Bryan Johnson: Kernel Brain-Computer Interfaces | Lex Fridman Podcast #186
the following is a conversation with brian johnson founder of kernel a company that has developed devices that can monitor and record brain activity and previously he was the founder of braintree a mobile payment company that acquired venmo and then was acquired by paypal and ebay quick mention of our sponsors for sigmatic netsuite grammarly and expressvpn check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note let me say that this was a fun and memorable experience wearing the kernel flow brain interface in the beginning of this conversation as you can see if you watch the video version of this episode and there's a ubuntu linux machine sitting next to me collecting the data from my brain the whole thing gave me hope that the mystery of the human mind will be unlocked in the coming decades as we begin to measure signals from the brain in a high bandwidth way to understand the mind we either have to build it or to measure it both are worth a try thanks to brian and the rest of the colonel team for making this little demo happen this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with brian johnson you ready lex yes i'm ready do you guys want to come in and put the interfaces on our heads and then i will proceed to tell you a few jokes so we uh we have two incredible pieces of technology and a machine running ubuntu 2004 in front of us what are we doing all right are these going on our heads they're going on our heads yeah and they will place it on our heads for proper alignment does this support giant heads because i kind of have a giant head is this is just as like an ego or are you saying physically both it's a nice massage yes okay how does it feel it moves around it's okay to move around yeah it feels oh yeah [Music] this feels awesome thank you that feels good so this is big head friendly it suits you well lex thank you i feel like i need to uh i feel like when i wear this i need to sound like sam harris calm collected eloquent i feel smarter actually i don't think i've ever felt quite as much like i'm part of the future as now have you ever worn a brain interface or had your brain imaged oh uh never had my brain imaged the only way i've analyzed my brain is by uh talking to myself and thinking no direct data yeah yeah that is it that is definitely an interface that has a lot of blind spots it has some blind spots yeah psychotherapy that's right all right are we recording all right so lex the objective of this i'm going to tell you some jokes and your objective is to not smile which as a russian you should have an edge make the motherland proud i gotcha okay let's hear the jokes lex and this is from the kernel crew we've been working on a device that can read your mind and we would love to see your thoughts is that the joke that's the opening okay if if i'm if i'm seeing the muscle activation correctly on your on your lips you're not gonna do well on this let's see all right here here comes the first unscrewed here comes the first one is this gonna break the device is it resilient to uh to laughter lex what goes through a potato's brain i got already failed that's the hilarious opener okay what tater thoughts what kind of fish performs brain surgery i don't know a neural surgeon and so we're getting data of everything that's happening in my brain right now lifetime yeah we're getting activation patterns of your entire cortex i'm gonna try to do better i'll edit out all the parts where i left photoshop you serious face over me you can recover all right lex what do scholars eat when they're hungry i don't know what academia nuts that's a pretty one so what we'll do is so you're wearing kernel flow which is an interface built uh using technology called spectroscopy so it's similar to what we wear wearables on the wrist using light so using lidar as you know and we're using that to image it's a functional imaging of brain activity and so as your neurons fire electrically and and chemically it creates uh blood oxygenation levels we're measuring that and so in you'll see in the reconstructions we do for you you'll see your activation patterns in your brain as throughout this entire time we are wearing it so in the reaction to the jokes and as we were sitting here talking so it's a we're moving towards a real-time feed of your cortical brain activity so there's a bunch of things that are in contact with my skull right now how many of them are there and so how many of them are what are they what are the actual sensors there's 52 modules and each module has one laser and six sensors and they're the sensors fire uh in about 100 picoseconds and then the photons scatter and absorb in your brain and then a few go in if you come back out they a bunch go in that a fuel come back out and we sense those photons and then we do the reconstruction for the activity overall there's about a thousand plus channels that are sampling your activity how difficult is it to make it as comfortable as it is because it's surprisingly comfortable i would not think it would be comfortable something that's measuring brain activity i would not think it would be comfortable but it is i agree in fact i want to take this home yeah yeah that's right so people are accustomed to being in big systems like fmri where there's 120 decibel sounds and you're in a claustrophobic encasement or eeg which is just painful or surgery and so yes i agree that this is a convenient option to be able to just put on your head it measures your brain activity in the contextual environment you choose so if we want to have it during the podcast if we want to be at home in a business setting so we it's freedom to be where to record your brain activity in the setting that you choose yeah but sort of from an engineering perspective are these uh what is it there's a bunch of different modular parts and they're kind of there's like a rubber band thing where they they mold to the shape of your head that's right so we we built this this version of the mechanical design to accommodate most adult heads but i have a giant head and if it's fine it feels fits well actually so i don't think i have an average head okay maybe i feel i feel much better about my head now maybe i'm uh i'm more average than i thought okay so what else is there interesting you could say what's up while it's on our heads i can keep this on the whole time this is kind of awesome and it's amazing for me as a fan of ubuntu i use a bunch of mate you guys should use that too but it's amazing to have code running to the side measuring stuff and collecting data i mean that i just i feel like much more important now that my data is being recorded like somebody care like you know when you you have a good friend that listens to you that actually like listens like actually is listening to you this is what i feel like i'm like a much better friend because it's like accurately listening to me upon two what a cool perspective i hadn't thought about that of feeling understood yeah heard yeah heard deeply by the mechanical system that is recording your brain activity versus the human that you're engaging with that your mind immediately goes to that there's this dimensionality and depth of understanding yeah of this software system which you're intimately familiar with and now you're able to communicate with this system in ways that you couldn't before yeah i feel heard yeah i mean i guess what's interesting about this is your intuitions are spot on most people have intuitions about brain interfaces that they've grown up with this idea of people moving cursors on the screen or typing or changing the channel or skipping a song it's primarily been anchored on control and i think the more relevant understanding of brain interfaces or neural imaging is that it's a measurement system and once you have numbers for a given thing a seemingly endless number of possibilities emerge around that of what to do with those numbers so before you tell me about the possibilities this was an incredible experience i can keep this on for another two hours but i'm being told that uh for a bunch of reasons just because we probably want to keep the data small and visualize it nicely for the final product we want to cut this off and take this to take this amazing helmet away from me so brian thank you so much for this experience and let's uh let's continue without helmetless all right so that was an incredible experience uh can you maybe speak to what kind of opportunities that opens up that stream of data that rich stream of data from the brain first i'm curious what is your reaction what what comes to mind when you put that on your head what does it mean to you and what possibilities emerge and what significance might it have i mean i'm curious where your orientation is at well for me i'm really excited by the possibility of various information about my body about my mind being converted into data such that data can be used to create products that make my life better so that that means really exciting possibility even just like a fitbit that measures i don't know some very basic measurements about your body is really cool but it's the the bandwidth of information the resolution of that information is very crude so it's not very interesting the possibility of recording of just building a data set coming in a clean way in a high bandwidth way from my brain opens up uh all kinds of you know at the very i was kind of joking when we're talking but it's not really it's like i feel heard in the sense that it feels like the full richness of the information coming from my mind is actually being recorded by the machine i mean there's a i can't i can't quite put it into words but there is a genuinely for me this is not some kind of joke about me being a robot is this genuinely feels like i'm being heard uh in a way that uh that's going to improve my life as long as the thing that's on the other end can do something useful with that data but even the the recording itself is like once you record it's like taking a picture that moment is forever saved in time now a picture cannot allow you to step back into that world but perhaps recording your brain is a much higher resolution thing much more personal recording of that information than a picture that would allow you to step back into that where you were in that particular moment in history and then map out a certain trajectory to tell you certain things about uh about yourself that could open up all kinds of applications of course there's health that i consider but honestly to me the exciting thing is just being heard my state of mind the level of focus all those kinds of things being heard what i heard you say is you have an entirety of lived experience some of which you can communicate in words and in body language some of which you feel internally which cannot be captured in those communication modalities and that this measurement system captures both the things you can try to articulate in words maybe in a lower dimensional space using one word for example to communicate focus yeah when it really may be represented in a 20 dimensional space of this particular kind of focus and that this information is being captured so it's a closer representation to the entirety of your experience captured in a dynamic fashion that is not just a static image of your conscious experience yeah yeah that that's that's that's the promise that's the hope that was the feeling and it felt like the future so it's a pretty cool experience and from the sort of mechanical perspective it was cool to have an actual device that feels pretty good that doesn't uh doesn't require me to go into the lab and also the other thing i was i was feeling there's a guy named andrew huberman he's a friend of mine amazing podcast people should uh uh should listen to a humor in the lab podcast we're working on a paper together about eye movement and so on and we're kind of he's a neuroscientist and i'm a data person a machine learning person and we're we're both excited by how much the that how much the data measurements of the human mind the brain and all the different metrics that come from that can be used to understand human beings and in a rigorous scientific way so the other thing i was thinking about is how this could be turned into a tool for science sort of not just personal science not just like fitbit style like uh how am i doing my personal metrics of health but doing larger scale studies of human behavior and so on so like data not at the scale of an individual but data at a scale of many individuals or a large number of individuals so science so it's personal being heard was exciting and also just for science is exciting it's very easy like there's a very powerful thing to it being so easy to just put on that you can scale much easier if you think about the second thing you said about the science of the brain most we've done a pretty good job like we the human race has done a pretty good job figuring out how to quantify the things around us from distance stars to calories and steps and our genome so we can measure and quantify pretty much everything in the known universe except for our minds and we can do these one-offs if we're going to get an fmri scan or do something with the low-res eeg system but we haven't done this at population scale and so if you think about human thought or human cognition is probably the single law largest raw input material into society at any given moment it's our conversations with our with ourselves and with other people and we have this this raw input that we can't haven't been able to measure yet yeah and if you when i think about it through that frame it's remarkable it's almost like we live in this wild wild west of unquantified communications within ourselves and between each other when everything else has been grounded me for example i know if i buy an appliance at this at the store or on a website i don't need to look at the measurements on the appliance make sure it can fit through my door that's an engineered system of appliance manufacturing and construction everyone's agreed upon engineering standards and we don't have engineering standards around cognition it's not a for it has not entered as a formal engineering discipline that enables us to scaffold in society with everything else we're doing including consuming news our relationships politics economics education all the above and so to me that the most significant contribution that kernel technology has to offer would be the formal sca the introduction of the formal engineering of cognition as it relates to everything else in society i love that i idea that you kind of think that there is just this ocean of data that's coming from people's brains as being in a crude way reduced down to like tweets and texts and so on just a very hardcore mini scale compression of actual the raw data but maybe you can comment because you use the word cognition i think the first step is to get the brain data but um is there a leap to be taking to sort of interpreting that data in terms of cognition so is your is your ideas basically you need to start collecting data at scale from the brain and then we start to really be able to take little steps along the path to actually measuring some deep sense of cognition because it's you know as i'm sure you know we don't we understand a few things but we don't understand most of what makes up cognition this has been one of the most significant challenges of building kernel and colonel wouldn't exist if i wasn't able to fund it initially by myself because when i engage in conversations with investors the immediate thought is what is the killer app and of course i understand that heuristic that's what they're looking at is they're looking to de-risk is the product solved is there a customer base are people willing to pay for it how does it compare to competing options and in the case with brain interfaces when i started the company there was no known path to even build a technology that could potentially become mainstream yes and then once we figured out the technology we could even we could commence having conversations with investors and it became what is a killer app and so what has been so i've funded the first 53 million dollars of the company and to raise the round of funding the first one we did i spoke to 228 investors one said yes it was remarkable and it was mostly around this concept around what is a killer app and so internally the way we think about it is we think of the the go-to-market strategy much more like the drake equation where if we can build technology that has the characteristics of it has the data quality is high enough it meets some certain threshold cost accessibility comfort it can be worn in contextual environments if it meets the criteria of being a mass-market device then the responsibility that we have is to figure out how to create the algorithm that enables the human to enable uh humans to then find value with it okay so it so the analogy is like brain interfaces are like early 90s of the internet is you you want to populate an ecosystem with a certain number of devices you want a certain number of people who play around with them who do experiments of certain data collection parameters you want to encourage certain mistakes from experts to non-experts these are all critical elements that ignite discovery and so we believe we've accomplished the first objective building technology that reaches those thresholds and now it's the drake equation component of how do we try to generate 20 years of value discovery in a two or three year time period how do we compress that so just to clarify so when you mean the drake equation uh which for people who don't know i don't know why you if you listen to this i bring up aliens every single conversation so it's i don't know how you would know what the drake equation is but you mean like the killer app it would be one alien civilization in that equation so meaning like this is in search of an application that's impactful transformative by the way it should be a we need to come up with a better term than killer app as a it's also violent right very violent you can go like viral app that's horrible too right it's some very uh inspiringly impactful application how about that no yeah okay so let's stick with killer app that's fine nobody's but i concur with you i dislike the chosen words in in capturing the concept you know it's one of those sticky things that uh is as effective to use in the tech world but when you now become a communicator outside of the tech world especially when you're talking about software and hardware and artificial intelligence applications it sounds horrible you know it's interesting i i actually regret now having called attention because i regret having used that word in this conversation because it's something i would not normally do i i used it in order to create a bridge of shared understanding of how others would what terminology others would use yeah but yeah i concur let's go with the impactful application value creation value creation something people love using there we go that's it love app okay so what uh do you have any ideas so you're basically creating a framework where there's the possibility of a discovery of uh an application that people love using is do you have ideas we've began to play a fun game internally where when we have these discussions and we begin circling around this concept of does anybody have an idea does anyone have intuitions and if we see the conversation starting to to veer in that direction we flag it and say human intuition alert stop it and so we really want to focus on the algorithm of there's a natural process of human discovery that that when you populate a system with devices and you give people the opportunity to play around with it in expected and unexpected ways we are thinking that is a much better system of discovery than us exercising tuitions and it's interesting we're also seeing a few neural scientists who have been have been talking to us where i was speaking just one young associate professor and i approached a conversation and said hey we have these five data streams that we're pulling off when you hear that what weighted value do you add to each data source like which one do you think is going to be valuable for your objectives and which one's not and he said i don't care just give me the data all i care about is my machine learning model but importantly he did not have a theory of mind he did not come to the table and say i think the brain operates you know in this way and these regions that have these these functions he didn't care he just wanted the data and we're seeing that more and more that certain people are devaluing human intuitions for good reasons as we've seen in machine learning over over the past couple years and we're doing the same in our value creation uh market strategy so more collect more data clean data make uh the products such that the collection of data is uh easy and and and fun and then the the rest will just spring to life that's right through humans playing around with them our objective is to create the most valuable data collection system of the brain ever and with that then applying all the best tools of machine learning and other techniques to extract out you know to try to find insight but yes our objective is really to systematize the discovery process because we we can't put definite time frames on discovery the brain is complicated and and science is not a business strategy and so we really need to figure out how to this is the difficulty of bringing bringing you know technology like this to market it's why most of the time it just ling it languishes in academia academia for quite some time but we hope that we will over you know cross over and make this mainstream in the coming years the thing was cool to wear but what's uh are you chasing a good reason for millions of people to put it this on their head and keep on their head regularly is there um like who's going to discover that reason is it going to be people just kind of organically or is there going to be a angry bird style application that's just uh too exciting to to not use if i think through the things that have changed my life most significantly over the past few years when i started wearing a wearable in my wrist that would give me data about my heart rate heart rate variability respiration rate metabolic approximations etc for the first time in my life i had access to information uh sleep patterns that were highly impactful they they told me for example if i eat close to bedtime i'm not going to get deep sleep and not getting deep sleep means you have all these follow-on consequences in life and so it opened up this window of understanding of myself that i cannot self-introspect and deduce these things this is information that was available to be acquired but it just wasn't i would have to get an expensive sleep study then it's an end like one night and that's not good enough to look to run all my trials and so if you look just at the information that one can acquire on their wrist and now you're applying planted to the entire cortex on the brain and you say what kind of information could we acquire it opens up a whole new universe of possibilities for example we did this internal study at kernel where i wore a prototype device and we were measuring the cognitive effects of sleep so i had a device measuring my sleep i performed with 13 of my my co-workers we performed four cognitive tasks over 13 sessions and we focused on reaction time impulse control short-term memory and then a resting state task and we with mine we found for example that my impulse control was independently correlated with my sleep outside of behavioral measures of my ability to play the game the point of the study was i had the brain study i did at colonel confirmed my life experience that if i my deep sleep determined whether or not i would be able to resist temptation the following day and my brain didn't show that as one example and so if you start thinking if you actually have uh data on yourself on your on your entire cortex you can control the settings i think there's probably an uh a large number of things that we could discover about ourselves very very small and very very big i just for example like when you read news what's going on like when you use social media when you use news what like uh all the ways we allocate attention that's right with the computer i mean that seems like a compelling place to where you would want to put on uh kernel by the way what is it called kernel flux kernel like what flow fluid yeah two technologies uh flow flow okay so when you when you put on the the kernel flow it it is seems like to be um a compelling time and place to do it is when you're behind a desk behind a computer because you could probably wear it for prolonged periods of time as you're as you're taking in content and there could a lot of because some of our so much of our lives happens in the digital world now that kind of coupling the information about the human mind with the consumption and the behaviors in the digital world might give us a lot of information about the effects of the way we behave and navigate the digital world to the actual physical meat space uh effects on our body it's interesting to think so in terms of both like for work i i'm a big fan of uh cal newport his ideas of deep work that uh i spend uh with few exceptions i try to spend the first two hours of every day usually if i'm like at home and have nothing on my schedule is going to be up to eight hours of deep work or focus zero distraction and for me to analyze the i mean i'm very aware of the uh the waning of that the ups and downs of that and it's almost like you you're surfing the ups and downs of that as you're doing programming as you're doing thinking about particular problems you're trying to visualize things in your mind you start trying to stitch them together you're trying to uh when there's a dead end about an idea you have to kind of calmly like walk back and start again all those kinds of processes it'd be interesting to get data on what my mind is actually doing and also recently started doing uh i just talked to sam harris a few days ago and been uh building up to that i started using started meditating using his app waking up but very much uh recommend it it'd be interesting to get data on that because it's you're very it's like you're removing all the noise from your head and you're very much it's an active process of active noise removal active noise cancelling like the headphones and it'd be interesting to see what is going on in the mind uh before the meditation during it and after all those kinds of things and in all of your examples it's interesting that everyone who's designed an experience for you so whether it be the meditation app or the deep work or with all the things you mentioned they constructed this product with a certain number of knowns yeah now what if we expanded the number of knowns by 10x or 20x or 30x they would reconstruct their product cool incorporate those known so it'd be yeah and so this is the dimensionality that i think is the promising aspect is that people will be able to use this quantification use this information to build more effective products and this is i'm not talking about better products to advertise to you or manipulate you i'm talking about uh our focus is helping people individuals have this contextual awareness and quantification and then to engage with others who are seeking to improve people's lives that the objective is is betterment across ourselves individually and also uh with each other yeah so it's a nice data stream to have if you're building an app like if you're building a podcast listening app it would be nice to know data about the listener so that like if you're bored or you fell asleep maybe pause the podcast it's like really dumb just very simple applications that could just improve the quality of the experience of the using the app and imagining if you have you have your neuron this is lex and you there's a statistical representation of you and you engage with the app and it says lex your best to engage with this meditation exercise in the following settings at this time of day after eating this kind of food or not eaten fasting with this level of blood glucose and this kind of night's sleep but all these data combined to give you this contextually relevant experience just like we do with our sleep we you've optimized your entire life based upon what information you can acquire and know about yourself and so the question is how much do we really know of the things going around us and i would venture to guess in my own my life life experience i capture my self-awareness captures an extremely small percent of the things that actually influence my conscious and unconscious experience well in some sense the data would help encourage you to be more self-aware not just because you trust everything the data is saying but is it'll give you a prod to start investigating like i would love to get like a a rating like a ranking of all the things i do and what are the things this is probably important to do without the data but the data will certainly help it's like rank all the things you do in life and which ones make you feel shitty which must make you feel good like uh you're talking about evening brian like uh this is a good example somebody like i do pig out at night as well and uh and it never makes like you're in a safe space this is just a safe space let's hear it no i i definitely have much less self-control at night and it's interesting and the same you know um people might criticize this but i i know my own body i know when i eat carnivore just eat meat i feel much better uh than uh if i eat more more carbs the more cups i eat the worse i feel i don't know why that is i don't i there is science supporting but i'm not leading on science i'm leaning on personal experience and that's really important i don't need to read i'm not going to go in a whole rant about nutrition science but many of those studies are very flawed they're doing their best but nutrition science is a very difficult uh field of study because humans are so different and the mind has so much impact on the way your body behaves and it's so difficult from a scientific perspective to conduct really strong studies that you have to be almost like a scientist of an of one you have to do these studies on yourself that's the best way to understand what works for you or not and i don't understand why because it sounds unhealthy but eating only meat always makes me feel good just eat eat meat that's it and i don't have any allergies and you know that kind of stuff i'm not full like jordan peterson where like if he like deviates a little bit that he goes off like deviates a little bit from the carnivore diet he goes off like the cliff no i can i can have like chalk i can i can go off the diet i feel fine it's not it's a it's a gradual uh it's a gradual worsening of how i feel but what i eat only meat i feel great and it'd be nice to be reminded of that like there's a very simple fact that i feel good when i eat carnivore and i think that repeats itself in all kinds of experiences like i feel really good uh when i exercise not i hate exercise okay but in the rest of the day the the uh the impact it has on my mind and the clarity of mind and the experiences and the happiness and all those kinds of things i feel really good and to be able to concretely express that through data would be would be nice it would be a nice reminder almost like a statement like remember what feels good and what not and there could be things like uh that i'm not many things like just you're suggesting that i could not be aware of they might be sitting right in front of me that uh make me feel really good and make me feel not good and the data would show that i agree with you i've actually employed the same strategy i i fired my mind entirely from being responsible for constructing my diet so i started doing a program where i now track over 200 biomarkers every 90 days and it captures of course the things you would expect like cholesterol but also dna methylation and all kinds of things that about my body all the processes that make up me and then i let that data generate the shopping list and so i never actually ask my mind what it wants it's entirely what my body is reporting that it wants and so i call this goal alignment within brian and there's 200 plus actors that i'm currently asking their opinion of and so i'm asking my liver how are you doing and it's expressing via the biomarkers and so then i construct that diet and i only eat those foods until my next testing round and that has changed my life more than i think anything else because in the emotion of my conscious mind that i gave primacy to my entire life it led me astray because like you were saying the mind then goes out into the world and it navigates the dozens of different dietary regimens people put together in books and it all has al their their supporting science in certain contextual settings but it's not n of one and like you're saying this dietary really is an end of one these what people have published scientifically of course can be used for nice groundings but it changes when you get to the end of one level and so that's what gets me excited about brainerd faces is if you if i could do the same thing for my brain where i can stop asking my conscious mind for its advice or for its decision making which is flawed and i'd rather just look at this data that and i've i've never had better health markers in my life than when i stopped actually asking myself to be in charge of it and the idea of uh the motion of the conscious mind is uh is such a sort of engineering way of phrasing like meditation with what they mean that's what we're doing right yeah that's beautiful that means really beautifully put by the way testing around what does that look like what's that well you mentioned uh yeah the very the test i do yes so includes a complete blood panel i do a microbiome test i do a food inflammation of diet induced inflammation so i look for excited kind expressions so foods that produce inflammatory reactions i look at my neural endocrine systems i look at all my neural transmitters i do yeah there's several micronutrient tests to see how i'm looking at the very various nutrients what about like self report of like how you feel you know almost like um you can't demote your con you still exist within your conscious mind right so that lived experience of is of a lot of value so how do you measure that i do a temporal sampling over some duration of time so i'll think through how i feel over a week over a month over three months i don't do a temporal sampling of if i'm at the grocery store in front of a cereal box and be like you know what captain crunch is probably the right thing for me today because i'm feeling like i need a little fun in my life yeah and so it's a temporal sampling if the data set's large enough then i i smooth out the function of my natural oscillations of how i feel about life where some days i may feel upset or depressed or down or whatever and i don't want those moments to then rule my decision making that's why the demotion happens and it says really if you're looking at health over 90 day period of time all my 200 voices speak up on that interval and they're all given voice to say this is how i'm doing and this is what i want and so it really is an accounting system for everybody so that's why i think that if you think about the future of being human there's two things i think that are really going on one is the design manufacturing and distribution of intelligence is heading towards zero con a cost curve over over a certain design over a certain time frame but our ability to you know evolution produced us an intelligent form of intelligence we are now designing our own intelligence systems and the design manufacturing distribution of that intelligence over a certain uh time frame is going to go to a cost of zero design manufacture distribution of intelligent cost is going to zero again just give me a second okay that's brilliant okay and evolution is doing the design manufacturing distribution of intelligence and now we are doing the design manufacturing distribution of intelligence and the cost of that is going to zero that's a very uh nice way of looking at life on earth so if that that's going on and then now in parallel to that then you say okay what what then happens if when that cost curve is heading to zero our existence becomes a goal alignment problem a goal alignment function and so the same thing i'm doing where i'm doing goal alignment within myself of these 200 biomarkers where i'm saying when when brian exists on a daily basis and this entity is deciding what to eat what to do and et cetera it's not just my conscious mind which is opining it's 200 biological processes and there's a whole bunch more voices involved so in that equation we're going to increasingly automate the things that we spend high energy on today because it's easier and now we're going to then negotiate the terms and conditions of intelligent life now we say conscious existence because we're biased because that's what we have but it will be the largest computational exercise in history because you're now doing go alignment with planet earth within yourself with each other within all the intelligent agents we're building bots and other you know voice assistants you basically i don't have a trillions and trillions of agents working on the negotiation of goal alignment yeah this this is in fact true uh and what was the second thing that was it so the cost the design manufacturing distribution of intelligence going to zero which then means what's really going on what are we really doing we're negotiating the terms and conditions of existence do you worry about the survival of this process that uh life as we know it on earth comes to an end or at least intelligent life that as the cost goes to zero all something happens where uh all of that intelligence is thrown in the trash by something like nuclear war or development of agi systems that are very dumb not agi i guess but ai is just that it's the paper clip thing what on mass is dumb but has unintended consequences to where it destroys human civilization do you worry about those kinds of things i mean it's it's unsurprising that a new thing comes into the sphere of human consciousness humans identify the foreign object in this case artificial intelligence our amygdala fires up and says scary foreign we should be apprehensive about this and so it makes sense from a biological perspective that humans for the the knee-jerk reaction is fear what i don't think has been properly weighted with that is that we are the first generation of intelligent beings on this earth that has been able to look out over their expected lifetime and see there is a real possibility of evolving into entirely novel forms of consciousness yeah so different that it would be totally unrecognizable to us today we don't have words for it we can't hint at it we can't point at it we can't you can't look in the sky and see that thing that is shining we're going to go up there you you cannot even create an aspirational statement about it and instead we've had this knee-jerk reaction of fear about everything that could go wrong but in my estimation this should be the defining aspiration of all intelligent life on earth that that we would aspire that basically every generation surveys the landscape of possibilities they're afforded given the technological cultural and other contextual situation that they're in we're in this context we haven't yet identified this and said this is unbelievable we should carefully think this thing through not just of mitigating the things that wipe us out like we have this potential and so we just haven't given voice to it even though it's within this realm of possibilities so you're excited about the possibility of super intelligence systems and what the opportunities that bring i mean there's parallels to this you think about people before the internet as the internet was coming to life i mean there's kind of a fog through which you can't see what does the future look like like predicting collective intelligence which i don't think we're understanding that we're living through that now is that there's now we've we've in some sense stopped being individual intelligences and become much more like collective intelligences because ideas travel much much faster now and they can in a viral way like sweep across the populations and so it's almost i mean it almost feels like a thought is had by many people now thousands or millions of people as opposed to an individual person and that's changed everything but to to me i don't think we're realizing how much that actually changed in people or societies but like to predict that before the internet would have been very difficult and in that same way we're sitting here with the fog before us thinking what is uh super intelligent systems how is that going to change the world what is uh increasing the bandwidth like uh plugging our brains into this whole thing how is that going to change the world and it seems like it's a fog you don't know and it could be it could uh whatever comes to be could destroy the world that this we could be the last generation but it also could uh transform in in ways that creates a an incredibly fulfilling life experience that's unlike anything we've ever experienced it might involve dissolution of ego and consciousness and so on you're no longer one individual it might be more you know that might be a certain kind of death and ego death but the experience might be really exciting and enriching maybe we'll live in a virtual like it's like it's it's it's funny to think about a bunch of sort of hypothetical questions of would it be more fulfilling to live in a virtual world like if you were able to plug your brain in in a very dense way into a video game like which world would you want to live in in the video game or in the physical world for most of us we're kind of touring it with the idea of the video again but we still want to live in the physical world have friendships and relationships in the physical world but we don't know that again it's a fog and maybe maybe in a hundred years we're all living inside a video game hopefully not call of duty hopefully more like like sims 5 which version is it on for you individually though does it make you sad that your brain ends that you die one day very soon that the whole thing that that uh that data source just goes offline sooner than you would like that's a complicated question i would have answered it differently in different times in my life i you know had chronic depression for 10 years and so in that 10-year time period i desperately wanted lights to be off and the thing that made it even worse is i was in a religious i was born into a religion it was the only reality i ever understood and it's difficult to articulate to people when you're born into that kind of reality and it's the only reality you're exposed to you're literally blinded to the existence of other realities because it's so much the in-group out group thing and so in that situation it was not only that i desperately wanted lights out forever it was that i couldn't have lights out forever it was there was an afterlife and this afterlife had this system that would either penalize or or reward you for your behaviors and so it's almost like this is indescribable hopelessness of not only being in hopeless despair of not wanting to exist but then also being forced to be to exist and so there was a duration of my time of the observation of life where i'd say yes i have no remorse for lights being out and actually want it more than anything in the entire world there are other times where i'm looking out at the future and i say this is an opportunity for future evolving human conscious experience that is beyond my ability to understand and and i jump out of bed and i race to work and i i can't think about anything else but i i think the the reality for me is i don't know what it's like to be in your head but in my head when i wake up in the morning i don't say good morning brian i'm so happy to see you like i'm sure you're just going to be beautiful to me today you're not going to make a huge long list of everything you should be anxious about you're not going to repeat that list to me 400 times you're not going to have me relive all the regrets i've made in life i'm sure you're not doing any of that you're just going to just help me along all day long i mean it's a brutal environment in my brain and we've just become normalized to this environment that we just accept that this is what it means to be human but if we look at it if we try to muster as much soberness as we can about the realities of being human it's brutal if it is for me and so am i sad that the brain may be off one day yeah it depends on the contextual setting like how am i feeling what moment are you asking me that and that's it's my mind is so fickle and this is why again i don't trust my conscious mind i have been given realities i was given a religious reality that was a video game and then i figured out it was not a real reality and then i lived in a depressive reality which delivered this terrible hopelessness that wasn't a real reality then i discovered uh behavioral psychology and i figured out how biased 188 chronicle biases and how my brain is distorting reality all the time i have gone from one reality to another i don't trust reality i don't trust realities are given to me and so to make try to make a decision on what i value or not value that future state i don't trust my response so not fully not fully listening to the conscious mind at any one moment as the ultimate truth but allowing it to go up and down as it does and just kind of being observing it yes i assume that whatever my conscious mind delivers up to my awareness is wrong on pawn landing and i just need to figure out where it's wrong how it's wrong how wrong it is and then try to correct for it as best i can but i i assume that on impact it's mistaken in some critical ways is there something you can say by way of advice when the mind is depressive when the conscious mind serves up something that uh you know the dark thoughts how you deal with that how in your own life you've overcome that and others who are experiencing that can overcome it two things one that those depressive states are biochemical states it's not you and the suggestions that these things that this state delivers to you about suggestion of the hopelessness of lice or or the meaninglessness of it or that you should hit the eject button that's a false reality yeah and that it's when i i completely understand their rational decision to commit suicide there's it is not lost to me at all that that is a and that is an irrational situation but the key is when you're in that situation those thoughts are landing to be able to say thank you you're not real i know you're not real yeah and so i'm in a situation where for whatever reason i'm having this this uh neurochemical state but that state can be altered and so it again it goes back to the realities of the difficulties of of being human and like when i was trying to solve my depression i tried literally ev you name it i tried it systematically and nothing would fix it and so this is what gives me hope with brain interfaces for example like could i have numbers on my brain can i see what's going on because i go to the doctor and it's like how do you feel i don't know terrible like on a scale of 10 how bad you want to commit suicide 10. okay at this moment here's here's his bottle how much i take well i don't know like just yeah it's very very crude and this data opens up the the yeah it opens up the possibility of really helping in those dark moments to first understand the the waves the ups and downs of those dark moments on the complete flip side of that i i am uh very conscious in my own brain and deeply deeply grateful that what they're it's it's almost like a chemistry thing a biochemistry thing that i go many times throughout the day i'll i'll look at like this cup and i'll be overcome with joy how amazing it is to be alive like i actually think i'm my biochemistry is such that it's not as common like i've talked to people and i don't think that's that common like it's a and it's not a rational thing at all it's like i feel like i'm on drugs and i'll just be like whoa a lot of people talk about like the meditative experience will allow you to sort of you know look at some basic things like the movement of your hand as uh deeply joyful because it's like that's life but i get that from just looking at a cup like i'm waiting for the coffee to brew and i'll just be like fuck life is awesome and i'll sometimes tweet that but then i'll like regret it later like god damn it you're so uh ridiculous but yeah so but that is purely chemistry like there's no rational it doesn't fit with the rest of my life i have all this shit i'm always late to stuff i'm always like there's all stuff you know i'm super self-critical like really self-critical about everything i do i'm to the point i almost hate everything i do but there's this engine of joy for life outside of all that and that has to be chemistry and the flip side of that is what depression probably is is the opposite of that feeling of like because i i bet you that feeling of the cup being amazing is would save anybody in a state of depression like that that would be like fresh you're in a desert and it's a drink of water shit man the brain is uh it would be nice to understand where that's coming from to to be able to um to understand the how you hit those lows and those highs that have nothing to do with the actual reality it has to do with some very specific aspects of how you maybe see the world maybe it could be just like basic habits that you engage in and then how to walk along the line to to find those experiences of joy and this goes back to the discussion we're having of human cognition is in volume the largest input of raw material into society yeah and it's not quantified we have no bearings on it and so we just you wonder we both articulated some of the challenges we have in our own mind and it's likely that others would say i have something similar yeah and you wonder when you look at society what how does that contribute to all the other compounded problems that we're experiencing how does that blind us to the the opportunities we could be looking at and so it really it has this potential distortion effect on reality that just makes everything worse and i hope if we can put some if we can assign some numbers to these things just to get our bearings so we're aware of what's going on if we could find greater stabilization in how we conduct our lives and how we build society it it might be the thing that enables us to scaffold uh because we've really again we've done a humans have done a fantastic job systematically scaffolding technology and science institutions it's humans it's our own selves which we have not been able to scaffold it's it's we are the we are the one part of this intelligence infrastructure that remains unchanged is there something you could say about coupling this brain data with uh not just the basic human experience but say an experience you mentioned sleep but the wildest experience which is psychedelics is there and there's been quite a few studies now that are being um approved and run which is exciting from a scientific perspective on psychedelics uh do you think uh what do you think happens to the brain on psychedelics and how can data about this help us understand it and uh when you're on dmt do you see else and can we guess can we convert into data um can you add aliens in there yeah aliens definitely do you actually meet aliens and elves are elves the aliens i'm asking for uh for a few austin friends yet that that are convinced that they've actually met the elves what are elves like are they friendly are they healthy i haven't met them the smurfs of like they're like they're industrious and they have different skill sets and yeah i think they're very uh they're very critical as friends that's what they're trolls the elder trolls no but they care about you so there's a bunch of different version of trolls there's there's a loving trolls that are harsh on you but they want you to be better and there's trolls that just enjoy the your destruction and i think they're the ones that care for you like i i think they're criticism for my see i'm i'm talking i haven't met him directly so i'm i'm it's like a friend of a friend yeah i'm getting a telephone yeah a bit of a and and the whole point is that in psychedelics and certainly at dmt where this is where the the the brain data versus war data fails which is you know words can't convey the experience most people that you can be poetic and so on but it really does not convey the experience of what what it actually means to meet the uh to meet the elves i mean to me what baselines this conversation is imagine if you if we were interested in the health of your heart and we started and said okay lex self-introspect tell me how's the health of your heart you sit there and you close your eyes and you think it feels all right like things seem things feel okay and then you went to the cardiologist and the cardiologist like hey lex you know tell me how you feel actually what i'd really like you to do is do an ekg and a blood panel and look at arterial plaques and let's look at my cholesterol and there's like five to ten studies you would do they then give you this report and say here's the quantified health of your heart now with this data i'm going to prescribe the following regime of exercise and maybe i'll put you on a statin like et cetera but the protocol is based upon this data you would think the cardiologist is out of their mind if they just gave you a bottle of statins based upon you're like well i think something's kind of wrong and they're just just kind of experiment and see what happens that's what we do with our mental health today so you're it's it's kind of absurd and so if you look at psychedelics to have again to be able to measure the brain and get a baseline state and then to measure during a psychedelic experience and post a psychedelic experience then do it longitudinally you now have a quantification of what's going on and so you could then pose questions what molecule is appropriate at what dosages at what frequency in what contextual environment what happens when i have this diet with this molecule with this experience all the experimentation you do when you have good sleep data or hrv and so that's what i think happens what we could potentially do with psychedelics is we could add this level of sophistication that is not in the industry currently and it may improve the outcomes people experience it may improve the safety and efficacy and so that's what i hope we are able to achieve and it would transform mental health because we would finally have numbers to work with to baseline ourselves and then if you think about it we when we talk about things related to the mind we talk about the modality we use words like meditation or psychedelics or or something else because we can't talk about a marker in the brain we can't use a word to say we can't talk about cholesterol we don't talk about plaque in the arteries we don't talk about hrv and so if we have numbers then the solutions get mapped to numbers instead of the modalities being the thing we talk about meditation just does good things in a crude fashion so in your blog post zeroth principle thinking good title you ponder how do people come up with uh truly original ideas uh what what's your thoughts on this as a human and as a person who's measuring brain data zeroth principles are building blocks first principles are understanding of system laws so if you take for example like in sherlock holmes he's a first principle thinker so he says once you've eliminated the impossible anything that remains however improbable is true whereas dirk gently the holistic detective by douglas adams says i don't like eliminating the impossible so when someone says from a first principal's perspective and they they're trying to assume the fewest number of things within a given time frame and so when i after braintree venmo i set my mind to the question of what single thing can i do that would maximally increase the probability that the human race thrives beyond what we can even imagine and i found that in my conversations with others in the books i read in my own deliberations i had a missing piece of the puzzle because i didn't feel like uh over if yeah i didn't feel like the future could be deduced from first principle thinking and that's when i i read the book zero a biography of a dangerous idea and i i have a really good book by the way it's i think it's my favorite book i've ever read it's also a really interesting number zero and i i wasn't aware that the number zero had to be discovered i didn't realize that it caused a revolution in philosophy and it just tore up math and it tore up i mean it builds modern society but it it wrecked everything in its way it was an unbelievable disrupter and it was so difficult for society to get their heads around it yeah and so zero is of course the representation of zeroth principle thinking which is it's the caliber and consequential nature of an idea and so when you talk about what kind of ideas have civilization transforming properties oftentimes they fall in the zeroth category and so in thinking this through i i was wanting to find a quantitative structure on how to think about these zeroth principles and that's so i came up with that to be a coupler with first principle thinking and so now it's a staple as part of how i think about the world in the future so it emphasizes trying to identify the lands on that word impossible like what is impossible essentially trying to identify what is impossible and what is possible and being as how do you i mean this this is the thing is most of society tells you the range of things they say is impossible is very wide so you need to be shrinking that i mean that's the whole process of of this kind of thinking is you need to be very rigorous in in trying to be trying to draw the lines of what is actually impossible because uh very few things are actually impossible i don't know what is actually impossible like uh it's the joe rogan is entirely possible i like that approach to uh to science to engineering to entrepreneurship it's entirely possible basically shrink the impossible to zero to very small set yeah life constraints favor first principle thinking because it it enables faster action with higher probability of success pursuing zero with principal optionality is expensive and uncertain and so in a society constrained by resources time and money and a desire for social status accomplishment etc it minimizes zero principle thinking but but the reason why i think zeroth principle thinking should be a staple of our shared cognitive infrastructure is if you look through the history of the past couple thousand years and let's just say we arbitrarily we subjectively try to assess what is a zero level zero level idea and we say how many have occurred on what time scales and what were the contextual settings for it i would argue that if you look at alphago when it played go from another dimension with the the human go players when it saw alphago's moves it attributed it to like playing with an alien playing go with uh with alcohol being from another dimension and so if you say computational intelligence has an attribute of introducing zero-like insights then if you say what is going to be the occurrence of zeros in society going forward and you could reasonably say probably a lot more than have occurred and probably more at a faster pace so then if you say what happens if you have this computational intelligence throughout society the manufacturing design and distribution of intelligence is now going to heading towards zero you have an increased number of zeros being produced with a tight connection between humans computers that's when i got to a point and said we cannot predict the future with first principles thinking we can't that cannot be our imagination set it can't be uh our sole anchor in this situation that basically the future of our conscious existence 20 30 40 50 years is probably a zero so just to clarify when you say zero you're referring to basically a truly revolutionary idea yeah something that is currently not a building block of our shared conscious existence either in the form of knowledge uh yeah it's currently not manifest yeah in what we acknowledge so zeroth principle thinking is playing with ideas that are so revolutionary that we can't even clearly reason about the consequences once those ideas come to be yeah or for example like einstein that was a zeroth i would categorize it as a zeroth principle insight you mean generality space time yeah basically building upon what newton had done and said yes also and it just changed the fabric of our understanding of reality and so that was unexpected it existed we just uh it became it came part of our awareness and the moves alpha go made existed it just came into our awareness and so it to your point there's this question of what do we know and what don't we know do we think we know 99 of all things or do we think we know 0.001 of all things and that goes back to no no no knowns and unknown unknowns and first principles and zero principle thinking gives us a quantitative framework to say there's no way for us to mathematically try to create probabilities for these things therefore it would be helpful if they were just part of our standard thought processes because it may encourage different behaviors in what we do individually collectively as a society what we aspire to what we talk about the possibility sets we imagine yeah i've been engaged in that kind of thinking uh quite a bit and thinking about engineering of consciousness i think it's feasible i think it's possible in the language that we're using here it's very difficult to reason about a world when inklings of consciousness can be engineered into uh artificial systems not from a philosophical perspective but from an engineering perspective i believe a good step towards engineering consciousness is is creating engineering the illusion of consciousness i'm captivated by our natural predisposition to anthropomorphize things and i think that's what we i don't want to hear from the philosophers but i think that's what we kind of do to each other okay that consciousness is created socially that like much of the power of consciousness is in the social interaction i create your consciousness no i create my consciousness by having interaction with you and that that's the display of consciousness it's the same as like the display of emotion emotion is created through communication language is created through its use and then we somehow humans kind of especially philosophers you know the heart problem of consciousness really want to believe that we possess this thing that's like there's a there's a bot there's a there's an elf sitting there with the with the hat that's or like name tag says consciousness and they're like feeding this subjective experience to us as opposed to like it actually being an illusion that would construct to make social communication more effective and so i think if you focus on creating the illusion of consciousness you can create some very fulfilling experiences in in software and so that to me is the compelling space of ideas to explore i agree with you and i think going back to our experience together with brain interfaces on you could imagine if we get to a certain level of maturity so first let's take the the inverse of this so you and i text back and forth and we're sending each other emojis that has a certain amount of information transfer rate as we're communicating with each other and so in our communication with people via email and text and whatnot we've taken the bandwidth of human interaction the information transfer rate and we've reduced it we have less social cues we have less information to work with there's a lot more opportunity for misunderstanding so that is altering the conscious experience between two individuals and if we add brain interfaces to the equation let's imagine now we amplify the dimensionality of our communications that to me is what you're talking about which is consciousness engineering perhaps i understand you with dimensions so maybe i understand your hap when you look at the cup and you experience that happiness you can tell me you're happy and i then do theory of mine and say i can imagine what it might be like to be lex and feel happy about seeing this cup but if the interface could then quantify and give me a 50 vector space model and say this is the version of happiness that lex is experiencing as he looks at this cup then it would allow me potentially to have much greater empathy for you and understand you as a human of this is how you experience joy yes which is entirely unique from how i experience joy even though we assumed ahead of time that we were having some kind of similar experience but i agree with you that the we do consciousness engineering today in everything we do when we talk to each other when we're building products and that we're entering into it in a stage where it will be much more methodical and quantitative based and computational in how we go about doing it which to me i find encouraging because i think it creates better guardrails for to create uh ethical systems on versus right now i feel like it's really wild wild west on how these interactions are happening yeah and it's funny you focus on human to human but that this kind of data enables human to machine yes interaction which is what we're kind of talking about when we say engineering consciousness and that will happen of course let's flip that on its head let's right now we're putting humans as the central node what if we gave gpt3 a bunch of human brains and said hey gpt3 learn some manners when you speak yeah and run your algorithms on humans brains and see how they respond so you can be polite and so that you can be friendly and so that you can be conversationally appropriate but to inverse it to give our machines a training set in real time with closed loop feedback so that our machines were better equipped to find their way through our society in polite and kind and appropriate ways i love the idea or better yet teach it some uh uh have it uh read the founding documents and have a visit austin in texas and so that when you ask when you tell it why don't you learn some manners it gpt3 learns to say no it learns what it means to be free and a sovereign individual so that it depends so it depends what kind of version of gpg3 you want one that's free one that behaves well with the social revolution you want you want to like you want a socialist gpt3 you want an anarchist gpc3 you want to polite like you take it home to visit mom and dad gpt-3 and you want like party and like vegas to a strip club gpt3 you want all flavors and then you've got to have goal alignment between all those yeah you know they don't want to manipulate each other for sure so that that's i mean you kind of spoke to ethics the one of the concerns that people have in this modern world the digital data is that of privacy and security but privacy you know they're concerned that when they share data it's the same thing we feel when we are trust other human beings uh in being fragile and revealing something that we're vulnerable vulnerable about there's a there's a leap of faith there's a leap of trust that that's going to be just between us as a privacy to it and then the challenge is when you're in the digital space then sharing your data with companies that use that data for advertisement all those kinds of things there's a hesitancy to share that much data to share a lot of deep personal data and if you look at brain data that feels a whole lot like it's richly deeply personal data so how do you think about privacy with this kind of ocean of data i think we got off to a wrong start with the internet where the basic rules of play for the for the company that be was if you're a company you can go out and get as much information on a person as you can find without their approval and you can also do things to induce them to give you as much information and you don't need to tell them what you're doing with it you can do anything on the back side you can make money on it but the game is who can acquire the most information and devise the most clever schemes to do it that was a bad starting place and so we are in this period where we need to wreck we need to correct for that and we need to say first of all the individual always has control over their data it's not a free-for-all it's not like a game of hungry hippo but they can just go out and grab as much as they want so for example when your brain data was recorded today the first thing we did in the kernel app was you have control over your data and so it's individual consent it's individual control and then you can build up on top of that but it has to be based upon some clear rules of play if everyone knows what's being collected they know what's being done with it and the person has control over it so transparency and control so everybody knows what does control look like me my ability to delete the data if i want yeah delete it and to know who is being shared with under what you know what under what terms and conditions we haven't reached that level of sophistication with our products of if if you say for example hey spotify please give me a customized playlist according to my neurom you know you could say you can have access to this vector space model but only for this duration of time and uh and then you've got to delete it we haven't gotten there to that level of physician but these are ideas we need to start talking about of how do you how would you actually structure permissions yeah and i think it creates a much more stable set for society to build where we understand the rules of play and people aren't vulnerable to being taken event it's not fair for an individual to be taken advantage of without their awareness with some other practice that some companies doing for their sole benefit and so hopefully we are going through a process now where we're correcting for these things and that it can be an economy-wide shift that because really these are these are fundamentals we need to have in place it's kind of fun to think about like uh in chrome when you install an extension or like install an app it's asking you like what permissions you're willing to give and be cool if in the future it says like uh you can have access to my brain data i mean and if it's it's not unimaginable in the future the big technology companies have built a business based upon acquiring data about you that they can then create you a model of you and sell that predictability and so it's not unimaginable that you will create with like kernel device for example a more reliable predictor of you than they could and that they're asking you for permission to complete their objectives and you're the one that gets to negotiate that with them and say sure but it's not un unimaginable that might be the case so there's a guy named elon musk and he has a company in one of the many companies called neuralink that has uh that's also excited about the brain so be interesting to hear your kind of opinions about a very different approach that's invasive that requires surgery that implants a data collection device in the brain how do you think about the difference between kernel and neurolink in the approaches of getting that stream of brain data yeah elon and i spoke about this a lot early on we we met up i had started colonel and he had an interest in printer faces as well and we explored doing something together him joining kernel and ultimately it wasn't the right move and so he started neural link and i continued building colonel but it was interesting because we were both at this very early time where it wasn't certain what if there was a path to pursue if now was the right time to do something and then the technological choice of doing that and so we were both our starting point was looking at invasive technologies and i was building invasive technology at the time that's ultimately where he's gone a little less than a year after elon and i were engaged i shifted kernel to do non-invasive and we had this neuroscientist come to colonel we were talking about he had been doing neurosurgery for 30 years one of the most respected neuroscientists in the us and we brought him to colonel to figure out the ins and outs of his profession and at the very end of our three hour conversation he said you know every 15 or so years a new technology comes along that changes everything he said it's probably already here you just can't see it yet and my jaw dropped i thought because i i had spoken to bob greenberg who had built a second site first on the optical nerve and then he did court up an array on the optical cortex and then i also became friendly with um neural pace who did who does the implants for seizure detection and remediation and i saw in our in their eyes what it was like to take something through an implantable device through for for a 15-year run they initially thought of seven years and ended up being 15 years and they thought it'd be 100 million is you know 300 400 million and i really didn't want to build invasive technology it was the only thing that appeared to be possible but then once i spun up an internal effort to start looking at non-invasive options we said is there something here is there anything here that again has the characteristics of it has the high quality data it could be low-cost it could be accessible could it make brain interfaces mainstream and so i did a bet the company move we shifted from non-invasive to invasive to non-invasive so the answer is yes to that there's something there it's possible uh the answer is we'll see we've now built both technologies and they're now you experience one of them today we were applying we're now deploying it so we're trying to figure out what value is really there but i'd say it's really too early to express confidence whether it's to i think it's too early to assess which technological choice is the right one on what time skills yeah time skills are really important here very important because if you look at the like on the invasive side there's so much activity going on right now of less invasive techniques to get at the neuron firings which would what neural link is building it's possible that in 10 15 years when they're scaling that technology other things have come along and you'd much rather do that that thing starts to clock again it may not be the case it may be the case that neural link has properly chosen the right technology and that that's exactly what they want to be totally possible and it's also possible that the paths we've chosen are non-invasive fall short for a variety of reasons it's just it's unknown and so right now the two technologies we chose the analogy i'd give to give you to create a baseline of understanding is if you think of it like the internet in the 90s the internet became useful when people could do a dial-up connection and then the page and then as as bandwidth increased so did the utility of that connection and so the ecosystem improve and so if you say what kernel flow uh is going to give you a full screen on the picture of information but as you're going to be watching a movie but the image is going to be blurred and the audio is going to be muffled so it has a lower resolution of coverage kernel flux our amyg technology is going to give you the full movie in 1080p okay and neuralink is going to give you a circle on the screen of 4k okay and so each one has their pros and cons and uh it's give and take and so the decision i made like kernel was that these two technologies flux and flow were basically the answer for the next seven years yeah and they would give rise to the ecosystem which would become much more valuable than the hardware itself and that we would just continue to improve on the hardware over time and you know it's early days so it's kind of fascinating to think about that you don't it's very true that you don't know uh both paths are very prom are promising and it's like 50 years from now we will look back and maybe not even remember one of them and the other one might change the world it's so cool how technology is i mean that's that's what entrepreneurship is is like mark it's the the zeroth principle is like you're marching ahead into the darkness into the fog not knowing it's wonderful to have someone else out there with us doing this because if you if you look at brainerd faces anything that's off the shelf right now is inadequate it's had its run for a couple decades it's still in hacker communities it hasn't gone to the mainstream the room size machines are on their own path but there is no answer right now of bringing brain interfaces mainstream and so it both you know both they and us we've both spent over 100 million dollars and that's kind of what it takes to have a go at this because you need to build full stack i mean that kernel we are from the photon and the atom through the machine learning we have just under 100 people i think it's something like 36 37 phds in these specialties these areas that there's only a few people in the world who have these abilities and that's what it takes to build next generation have to make an attempt at breaking into brain interfaces and so we'll see over the couple years whether it's the right time or whether we're both too early or whether something else comes along in seven to ten years which is the right thing that brings it mainstream so you see elon is the kind of competitor or a fellow traveler along the path of uncertainty or both it's a fellow traveler it's like at the beginning of the internet is how many companies are going to be invited to this new ecosystem like an endless number because if you think that the hardware just starts the process and so if you okay back to your initial example if you take the fitbit for example you say okay now i can get measurements on the body and what do we think the ultimate value of this device is going to be what is the information transfer rate and they were in the market for a certain duration of time and google bought them for two and a half billion dollars they didn't have ancillary value add there weren't people building on top of the fitbit device they also didn't have increased insight with additional data streams so it's really just the device if you look for example at apple and the device they sell you have value in the device that someone buys but also you have everyone who's building on top of it you have this additional ecosystem value and then you have additional data streams that come in which increase the value of the product and so if you say if you look at the the hardware as the instigator of value creation you know over time it what we've built may constitute five or ten percent of the value of the overall ecosystem and that's what we really care about what we're trying to do is kick-start the mainstream adoption of quantifying the brain and the hardware just opens the door to say what kind of ecosystem could exist and that's why we the examples are so relevant of the things you've outlined in your life we hope i hope those things the books people write the experiences people build the conversations you have your relationship with your ai systems i hope those all are feeding on the insights built upon this ecosystem we've created to better your life and so that's the thinking behind it again with the drake equation being the underlying driver of value and you know the people at colonel have joined not because we have certainty of success but because we find it to be the most exhilarating opportunity we could ever pursue in this time uh to be alive you founded the payment system braintree in 2007 that acquired venmo in 2012 and then in that same year was acquired by paypal which is now ebay can you tell me the story of the vision and the challenge of building an online payment system and just building a large successful business in general i discovered payments by accident as i was when i was 21 i i just returned from ecuador living the money extreme poverty for two years and i came back to the u.s and i was shocked by the opulence and [Music] yeah of the united states and i just thought this is i couldn't believe it and i decided i wanted to try to spend my life helping others that was the that was a life objective that i thought was worthwhile to pursue versus making money and whatever the case may be for its own right and so i decided in that moment that i was going to try to make enough money by the age of 30 to never have to work again and then with some abundance of money i could then choose to do things that might be beneficial to others but may not meet the criteria of being you know a standalone business and so in that process i started a few companies had some small successes had some failures in one of the endeavors i was up to my eyeballs in debt things were not going well and i needed a part-time job to pay my bills and so i one day i saw in the paper in utah where i was living the 50 richest people in utah and i emailed each one of their assistants and said you know i i'm young i'm resourceful i'll do anything i just wanna i'm entrepreneurial i tried to get a job that would be flexible and no one responded and then i interviewed at a few dozen places nobody would even give me the time of day like it wouldn't want to take me seriously and so finally i it was on monster.com that i saw this job posting for credit card sales door-to-door commission i did not know the story this is great i love the head drop that's exactly right so it was the low points to which we go in life so i i responded and you know the person made an attempt at suggesting that they had some kind of standards that they would consider in hiring but it's kind of like if you could fog a mirror like you come and do this because it's 100 commission and so i started walking up and down the street in my community selling credit card processing and so what you learn immediately in doing that is if you you walk into a business first of all the business owner is typically there it's and you walk in the door and they can tell by how you're addressed or how you walk whatever their pattern recognition is and they just hate you immediately it's like stop wasting my time i really am trying to get stuff done i don't want to do a sales pitch and so you have to overcome the initial get out and then once you engage when you say the word credit card processing the person's like i already hate you because i have been taken advantage of dozens of times because you all are yeah weasels and so i had to figure out an algorithm to get past all those different conditions because i was still working on my other startup uh for the majority of my times i was doing this part time and so i figured out that the industry really was built on people on deceit basically people promising things that that were not reality and so i'd walk into a business and say look i would give you 100 i'd pull out a hundred dollar bill and say i'll give you a hundred dollars for three minutes of your time if you don't say yes to what i'm saying i'll give you a hundred dollars and then you usually crack a smile and say okay what do you got for me son and so i'd sit down i just open my book and i'd say here's the credit card industry here's how it works here are the players here's what they do here's how they deceive you here's what i am i'm no different than anyone else it's like you're gonna process your credit card you're gonna get the money in the account you're just gonna get a clean statement you're gonna have someone who answers the call when someone asks and you know just like the basic like you're okay and people started saying yes and then of course i went to the next business and be like you know joe and susie and whoever said yes too and so i built a social proof structure and i became the number one salesperson out of 400 people nationwide doing this and i worked you know half time still doing another startup and that's a brilliant strategy by the way it's very well very well strategized and executed i did it for nine months and at the time my customer base was making was generating around i think a sick if i remember correctly sixty two thousand five hundred four dollars a month were the overall revenues i thought wow that's amazing if i built that as my own company i would just make sixty two thousand dollars a month of income passively with these merchants processing credit cards so i thought hmm and so uh that's when i thought i'm going to create a company and so then i started braintree and the idea was the online world was broken because paypal had a uh had been acquired by ebay around i think 2000 1999 or 2000 and ebay had not innovated much with paypal so it basically sat still for seven years as the software world moved along and then authorized.net was also a company that was relatively stagnant so you basically had software engineers who wanted modern payment tools but there were none available for them and so they just dealt with software they didn't like and so with braintree i thought the entry point is to build software that engineers will love and if we can find the entry point via software make it easy and beautiful and just a magical experience and then provide customer service on top of that it was easy that would be great what i was really going after for though was it was paypal they were the only company in payments making money because they because they had the relationship with ebay early on people created a paypal account they'd fund their account with their checking account versus their credit cards and then when they'd use paypal to pay a merchant paypal had a cost of payment of zero versus if you have coming from a credit card you have to pay the bank the fees so paypal's margins were three percent on a transaction versus a typical payments company which may be a nickel or a penny or a dime or something like that and so i knew a new paypal really was the model to replicate but a bunch of companies had tried to do that they tried to come in and build a two-sided marketplace so get consumers to fund the checking account and merchants to accept it but they'd all failed because building a two-sided marketplace is very hard at the same time so my plan was i'm going to build a company and get the best merchants in the whole world to use our service then in year five i'm going to have i'm going to acquire a consumer payments company and i'm going to bring the two together wow and so focus on the merchant side exactly and then get the payments company does the the customer the whatever the the other side yeah this is the planet presented uh when i was at the university of chicago and weirdly it happened exactly like that so for four years in our customer base included uber airbnb github 37 signals now base camp we had a fantastic collection of companies that represented the fastest growing some of the fastest growing tech companies in the world and then we met up with venmo and they had done a remarkable job in building products then something very counterintuitive which is make public your private financial transactions which people previously thought were something that should be hidden from others and we acquired venmo and at that point we now had we replicated the model because now people could fund their venmo account with their checking account keep money in the account and then you could just plug them one as a form of payment and so i think paypal saw that that we were getting the best merchants in the world we had people using venmo they were both the up and coming millennials at the time who had so much influence online and so they came in and offered us uh an attractive number and my my goal was not to build the biggest payments company in the world it wasn't to try to climb the forbes billionaire list it was the objective was i want to earn enough money so that i can basically dedicate my attention to doing something that could potentially be useful on a society-wide skill and uh more importantly that could be considered to be valuable from the vantage point of 2050 2100 and 2500 so thinking about it on a a few hundred year time scale and there was a certain amount of money i needed to do that so i didn't require the permission of anybody to do that and so that what paypal offered was sufficient for me to get that amount of money to basically have a go and that's when i set off to survey everything i could identify in existence to say of anything in the entire world i could do what one thing could i do that would actually have the highest value potential for the species and so it took me a little while to arrive at brain interfaces but you know payments in themselves are revolutionary technologies that can change the world like let's not let's not uh sort of um let's not forget that too easily i mean obviously you know this but there's uh quite a few lovely folks who are now fascinated with the space of cryptocurrency and uh where payments are very much connected to this but in general just money and many of the folks i've spoken with they also kind of connect that to not just purely financial discussions but philosophical and political discussions and they see bitcoin as a way almost as activism almost as a way to resist the the corruption of centralized the centers of power and sort of basically in the 21st century decentralizing control whether that's bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies they see that's one possible way to give power to those that live in uh regimes that are corrupt or are not respectful of human rights and all those kinds of things what's your sense just all your expertise with with payments and seeing how that changed the world what's your sense about the lay of the land for the future of bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies in the positive impact it may have in the world and to be clear my communication wasn't suggest wasn't meant to minimize payments or to denigrate it in any way it was a an attempted communication that when i was surveying the world it was an algorithm of what could i individually yes do so there's there are things that exist that have a lot of potential that can be done and then there's a filtering of how many people are qualified to do this given thing and then there's a further characterization that can be done of okay given the number of qualified people will somebody be uh a unique out performer of that group to make something truly impossible to be something done that otherwise couldn't get done so there's there's a process of assessing where can you add unique value in the world and some of that has to do with you're being very uh very formal and calculative here but some of that is just like what do you sense like part of that equation is how much passion you sense within yourself to be able to drive that through to discover the impossibilities and make them possible that's right and so we we were a braintree i think we were the first company to integrate coinbase into our i think we were the first payments company to formally incorporate uh crypto if i'm not mistaken for people who are not familiar coinbase is a place where you can trade cryptocurrencies yeah which was one of the only places you could so we were early uh in in doing that and of course this was in the year 2013. so an attorney to go in in cryptocurrency land i concur with the the statement you made of the potential of the principles underlying cryptocurrencies and that many of the things that they're building in the name of money and of of moving value is equally applicable to the brain and equally applicable to how the brain interacts with the rest of the world and how we would imagine doing goal alignment with people so it's to me it's a continuous spectrum of possibility and we're talk your question is isolated on the money and i think it just is basically a scaffolding layer for all of society so you don't see the this money is particularly distinct from i don't it's i think we we at colonel we will benefit greatly from the progress being made in cryptocurrency because it will be a similar technology stack we will want to use for many things we want to accomplish and so i'm bullish on what's going on and i think it could greatly enhance uh brain interfaces and the value of the brain face ecosystem i mean is there something you could say about first of all bullish on cryptocurrency versus fiat money so do you have a sense that in 21st century cryptocurrency will be embraced by governments and changed of the the face of governments the structure of government it's the it's the same way i think about my diet where previously it was conscious brian looking at foods in certain biochemical states am i hungry am i irritated am i depressed and that i choose based upon those momentary windows do i eat at night when i'm fatigued and i have low willpower am i going to pig out on something and the current monetary system is based upon human conscious decision making and politics and power and this whole mess of things and what i like about the building blocks of cryptocurrency is it's methodical it's structured it is uh accountable it's transparent and so it introduces this scaffolding which i think again is the right starting point for how we think about building next generation institutions for society and that's why i think it's much broader much broader than money so i guess what you're saying is bitcoin is the demotion of the conscious mind as well in the same way you were talking about diet it's like giving less priority to the the ups and downs of any one particular human mind in this case your own and uh giving more power to the sort of data driven yes yeah i i think that is accurate that cryptocurrency is a version of what i would call my autonomous self that i'm trying to build yeah it is an introduction of an autonomous system of value exchange and value and the process yeah of value creation in society yes that's their similarities so i guess what you're saying is bitcoin will somehow help me not pig out at night or the equivalent of speaking of diet if we could just linger on that uh that topic a little bit we already talked about your your blog post of i i fired myself i fired brian the the evening brian who was uh too willing to uh not not making good decisions for the long-term well-being and happiness of the entirety of the organism uh basically you were like pigging out at night and but it's interesting because i do this i do the same in fact i often eat one meal a day and uh like i have been this this week actually especially when i travel and it's it's funny that uh it never occurred to me to just basically look at the fact that i'm able to be much smarter about my eating decisions in the morning in the afternoon than i am at night so if i eat one meal a day why not eat that one meal a day in the morning like i'm not it never occurred to me this revolutionary yeah until until you've uh you've outlined that so maybe can you give some details and what this is just you this is one person brian arrives at a particular thing that they do but it's fascinating uh to kind of look at this one particular case study so what works for you diet-wise what's your actual diet what do you eat how often do you eat my current protocol is basically the the result of thousands of experiments and decision making so i've i do this every 90 days i do the tests i do the cycle throughs then i measure again and then i'm measuring all the time and so what i i of course i'm optimizing for my biomarkers i want perfect cholesterol and i brought perfect blood glucose levels and perfect dna methylation you know processes i also want perfect sleep and so for example recently the past two weeks my resting heart rate has been a 42 when i sleep and when my resting heart rate's at 42 my hrv is at its highest and i wake up in the morning feeling more energized than any other configuration and so i know from all these processes that eating at roughly 8 30 in the morning right after i work out on an empty stomach creates enough distance between that completed eating and bedtime where i have no almost no digestion processes going on in my body therefore my resting heart rate goes very low and when my heart rate is very low i sleep with high quality and so basically i've been trying to optimize the entirety of what i eat to my sleep quality and my sleep quality then of course feeds into my willpower so it creates this virtuous cycle and so what i at 830 what i do is i eat what i call super veggie which is it's a pudding of 250 grams of broccoli 150 grams of cauliflower and a whole bunch of other vegetables that i eat what i call nutty pudding which is make the pudding yourself like red like veg like the um what do you call it like a veggie mix whatever thing is that like a blender yeah the pasta can be made in a high-speed blender but basically i eat the same thing every day veggie bowl as in the form of pudding and then a bowl in the form of nuts and then i have vegan vegan yes vegan and so that's fat and that's like uh there's fat and carbs and protein and so on everything tastes good i'd love it i i love it so much i dream about it yeah that's awesome this is uh and then i have a third dish which is it changes every day uh today was kale and spinach and sweet potato and then i take about 20 supplements that hopefully make constitute a perfect nutritional profile so what i'm trying to do is create the perfect diet for my body every single day or sleep as part of the optimization that's right you're like one of the things you're really tracking me can you well i have a million questions but 20 supplements like what kind or like would you say are essential because i only take i only take uh athletic athletic greens.com that's like the multivitamin essentially yeah that's like the lazy man you know like like if you don't actually want to think about shit that's what you take and then uh fish oil and that's it that's all i take yeah you know alfred north whitehead said advan uh civilization advances as it extends the number of important operations it can do without thinking about them yes and so my objective on this is i want an algorithm for perfect health that i never have to think about and then i want that system to be scalable to anybody so that they don't have to think about it and right now it's expensive for me to do it it's time consuming for me to do it and i have infrastructure to do it but the future of being human is not going to the grocery store and deciding what to eat it's also not reading scientific papers trying to decide this thing or that thing it's all n of one it's so it's the it's devices on the outside and inside your body assessing real time what your body needs and then creating closed systems for that to happen yeah so right now you're doing the data collection and you're being the scientist it'd be much better if you're doing just that if you just did the data collect or it was being essentially done for you and you can outsource that to another scientist that's doing the no one study of you that's right because every time i spend time thinking about this or executing spending time on i'm spending less time thinking about building kernel or or the future of being human and so it's we just all have this the budget of our capacity on everyday basis and we will scaffold our way up out of this and so yeah hopefully that what i'm doing is really it serves as a model uh that others can also you build that's why that's why i wrote about it is hopefully people can take it and improve upon it uh i hold nothing sacred i change my diet almost every day based upon some new test results or science or something like that but can you maybe elaborate on the sleep thing why is sleep so important and why presumably if like what does good sleep mean to you i think sleep is a contender for being the most powerful health intervention in existence it's a contender i mean it's uh it's magical what it does if you're well rested and what your body can do and i mean for example i know when when i eat close to my bedtime and i've done a systematic study for years looking at like 15 minute increments on time of day on where i eat my last meal my willpower is directly correlated to my to the amount of deep sleep i get so my ability to not binge eat at night when rascal brian's out and about is based upon how much deep sleep i got the night before yeah and so there's some there's a lot to that yeah and so i just i've seen it manifest itself and so the i think the way i summarize this is in society we've had this myth of we tell stories for example of entrepreneurship where this person was so amazing they stayed at the office for three days and slept under their desk and we say wow that's amazing there's that's amazing and now i think we're headed towards a state where we'd say that's primitive and really not a good idea on every level and so the new mythology is going to be the exact opposite yeah by the way just to sort of maybe push back a little bit on that idea uh did you sleep under your desk collects well yeah a lot i'm not a big believer in that actually i'm a big believer in in chaos and not giving and like giving in to your passion and sometimes doing things that are out of the ordinary that are like not trying to optimize health for certain periods of time in uh in lieu of your passions is a signal to yourself that you're throwing everything away so i think what you're referring to is how to have good performance for prolonged periods of time i think there's there's moments in life when you need to throw all that away all the plans away all the structure way so the i i don't this i'm not sure i have an eloquent way of describing exactly what i'm talking about but it all depends on different on people people are different but there's a danger of over optimization to where you don't just give in to the madness of the way your brain flows i mean to push back on my pushback is like it's nice to have like where the k where the foundations of your brain are not messed with so you have a fixed foundation where the diet is fixed where the sleep is fixed and that all that is optimal and the chaos happens in the space of ideas as opposed to the space of biology but you know i i'm not sure if there's a uh that requires real discipline and forming habits there's some aspect to which some of the the best uh days and weeks of my life have been yeah sleeping under a desk kind of thing and i don't i'm not too willing to let go of things that empirically worked for things that uh work in theory and so i'm i'm again i'm absolutely with you on sleep also i'm with you on sleep conceptually but i'm also very humbled to understand that for different people good sleep means different things i'm very hesitant to trust science on sleep i think you should also be a scholar of your own body again experiment of n of one i'm not so sure that a full night's sleep is great for me there is something about that power nap that i just have not fully studied yet but that nap is something special i'm not sure i found the optimal thing yeah so like there's a lot to be explored to what is exactly optimal amount of sleep optimal kind of sleep combined with diet and all those cousins i mean that all maps the sort of data at least the truth exactly what all everything you're referring to here's a data point for your consideration yes the progress in biology over the past say decade has been stunning yes and it now appears as if we will be able to replace are organs xenox transplantation and so we probably have a path to replace and regenerate every organ of your body except for your brain you can you can lose your hand and your arm and leg you can have an artificial heart you can't operate without your brain and so when you make that trade-off decision of whether you're going to sleep under the desk or not and go all out for a four-day marathon right there's a there's a cost-benefit trade-off of what's going on what's happening to your brain in that situation we don't know the consequences of modern day life on our brain we don't it's the most valuable organ in our existence and we don't know what's going on if we in how we're treating it today with stress and with sleep and with dietary and to me then if you say that you're trying to you're you're trying to optimize life for whatever things you're trying to do the game is soon with the progress in anti-aging and biology the game is very soon going to become different than what it is right now uh with organ rejuvenation organ replacement and i'm i would conjecture that we will value the health status of our brain above all things yeah no absolutely everything's you're saying is true but i we die we die pretty quickly life is short and i'm one of those people that uh i would rather die in battle than uh then stay safe at home it's like yeah you you look at kind of there's a lot of things that you can reasonably say that this is the smart thing to do that can prevent you that becomes conservative that can prevent you from fully embracing life i think ultimately you can be very intelligent and data driven and also embrace life but i er on the side of embracing life it's very it takes a very skillful person to not sort of that hovering parent that says no you know what there's a three percent chance that if you go out if you go by yourself and play you're going to die get run over by a car come to a slow or a sudden end and uh i'm more a supporter of just go out there if you die you die and that's a you it's a balance you have to strike i think long there's a balance of striking long-term optimization and uh short-term freedom for me for programmer for a programming mind i tend to over optimize and i'm very cautious and afraid of that to not over optimize and thereby be overly cautious suboptimally cautious about everything i do and that's the ultimate thing i'm trying to optimize for it's funny you said like sleep and all those kinds of things i tend to think this is uh you're being more precise than i am but i think i tend to want to minimize stress which everything comes into that from your sleep and all those kinds of things but i worry that whenever i'm trying to be too strict with myself then the stress goes up when i don't follow the strictness and so you have to kind of it's a weird it's a there's so many variables in an objective function as it's hard to get right and sort of not giving a damn about sleep and not giving a damn bad diet is a good thing to inject in there every once in a while for somebody who's trying to optimize everything that's but that's me just trying to uh like it's exactly like you said you're just a scientist i'm a scientist of myself you're a scientist of yourself it'd be nice if somebody else was doing it and had much better data than uh because i don't trust my conscious mind and i pigged out last night at some brisket in la that uh i regret deeply it's still uh there's no point to anything i just said what what is the nature of your regret on the brisket is it do you wish you hadn't eaten it entirely is it that you wish you hadn't as much as you did is it that i think uh well the most regret i mean if we want to be specific i drank way too much like diet soda my biggest regret is like having drank so much diet soda that's the thing that really was the problem i had trouble sleeping because of that because i was like programming and then i was editing and so i stayed up late at night and then i had to get up to to go pee a few times and it was just a mess and the mess of the night it was well it's not really a mess but like it's so many it's like the little things i know if i just eat i i drink a little bit of water and that's it and there's a certain all of us have perfect days that we know diet wise and so on that's good to follow you feel good i know what it takes for me to do that i didn't fully do that and thereby because there's there's an avalanche effect where the other sources of stress all the other to do items i have pile on my failure to execute on some basic things that i know make me feel good and all that combines to uh you know to create to create a mess of a day but some of that chaos you know you have to be okay with it but some of it i wish was uh was a little bit more optimal and your ideas about eating in the morning are quite interesting as an experiment to try can you elaborate are you eating once a day yes in the morning and that's it can you maybe speak to how that you spoke it's funny he spoke about the metrics of sleep but you're also you know and you run a business you're incredibly intelligent you have to most of your happiness and success relies on you thinking clearly so how does that affect your mind and your body in terms of performance so not just sleep but actually like mental performance as you were explaining your objective function of for example in the criteria you were including you like certain neurochemical states like you like feeling like you're living life that life has enjoyment that sometimes you want to disregard certain rules to have a moment of passion of focus there's this architecture of the way lex is which makes you happy as a story you tell as something you kind of experience maybe the experience is a bit more complicated but it's in this idea you have this is a version of you and the reason why i maintain the schedule i do is i've chosen a game to say i would like to live a life where i care more about what intelligent what people who live in 2000 the year 2500 think of me than i do today that's the game i'm trying to play and so therefore the only thing i really care about on this optimization is trying to see past myself past my limitations using xero's principle thinking pull myself out of this contextual mesh we're in right now and say what will matter a hundred years from now and 200 years from now what are the big things really going on that are defining reality and i find that if i were to hang out with diet soda lex and diet soda brian were to play along with that and my deep sleep were to get crushed as a result my mind would not be on what matters in 100 years or 200 or 300 years i would be irritable i would be you know i'd be in a different state and so it's just gameplay selection it's what you and i have chosen to think about it's what we've chosen to uh work on and this is why i'm saying that no generation of humans have ever been afforded the opportunity to look at their lifespan and contemplate that they will have the possibility of experiencing an evolved form of consciousness that is unidentifiable it would fall in a zeroth category of potential that to me is the most exciting thing in existence and i would not trade any momentary neurochemical state right now in exchange for that i would i'd be willing to deprive myself of all momentary joy in the pursuit of that goal because that's what makes me happy that's brilliant but i'm uh i'm a bit i just looked it up i just looked up braveheart speech and william wallace but i know you've seen it fighting you may die run and you'll live at least a while and dying in your beds many years from now would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance just one chance picture of mel gibson's saying this to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives with growing excitement but they'll never take our freedom i get excited every time i see that in the movie but that's kind of how i approach life uh and do you think they were trying to sleep i did we're not tracking their sleep and they ate way too much brisket and they were fat unhealthy died early and uh were primitive but uh there's some there's something in my eight brain that's attracted to that even though most of my life is fully aligned with the way you see yourself and part of it is for comedy of course but part of it is like i'm almost afraid of uh over optimization really what you're saying though if we're looking at this let's say from a first principal's perspective when you read those words they conjure up certain life experiences but you're basically saying i experience a certain neurotransmitter state when these things are an action yeah that's all you're saying so whether it's that or something else you're just saying you have a selection for how your state for your body and so if you as an engineer of consciousness that should just be engineerable and that's just triggering certain chemical reactions and so whether so it doesn't mean they have to be mutually exclusive you can have that and experience that and also not sacrifice long-term health and i think that's the potential of where we're going is we don't have we don't have to assume they are trade-offs that must be had absolutely and so i guess for my particular brain it's useful to have the outlier experiences that also come along with the uh illusion of free will where i chose those that make me feel like it's freedom listen going to texas made me realize i spent so i was i still am but i lived at cambridge at mit and i never felt like home there i felt like home in the space of ideas with the colleagues like when i was actually discussing ideas but there is something about this the constraints the how cautious people are how much they valued also kind of uh material success career success when i showed up to texas it felt like i belonged that was very interesting but that's my neurochemistry whatever the hell that is whatever whatever maybe probably is rooted to the fact that i grew up in the soviet union it was so such a constrained system that you'd really deeply value freedom and you've you always want to escape the demand and the control of centralized systems i don't know what it is but that's but at the same time i love strictness i love the dogmatic authoritarianism of diet of like the same habit exactly the habit you have i think that's actually when bodies perform optimally my body performs optimally so balancing those two i think if i have the data every once in a while party with some wild people but most of the time eat once a day perhaps in the morning i'm going to try that might be very interesting but i'd rather i'd rather not try it i'd rather have the data that tells me to do it but in general you're able to eating once a day think deeply about stuff like this concern that people have is like you know does your energy wane all those kinds of things do you find that it's especially because um it's unique it's vegan as well so you find that you're able to have a clear mind a focus and just physically and mentally throughout yeah i find like my personal experience in thinking about hard things is like oftentimes i feel like i'm i'm looking through a telescope and like i'm aligning two or three telescopes and you kind of have to close one eye and move it back and forth a little bit and just find just the right alignment then you find just a sneak peek at the thing you're trying to find but it's fleeting if you move just one little bit it's gone yeah and oftentimes what i feel like are the hot the ideas i value the most are like that they're so fragile and fleeting and slippery and elusive and it requires a sensitivity to thinking and a sensitivity to maneuver through these things if i concede to a world where i'm on my phone texting i'm also on social media i'm also doing 15 things at the same time because i'm running the company and i'm also feeling terrible from the last night it all just comes crashing down and the quality of my thoughts goes to a zero i'm just a i'm a functional person to respond to basic level things but i don't feel like i i'm doing anything interesting i think that's a good word sensitivity because that's when you that's that's what uh thinking deeply feels like is you're sensitive to the fragile thoughts and you're right all those other distractions kind of dull your ability to be sensitive to the the fragile thoughts it's a really good word out of all the things you've done you've also climbed mount kilimanjaro is this true it's true uh what do you uh why and how and what do you take from that experience i guess the backstory is relevant because that uh in that moment it was the darkest time in my life i was ending a 13-year marriage i was leaving my religion i sold braintree and i was coming battling depression where i was just at the end and i got invited to go to tanzania as part of a group that was raising money to build clean water wells and i had made some money from braintree and so i was able to donate 25 000 and it was the first time i had ever had money to donate outside of paying tithing at my religion it was such a phenomenal experience to to contribute something meaningful to someone else in that form and as part of this process we were going to climb the mountain and so we went there and we saw the clean water whales we were building we spoke to the the people there it was very energizing and then we climbed kilimanjaro and i came down with a stomach flu on on day three and i also had altitude sickness but i became so sick that on day four we were summoning on day five i came into the camp base camp at fifteen thousand feet uh just you know going to the bathroom on myself and like falling all over it was just i was just a disaster uh i was still sick so stomach flu and altitude sickness yeah and i just was destroyed from the situation and plus what psychologically one of the lowest points yeah and i think that was probably a big contributor i was i was just smoked as a human just absolutely done and i had three young children and so i was trying to reconcile like this is not a whether whether i live or not is not my decision by itself i'm now intertwined with these three little people and i have an obligation whether i like it or not i need to be there and so it did it felt like i was just stuck in a straight jacket and i had to decide whether i was going to summit the next day with the team and it was a difficult decision because once you start hiking there's no way to get off the mountain and midnight came and our guide came in and he said where you at and i said i think i'm okay i think i can try and so we we went and so from midnight to i made it to the summit at 5 a.m it was one of the most transformational moments of my existence and the mountain became my problem it became everything that i was struggling with and when i started hiking it was the pain got so ferocious uh that it was kind of like this it became so ferocious that um i turned my music to eminem and it was you know eminem was is the he was the only person in existence that spoke to my soul and it was something about you know his anger and his vibrancy and his multi-bench way he's the only person i who i could turn on and i could say ah like i feel some relief i turned i turned on eminem and um i made it to the summit uh after five hours but just just a hundred yards from the top i was with my guide ike and i started getting very dizzy and i felt like i was gonna fall backwards off this this cliff area we were on i was like this is dangerous and uh he said look brian i i know where you're at i know where you're at and i can tell you you've got it in you so i want you to look up take a step take a breath and look up take a breath and take a step and i did and i made it and so i got there and i just i sat down with him at the top i just cried like a baby broke down did just i just lost it and uh so you know he'd let me do my thing and then we pulled out the the pulse oximeter and measured my blood oxygen levels and it's like it was like 50 something percent and it was danger zone so he so he looked at it and i think he was like really alarmed that i was in this situation and so uh he said we can't get a helicopter here and we can't get you emergency evacuated you've got to go down you've got to hike down to fifteen thousand feet to get base camp and so he we went around the mountain i got bound back down to base camp and um again that was pretty difficult and then they put me on a stretcher this metal stretcher with this one wheel and a team of six people wheeled me down the mountain and it was it was pretty torturous i'm very appreciative they did also the trail was very bumpy so they'd go over these big rocks and so my head would just slam against this metal thing for hours and so i just felt awful plus i'd get my head slammed every couple seconds yeah so the whole experience uh was really a life-changing moment and that's it that was the demarcation of me basically building a new life of basically i said i'm going to reconstruct brian my my understanding of reality my existential realities what i want to go after and i try i mean as much as that's possible as a human but that's when i set out to rebuild everything was it the struggle of that i mean there's also just like the romantic poetic it's a freaking mountain it's a man in in pain psychological and physical struggling up a mountain but it's just struggle just uh in the in the face of just pushing through in the face of hardship or nature too something much bigger than you is that was that the thing that just clicked for me it felt like i was just locked in with reality and it was a death match it was in that moment one of us is going to die see you were pondering death yeah like not surviving yeah and and it was and that was the moment and it was uh the summit to me was i i'm gonna come out on top and i can do this and uh giving in was it's like i'm just done and so it did i locked in and uh that's why yeah mountains are magical to me uh i didn't expect that i didn't design that i didn't know that was gonna be the case i and not it would not have been something i would have anticipated but you are not the same man afterwards is there advice you can give to uh young people today that look at your story that's successful in many dimensions um advice you can give to them about how to be successful in their career successful in life whatever path they choose yes i would say listen to advice and see it for what it is a mirror of that person and then map and know that your future is going to be in a zeroth principle land and so what you're hearing today is a representation of what may have been the right principles to build upon previously but they're likely depreciating very fast and so i am a strong proponent that people ask for advice but they don't take advice so how do you take advice properly it's in the careful examination of the advice it's it's actually you the person makes a statement about a given thing somebody should follow the value is not doing that the value is understanding the assumption stack they built the assumption and knowledge stack they built around that that body of knowledge that's the value it's not doing what they say considering the advice but digging deeper to understand the assumption stack like the full person it's almost i mean this is deep empathy essentially to understand the journey of the person that arrived at the advice and the advice is just the tip of the iceberg that's right that ultimately is not the thing that gives you that's right it could it could be the right thing to do it could be the completely wrong thing to do depending on the assumption stack so you need to investigate the the whole thing is there some are there been people in your startup in your business journey that have served that role of advice giver has been helpful or did do you feel like your journey felt like a lonely path or was it one that was of course we're all we all are born and die alone uh but uh do you fundamentally remember the experiences one where you leaned on people at a particular moment of time that changed everything yeah the most significant moments of my memory for example like on kilimanjaro when ike some person i'd never met in tanzania was able to in that moment apparently see my soul when i was in this death match with reality yes and he gave me the instructions look up step and so there's magical people in my life that have done things like that and i suspect they probably don't know i i probably should be better at identifying those things and but yeah hopefully them i suppose like the wisdom i would aspire to is to have the awareness and the empathy to be that for other people and not a a retail advertiser of advice of tricks and for life but deeply meaningful and empathetic with a one-on-one context with people that it really could make a difference yeah i actually kind of experienced i think about that sometimes you know you have like a 18 year old kid come up to you it's not always obvious it's not always easy to really listen to them like not not the facts but like see who that person is i think people say that about being a parent is you know you want to consider that you you don't want to be the authority figure in a sense that you you really want to consider that there's a special unique human being there with a unique brain that may be um brilliant in ways that you are not understanding that you'll never be and really try to hear that so when giving advice there's something to that so both sides should be deeply empathetic about the assumption stack i love that uh the terminology what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing of life why the hell are we here ryan johnson we've been talking about brains and studying brains and you had this very eloquent way of describing life on earth as uh as an optimization problem uh of uh the cost of intelligence going to zero at first through the evolutionary process and then eventually through building through our technology building more and more intelligent systems you ever ask yourself why is doing that yeah i think the answer to this question again the information value is more in the mirror it provides of that person which is a representation of the technological social political context of the time so if you asked this question a hundred years ago you would get a certain answer that reflects that time period same thing would be true over a thousand years ago it's rare it's difficult for a person to pull themselves out of their contextual awareness yeah and offer truly original response and so knowing that i am contextually influenced by the situation that i am a mirror for our reality i would say that in this moment i think the real game going on is that in evolution built a system of scaffolding intelligence that produced us we are now building intelligent systems that are scaffolding higher dimensional intelligence this is developing more robust systems of intelligence in doing in that process with the cost going to zero then the meaning of life becomes goal alignment which is the negotiation of our conscious and unconscious existence and then i'd say the third thing is if we're thinking that we want to be explorers is our technological progress is getting to a point where we could aspirationally say we want to figure out what is really going on really going on because does any of this really make sense now we may be 100 200 500 a thousand years away from being able to poke our way out of whatever is is going on but it's interesting that we could even state an aspiration to say we want to poke at this question but i'd say in this moment of time the meaning of life is that we can build a future state of existence that is more fantastic than anything we could ever imagine the striving for something more amazing and that defies expectations that we would consider bewildering and all the things that that that's and and i guess the last thing if there's multiple meanings of life it would be infinite games you know james karst wrote the book finite games infinite games the only game to play right now is to keep playing the game and so this goes back to the algorithm of the lex algorithm of diet soda and brisket and pursuing the passion i'm what i'm suggesting is there is a there's a moment here where we can contemplate playing infinite games therefore it may make sense to err on the side of making sure one is in a situation to be plain infinite games if that opportunity arises so just the landscape of possibilities changing very very fast and therefore our old algorithms of how we might assess risk assessment and what things we might pursue and why those assumptions may fall away very quickly well i think i speak for a lot of people when i say that the game you mr brian johnson have been playing is quite incredible thank you so much for talking today thanks lex thanks for listening to this conversation with brian johnson and thank you to four sigmatic netsuite grammarly and expressvpn check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from diane ackerman our brain is a crowded chemistry lab bustling with non-stop neural conversations thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you