridman (29:23.740)
And there could a lot of,
Lex Fridman (29:25.300)
because so much of our lives happens
Bryan Johnson (29:28.220)
in the digital world now.
Lex Fridman (29:29.960)
That kind of coupling the information about the human mind
Bryan Johnson (29:34.620)
with the consumption and the behaviors in the digital world
Lex Fridman (29:39.540)
might give us a lot of information about the effects
Bryan Johnson (29:42.100)
of the way we behave and navigate the digital world
Lex Fridman (29:45.120)
to the actual physical meat space effects on our body.
Bryan Johnson (29:50.580)
It's interesting to think,
Lex Fridman (29:51.420)
so in terms of both like for work,
Bryan Johnson (29:54.760)
I'm a big fan of Cal Newport, his ideas of deep work
Lex Fridman (29:59.740)
that I spend, with few exceptions,
Bryan Johnson (2:00:00.200)
optimal kind of sleep combined with diet
Lex Fridman (2:00:02.400)
and all those kinds of things.
Bryan Johnson (2:00:03.240)
I mean, that all maps the sort of data,
Lex Fridman (2:00:05.560)
at least the truth, exactly what you're referring to.
Bryan Johnson (2:00:08.840)
Here's a data point for your consideration.
Lex Fridman (2:00:10.520)
Yes.
Bryan Johnson (2:00:12.760)
The progress in biology over the past, say decade,
Lex Fridman (2:00:17.400)
has been stunning.
Bryan Johnson (2:00:18.800)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (2:00:19.640)
And it now appears as if we will be able to replace
Bryan Johnson (2:00:25.220)
our organs, zero X for a transplantation.
Lex Fridman (2:00:28.300)
And so we probably have a path to replace
Lex Fridman (2:00:33.880)
and regenerate every organ of your body,
Lex Fridman (2:00:37.840)
except for your brain.
Bryan Johnson (2:00:42.480)
You can lose your hand and your arm and a leg.
Lex Fridman (2:00:45.280)
You can have an artificial heart.
Bryan Johnson (2:00:47.520)
You can't operate without your brain.
Lex Fridman (2:00:49.640)
And so when you make that trade off decision
Bryan Johnson (2:00:52.180)
of whether you're going to sleep under the desk or not
Lex Fridman (2:00:54.760)
and go all out for a four day marathon, right?
Bryan Johnson (2:01:00.280)
There's a cost benefit trade off of what's going on,
Lex Fridman (2:01:02.760)
what's happening to your brain in that situation.
Bryan Johnson (2:01:05.740)
We don't know the consequences
Lex Fridman (2:01:07.600)
of modern day life on our brain.
Bryan Johnson (2:01:09.940)
We don't, it's the most valuable organ in our existence.
Lex Fridman (2:01:14.940)
And we don't know what's going on if we,
Bryan Johnson (2:01:18.200)
in how we're treating it today with stress
Lex Fridman (2:01:20.660)
and with sleep and with dietary.
Lex Fridman (2:01:23.400)
And to me, then if you say that you're trying to,
Lex Fridman (2:01:28.520)
you're trying to optimize life
Bryan Johnson (2:01:30.000)
for whatever things you're trying to do.
Lex Fridman (2:01:32.920)
The game is soon with the progress in anti aging and biology,
Bryan Johnson (2:01:36.380)
the game is very soon going to become different
Lex Fridman (2:01:38.160)
than what it is right now with organ rejuvenation,
Bryan Johnson (2:01:41.240)
organ replacement.
Lex Fridman (2:01:42.660)
And I would conjecture that we will value
Bryan Johnson (2:01:48.400)
the health status of our brain above all things.
Lex Fridman (2:01:52.440)
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Bryan Johnson (2:01:53.960)
Everything you're saying is true, but we die.
Lex Fridman (2:01:58.200)
We die pretty quickly, life is short.
Lex Fridman (2:02:01.160)
And I'm one of those people that I would rather die in battle
Lex Fridman (2:02:08.320)
than stay safe at home.
Bryan Johnson (2:02:11.160)
It's like, yeah, you look at kind of,
Lex Fridman (2:02:14.860)
there's a lot of things that you can reasonably say,
Bryan Johnson (2:02:17.120)
these are, this is the smart thing to do
Lex Fridman (2:02:19.040)
that can prevent you, that becomes conservative,
Bryan Johnson (2:02:21.640)
that can prevent you from fully embracing life.
Lex Fridman (2:02:24.440)
I think ultimately you can be very intelligent
Lex Fridman (2:02:27.560)
and data driven and also embrace life.
Lex Fridman (2:02:30.760)
But I err on the side of embracing life.
Bryan Johnson (2:02:33.760)
It's very, it takes a very skillful person
Lex Fridman (2:02:36.720)
to not sort of that hovering parent that says,
Bryan Johnson (2:02:40.280)
you know what, there's a 3% chance that if you go out,
Lex Fridman (2:02:44.600)
if you go out by yourself and play, you're going to die,
Bryan Johnson (2:02:47.700)
get run over by a car, come to a slow or a sudden end.
Lex Fridman (2:02:51.820)
And I am more a supporter of just go out there.
Bryan Johnson (2:02:57.480)
If you die, you die.
Lex Fridman (2:02:59.280)
And that's a, it's a balance you have to strike.
Bryan Johnson (2:03:02.880)
I think there's a balance to strike
Lex Fridman (2:03:04.880)
in the longterm optimization and short term freedom.
Bryan Johnson (2:03:11.760)
For me, for a programmer, for a programming mind,
Lex Fridman (2:03:15.320)
I tend to over optimize and I'm very cautious
Lex Fridman (2:03:18.240)
and afraid of that, to not over optimize
Lex Fridman (2:03:21.440)
and thereby be overly cautious, suboptimally cautious
Bryan Johnson (2:03:26.080)
about everything I do.
Lex Fridman (2:03:27.520)
And that's the ultimate thing I'm trying to optimize for.
Bryan Johnson (2:03:30.360)
It's funny you said like sleep and all those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (2:03:33.440)
I tend to think, this is, you're being more precise
Bryan Johnson (2:03:38.440)
than I am, but I think I tend to want to minimize stress,
Lex Fridman (2:03:47.440)
which everything comes into that from your sleep
Lex Fridman (2:03:49.900)
and all those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (2:03:50.860)
But I worry that whenever I'm trying to be too strict
Bryan Johnson (2:03:54.800)
with myself, then the stress goes up
Lex Fridman (2:03:57.640)
when I don't follow the strictness.
Lex Fridman (2:04:00.520)
And so you have to kind of, it's a weird,
Lex Fridman (2:04:02.880)
it's a, there's so many variables in an objective function
Bryan Johnson (2:04:05.680)
as it's hard to get right.
Lex Fridman (2:04:07.320)
And sort of not giving a damn about sleep
Lex Fridman (2:04:09.640)
and not giving a damn about diet is a good thing
Lex Fridman (2:04:11.940)
to inject in there every once in a while
Bryan Johnson (2:04:14.040)
for somebody who's trying to optimize everything.
Lex Fridman (2:04:17.080)
But that's me just trying to, it's exactly like you said,
Bryan Johnson (2:04:20.240)
you're just a scientist, I'm a scientist of myself,
Lex Fridman (2:04:22.700)
you're a scientist of yourself.
Bryan Johnson (2:04:24.120)
It'd be nice if somebody else was doing it
Lex Fridman (2:04:25.800)
and had much better data, because I don't trust
Bryan Johnson (2:04:28.680)
my conscious mind and I pigged out last night
Lex Fridman (2:04:30.820)
at some brisket in LA that I regret deeply.
Bryan Johnson (2:04:34.120)
It's just so, uh.
Lex Fridman (2:04:37.040)
There's no point to anything I just said.
Bryan Johnson (2:04:38.880)
But.
Lex Fridman (2:04:39.720)
But.
Lex Fridman (2:04:40.540)
What is the nature of your regret on the brisket?
Lex Fridman (2:04:46.680)
Is it, do you wish you hadn't eaten it entirely?
Lex Fridman (2:04:49.800)
Is it that you wish you hadn't eaten as much as you did?
Lex Fridman (2:04:51.800)
Is it that?
Bryan Johnson (2:04:55.200)
I think, well, the most regret, I mean,
Lex Fridman (2:04:58.520)
if we want to be specific, I drank way too much like that.
Bryan Johnson (2:05:03.520)
Like diet soda.
Lex Fridman (2:05:05.260)
My biggest regret is like having drank so much diet soda.
Bryan Johnson (2:05:08.100)
That's the thing that really was the problem.
Lex Fridman (2:05:10.380)
I had trouble sleeping because of that.
Bryan Johnson (2:05:12.160)
Because I was like programming and then I was editing.
Lex Fridman (2:05:14.660)
And so I'd stay up late at night
Lex Fridman (2:05:15.740)
and then I had to get up to go pee a few times
Lex Fridman (2:05:18.500)
and it was just a mess.
Bryan Johnson (2:05:19.460)
A mess of a night.
Lex Fridman (2:05:20.360)
It was, well, it's not really a mess,
Lex Fridman (2:05:22.340)
but like it's so many, it's like the little things.
Lex Fridman (2:05:25.980)
I know if I just eat, I drink a little bit of water
Lex Fridman (2:05:30.100)
and that's it, and there's a certain,
Lex Fridman (2:05:31.780)
all of us have perfect days that we know diet wise
Lex Fridman (2:05:36.580)
and so on that's good to follow, you feel good.
Lex Fridman (2:05:39.180)
I know what it takes for me to do that.
Bryan Johnson (2:05:41.700)
I didn't fully do that and thereby,
Lex Fridman (2:05:43.820)
because there's an avalanche effect
Bryan Johnson (2:05:47.660)
where the other sources of stress,
Lex Fridman (2:05:50.140)
all the other to do items I have piled on,
Bryan Johnson (2:05:53.180)
my failure to execute on some basic things
Lex Fridman (2:05:55.660)
that I know make me feel good and all of that combines
Bryan Johnson (2:05:58.860)
to create a mess of a day.
Lex Fridman (2:06:02.460)
But some of that chaos, you have to be okay with it,
Lex Fridman (2:06:05.020)
but some of it I wish was a little bit more optimal.
Lex Fridman (2:06:07.900)
And your ideas about eating in the morning
Bryan Johnson (2:06:11.020)
are quite interesting as an experiment to try.
Lex Fridman (2:06:14.380)
Can you elaborate, are you eating once a day?
Bryan Johnson (2:06:18.540)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (2:06:19.780)
In the morning and that's it.
Lex Fridman (2:06:22.240)
Can you maybe speak to how that,
Lex Fridman (2:06:24.380)
you spoke, it's funny, you spoke about the metrics of sleep,
Lex Fridman (2:06:30.660)
but you're also, you run a business,
Lex Fridman (2:06:34.780)
you're incredibly intelligent,
Bryan Johnson (2:06:36.180)
mostly your happiness and success
Lex Fridman (2:06:40.260)
relies on you thinking clearly.
Lex Fridman (2:06:43.240)
So how does that affect your mind and your body
Lex Fridman (2:06:45.900)
in terms of performance?
Lex Fridman (2:06:47.180)
So not just sleep, but actual mental performance.
Lex Fridman (2:06:50.980)
As you were explaining your objective function of,
Bryan Johnson (2:06:53.620)
for example, in the criteria you were including,
Lex Fridman (2:06:56.660)
you like certain neurochemical states,
Bryan Johnson (2:06:59.740)
like you like feeling like you're living life,
Lex Fridman (2:07:02.520)
that life has enjoyment,
Bryan Johnson (2:07:04.580)
that sometimes you want to disregard certain rules
Lex Fridman (2:07:07.540)
to have a moment of passion, of focus.
Bryan Johnson (2:07:10.220)
There's this architecture of the way Lex is,
Lex Fridman (2:07:13.260)
which makes you happy as a story you tell,
Bryan Johnson (2:07:16.340)
as something you kind of experience,
Lex Fridman (2:07:17.740)
maybe the experience is a bit more complicated,
Lex Fridman (2:07:19.340)
but it's in this idea you have, this is a version of you.
Lex Fridman (2:07:22.500)
And the reason why I maintain the schedule I do
Bryan Johnson (2:07:26.860)
is I've chosen a game to say,
Lex Fridman (2:07:29.620)
I would like to live a life
Bryan Johnson (2:07:31.780)
where I care more about what intelligent,
Lex Fridman (2:07:37.740)
what people who live in the year 2500
Bryan Johnson (2:07:41.660)
think of me than I do today.
Lex Fridman (2:07:44.780)
That's the game I'm trying to play.
Lex Fridman (2:07:46.620)
And so therefore the only thing I really care about
Lex Fridman (2:07:51.140)
on this optimization is trying to see past myself,
Bryan Johnson (2:07:56.420)
past my limitations, using zeroes principle thinking,
Lex Fridman (2:08:01.060)
pull myself out of this contextual mesh we're in right now
Lex Fridman (2:08:04.220)
and say, what will matter 100 years from now
Lex Fridman (2:08:07.380)
and 200 years from now?
Lex Fridman (2:08:08.460)
What are the big things really going on
Lex Fridman (2:08:11.220)
that are defining reality?
Lex Fridman (2:08:13.300)
And I find that if I were to hang out with Diet Soda Lex
Lex Fridman (2:08:22.300)
and Diet Soda Brian were to play along with that
Lex Fridman (2:08:24.940)
and my deep sleep were to get crushed as a result,
Lex Fridman (2:08:28.500)
my mind would not be on what matters
Bryan Johnson (2:08:30.580)
in 100 years or 200 years or 300 years.
Lex Fridman (2:08:32.140)
I would be irritable.
Bryan Johnson (2:08:34.300)
I would be, I'd be in a different state.
Lex Fridman (2:08:37.460)
And so it's just gameplay selection.
Bryan Johnson (2:08:41.100)
It's what you and I have chosen to think about.
Lex Fridman (2:08:43.660)
It's what we've chosen to work on.
Lex Fridman (2:08:47.500)
And this is why I'm saying that no generation of humans
Lex Fridman (2:08:51.740)
have ever been afforded the opportunity
Bryan Johnson (2:08:54.580)
to look at their lifespan and contemplate
Lex Fridman (2:08:58.660)
that they will have the possibility of experiencing
Bryan Johnson (2:09:03.180)
an evolved form of consciousness that is undeniable.
Lex Fridman (2:09:06.860)
They would fall in a zero category of potential.
Bryan Johnson (2:09:10.980)
That to me is the most exciting thing in existence.
Lex Fridman (2:09:14.100)
And I would not trade any momentary neurochemical state
Bryan Johnson (2:09:19.700)
right now in exchange for that.
Lex Fridman (2:09:21.500)
I would, I'd be willing to deprive myself
Bryan Johnson (2:09:23.660)
of all momentary joy in pursuit of that goal
Lex Fridman (2:09:27.060)
because that's what makes me happy.
Bryan Johnson (2:09:29.780)
That's brilliant.
Lex Fridman (2:09:30.780)
But I'm a bit, I just looked it up.
Bryan Johnson (2:09:34.300)
I'm with, I just looked up Braveheart's speech
Lex Fridman (2:09:38.620)
and William Wallace, but I don't know if you've seen it.
Bryan Johnson (2:09:41.780)
Fight and you may die, run and you'll live at least a while.
Lex Fridman (2:09:45.500)
And dying in your beds many years from now,
Bryan Johnson (2:09:48.020)
would you be willing to trade all the days
Lex Fridman (2:09:51.420)
from this day to that for one chance,
Bryan Johnson (2:09:53.700)
just one chance, picture Mel Gibson saying this,
Lex Fridman (2:09:57.060)
to come back here and tell our enemies
Bryan Johnson (2:09:59.060)
that they may take our lives with growing excitement,
Lex Fridman (2:10:03.700)
but they'll never take our freedom.
Bryan Johnson (2:10:06.380)
I get excited every time I see that in the movie,
Lex Fridman (2:10:08.700)
but that's kind of how I approach life and eating.
Lex Fridman (2:10:11.020)
Do you think they were tracking their sleep?
Lex Fridman (2:10:13.140)
They were not tracking their sleep
Lex Fridman (2:10:14.460)
and they ate way too much brisket
Lex Fridman (2:10:16.180)
and they were fat, unhealthy, died early,
Lex Fridman (2:10:19.420)
and were primitive.
Lex Fridman (2:10:22.420)
But there's something in my ape brain
Bryan Johnson (2:10:25.420)
that's attracted to that, even though most of my life
Lex Fridman (2:10:29.340)
is fully aligned with the way you see yours.
Bryan Johnson (2:10:32.620)
Part of it is for comedy, of course,
Lex Fridman (2:10:34.100)
but part of it is I'm almost afraid of overoptimization.
Bryan Johnson (2:10:38.820)
Really what you're saying though,
Lex Fridman (2:10:39.860)
if we're looking at this,
Bryan Johnson (2:10:41.580)
let's say from a first principles perspective,
Lex Fridman (2:10:43.460)
when you read those words,
Bryan Johnson (2:10:44.700)
they conjure up certain life experiences,
Lex Fridman (2:10:46.540)
but you're basically saying,
Bryan Johnson (2:10:47.460)
I experienced a certain neurotransmitter state
Lex Fridman (2:10:50.340)
when these things are in action.
Bryan Johnson (2:10:53.060)
That's all you're saying.
Lex Fridman (2:10:53.940)
So whether it's that or something else,
Bryan Johnson (2:10:55.300)
you're just saying you have a selection
Lex Fridman (2:10:57.180)
for how your state for your body.
Lex Fridman (2:10:59.380)
And so if you as an engineer of consciousness,
Lex Fridman (2:11:02.780)
that should just be engineerable.
Lex Fridman (2:11:05.180)
And that's just triggering certain chemical reactions.
Lex Fridman (2:11:08.260)
And so it doesn't mean they have to be mutually exclusive.
Bryan Johnson (2:11:11.300)
You can have that and experience that
Lex Fridman (2:11:12.980)
and also not sacrifice longterm health.
Lex Fridman (2:11:15.780)
And I think that's the potential of where we're going
Lex Fridman (2:11:17.540)
is we don't have to assume they are trade offs
Bryan Johnson (2:11:23.980)
that must be had.
Lex Fridman (2:11:25.660)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (2:11:26.500)
And so I guess for my particular brain,
Lex Fridman (2:11:28.860)
it's useful to have the outlier experiences
Bryan Johnson (2:11:32.100)
that also come along with the illusion of free will
Lex Fridman (2:11:35.660)
where I chose those experiences
Bryan Johnson (2:11:37.780)
that make me feel like it's freedom.
Lex Fridman (2:11:39.540)
Listen, going to Texas made me realize I spent,
Lex Fridman (2:11:42.380)
so I still am, but I lived at Cambridge at MIT
Lex Fridman (2:11:46.740)
and I never felt like home there.
Bryan Johnson (2:11:49.140)
I felt like home in the space of ideas with the colleagues,
Lex Fridman (2:11:52.580)
like when I was actually discussing ideas,
Lex Fridman (2:11:54.340)
but there is something about the constraints,
Lex Fridman (2:11:58.780)
how cautious people are,
Lex Fridman (2:12:00.260)
how much they valued also kind of a material success,
Lex Fridman (2:12:05.140)
career success.
Bryan Johnson (2:12:06.820)
When I showed up to Texas, it felt like I belong.
Lex Fridman (2:12:12.020)
That was very interesting, but that's my neurochemistry,
Bryan Johnson (2:12:14.740)
whatever the hell that is, whatever,
Lex Fridman (2:12:17.260)
maybe probably is rooted to the fact
Bryan Johnson (2:12:18.740)
that I grew up in the Soviet Union
Lex Fridman (2:12:20.060)
and it was such a constrained system
Bryan Johnson (2:12:22.020)
that you'd really deeply value freedom
Lex Fridman (2:12:23.940)
and you always want to escape the man
Lex Fridman (2:12:27.420)
and the control of centralized systems.
Lex Fridman (2:12:29.060)
I don't know what it is, but at the same time,
Bryan Johnson (2:12:32.380)
I love strictness.
Lex Fridman (2:12:33.820)
I love the dogmatic authoritarianism of diet,
Bryan Johnson (2:12:38.620)
of like the same habit, exactly the habit you have.
Lex Fridman (2:12:41.340)
I think that's actually when bodies perform optimally,
Bryan Johnson (2:12:43.740)
my body performs optimally.
Lex Fridman (2:12:45.540)
So balancing those two, I think if I have the data,
Bryan Johnson (2:12:48.860)
every once in a while, party with some wild people,
Lex Fridman (2:12:51.620)
but most of the time eat once a day,
Bryan Johnson (2:12:54.580)
perhaps in the morning, I'm gonna try that.
Lex Fridman (2:12:56.220)
That might be very interesting,
Lex Fridman (2:12:57.900)
but I'd rather not try it.
Lex Fridman (2:12:59.980)
I'd rather have the data that tells me to do it.
Lex Fridman (2:13:03.100)
But in general, you're able to, eating once a day,
Lex Fridman (2:13:07.180)
think deeply about stuff like this.
Bryan Johnson (2:13:09.940)
Concern that people have is like does your energy wane,
Lex Fridman (2:13:13.860)
all those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (2:13:15.140)
Do you find that it's, especially because it's unique,
Lex Fridman (2:13:19.220)
it's vegan as well.
Lex Fridman (2:13:21.020)
So you find that you're able to have a clear mind,
Lex Fridman (2:13:23.860)
a focus, and just physically and mentally throughout?
Bryan Johnson (2:13:27.740)
Yeah, and I find like my personal experience
Lex Fridman (2:13:29.820)
in thinking about hard things is,
Bryan Johnson (2:13:36.020)
like oftentimes I feel like I'm looking through a telescope
Lex Fridman (2:13:40.180)
and like I'm aligning two or three telescopes.
Lex Fridman (2:13:42.260)
And you kind of have to close one eye
Lex Fridman (2:13:44.100)
and move it back and forth a little bit
Lex Fridman (2:13:46.180)
and just find just the right alignment.
Lex Fridman (2:13:47.940)
Then you find just a sneak peek
Bryan Johnson (2:13:49.820)
at the thing you're trying to find, but it's fleeting.
Lex Fridman (2:13:51.660)
If you move just one little bit, it's gone.
Lex Fridman (2:13:54.780)
And oftentimes what I feel like are the ideas
Lex Fridman (2:13:58.820)
I value the most are like that.
Bryan Johnson (2:14:00.620)
They're so fragile and fleeting and slippery and elusive.
Lex Fridman (2:14:06.700)
And it requires a sensitivity to thinking
Lex Fridman (2:14:13.860)
and a sensitivity to maneuver through these things.
Lex Fridman (2:14:16.500)
If I concede to a world where I'm on my phone texting,
Bryan Johnson (2:14:21.500)
I'm also on social media.
Lex Fridman (2:14:22.340)
I'm also doing 15 things at the same time
Bryan Johnson (2:14:25.340)
because I'm running a company
Lex Fridman (2:14:26.380)
and I'm also feeling terrible from the last night.
Bryan Johnson (2:14:30.620)
It all just comes crashing down.
Lex Fridman (2:14:31.860)
And the quality of my thoughts goes to a zero.
Bryan Johnson (2:14:35.860)
I'm a functional person to respond to basic level things,
Lex Fridman (2:14:40.100)
but I don't feel like I am doing anything interesting.
Bryan Johnson (2:14:44.940)
I think that's a good word, sensitivity,
Lex Fridman (2:14:46.940)
because that's the word that's used the most.
Bryan Johnson (2:14:50.420)
That's what thinking deeply feels like
Lex Fridman (2:14:53.860)
is you're sensitive to the fragile thoughts.
Lex Fridman (2:14:55.820)
And you're right.
Lex Fridman (2:14:56.660)
All those other distractions kind of dull
Bryan Johnson (2:14:59.100)
your ability to be sensitive to the fragile thoughts.
Lex Fridman (2:15:02.980)
It's a really good word.
Bryan Johnson (2:15:05.540)
Out of all the things you've done,
Lex Fridman (2:15:08.140)
you've also climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.
Lex Fridman (2:15:13.100)
Is this true?
Lex Fridman (2:15:14.120)
It's true.
Lex Fridman (2:15:14.960)
Why and how, and what do you take from that experience?
Lex Fridman (2:15:25.680)
I guess the backstory is relevant
Bryan Johnson (2:15:26.880)
because in that moment, it was the darkest time in my life.
Lex Fridman (2:15:32.440)
I was ending a 13 year marriage.
Bryan Johnson (2:15:34.280)
I was leaving my religion.
Lex Fridman (2:15:35.320)
I sold Braintree and I was battling depression
Bryan Johnson (2:15:38.480)
where I was just at the end.
Lex Fridman (2:15:40.880)
And I got invited to go to Tanzania
Bryan Johnson (2:15:45.800)
as part of a group that was raising money
Lex Fridman (2:15:47.120)
to build clean water wells.
Lex Fridman (2:15:49.400)
And I had made some money from Braintree,
Lex Fridman (2:15:51.560)
and so I was able to donate $25,000.
Lex Fridman (2:15:54.480)
And it was the first time I had ever had money to donate
Lex Fridman (2:15:59.280)
outside of paying tithing in my religion.
Bryan Johnson (2:16:01.720)
It was such a phenomenal experience
Lex Fridman (2:16:04.400)
to contribute something meaningful to someone else
Bryan Johnson (2:16:09.400)
in that form.
Lex Fridman (2:16:11.280)
And as part of this process,
Bryan Johnson (2:16:12.720)
we were gonna climb the mountain.
Lex Fridman (2:16:13.800)
And so we went there and we saw the clean water wells
Bryan Johnson (2:16:16.600)
we were building.
Lex Fridman (2:16:17.440)
We spoke to the people there and it was very energizing.
Lex Fridman (2:16:20.520)
And then we climbed Kilimanjaro
Lex Fridman (2:16:21.920)
and I came down with a stomach flu on day three.
Lex Fridman (2:16:29.240)
And I also had altitude sickness,
Lex Fridman (2:16:30.720)
but I became so sick that on day four,
Bryan Johnson (2:16:33.080)
we are somebody on day five,
Lex Fridman (2:16:34.760)
I came into the camp, base camp at 15,000 feet,
Bryan Johnson (2:16:39.480)
just going to the bathroom on myself
Lex Fridman (2:16:42.840)
and falling all over.
Bryan Johnson (2:16:44.520)
I was just a disaster, I was so sick.
Lex Fridman (2:16:47.160)
So stomach flu and altitude sickness.
Bryan Johnson (2:16:49.920)
Yeah, and I just was destroyed from the situation.
Lex Fridman (2:16:57.120)
Plus, it was psychologically one of the lowest points.
Bryan Johnson (2:17:00.880)
Yeah, and I think that was probably a big contributor.
Lex Fridman (2:17:03.360)
I was just smoked as a human, just absolutely done.
Lex Fridman (2:17:06.600)
And I had three young children.
Lex Fridman (2:17:07.760)
And so I was trying to reconcile,
Bryan Johnson (2:17:09.680)
this is not a, whether I live or not
Lex Fridman (2:17:12.960)
is not my decision by itself.
Bryan Johnson (2:17:14.920)
I'm now intertwined with these three little people
Lex Fridman (2:17:19.600)
and I have an obligation whether I like it or not,
Bryan Johnson (2:17:22.960)
I need to be there.
Lex Fridman (2:17:24.480)
And so it did, it felt like I was just stuck
Bryan Johnson (2:17:26.440)
in a straight jacket.
Lex Fridman (2:17:27.680)
And I had to decide whether I was going to summit
Bryan Johnson (2:17:32.240)
the next day with the team.
Lex Fridman (2:17:35.280)
And it was a difficult decision
Bryan Johnson (2:17:36.600)
because once you start hiking,
Lex Fridman (2:17:38.200)
there's no way to get off the mountain.
Lex Fridman (2:17:40.800)
And a midnight came and our guide came in
Lex Fridman (2:17:44.000)
and he said, where are you at?
Lex Fridman (2:17:44.960)
And I said, I think I'm okay, I think I can try.
Lex Fridman (2:17:48.200)
And so we went.
Lex Fridman (2:17:49.760)
And so from midnight to, I made it to the summit at 5 a.m.
Lex Fridman (2:17:56.840)
It was one of the most transformational moments
Bryan Johnson (2:17:59.640)
of my existence.
Lex Fridman (2:18:00.960)
And the mountain became my problem.
Bryan Johnson (2:18:06.560)
It became everything that I was struggling with.
Lex Fridman (2:18:09.920)
And when I started hiking, it was,
Bryan Johnson (2:18:12.560)
the pain got so ferocious that it was kind of like this.
Lex Fridman (2:18:19.080)
It became so ferocious that I turned my music to Eminem
Lex Fridman (2:18:25.040)
and it was, Eminem was the,
Lex Fridman (2:18:26.920)
he was the only person in existence that spoke to my soul.
Lex Fridman (2:18:31.160)
And it was something about his anger
Lex Fridman (2:18:33.680)
and his vibrancy and his multi eventually,
Bryan Johnson (2:18:38.040)
he's the only person who I could turn on
Lex Fridman (2:18:39.960)
and I could just say, I feel some relief.
Bryan Johnson (2:18:42.760)
I turned on Eminem and I made it to the summit
Lex Fridman (2:18:46.760)
after five hours, but just 100 yards from the top.
Bryan Johnson (2:18:51.000)
I was with my guide Ike and I started getting very dizzy
Lex Fridman (2:18:54.440)
and I felt like I was gonna fall backwards
Bryan Johnson (2:18:56.960)
off this cliff area we were on.
Lex Fridman (2:18:58.520)
I was like, this is dangerous.
Lex Fridman (2:19:00.440)
And he said, look, Brian, I know where you're at.
Lex Fridman (2:19:04.600)
I know where you're at.
Lex Fridman (2:19:06.200)
And I can tell you, you've got it in you.
Lex Fridman (2:19:08.400)
So I want you to look up, take a step, take a breath
Lex Fridman (2:19:14.360)
and look up, take a breath and take a step.
Lex Fridman (2:19:16.520)
And I did and I made it.
Lex Fridman (2:19:19.240)
And so I got there and I just sat down with him at the top.
Lex Fridman (2:19:22.720)
I just cried like a baby.
Bryan Johnson (2:19:24.200)
Broke down.
Lex Fridman (2:19:25.040)
Yeah, I just lost it.
Lex Fridman (2:19:26.720)
And so he'd let me do my thing.
Lex Fridman (2:19:29.520)
And then we pulled out the pulse oximeter
Lex Fridman (2:19:31.920)
and he measured my blood oxygen levels
Lex Fridman (2:19:33.240)
and it was like 50 something percent
Lex Fridman (2:19:36.080)
and it was danger zone.
Lex Fridman (2:19:36.960)
So he looked at it and I think he was like really alarmed
Bryan Johnson (2:19:39.560)
that I was in this situation.
Lex Fridman (2:19:41.160)
And so he said, we can't get a helicopter here
Lex Fridman (2:19:44.840)
and we can't get you emergency evacuated.
Lex Fridman (2:19:46.160)
You've gotta go down.
Bryan Johnson (2:19:47.000)
You've gotta hike down to 15,000 feet to get base camp.
Lex Fridman (2:19:49.720)
And so we went out on the mountain.
Bryan Johnson (2:19:53.080)
I got back down to base camp.
Lex Fridman (2:19:55.000)
And again, that was pretty difficult.
Lex Fridman (2:19:57.560)
And then they put me on a stretcher,
Lex Fridman (2:19:59.160)
this metal stretcher with this one wheel
Lex Fridman (2:20:01.040)
and a team of six people wheeled me down the mountain.
Lex Fridman (2:20:04.680)
And it was pretty torturous.
Bryan Johnson (2:20:06.440)
I'm very appreciative they did.
Lex Fridman (2:20:07.600)
Also the trail was very bumpy.
Lex Fridman (2:20:09.080)
So they'd go over the big rocks.
Lex Fridman (2:20:10.240)
And so my head would just slam
Bryan Johnson (2:20:11.880)
against this metal thing for hours.
Lex Fridman (2:20:14.880)
And so I just felt awful.
Bryan Johnson (2:20:15.960)
Plus I'd get my head slammed every couple of seconds.
Lex Fridman (2:20:18.880)
So the whole experience was really a life changing moment.
Lex Fridman (2:20:22.080)
And that was the demarcation of me
Lex Fridman (2:20:25.040)
basically building a new life.
Bryan Johnson (2:20:26.680)
Basically I said, I'm going to reconstruct Brian,
Lex Fridman (2:20:31.440)
my understanding of reality, my existential realities,
Lex Fridman (2:20:35.000)
what I want to go after.
Lex Fridman (2:20:36.760)
And I try, I mean, as much as that's possible as a human,
Lex Fridman (2:20:39.640)
but that's when I set out to rebuild everything.
Lex Fridman (2:20:44.360)
Was it the struggle of that?
Bryan Johnson (2:20:46.040)
I mean, there's also just like the romantic poetic,
Lex Fridman (2:20:50.840)
it's a fricking mountain.
Bryan Johnson (2:20:54.000)
There's a man in pain, psychological and physical
Lex Fridman (2:20:58.040)
struggling up a mountain.
Lex Fridman (2:20:59.840)
But it's just struggle, just in the face of,
Lex Fridman (2:21:05.600)
just pushing through in the face of hardship or nature too.
Bryan Johnson (2:21:09.800)
Something much bigger than you.
Lex Fridman (2:21:12.480)
Is that, was that the thing that just clicked?
Bryan Johnson (2:21:14.880)
For me, it felt like I was just locked in with reality
Lex Fridman (2:21:18.000)
and it was a death match.
Bryan Johnson (2:21:21.280)
It was in that moment, one of us is going to die.
Lex Fridman (2:21:24.040)
So you were pondering death, like not surviving.
Bryan Johnson (2:21:27.480)
Yep.
Lex Fridman (2:21:28.320)
And it was, and that was the moment.
Lex Fridman (2:21:29.880)
And it was, the summit to me was,
Lex Fridman (2:21:33.720)
I'm going to come out on top and I can do this.
Lex Fridman (2:21:35.920)
And giving in was, it's like, I'm just done.
Lex Fridman (2:21:40.640)
And so it did, I locked in and that's why,
Bryan Johnson (2:21:43.400)
yeah, mountains are magical to me.
Lex Fridman (2:21:49.200)
I didn't expect that.
Bryan Johnson (2:21:50.320)
I didn't design that.
Lex Fridman (2:21:51.240)
I didn't know that was going to be the case.
Bryan Johnson (2:21:52.960)
I not, it would not have been something
Lex Fridman (2:21:55.000)
I would have anticipated.
Lex Fridman (2:21:58.120)
But you were not the same man afterwards.
Lex Fridman (2:22:01.600)
Yeah.
Bryan Johnson (2:22:02.840)
Is there advice you can give to young people today
Lex Fridman (2:22:06.320)
that look at your story,
Bryan Johnson (2:22:07.400)
that's successful in many dimensions,
Lex Fridman (2:22:10.600)
advice you can give to them about how to be successful
Bryan Johnson (2:22:13.240)
in their career, successful in life,
Lex Fridman (2:22:16.160)
whatever path they choose?
Bryan Johnson (2:22:18.880)
Yes, I would say, listen to advice
Lex Fridman (2:22:22.560)
and see it for what it is, a mirror of that person,
Lex Fridman (2:22:28.840)
and then map and know that your future
Lex Fridman (2:22:31.920)
is going to be in a zero principle land.
Lex Fridman (2:22:34.760)
And so what you're hearing today is a representation
Lex Fridman (2:22:38.080)
of what may have been the right principles
Bryan Johnson (2:22:39.800)
to build upon previously,
Lex Fridman (2:22:41.360)
but they're likely depreciating very fast.
Lex Fridman (2:22:45.680)
And so I am a strong proponent
Lex Fridman (2:22:49.120)
that people ask for advice, but they don't take advice.
Lex Fridman (2:22:57.280)
So how do you take advice properly?
Lex Fridman (2:23:00.920)
It's in the careful examination of the advice.
Bryan Johnson (2:23:03.320)
It's actually the person makes a statement
Lex Fridman (2:23:06.600)
about a given thing somebody should follow.
Bryan Johnson (2:23:09.120)
The value is not doing that.
Lex Fridman (2:23:10.640)
The value is understanding the assumption stack they built,
Bryan Johnson (2:23:13.480)
the assumption and knowledge stack they built
Lex Fridman (2:23:15.320)
around that body of knowledge.
Bryan Johnson (2:23:18.080)
That's the value.
Lex Fridman (2:23:18.920)
It's not doing what they say.
Bryan Johnson (2:23:20.800)
Considering the advice, but digging deeper
Lex Fridman (2:23:25.080)
to understand the assumption stack,
Bryan Johnson (2:23:27.920)
like the full person,
Lex Fridman (2:23:29.560)
I mean, this is deep empathy, essentially,
Bryan Johnson (2:23:32.400)
to understand the journey of the person
Lex Fridman (2:23:34.200)
that arrived at the advice.
Lex Fridman (2:23:36.320)
And the advice is just the tip of the iceberg
Lex Fridman (2:23:39.040)
that ultimately is not the thing that gives you.
Bryan Johnson (2:23:41.080)
It could be the right thing to do.
Lex Fridman (2:23:43.560)
It could be the complete wrong thing to do
Bryan Johnson (2:23:45.080)
depending on the assumption stack.
Lex Fridman (2:23:47.000)
So you need to investigate the whole thing.
Bryan Johnson (2:23:49.520)
Is there some, are there been people in your startup
Lex Fridman (2:23:54.080)
and your business journey that have served that role
Lex Fridman (2:23:59.360)
of advice giver that's been helpful?
Lex Fridman (2:24:02.640)
Or do you feel like your journey felt like a lonely path?
Bryan Johnson (2:24:07.640)
Or was it one that was, of course,
Lex Fridman (2:24:11.520)
we're all there born and die alone.
Lex Fridman (2:24:15.240)
But do you fundamentally remember the experiences,
Lex Fridman (2:24:21.360)
one where you leaned on people
Lex Fridman (2:24:23.960)
at a particular moment in time that changed everything?
Lex Fridman (2:24:26.920)
Yeah, the most significant moments of my memory,
Bryan Johnson (2:24:30.840)
for example, like on Kilimanjaro,
Lex Fridman (2:24:33.040)
when Ike, some person I'd never met in Tanzania,
Bryan Johnson (2:24:38.160)
was able to, in that moment, apparently see my soul
Lex Fridman (2:24:41.800)
when I was in this death match with reality.
Lex Fridman (2:24:45.000)
And he gave me the instructions, look up, step.
Lex Fridman (2:24:48.680)
And so there's magical people in my life
Bryan Johnson (2:24:54.880)
that have done things like that.
Lex Fridman (2:24:57.640)
And I suspect they probably don't know.
Bryan Johnson (2:25:00.760)
I probably should be better at identifying those things.
Lex Fridman (2:25:04.480)
And, but yeah, hopefully the,
Bryan Johnson (2:25:16.000)
I suppose like the wisdom I would aspire to
Lex Fridman (2:25:18.960)
is to have the awareness and the empathy
Bryan Johnson (2:25:22.920)
to be that for other people.
Lex Fridman (2:25:24.920)
And not a retail advertiser of advice,
Bryan Johnson (2:25:33.640)
of tricks for life, but deeply meaningful
Lex Fridman (2:25:39.000)
and empathetic with a one on one context
Bryan Johnson (2:25:41.800)
with people that it really can make a difference.
Lex Fridman (2:25:45.560)
Yeah, I actually kind of experience,
Bryan Johnson (2:25:47.400)
I think about that sometimes.
Lex Fridman (2:25:49.040)
You have like an 18 year old kid come up to you.
Lex Fridman (2:25:51.560)
And it's not always obvious,
Lex Fridman (2:25:56.080)
it's not always easy to really listen to them.
Bryan Johnson (2:26:00.120)
Like not the facts, but like see who that person is.
Lex Fridman (2:26:04.600)
I think people say that about being a parent
Bryan Johnson (2:26:07.040)
is you want to consider that,
Lex Fridman (2:26:11.960)
you don't want to be the authority figure
Bryan Johnson (2:26:14.200)
in the sense that you really want to consider
Lex Fridman (2:26:16.040)
that there's a special unique human being there
Bryan Johnson (2:26:18.720)
with a unique brain that may be brilliant
Lex Fridman (2:26:23.520)
in ways that you are not understanding
Bryan Johnson (2:26:25.520)
that you'll never be and really try to hear that.
Lex Fridman (2:26:29.360)
So when giving advice, there's something to that.
Bryan Johnson (2:26:31.640)
It's a both sides should be deeply empathetic
Lex Fridman (2:26:34.000)
about the assumption stack.
Bryan Johnson (2:26:36.880)
I love that terminology.
Lex Fridman (2:26:38.800)
What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing of life?
Lex Fridman (2:26:43.400)
Why the hell are we here, Brian Johnson?
Lex Fridman (2:26:46.080)
We've been talking about brains and studying brains
Lex Fridman (2:26:48.320)
and you had this very eloquent way of describing life
Lex Fridman (2:26:51.440)
on Earth as an optimization problem
Bryan Johnson (2:26:55.400)
of the cost of intelligence going to zero.
Lex Fridman (2:26:59.400)
At first through the evolutionary process
Lex Fridman (2:27:01.760)
and then eventually through building,
Lex Fridman (2:27:05.280)
through our technology,
Bryan Johnson (2:27:06.720)
building more and more intelligent systems.
Lex Fridman (2:27:09.280)
You ever ask yourself why is doing that?
Bryan Johnson (2:27:13.600)
Yeah, I think the answer to this question,
Lex Fridman (2:27:17.440)
again, the information value is more in the mirror
Bryan Johnson (2:27:21.640)
it provides of that person,
Lex Fridman (2:27:24.360)
which is a representation of the technological,
Bryan Johnson (2:27:26.960)
social, political context of the time.
Lex Fridman (2:27:30.120)
So if you ask this question a hundred years ago,
Bryan Johnson (2:27:32.240)
you would get a certain answer
Lex Fridman (2:27:33.280)
that reflects that time period.
Bryan Johnson (2:27:35.040)
Same thing would be true of a thousand years ago.
Lex Fridman (2:27:36.960)
It's rare, it's difficult for a person to pull themselves
Bryan Johnson (2:27:40.920)
out of their contextual awareness
Lex Fridman (2:27:43.080)
and offer a truly original response.
Lex Fridman (2:27:45.240)
And so knowing that I am contextually influenced
Lex Fridman (2:27:48.520)
by the situation, that I am a mirror for our reality,
Bryan Johnson (2:27:52.400)
I would say that in this moment,
Lex Fridman (2:27:55.160)
I think the real game going on
Bryan Johnson (2:28:01.280)
is that evolution built a system
Lex Fridman (2:28:07.920)
of scaffolding intelligence that produced us.
Bryan Johnson (2:28:11.560)
We are now building intelligence systems
Lex Fridman (2:28:13.880)
that are scaffolding higher dimensional intelligence,
Bryan Johnson (2:28:19.040)
that's developing more robust systems of intelligence.
Lex Fridman (2:28:28.040)
In doing in that process with the cost going to zero,
Bryan Johnson (2:28:32.680)
then the meaning of life becomes goal alignment,
Lex Fridman (2:28:37.680)
which is the negotiation of our conscious
Lex Fridman (2:28:41.520)
and unconscious existence.
Lex Fridman (2:28:43.680)
And then I'd say the third thing is,
Bryan Johnson (2:28:45.040)
if we're thinking that we wanna be explorers
Lex Fridman (2:28:48.800)
is our technological progress is getting to a point
Bryan Johnson (2:28:52.920)
where we could aspirationally say,
Lex Fridman (2:28:57.240)
we want to figure out what is really going on,
Lex Fridman (2:29:01.240)
really going on, because does any of this really make sense?
Lex Fridman (2:29:06.600)
Now we may be a hundred, 200, 500, a thousand years away
Bryan Johnson (2:29:09.200)
from being able to poke our way out of whatever is going on.
Lex Fridman (2:29:16.000)
But it's interesting that we could even state an aspiration
Bryan Johnson (2:29:20.120)
to say, we wanna poke at this question.
Lex Fridman (2:29:22.960)
But I'd say in this moment of time,
Bryan Johnson (2:29:26.000)
the meaning of life is that we can build a future state
Lex Fridman (2:29:31.880)
of existence that is more fantastic
Bryan Johnson (2:29:35.200)
than anything we could ever imagine.
Lex Fridman (2:29:37.120)
The striving for something more amazing.
Lex Fridman (2:29:43.640)
And that defies expectations that we would consider
Lex Fridman (2:29:50.920)
bewildering and all the things that that's,
Lex Fridman (2:29:55.720)
and I guess the last thing,
Lex Fridman (2:29:57.280)
if there's multiple meanings of life,
Bryan Johnson (2:29:59.120)
it would be infinite games.
Lex Fridman (2:30:00.480)
James Kars wrote the book,
Bryan Johnson (2:30:01.960)
Finite Games, Infinite Games.
Lex Fridman (2:30:04.120)
The only game to play right now is to keep playing the game.
Lex Fridman (2:30:09.640)
And so this goes back to the algorithm
Lex Fridman (2:30:11.400)
of the Lex algorithm of diet soda and brisket
Lex Fridman (2:30:14.640)
and pursuing the passion.
Lex Fridman (2:30:16.200)
What I'm suggesting is there's a moment here
Bryan Johnson (2:30:19.320)
where we can contemplate playing infinite games.
Lex Fridman (2:30:22.560)
Therefore, it may make sense to err on the side
Bryan Johnson (2:30:25.840)
of making sure one is in a situation
Lex Fridman (2:30:27.720)
to be playing infinite games if that opportunity arises.
Lex Fridman (2:30:31.240)
So the landscape of possibility is changing very, very fast
Lex Fridman (2:30:35.320)
and therefore our old algorithms
Bryan Johnson (2:30:37.000)
of how we might assess risk assessment
Lex Fridman (2:30:38.440)
and what things we might pursue
Lex Fridman (2:30:39.280)
and why those assumptions may fall away very quickly.
Lex Fridman (2:30:44.120)
Well, I think I speak for a lot of people
Bryan Johnson (2:30:46.120)
when I say that the game you, Mr. Brian Johnson,
Lex Fridman (2:30:50.520)
have been playing is quite incredible.
Bryan Johnson (2:30:53.200)
Thank you so much for talking to me.
Lex Fridman (2:30:54.280)
Thanks, Lex.
Bryan Johnson (2:30:56.160)
Thanks for listening to this conversation
Lex Fridman (2:30:57.680)
with Brian Johnson and thank you
Bryan Johnson (2:30:59.480)
to Four Sigmatic, NetSuite, Grammarly, and ExpressVPN.
Lex Fridman (2:31:05.040)
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman (2:31:08.360)
And now let me leave you with some words
Lex Fridman (2:31:10.120)
from Diane Ackerman.
Bryan Johnson (2:31:12.000)
Our brain is a crowded chemistry lab,
Lex Fridman (2:31:15.120)
bustling with nonstop neural conversations.
Bryan Johnson (2:31:18.760)
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman (30:05.020)
I try to spend the first two hours of every day,
Bryan Johnson (30:07.860)
usually if I'm like at home and have nothing on my schedule
Lex Fridman (30:11.340)
is going to be up to eight hours of deep work,
Bryan Johnson (30:15.020)
of focus, zero distraction.
Lex Fridman (30:16.740)
And for me to analyze, I mean I'm very aware
Bryan Johnson (30:20.060)
of the waning of that, the ups and downs of that.
Lex Fridman (30:24.780)
And it's almost like you're surfing the ups and downs
Bryan Johnson (30:27.940)
of that as you're doing programming,
Lex Fridman (30:29.440)
as you're doing thinking about particular problems,
Bryan Johnson (30:32.580)
you're trying to visualize things in your mind,
Lex Fridman (30:34.260)
you start trying to stitch them together.
Bryan Johnson (30:37.300)
You're trying to, when there's a dead end about an idea,
Lex Fridman (30:40.960)
you have to kind of calmly like walk back and start again,
Bryan Johnson (30:45.520)
all those kinds of processes.
Lex Fridman (30:47.260)
It'd be interesting to get data
Bryan Johnson (30:49.020)
on what my mind is actually doing.
Lex Fridman (30:51.100)
And also recently started doing,
Bryan Johnson (30:53.360)
I just talked to Sam Harris a few days ago
Lex Fridman (30:55.940)
and been building up to that.
Bryan Johnson (30:58.080)
I started using, started meditating using his app,
Lex Fridman (31:01.900)
Waking Up, I very much recommend it.
Bryan Johnson (31:05.340)
It'd be interesting to get data on that
Lex Fridman (31:07.500)
because it's, you're very, it's like you're removing
Bryan Johnson (31:10.540)
all the noise from your head and you very much,
Lex Fridman (31:13.740)
it's an active process of active noise removal,
Bryan Johnson (31:18.340)
active noise canceling like the headphones.
Lex Fridman (31:21.220)
And it'd be interesting to see what is going on in the mind
Bryan Johnson (31:24.900)
before the meditation, during it and after,
Lex Fridman (31:28.400)
all those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (31:29.240)
And all of your examples, it's interesting
Lex Fridman (31:31.280)
that everyone who's designed an experience for you,
Lex Fridman (31:35.400)
so whether it be the meditation app or the Deep Work
Lex Fridman (31:38.520)
or all the things you mentioned,
Bryan Johnson (31:40.400)
they constructed this product
Lex Fridman (31:43.280)
with a certain number of knowns.
Bryan Johnson (31:45.920)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (31:47.040)
Now, what if we expanded the number of knowns by 10X
Bryan Johnson (31:50.580)
or 20X or 30X, they would reconstruct their product
Lex Fridman (31:54.240)
or incorporate those knowns.
Lex Fridman (31:55.480)
So it'd be, and so this is the dimensionality
Lex Fridman (31:58.520)
that I think is the promising aspect
Bryan Johnson (32:00.320)
is that people will be able to use this quantification,
Lex Fridman (32:04.600)
use this information to build more effective products.
Lex Fridman (32:09.260)
And this is, I'm not talking about better products
Lex Fridman (32:11.360)
to advertise to you or manipulate you.
Bryan Johnson (32:13.960)
I'm talking about our focus is helping people,
Lex Fridman (32:17.820)
individuals have this contextual awareness
Lex Fridman (32:20.360)
and this quantification and then to engage with others
Lex Fridman (32:23.040)
who are seeking to improve people's lives,
Bryan Johnson (32:26.060)
that the objective is betterment across ourselves,
Lex Fridman (32:31.360)
individually and also with each other.
Bryan Johnson (32:33.480)
Yeah, so it's a nice data stream to have
Lex Fridman (32:35.000)
if you're building an app,
Bryan Johnson (32:36.120)
like if you're building a podcast listening app,
Lex Fridman (32:38.040)
it would be nice to know data about the listener
Lex Fridman (32:40.320)
so that like if you're bored or you fell asleep,
Lex Fridman (32:42.820)
maybe pause the podcast, it's like really dumb,
Bryan Johnson (32:46.000)
just very simple applications
Lex Fridman (32:48.400)
that could just improve the quality of the experience
Bryan Johnson (32:50.640)
of using the app.
Lex Fridman (32:52.000)
I'm imagining if you have your neural, this is Lex
Lex Fridman (32:56.680)
and there's a statistical representation of you
Lex Fridman (32:59.880)
and you engage with the app and it says,
Bryan Johnson (33:02.540)
Lex, you're best to engage with this meditation exercise
Lex Fridman (33:09.560)
in the following settings.
Bryan Johnson (33:11.040)
At this time of day, after eating this kind of food
Lex Fridman (33:14.020)
or not eating, fasting with this level of blood glucose
Lex Fridman (33:17.380)
and this kind of night's sleep.
Lex Fridman (33:19.680)
But all these data combined
Bryan Johnson (33:23.000)
to give you this contextually relevant experience,
Lex Fridman (33:26.600)
just like we do with our sleep.
Bryan Johnson (33:27.800)
You've optimized your entire life based upon
Lex Fridman (33:30.360)
what information you can acquire and know about yourself.
Lex Fridman (33:34.240)
And so the question is, how much do we really know
Lex Fridman (33:37.200)
of the things going around us?
Lex Fridman (33:38.480)
And I would venture to guess in my own life experience,
Lex Fridman (33:41.520)
I capture, my self awareness captures an extremely small
Bryan Johnson (33:45.920)
percent of the things that actually influence
Lex Fridman (33:47.760)
my conscious and unconscious experience.
Bryan Johnson (33:50.500)
Well, in some sense, the data would help encourage you
Lex Fridman (33:54.560)
to be more self aware, not just because you trust everything
Bryan Johnson (33:57.520)
the data is saying, but it'll give you a prod
Lex Fridman (34:02.820)
to start investigating.
Bryan Johnson (34:04.800)
Like I would love to get like a rating,
Lex Fridman (34:08.040)
like a ranking of all the things I do
Lex Fridman (34:11.160)
and what are the things, it's probably important to do
Lex Fridman (34:13.800)
without the data, but the data will certainly help.
Bryan Johnson (34:16.280)
It's like rank all the things you do in life
Lex Fridman (34:19.840)
and which ones make you feel shitty,
Bryan Johnson (34:21.800)
which ones make you feel good.
Lex Fridman (34:23.600)
Like you're talking about evening, Brian.
Bryan Johnson (34:26.460)
Like this is a good example, somebody like,
Lex Fridman (34:30.320)
I do pig out at night as well.
Lex Fridman (34:32.680)
And it never makes me feel good.
Lex Fridman (34:35.840)
Like you're in a safe space.
Bryan Johnson (34:37.400)
This is a safe space, let's hear it.
Lex Fridman (34:40.440)
No, I definitely have much less self control
Bryan Johnson (34:42.720)
at night and it's interesting.
Lex Fridman (34:44.400)
And the same, people might criticize this,
Lex Fridman (34:47.760)
but I know my own body.
Lex Fridman (34:50.000)
I know when I eat carnivores, just eat meat,
Bryan Johnson (34:52.800)
I feel much better than if I eat more carbs.
Lex Fridman (35:00.120)
The more carbs I eat, the worse I feel.
Bryan Johnson (35:02.300)
I don't know why that is.
Lex Fridman (35:04.160)
There is science supporting it,
Lex Fridman (35:05.260)
but I'm not leaning on science.
Lex Fridman (35:06.640)
I'm leaning on personal experience
Lex Fridman (35:07.720)
and that's really important.
Lex Fridman (35:09.360)
I don't need to read, I'm not gonna go on a whole rant
Bryan Johnson (35:12.560)
about nutrition science, but many of those studies
Lex Fridman (35:15.680)
are very flawed.
Bryan Johnson (35:17.160)
They're doing their best, but nutrition science
Lex Fridman (35:19.420)
is a very difficult field of study
Bryan Johnson (35:21.680)
because humans are so different
Lex Fridman (35:24.200)
and the mind has so much impact
Bryan Johnson (35:26.120)
on the way your body behaves.
Lex Fridman (35:28.440)
And it's so difficult from a scientific perspective
Bryan Johnson (35:30.800)
to conduct really strong studies
Lex Fridman (35:32.760)
that you have to be almost like a scientist of one
Bryan Johnson (35:36.960)
if to do these studies on yourself.
Lex Fridman (35:39.020)
That's the best way to understand what works for you or not.
Lex Fridman (35:41.560)
And I don't understand why, because it sounds unhealthy,
Lex Fridman (35:44.560)
but eating only meat always makes me feel good.
Bryan Johnson (35:47.440)
Just eat meat, that's it.
Lex Fridman (35:49.680)
And I don't have any allergies, any of that kind of stuff.
Bryan Johnson (35:52.880)
I'm not full like Jordan Peterson,
Lex Fridman (35:54.520)
where if he deviates a little bit from the carnivore diet,
Bryan Johnson (36:01.360)
he goes off the cliff.
Lex Fridman (36:03.200)
No, I can have chocolate, I can go off the diet,
Bryan Johnson (36:06.320)
I feel fine, it's a gradual worsening of how I feel.
Lex Fridman (36:14.920)
But when I eat only meat, I feel great.
Lex Fridman (36:17.080)
And it'd be nice to be reminded of that.
Lex Fridman (36:19.280)
Like there's a very simple fact
Bryan Johnson (36:21.920)
that I feel good when I eat carnivore.
Lex Fridman (36:24.200)
And I think that repeats itself in all kinds of experiences.
Bryan Johnson (36:27.560)
Like I feel really good when I exercise.
Lex Fridman (36:32.560)
I hate exercise, but in the rest of the day,
Bryan Johnson (36:39.760)
the impact it has on my mind and the clarity of mind
Lex Fridman (36:43.640)
and the experiences and the happiness
Lex Fridman (36:45.800)
and all those kinds of things, I feel really good.
Lex Fridman (36:48.040)
And to be able to concretely express that through data
Bryan Johnson (36:52.440)
would be nice.
Lex Fridman (36:53.800)
It would be a nice reminder, almost like a statement,
Bryan Johnson (36:55.840)
like remember what feels good and whatnot.
Lex Fridman (36:58.280)
And there could be things like that,
Bryan Johnson (37:01.800)
I'm not, many things that you're suggesting
Lex Fridman (37:04.560)
that I could not be aware of,
Bryan Johnson (37:07.000)
that might be sitting right in front of me
Lex Fridman (37:09.080)
that make me feel really good and make me feel not good.
Lex Fridman (37:12.160)
And the data would show that.
Lex Fridman (37:14.000)
I agree with you.
Bryan Johnson (37:14.840)
I've actually employed the same strategy.
Lex Fridman (37:17.320)
I fired my mind entirely from being responsible
Bryan Johnson (37:21.480)
for constructing my diet.
Lex Fridman (37:23.240)
And so I started doing a program
Bryan Johnson (37:24.600)
where I now track over 200 biomarkers every 90 days.
Lex Fridman (37:28.680)
And it captures, of course, the things you would expect
Bryan Johnson (37:31.800)
like cholesterol, but also DNA methylation
Lex Fridman (37:34.360)
and all kinds of things about my body,
Bryan Johnson (37:37.120)
all the processes that make up me.
Lex Fridman (37:39.360)
And then I let that data generate the shopping lists.
Lex Fridman (37:43.280)
And so I never actually ask my mind what it wants.
Lex Fridman (37:45.560)
It's entirely what my body is reporting that it wants.
Lex Fridman (37:48.360)
And so I call this goal alignment within Brian.
Lex Fridman (37:51.760)
And there's 200 plus actors
Bryan Johnson (37:53.480)
that I'm currently asking their opinion of.
Lex Fridman (37:55.240)
And so I'm asking my liver, how are you doing?
Lex Fridman (37:57.800)
And it's expressing via the biomarkers.
Lex Fridman (38:00.200)
And so that I construct that diet
Lex Fridman (38:02.280)
and I only eat those foods until my next testing round.
Lex Fridman (38:06.160)
And that has changed my life more than I think anything else
Bryan Johnson (38:10.840)
because in the demotion of my conscious mind
Lex Fridman (38:15.920)
that I gave primacy to my entire life,
Bryan Johnson (38:18.000)
it led me astray because like you were saying,
Lex Fridman (38:20.480)
the mind then goes out into the world
Lex Fridman (38:22.520)
and it navigates the dozens
Lex Fridman (38:25.720)
of different dietary regimens people put together in books.
Lex Fridman (38:29.080)
And it's all has their supporting science
Lex Fridman (38:32.760)
in certain contextual settings, but it's not N of one.
Lex Fridman (38:35.720)
And like you're saying, this dietary really is an N of one.
Lex Fridman (38:39.440)
What people have published scientifically of course
Bryan Johnson (38:41.920)
can be used for nice groundings,
Lex Fridman (38:46.480)
but it changes when you get to an N of one level.
Lex Fridman (38:48.580)
And so that's what gets me excited about brain interfaces
Lex Fridman (38:51.680)
is if I could do the same thing for my brain
Bryan Johnson (38:54.640)
where I can stop asking my conscious mind for its advice
Lex Fridman (38:58.000)
or for its decision making, which is flawed.
Lex Fridman (39:01.520)
And I'd rather just look at this data
Lex Fridman (39:03.520)
and I've never had better health markers in my life
Bryan Johnson (39:05.640)
than when I stopped actually asking myself
Lex Fridman (39:08.000)
to be in charge of it.
Bryan Johnson (39:09.680)
The idea of demotion of the conscious mind
Lex Fridman (39:15.040)
is such a sort of engineering way of phrasing meditation.
Lex Fridman (39:21.680)
That's what we're doing, right?
Lex Fridman (39:22.840)
That's beautiful, that means really beautifully put.
Lex Fridman (39:26.120)
By the way, testing round, what does that look like?
Lex Fridman (39:28.560)
What's that?
Bryan Johnson (39:29.900)
Well, you mentioned.
Lex Fridman (39:31.360)
Yeah, the test I do.
Bryan Johnson (39:33.240)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (39:34.080)
So it includes a complete blood panel.
Bryan Johnson (39:37.560)
I do a microbiome test.
Lex Fridman (39:39.040)
I do a diet induced inflammation.
Lex Fridman (39:43.560)
So I look for exotokine expressions.
Lex Fridman (39:45.440)
So foods that produce inflammatory reactions.
Bryan Johnson (39:48.400)
I look at my neuroendocrine systems.
Lex Fridman (39:50.120)
I look at all my neurotransmitters.
Bryan Johnson (39:53.000)
I do, yeah, there's several micronutrient tests
Lex Fridman (39:57.440)
to see how I'm looking at the various nutrients.
Lex Fridman (39:59.400)
What about self report of how you feel?
Lex Fridman (40:04.500)
Almost like, you can't demote your,
Lex Fridman (40:09.160)
you still exist within your conscious mind, right?
Lex Fridman (40:12.520)
So that lived experience is of a lot of value.
Lex Fridman (40:16.280)
So how do you measure that?
Lex Fridman (40:17.880)
I do a temporal sampling over some duration of time.
Lex Fridman (40:20.920)
So I'll think through how I feel over a week,
Lex Fridman (40:23.720)
over a month, over three months.
Bryan Johnson (40:25.760)
I don't do a temporal sampling of
Lex Fridman (40:27.540)
if I'm at the grocery store in front of a cereal box
Lex Fridman (40:29.680)
and be like, you know what, Captain Crunch
Lex Fridman (40:31.800)
is probably the right thing for me today
Bryan Johnson (40:33.320)
because I'm feeling like I need a little fun in my life.
Lex Fridman (40:36.560)
And so it's a temporal sampling.
Bryan Johnson (40:37.640)
If the data sets large enough,
Lex Fridman (40:38.840)
then I smooth out the function of my natural oscillations
Bryan Johnson (40:42.200)
of how I feel about life where some days I may feel upset
Lex Fridman (40:45.360)
or depressed or down or whatever.
Lex Fridman (40:47.360)
And I don't want those moments
Lex Fridman (40:48.920)
to then rule my decision making.
Bryan Johnson (40:50.480)
That's why the demotion happens.
Lex Fridman (40:52.480)
And it says, really, if you're looking at
Bryan Johnson (40:54.160)
health over a 90 day period of time,
Lex Fridman (40:56.520)
all my 200 voices speak up on that interval.
Lex Fridman (41:00.040)
And they're all given voice to say,
Lex Fridman (41:02.360)
this is how I'm doing and this is what I want.
Lex Fridman (41:04.600)
And so it really is an accounting system for everybody.
Lex Fridman (41:07.120)
So that's why I think that if you think about
Bryan Johnson (41:10.140)
the future of being human,
Lex Fridman (41:11.740)
there's two things I think that are really going on.
Bryan Johnson (41:17.820)
One is the design, manufacturing,
Lex Fridman (41:20.020)
and distribution of intelligence
Bryan Johnson (41:22.860)
is heading towards zero on a cost curve
Lex Fridman (41:26.740)
over a certain design, over a certain timeframe
Bryan Johnson (41:30.180)
that our ability to, you know, evolution produced us
Lex Fridman (41:33.140)
an intelligent form of intelligence.
Bryan Johnson (41:35.580)
We are now designing our own intelligence systems
Lex Fridman (41:38.580)
and the design, manufacturing, distribution
Bryan Johnson (41:40.140)
of that intelligence over a certain timeframe
Lex Fridman (41:42.860)
is going to go to a cost of zero.
Bryan Johnson (41:45.100)
Design, manufacturing, distribution of intelligence
Lex Fridman (41:48.060)
cost is going to zero.
Bryan Johnson (41:49.700)
For example.
Lex Fridman (41:50.540)
Again, just give me a second.
Bryan Johnson (41:52.540)
That's brilliant, okay.
Lex Fridman (41:54.540)
And evolution is doing the design, manufacturing,
Bryan Johnson (41:58.300)
distribution of intelligence.
Lex Fridman (41:59.880)
And now we are doing the design, manufacturing,
Bryan Johnson (42:02.380)
distribution of intelligence.
Lex Fridman (42:04.420)
And the cost of that is going to zero.
Bryan Johnson (42:06.660)
That's a very nice way of looking at life on Earth.
Lex Fridman (42:10.780)
So if that's going on and then now in parallel to that,
Bryan Johnson (42:15.580)
then you say, okay, what then happens
Lex Fridman (42:19.060)
if when that cost curve is heading to zero?
Bryan Johnson (42:24.700)
Our existence becomes a goal alignment problem,
Lex Fridman (42:28.780)
a goal alignment function.
Lex Fridman (42:31.340)
And so the same thing I'm doing
Lex Fridman (42:33.060)
where I'm doing goal alignment within myself
Bryan Johnson (42:34.880)
of these 200 biomarkers, where I'm saying,
Lex Fridman (42:37.580)
when Brian exists on a daily basis
Lex Fridman (42:41.740)
and this entity is deciding what to eat
Lex Fridman (42:43.740)
and what to do and et cetera,
Bryan Johnson (42:45.300)
it's not just my conscious mind, which is opining,
Lex Fridman (42:47.780)
it's 200 biological processes
Lex Fridman (42:50.220)
and there's a whole bunch of more voices involved.
Lex Fridman (42:52.140)
So in that equation,
Bryan Johnson (42:57.400)
we're going to increasingly automate the things
Lex Fridman (43:02.060)
that we spend high energy on today because it's easier.
Lex Fridman (43:05.340)
And now we're going to then negotiate the terms
Lex Fridman (43:09.260)
and conditions of intelligent life.
Bryan Johnson (43:11.200)
Now we say conscious existence because we're biased
Lex Fridman (43:13.180)
because that's what we have,
Lex Fridman (43:15.100)
but it will be the largest computational exercise
Lex Fridman (43:18.140)
in history because you're now doing goal alignment
Bryan Johnson (43:20.380)
with planet Earth, within yourself, with each other,
Lex Fridman (43:24.980)
within all the intelligent agents we're building,
Bryan Johnson (43:26.900)
bots and other voice assistants.
Lex Fridman (43:29.420)
You basically have a trillions and trillions of agents
Bryan Johnson (43:32.020)
working on the negotiation of goal alignment.
Lex Fridman (43:35.860)
Yeah, this is in fact true.
Lex Fridman (43:39.180)
And what was the second thing?
Lex Fridman (43:40.580)
That was it.
Lex Fridman (43:41.420)
So the cost, the design, manufacturing, distribution
Lex Fridman (43:44.300)
of intelligence going to zero,
Lex Fridman (43:45.860)
which then means what's really going on?
Lex Fridman (43:48.660)
What are we really doing?
Bryan Johnson (43:50.180)
We're negotiating the terms and conditions of existence.
Lex Fridman (43:55.100)
Do you worry about the survival of this process
Bryan Johnson (43:59.220)
that life as we know it on Earth comes to an end
Lex Fridman (44:04.900)
or at least intelligent life,
Bryan Johnson (44:06.620)
that as the cost goes to zero something happens
Lex Fridman (44:11.580)
where all of that intelligence is thrown in the trash
Bryan Johnson (44:14.980)
by something like nuclear war or development of AGI systems
Lex Fridman (44:19.220)
that are very dumb, not AGI I guess,
Lex Fridman (44:21.960)
but AI systems, the paperclip thing,
Lex Fridman (44:25.380)
en masse is dumb but has unintended consequences
Bryan Johnson (44:28.980)
where it destroys human civilization.
Lex Fridman (44:31.060)
Do you worry about those kinds of things?
Bryan Johnson (44:32.260)
I mean, it's unsurprising that a new thing
Lex Fridman (44:37.140)
comes into the sphere of human consciousness.
Bryan Johnson (44:40.980)
Humans identify the foreign object,
Lex Fridman (44:43.020)
in this case, artificial intelligence.
Bryan Johnson (44:45.460)
Our amygdala fires up and says scary, foreign,
Lex Fridman (44:50.660)
we should be apprehensive about this.
Lex Fridman (44:53.300)
And so it makes sense from a biological perspective
Lex Fridman (44:57.020)
that humans, the knee jerk reaction is fear.
Lex Fridman (45:02.060)
What I don't think has been properly weighted with that
Lex Fridman (45:08.260)
is that we are the first generation of intelligent beings
Bryan Johnson (45:13.940)
on this Earth that has been able to look out
Lex Fridman (45:17.260)
over their expected lifetime
Lex Fridman (45:20.420)
and see there is a real possibility of evolving
Lex Fridman (45:23.420)
into entirely novel forms of consciousness, so different
Bryan Johnson (45:28.780)
that it would be totally unrecognizable to us today.
Lex Fridman (45:33.060)
We don't have words for it, we can't hint at it,
Bryan Johnson (45:34.900)
we can't point at it, we can't,
Lex Fridman (45:36.900)
you can't look in the sky and see that thing
Bryan Johnson (45:38.460)
that is shining, we're gonna go up there.
Lex Fridman (45:40.940)
You cannot even create an aspirational statement about it.
Lex Fridman (45:46.780)
And instead we've had this knee jerk reaction of fear
Lex Fridman (45:51.780)
about everything that could go wrong.
Lex Fridman (45:53.540)
But in my estimation, this should be the defining aspiration
Lex Fridman (46:00.500)
of all intelligent life on Earth that we would aspire,
Bryan Johnson (46:04.540)
that basically every generation surveys the landscape
Lex Fridman (46:08.020)
of possibilities that are afforded,
Bryan Johnson (46:09.380)
given the technological, cultural
Lex Fridman (46:10.980)
and other contextual situation that they're in.
Bryan Johnson (46:14.500)
We're in this context, we haven't yet identified this
Lex Fridman (46:17.940)
and said, this is unbelievable, we should carefully
Bryan Johnson (46:22.660)
think this thing through, not just of mitigating
Lex Fridman (46:26.060)
the things that'll wipe us out,
Lex Fridman (46:27.100)
but we have this potential,
Lex Fridman (46:29.540)
and so we just haven't given voice to it,
Bryan Johnson (46:31.580)
even though it's within this realm of possibilities.
Lex Fridman (46:33.740)
So you're excited about the possibility
Bryan Johnson (46:35.340)
of superintelligence systems
Lex Fridman (46:37.020)
and the opportunities that bring,
Bryan Johnson (46:38.980)
I mean, there's parallels to this,
Lex Fridman (46:41.660)
you think about people before the internet
Bryan Johnson (46:43.940)
as the internet was coming to life,
Lex Fridman (46:45.940)
I mean, there's kind of a fog through which you can't see,
Lex Fridman (46:51.020)
what does the future look like?
Lex Fridman (46:54.340)
Predicting collective intelligence,
Bryan Johnson (46:56.460)
which I don't think we're understanding
Lex Fridman (46:57.740)
that we're living through that now,
Bryan Johnson (46:59.300)
is that there's now, we've in some sense
Lex Fridman (47:03.100)
stopped being individual intelligences
Lex Fridman (47:05.580)
and become much more like collective intelligences,
Lex Fridman (47:09.420)
because ideas travel much, much faster now,
Lex Fridman (47:13.780)
and they can, in a viral way,
Lex Fridman (47:16.700)
sweep across the populations,
Lex Fridman (47:18.940)
and so it's almost, I mean, it almost feels like
Lex Fridman (47:23.340)
a thought is had by many people now,
Bryan Johnson (47:26.500)
thousands or millions of people
Lex Fridman (47:27.940)
as opposed to an individual person,
Lex Fridman (47:29.780)
and that's changed everything,
Lex Fridman (47:30.860)
but to me, I don't think we're realizing
Lex Fridman (47:33.060)
how much that actually changed people or societies,
Lex Fridman (47:36.220)
but to predict that before the internet
Bryan Johnson (47:38.980)
would have been very difficult,
Lex Fridman (47:41.220)
and in that same way, we're sitting here
Bryan Johnson (47:43.220)
with the fog before us, thinking,
Lex Fridman (47:45.300)
what is superintelligence systems,
Lex Fridman (47:49.620)
how is that going to change the world?
Lex Fridman (47:51.780)
What is increasing the bandwidth,
Bryan Johnson (47:54.740)
like plugging our brains into this whole thing,
Lex Fridman (47:59.380)
how is that going to change the world?
Lex Fridman (48:01.340)
And it seems like it's a fog, you don't know,
Lex Fridman (48:05.740)
and it could be, it could, whatever comes to be,
Bryan Johnson (48:10.820)
could destroy the world,
Lex Fridman (48:12.460)
we could be the last generation,
Lex Fridman (48:14.980)
but it also could transform in ways
Lex Fridman (48:18.100)
that creates an incredibly fulfilling life experience
Bryan Johnson (48:24.500)
that's unlike anything we've ever experienced.
Lex Fridman (48:27.380)
It might involve dissolution of ego and consciousness
Lex Fridman (48:30.420)
and so on, you're no longer one individual,
Lex Fridman (48:32.620)
it might be more, you know,
Bryan Johnson (48:35.980)
that might be a certain kind of death, an ego death,
Lex Fridman (48:38.900)
but the experience might be really exciting and enriching,
Bryan Johnson (48:42.220)
maybe we'll live in a virtual,
Lex Fridman (48:44.020)
like it's like, it's funny to think about
Bryan Johnson (48:48.100)
a bunch of sort of hypothetical questions
Lex Fridman (48:49.900)
of would it be more fulfilling to live in a virtual world?
Bryan Johnson (48:57.820)
Like if you were able to plug your brain in
Lex Fridman (48:59.540)
in a very dense way into a video game,
Lex Fridman (49:03.580)
like which world would you want to live in?
Lex Fridman (49:05.700)
In the video game or in the physical world?
Bryan Johnson (49:08.860)
For most of us, we're kind of toying it
Lex Fridman (49:12.940)
with the idea of the video game,
Lex Fridman (49:14.100)
but we still want to live in the physical world,
Lex Fridman (49:16.060)
have friendships and relationships in the physical world,
Lex Fridman (49:20.060)
but we don't know that, again, it's a fog,
Lex Fridman (49:23.380)
and maybe in 100 years,
Bryan Johnson (49:25.460)
we're all living inside a video game,
Lex Fridman (49:27.180)
hopefully not Call of Duty,
Lex Fridman (49:29.060)
hopefully more like Sims 5, which version is it on?
Lex Fridman (49:33.940)
For you individually though,
Lex Fridman (49:36.060)
does it make you sad that your brain ends?
Lex Fridman (49:41.620)
That you die one day very soon?
Bryan Johnson (49:45.900)
That the whole thing, that data source
Lex Fridman (49:49.220)
just goes offline sooner than you would like?
Bryan Johnson (49:54.660)
That's a complicated question.
Lex Fridman (49:56.060)
I would have answered it differently
Bryan Johnson (49:59.180)
in different times in my life.
Lex Fridman (50:00.620)
I had chronic depression for 10 years,
Lex Fridman (50:03.300)
and so in that 10 year time period,
Lex Fridman (50:06.060)
I desperately wanted lights to be off,
Lex Fridman (50:09.140)
and the thing that made it even worse
Lex Fridman (50:11.060)
is I was in a religious, I was born into a religion.
Bryan Johnson (50:15.860)
It was the only reality I ever understood,
Lex Fridman (50:17.780)
and it's difficult to articulate to people
Bryan Johnson (50:20.340)
when you're born into that kind of reality
Lex Fridman (50:22.180)
and it's the only reality you're exposed to,
Bryan Johnson (50:24.860)
you are literally blinded to the existence of other realities
Lex Fridman (50:28.220)
because it's so much the in group, out group thing,
Lex Fridman (50:31.460)
and so in that situation,
Lex Fridman (50:33.820)
it was not only that I desperately wanted lights out forever,
Bryan Johnson (50:37.300)
it was that I couldn't have lights out forever.
Lex Fridman (50:38.860)
It was that there was an afterlife,
Lex Fridman (50:40.700)
and this afterlife had this system
Lex Fridman (50:45.460)
that would either penalize or reward you for your behaviors,
Lex Fridman (50:50.500)
and so it was almost like this,
Lex Fridman (50:53.860)
this indescribable hopelessness
Bryan Johnson (50:57.820)
of not only being in hopeless despair
Lex Fridman (51:01.060)
of not wanting to exist,
Lex Fridman (51:02.180)
but then also being forced to exist,
Lex Fridman (51:05.180)
and so there was a duration of my time,
Bryan Johnson (51:06.780)
a duration of life where I'd say,
Lex Fridman (51:08.620)
like yes, I have no remorse for lights being out,
Lex Fridman (51:13.300)
and I actually want it more than anything
Lex Fridman (51:15.380)
in the entire world.
Bryan Johnson (51:18.700)
There are other times where I'm looking out at the future
Lex Fridman (51:21.260)
and I say this is an opportunity
Bryan Johnson (51:24.980)
for a future evolving human conscious experience
Lex Fridman (51:27.860)
that is beyond my ability to understand,
Lex Fridman (51:31.540)
and I jump out of bed and I race to work
Lex Fridman (51:34.380)
and I can't think about anything else,
Lex Fridman (51:37.620)
but I think the reality for me is,
Lex Fridman (51:44.300)
I don't know what it's like to be in your head,
Lex Fridman (51:45.740)
but in my head, when I wake up in the morning,
Lex Fridman (51:48.980)
I don't say good morning, Brian, I'm so happy to see you.
Bryan Johnson (51:52.900)
Like I'm sure you're just gonna be beautiful to me today.
Lex Fridman (51:55.980)
You're not gonna make a huge long list
Bryan Johnson (51:57.620)
of everything you should be anxious about.
Lex Fridman (51:59.140)
You're not gonna repeat that list to me 400 times.
Bryan Johnson (52:01.420)
You're not gonna have me relive
Lex Fridman (52:03.060)
all the regrets I've made in life.
Bryan Johnson (52:04.660)
I'm sure you're not doing any of that.
Lex Fridman (52:06.060)
You're just gonna just help me along all day long.
Bryan Johnson (52:08.900)
I mean, it's a brutal environment in my brain,
Lex Fridman (52:11.820)
and we've just become normalized to this environment
Bryan Johnson (52:15.580)
that we just accept that this is what it means to be human,
Lex Fridman (52:18.420)
but if we look at it, if we try to muster
Bryan Johnson (52:21.820)
as much soberness as we can
Lex Fridman (52:24.100)
about the realities of being human, it's brutal.
Bryan Johnson (52:27.260)
If it is for me, and so am I sad
Lex Fridman (52:31.940)
that the brain may be off one day?
Bryan Johnson (52:37.060)
It depends on the contextual setting.
Lex Fridman (52:38.300)
Like how am I feeling?
Lex Fridman (52:39.140)
At what moment are you asking me that?
Lex Fridman (52:40.540)
And my mind is so fickle.
Lex Fridman (52:42.460)
And this is why, again, I don't trust my conscious mind.
Lex Fridman (52:45.180)
I have been given realities.
Bryan Johnson (52:47.500)
I was given a religious reality that was a video game.
Lex Fridman (52:51.540)
And then I figured out it was not a real reality.
Lex Fridman (52:54.540)
And then I lived in a depressive reality,
Lex Fridman (52:56.260)
which delivered this terrible hopelessness.
Bryan Johnson (52:59.740)
That wasn't a real reality.
Lex Fridman (53:00.780)
Then I discovered behavioral psychology,
Lex Fridman (53:03.180)
and I figured out how biased, 188 chronicle biases,
Lex Fridman (53:06.420)
and how my brain is distorting reality all the time.
Bryan Johnson (53:08.900)
I have gone from one reality to another.
Lex Fridman (53:11.300)
I don't trust reality.
Bryan Johnson (53:13.580)
I don't trust realities are given to me.
Lex Fridman (53:15.860)
And so to try to make a decision
Bryan Johnson (53:17.540)
on what I value or not value that future state,
Lex Fridman (53:20.620)
I don't trust my response.
Lex Fridman (53:22.020)
So not fully listening to the conscious mind
Lex Fridman (53:28.260)
at any one moment as the ultimate truth,
Lex Fridman (53:31.020)
but allowing it to go up and down as it does,
Lex Fridman (53:33.780)
and just kind of being observing it.
Bryan Johnson (53:35.300)
Yes, I assume that whatever my conscious mind delivers up
Lex Fridman (53:38.780)
to my awareness is wrong upon landing.
Lex Fridman (53:43.220)
And I just need to figure out where it's wrong,
Lex Fridman (53:45.060)
how it's wrong, how wrong it is,
Lex Fridman (53:46.900)
and then try to correct for it as best I can.
Lex Fridman (53:49.260)
But I assume that on impact,
Bryan Johnson (53:52.380)
it's mistaken in some critical ways.
Lex Fridman (53:55.620)
Is there something you can say by way of advice
Bryan Johnson (53:59.340)
when the mind is depressive,
Lex Fridman (54:00.860)
when the conscious mind serves up something that,
Bryan Johnson (54:06.300)
dark thoughts, how you deal with that,
Lex Fridman (54:08.980)
like how in your own life you've overcome that,
Lex Fridman (54:11.100)
and others who are experiencing that can overcome it?
Lex Fridman (54:15.500)
Two things.
Bryan Johnson (54:16.340)
One, those depressive states are biochemical states.
Lex Fridman (54:25.660)
It's not you.
Lex Fridman (54:28.700)
And the suggestions that these things,
Lex Fridman (54:31.540)
that this state delivers to you
Bryan Johnson (54:33.060)
about suggestion of the hopelessness of life
Lex Fridman (54:35.100)
or the meaninglessness of it,
Bryan Johnson (54:37.420)
or that you should hit the eject button,
Lex Fridman (54:42.380)
that's a false reality.
Lex Fridman (54:44.020)
And that it's when,
Lex Fridman (54:47.660)
I completely understand the rational decision
Bryan Johnson (54:51.980)
to commit suicide.
Lex Fridman (54:53.340)
It is not lost on me at all
Bryan Johnson (54:55.180)
that that is an irrational situation,
Lex Fridman (54:57.340)
but the key is when you're in that situation
Lex Fridman (54:59.780)
and those thoughts are landing,
Lex Fridman (55:01.720)
to be able to say, thank you, you're not real.
Bryan Johnson (55:06.660)
I know you're not real.
Lex Fridman (55:08.140)
And so I'm in a situation where for whatever reason
Bryan Johnson (55:10.620)
I'm having this neurochemical state,
Lex Fridman (55:13.740)
but that state can be altered.
Lex Fridman (55:16.300)
And so again, it goes back to the realities
Lex Fridman (55:18.620)
of the difficulties of being human.
Lex Fridman (55:21.240)
And like when I was trying to solve my depression,
Lex Fridman (55:22.940)
I tried literally, you name it, I tried it systematically,
Lex Fridman (55:27.900)
and nothing would fix it.
Lex Fridman (55:29.380)
And so this is what gives me hope with brain interfaces,
Lex Fridman (55:32.320)
for example, like, could I have numbers on my brain?
Lex Fridman (55:35.420)
Can I see what's going on?
Bryan Johnson (55:36.500)
Because I go to the doctor and it's like,
Lex Fridman (55:38.260)
how do you feel?
Bryan Johnson (55:39.100)
I don't know, terrible.
Lex Fridman (55:41.360)
Like on a scale from one to 10,
Lex Fridman (55:42.200)
how bad do you want to commit suicide?
Lex Fridman (55:43.460)
10.
Bryan Johnson (55:45.680)
Okay, here's his bottle.
Lex Fridman (55:48.420)
How much should I take?
Bryan Johnson (55:49.260)
Well, I don't know, like just.
Lex Fridman (55:51.060)
Yeah, it's very, very crude.
Lex Fridman (55:52.900)
And this data opens up the,
Lex Fridman (55:56.540)
yeah, it opens up the possibility of really helping
Bryan Johnson (56:00.300)
in those dark moments to first understand
Lex Fridman (56:03.460)
the ways, the ups and downs of those dark moments.
Bryan Johnson (56:06.080)
On the complete flip side of that,
Lex Fridman (56:07.880)
right, I am very conscious in my own brain
Lex Fridman (56:14.880)
and deeply, deeply grateful that what there,
Lex Fridman (56:19.120)
it's almost like a chemistry thing, a biochemistry thing
Bryan Johnson (56:23.000)
that I go many times throughout the day.
Lex Fridman (56:26.080)
I'll look at like this cup and I'll be overcome with joy
Lex Fridman (56:31.720)
how amazing it is to be alive.
Lex Fridman (56:34.120)
Like I actually think my biochemistry is such
Bryan Johnson (56:37.440)
that it's not as common, like I've talked to people
Lex Fridman (56:42.440)
and I don't think that's that common.
Bryan Johnson (56:44.660)
Like it's a, and it's not a rational thing at all.
Lex Fridman (56:48.220)
It's like, I feel like I'm on drugs
Lex Fridman (56:51.920)
and I'll just be like, whoa.
Lex Fridman (56:55.120)
And a lot of people talk about like the meditative
Bryan Johnson (56:57.400)
experience will allow you to sort of, you know,
Lex Fridman (56:59.960)
look at some basic things like the movement of your hand
Bryan Johnson (57:02.840)
as deeply joyful because it's like, that's life.
Lex Fridman (57:06.240)
But I get that from just looking at a cup.
Bryan Johnson (57:08.480)
Like I'm waiting for the coffee to brew
Lex Fridman (57:10.000)
and I'll just be like, fuck, life is awesome.
Lex Fridman (57:15.080)
And I'll sometimes tweet that, but then I'll like regret
Lex Fridman (57:17.440)
it later, like, God damn it, you're so ridiculous.
Lex Fridman (57:20.040)
But yeah, so, but that is purely chemistry.
Lex Fridman (57:24.880)
Like there's no rational, it doesn't fit
Bryan Johnson (57:27.400)
with the rest of my life.
Lex Fridman (57:28.240)
I have all this shit, I'm always late to stuff.
Bryan Johnson (57:30.760)
I'm always like, there's all this stuff, you know,
Lex Fridman (57:32.680)
I'm super self critical, like really self critical
Bryan Johnson (57:35.640)
about everything I do, to the point I almost hate
Lex Fridman (57:38.840)
everything I do, but there's this engine of joy
Bryan Johnson (57:41.840)
for life outside of all that.
Lex Fridman (57:43.480)
And that has to be chemistry.
Lex Fridman (57:45.200)
And this flip side of that is what depression probably is,
Lex Fridman (57:48.480)
is the opposite of that feeling of like,
Bryan Johnson (57:53.520)
cause I bet you that feeling of the cup being amazing
Lex Fridman (57:57.680)
would save anybody in a state of depression.
Bryan Johnson (58:01.000)
Like that would be like fresh, you're in a desert
Lex Fridman (58:03.840)
and it's a drink of water, shit man.
Bryan Johnson (58:08.160)
The brain is a, it would be nice to understand
Lex Fridman (58:11.560)
where that's coming from, to be able to understand
Lex Fridman (58:17.440)
how you hit those lows and those highs
Lex Fridman (58:19.240)
that have nothing to do with the actual reality.
Bryan Johnson (58:21.840)
It has to do with some very specific aspects
Lex Fridman (58:25.320)
of how you maybe see the world, maybe,
Bryan Johnson (58:28.440)
it could be just like basic habits that you engage in
Lex Fridman (58:31.040)
and then how to walk along the line to find
Bryan Johnson (58:34.120)
those experiences of joy.
Lex Fridman (58:35.560)
And this goes back to the discussion we're having
Bryan Johnson (58:37.440)
of human cognition is in volume, the largest input
Lex Fridman (58:43.120)
of raw material into society.
Lex Fridman (58:45.960)
And it's not quantified.
Lex Fridman (58:47.840)
We have no bearings on it.
Lex Fridman (58:50.200)
And so we just, you wonder, we both articulated
Lex Fridman (58:55.720)
some of the challenges we have in our own mind.
Lex Fridman (58:58.640)
And it's likely that others would say,
Lex Fridman (59:02.280)
I have something similar.
Lex Fridman (59:03.840)
And you wonder when you look at society,
Lex Fridman (59:08.920)
how does that contribute to all the other compounder
Lex Fridman (59:11.520)
problems that we're experiencing?
Lex Fridman (59:12.760)
How does that blind us to the opportunities
Lex Fridman (59:16.760)
we could be looking at?
Lex Fridman (59:18.560)
And so it really, it has this potential distortion effect
Bryan Johnson (59:24.040)
on reality that just makes everything worse.
Lex Fridman (59:27.080)
And I hope if we can put some,
Bryan Johnson (59:30.160)
if we can assign some numbers to these things
Lex Fridman (59:34.560)
and just to get our bearings,
Lex Fridman (59:36.280)
so we're aware of what's going on,
Lex Fridman (59:38.040)
if we could find greater stabilization
Bryan Johnson (59:40.120)
in how we conduct our lives and how we build society,
Lex Fridman (59:46.160)
it might be the thing that enables us to scaffold.
Bryan Johnson (59:50.480)
Because we've really, again, we've done it,
Lex Fridman (59:52.560)
humans have done a fantastic job
Bryan Johnson (59:53.920)
systematically scaffolding technology
Lex Fridman (59:58.160)
and science and institutions.
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