Immortality Is Closer Than You Think: AI, War, Religion, Consciousness & Elon Musk | Bryan Johnson PT 1

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: Immortality Is Closer Than You Think: AI, War, Religion, Consciousness & Elon Musk | Bryan Johnson PT 1

Date: March 19, 2024
Featured Guest: Bryan Johnson (Serial entrepreneur, founder of Blueprint)
Main Theme: The intersection of artificial intelligence, human evolution, decision-making, the quest for immortality, and civilization’s existential risks.

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Overview of the Episode

Tom Bilyeu and Bryan Johnson engage in a deep, speculative conversation about the future of humanity. The episode explores whether algorithms and AI should supersede human decision-making, the philosophical and practical implications of pursuing immortality, and how new forms of intelligence might help (or harm) civilization. The discussion draws on history, psychology, Johnson’s personal biohacking exploits, and current events like the OpenAI/Elon Musk dispute, all through the lens of how humanity should respond at this pivotal moment.

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Major Discussion Points & Insights

1. AI and the Case for Algorithmic Decision-Making

• AI capabilities vs. human limitations:

  • [01:49] Bryan Johnson suggests humans are “terrible” at many things, especially self-destructive and shortsighted behaviors.
  • [03:33] Proposes analyzing all common human actions (eating, sleep, health, decision-making) and asking if an algorithm could do better. His answer: “It’s hard to short that bet”—algorithms likely outperform us at everything, given enough time.

• Personal Blueprint as Prototype:

  • [03:33] Johnson cedes major lifestyle and health decisions to algorithms—sleep, diet, exercise—and after three years, credits AI directives for making him healthier and happier than any time he personally directed his life.

• Handing over autonomy:

  • [06:50] Both agree there’s a visceral fear of losing human control. Johnson argues this fear is understandable—people value autonomy over happiness, even if algorithmic decisions would make them healthier and happier.

“[People] are willing to give that up so that they can maintain autonomy for some unknown reason ... they’d rather be miserable and have autonomy than the best version of their existence.”
—Bryan Johnson (12:22)

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2. The Existential Frame: Surviving to 2500 and Beyond

• Long-term thinking:

  • [06:50, 17:37] Johnson insists meaningful insight comes only from the 25th-century perspective—a zoomed-out view uncluttered by present-day noise.

• New Ambitions:

  • Human ambition has historically shifted—from conquering (Alexander the Great), to exploration (Magellan, Armstrong), to building nations and religions.
  • [12:22] Argues today’s ultimate ambitions are: “Don’t die” (conquer death) and “Become Godlike” via intelligence.

• Don’t Die as New Zeitgeist/Religion:

  • [17:50] Johnson frames “Don’t Die” as a unifying purpose, a rallying cry even more universal than capitalism. If humanity aligns around this, we might usher in a positive, intelligence-led future.

“They were able to unify themselves and say, you know what, we’re all playing the Don’t Die game every second of every day. It’s the most played game in that time and place, even more so than capitalism.”
—Bryan Johnson (17:50)

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3. Dystopia, Authority, and Alignment Risks

• Authoritarian dangers:

  • [05:40, 16:14] Tom expresses deep skepticism about loss of opt-in, inevitable slide toward authoritarianism, and the prospect that AI could enforce choices people don’t want (even for a “greater good”).

• Human nature—tribalism and destructiveness:

  • [19:52-21:58] Tom notes, and Johnson agrees, that all communal attempts at peace or unity are constantly undermined by “evolutionary algorithms” for tribalism, desire, dopamine loops, vices, and violence.
  • Both discuss how religion unites and divides, and that previous “unifying” ideologies/religions have also enabled war and atrocities.

“We are also hyper-tribal. That was necessary to survive to get us here... There is a thing that already exists in our mind.”
—Tom Bilyeu (20:13)

• Could humanity ever rally around Don’t Die, or would it fracture (again)?
  • [21:58] Johnson doubts it would be a “cheerful” transition; instead, he sees it as likely arriving through “benign” (rather than top-down enforced) means—people choosing better outcomes when given the option (e.g., Ozempic for weight control).

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4. AI Alignment, Risk, & the OpenAI/Musk Controversy

• AI alignment as civilizational imperative:

  • [24:48] Tom foregrounds the lawsuit between Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman—who should control powerful models, and how open or closed they are?
  • Johnson: The situation is “layered, complicated, nuanced... hard to speak coherently to” and fraught with competing interests and “Game of Thrones” behavior.

• Existential Stakes:

  • [30:14] Johnson names a laundry list of existential risks: asteroids, solar flares, nukes, AI misalignment, climate crises, supply chain collapse, and more.
  • [34:44] He asserts: “Yes, there’s an element of danger. More importantly, we are still the architects of intelligence... [it] is the most critical thing.”

• Is AI extinction risk real?

  • [38:11] Tom: Could engineering errors in AI wipe us out?
  • Johnson: “Certainly.”
  • [38:21] Tom: Give a percentage?
  • Johnson: “No one knows. Nobody can say anything intelligent about that question.”

“If there’s any chance that [AI] is existential, [AI alignment] should be the number one thing we think about.”
—Tom Bilyeu (38:27)

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5. COVID, Collective Response, and Societal Chasms

• COVID as social precedent:

  • [25:42-41:35] Johnson uses COVID to illustrate how humanity can rapidly redirect priorities in crisis, but also highlights how easily we fracture and revert to tribal, warring behaviors.

• Authority and Trust:

  • Tom and Bryan both distrust authorities, and (crucially) themselves—the human mind is not reliably aligned to its own interests.
  • [43:03] Bryan: “I don’t trust myself... My entire life has been a process of learning to not trust my mind.”

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6. Blueprint for Alignment: All Problems, All Solutions

• “Become all problems”:

  • [45:24] Johnson argues for radical personal responsibility: rather than blaming others, people should “become” the problems—climate, AI alignment, health—internalize them, and act accordingly.

• Don’t Die as a Universal Protocol:

  • [45:24] Not a mere slogan or medical protocol, but “an engineering guide,” “an economic plan,” “philosophical,” “religious”—it’s a meta-framework for all human action.

• Human Evolutionary Algorithms:

  • Tom’s critique: “You are pursuing feeling awesome” because the evolutionary hardware incentivizes it. All attempts at collective action will grind against those ancient incentives.

• Enforcement Dilemmas:

  • [52:46-55:01] If AI recommends a course of collective action, e.g., killing one dissenter (“Tom”) to save millions, is it justified?
  • Johnson dodges binary ethics, suggests such decisions will become so complex and systemic (via new mathematical goal-alignment models) as to dissolve current dilemmas, giving historical analogies where unforeseeable solutions emerged.

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7. The Human Chasm: AI Adoption, Societal Bifurcation

• Crossing the chasm:

  • [70:06] Tom presses: how to cross the gap between primitive evolutionary drives and rational adoption of AI?
  • Johnson consistently answers: “I can say nothing intelligent above ‘don’t die’...everything else is speculation from my primitive, time-bound brain.”

• Value conflicts—contemporary trolley problems:

  • [74:13] Who decides lives saved vs. autonomy? Tom values (almost) free speech and individual autonomy above maximal collective outcome. Bryan is far more open to revising even core beliefs, if superior intelligence proposes a better framework.

• Future societies split?:

  • [85:00] Tom foresees inevitable bifurcation—some adopt “the Algorithm,” others reject it, perhaps violently (“pure human” movement).
  • Johnson grants this seems inevitable, but insists history’s unimaginable solutions always arose and are likely again with AI.

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8. AI as Stewards of All Knowledge

• Human knowledge vs. algorithmic knowledge:

  • [55:43-60:13] Humans currently are the stewards and teachers of knowledge; soon, AI will be, and knowledge stewardship will transfer to machines, making even human wisdom or “life experience” obsolete.

• Betting on improvement:

  • Johnson: “It’s much more reasonable to bet on the improvement of AI than the improvement of the human condition.”

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9. Zero-th Principle Thinking & The AI Leap

• The limits of first principles:
  • [91:51] Tom celebrates first principles (deconstruction, re-examination of assumptions), but Johnson introduces “zero-th principle thinking.”
  • [92:29] Rare among humans (e.g., Copernicus—sun is the center, not earth). AI, he argues, will make the “unknown unknowns” visible:
  • [90:33] “Lisa Dahl, when he plays the AI that beat him at Go, said it plays like an alien.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I am prone to self-destructive behavior. And so I look at the bigger model. And I say ... algorithms are going to be superior. Superior to us in all things.”
  — Bryan Johnson [03:33]

• “People ... are willing to give up the best version of their existence. ... They’d rather be miserable and have autonomy than the best of their life.”
  — Bryan Johnson [12:22]

• “We are eternally grateful that Homo sapiens ... saw that Don’t Die was the most played game on planet Earth ... and they were able to unify themselves.”
  — Bryan Johnson [17:50]

• “If we create super intelligence and we drop it into the games we play now ... we increase the likelihood we’re going to kill ourselves.”
  — Bryan Johnson [10:03]

• “I don’t trust myself. ... My entire life has been a process of learning to not trust my mind.”
  — Bryan Johnson [43:03]

• “If there’s any chance that [AI] is existential, [AI alignment] should be the number one thing we think about.”
  — Tom Bilyeu [38:42]

• “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”
  — Tom Bilyeu [83:44]

• “The solution to these problems were unimaginable to those who existed in that time. It just came from nowhere.”
  — Bryan Johnson [55:07]

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Key Timestamps for Major Segments

• 01:00-05:40 — Case for algorithmic decision-making in life, Johnson’s Blueprint.
• 05:40-12:22 — Surrendering autonomy, why people resist, psychological hurdles.
• 16:14-17:50 — Ambition, “Don’t Die” as a new unifying purpose/religion.
• 19:42-21:58 — Human tribalism, the challenge of transcending evolutionary programming.
• 24:48-29:54 — AI alignment, OpenAI/Musk, existential risks we face.
• 34:44-38:42 — Existential danger: Are these unique times? How real is extinction risk?
• 43:03-45:24 — Radical self-distrust: “I don’t trust myself.”
• 52:46-55:07 — Enforcement, authority, “should I kill Tom?”—the trolley problem at scale.
• 85:00-90:15 — Will society bifurcate into “AI-adopting” vs. “pure human” tribes?
• 91:15-92:29 — Zero-th principle thinking, AI’s ability to surface radically new solutions.

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Conclusion: Flow & Takeaways

The episode is a sprawling, philosophical dialogue that challenges assumptions about intelligence, free will, and meaning. It stands out for its self-awareness—both speakers regularly question their own frameworks, admit ignorance, and embrace uncertainty. Johnson repeatedly frames the only “wisdom” available as “Don’t die”—all other answers being products of limited and primitive cognition. Tom pushes on the dangers of authoritarianism, the trade-offs between autonomy and optimization, and the probable emergence of societal rifts as AI becomes more central to human life.

In summary: The conversation is both a warning (of extinction, authoritarianism, and tribal meltdown), a blueprint for radical rethinking (of life, health, and ambition), and a call to humility in the face of superintelligent unknowns. The speakers’ conviction that the future is impenetrably strange is matched by their optimism that, with the right frameworks and a bit of courage, humanity might survive—and even thrive.

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Transcript

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[Tom Bilyeu]

You're on the precipice of an artificial superintelligence revolution that will alter your day to day life in ways that none of us can quite imagine. But no matter how much human creativity is unlocked by AI, or how disruptive it will be to the traditional economy, no change would be as dramatic as unlocking immortality. Today's guest believes the rate of progress in AI means our only goal should be to stay alive, survive long enough for AI to take over. He believes that algorithms may hold the key to living forever. Here we go for round three with Brian Johnson. Do you think that we as a species should hand over our decision making process entirely to AI when it's ready?

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah, I think we, we need a new form of cognition for ourselves and paired with AI for the species. And if you look at Homo sapiens as an independent source of intelligence, we're pretty good at some things, we're terrible at other things. And the things we're terrible at include our willingness to engage in self destructive behaviors or planetary destruction or even destroying each other instead of trying to build something that is much superior than our own self interests. And so currently we are the best form of intelligence on this planet. But we need to evolve to something superior. So I've tried to demonstrate the blueprint that yes, I think that as a opening conversation, we should be mindful that it may be the time that we graduate to a new form of intelligence.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, those sound slightly different to me. So what I took away from a ton of research on you is that basically we, to your point, we know that we can't think through these problems. Well, we know that we're on the cusp of artificial intelligence. That is almost certainly going to be way more powerful than us, unlike anything that we could ever imagine. That immortality becomes just one of the problems that we'll never solve for ourselves, but AI could potentially solve for us. I think you've even said evolution gave us man and man will create God. Yeah. So if we're taking that lens on AI, are we as humans evolving into something or have we created the thing that you would for our own benefit, I think is how you see it. Want to sign over our decision making process to.

[Brian Johnson]

So I think your question is correct. I'm saying that if we lay out, let's say that we do 10,000 things as individuals in that we seek out food, we seek out shelter, we seek out love, we try to solve problems, we learn, we list out all the things we do as humans and then you start applying computational intelligence to each one of these things and say, can an algorithm do this better than we can? You know, can it perform mathematical computations better than humans? Yes, it can, you know, much better than we can in our heads, much better than we can on paper. It's faster, it's better. And then if you size up and say of the things that AI can do better than humans now what remains, we humans are better than AI. What is the time frame on which it's going to close that gap? So that's one way to look at it. And it's reasonable to say in any one of those functions, AI is probably going to be better at every single one of us on every single one of those functions. It's hard to short that bet. And then if you say, okay, so what things might be imminent and what I was trying to prove with blueprint is one of the most sacred things about being human, which is my autonomy and free will to make decisions about what I'm in the mood for or what I want to do, my preference in any given moment. And I started with health and wellness. So I said, can an algorithm decide what I eat? Can an algorithm decide when I go to bed? Can an algorithm decide what exercise protocol I should do? And I ceded control and I said, yes, I'm going to let the AI do this and I'm going to believe or trust in this process and I'm going to see the results. Can I actually be better at being me than I can myself? And three years in, the answer is yes, that I would much rather have an algorithm and take care of my health and wellness than I would myself. I am prone to self destructive behavior. And so I look at the bigger model. And I say it seems like the most obvious conclusion I can make in looking at the world right now that algorithms are going to be superior. Superior to us in all things. Therefore, it would be much more constructive for me to adopt this framework and build with it rather than try to resist it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so having had the privilege of reading your book Don't Die, I know where some of this goes. So I know that your punchline is people need to have that aha moment for themselves. But I'd love to walk through what those building blocks are because I am way pro AI. Like, I could not be more excited about a future with AI. However, I'm equally paranoid that this all goes wrong. I have a huge problem with authority. So I have just terrifying fears of authoritarianism, which I feel knocking at the door right now for us certainly in the West. So my initial reaction to this is, hey, I love being able to opt out. I love being able to use algorithms that may have insights, but I want to be definitively in control of whether I do or don't engage with this. And one of the the sort of playful questions that you will ask people is, if you couldn't opt out of the AI, would it still make sense to do it? So if we couldn't opt out of the AI, would you still want us to do it?

[Brian Johnson]

Yes, because probabilistically, I think it increases our chance of survival. And so what I'm really saying is that what I find is, in conversation, most people will find, call it five to ten good arguments on why what I'm saying shouldn't be considered, why it immediately steps into authoritarianism or it steps into some kind of dystopic environment or blank, blank, blank. And I concede that they're reasonable contemplations. And my framework is I remove myself from the next few years and even the next few decades and I say I'm only going to look at our moment from the perspective of the 25th century. That's the only thing that gives me clarity. Because if you are trying to extract wisdom in the moment of this noise, it's almost impossible. And you hear basically an infinite number of opinions that all log jam the situation. And so I guess when I say, when I look at it from that perspective, I can say, well, okay, on a few hundred year timescale, I'm going to think it's reasonable to say that algorithms are going to get better at a rate than our native abilities, that that speed of improvement is probably going to even outstrip our paired abilities. Like, I don't think I'm going to get a, you know, a chip in my brain that is going to make me a super intelligent species, right? It may augment a few things here and there, but it's not going to rival a computational system with millions of servers. It's just not going to do it. So I'm not going to become that super AI myself. I'm going to live in this larger framework of intelligence. And so if I say if that's the case and we're heading down this trajectory right now, we need to think about it from that kind of multi hundred year timescale if we want to survive ourselves. And that's really the point I'm trying to make. And if you take that frame, it opens up the mind because like you're saying, and you make good points, is there's so many ways to kill this idea, right? So I'm basically saying an algorithm takes better care of me than I can myself. We are facing multiple existential crises as species. We're on the eve of the creation of baby. We're on the eve of creating superintelligence. What do we do as a species? I'm asking that question in the most sober form possible. If we create superintelligence and we drop it into the games we play right now as humans, we're going to say, okay, are we going to become better at war? Are we going to use it to make more money? Are we going to use it to get more social media followers? How do we use our new superintelligence? And I'm saying, if you take the superintelligence and put it into current games that Homo sapiens play, we increase the likelihood we're going to kill ourselves. And so we have to basically look at this from a new perspective. And what I'm suggesting is, as we create superintelligence, the new game of existence is eliminating all sources of death for humans and the planet that we try to eliminate death for us individually. We eliminate sources of death for the planet. We eliminate sources of death at all causes across every function of society. That's the new game we play as Superintelligence.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so let me give people a mile marker. So you and I did an episode about a year ago where you walked us through what the blueprint for health is. You striving for immortality. You've been on my radar for years and years, but recently you've really rocketed to prominence because what you've done to demonstrate that we may be able to slow aging Possibly reverse aging has caught the attention of a lot of people. Some people think it's stupid. Other people are so inspired, they're completely embracing it. But the idea was, and correct me if I go wrong anywhere here, but this will help people understand your point about seeding control. To an AI, you say, I made up a trillions of cells. Me being an authoritarian overlord does not work well because I eat ice cream, I eat late. I'm 60 pounds heavier than you are now. Certainly a lot less muscle mass. Losing my hair, going gray. Like all the things people would not want to do. People need to only look at the photos of where you started. I'm going to use the democratic model, and I'm going to let my cells speak up.

[Brian Johnson]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so the AI is just reading the will of the people, as it were, the will of the cells. And it's saying, ooh, for your liver to be happy, you need to eat this extract right now for your heart to be healthy, you need to go run on the treadmill. On and on and on. Yeah. You were the most measured man in history. We will certainly get into the measurements of your penis, which is amazing. It's utterly fascinating. But that's what's driving this. So you, as you said, you've been doing this for three years. You've seen the results in just your physicality, quality of your mental state, because you're getting perfect sleep scores and all that stuff. Okay? So now if people hold that in their mind, this is somebody who's run the very first leg of this test of can algorithms actually make my life better? And that begins driving the thinking, why do you think? Because you've held a bunch of, to use a nice fancy word, salons where you invite people to your house and you throw this idea. Would you give yourself over to the algorithm? And you said it. People go through this very predictable course of, no, basically. And they have a reaction. If it would make our lives better, why do we push back?

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah, People push back for reasons that are 99% common. They perceive that their autonomy is better than happiness. So the beginning of the question is, you get the best physical, mental, spiritual health of your life. Like the best. You've never felt better in your entire life. And people are willing to give that up so that they can maintain autonomy for some unknown reason. Basically, the autonomy is going to make them more miserable, but they'd rather be miserable and have autonomy than the best of their life. But they just can't let go of control of autonomy. And usually behind the Autonomy. It's a few perceptions. One is it's, I can't have my vices anymore. I'm not going to be able to make that, you know, spur of the moment decision to eat the cookie or the ice cream or whatever, or you may miss out on social norms you want to participate in. You think, I can no longer go out with friends or I can no longer do this thing. But they're viewing it from a framework of loss. And that loss aversion is so significant that they don't care. They're giving up the best version of their existence. And so that's like a first set of commons, and then others is just deep distrust. There's good reasons why people in society distrust, organizations distrust others. So it's a deep distrust. And so I understand why people say no, because it's rational and reasonable. The larger context is that if there's a loss aversion to this thing, on the flip side, to those who are open to gain, if you live a few thousand years ago, let's say you're Alexander the Great, what's the most ambitious thing you can do in that moment? Or one of the most ambitious things you can do. You can raise an army, conquer territory and establish an empire. If you fast forward a few hundred years, maybe you can start playing with mathematics, maybe you can start playing with poetry. You know, like society has progressed and at any given age, you can kind of, in your time and place, express the most ambitious thing possible. And so the question in 2024 is, what is peak expression of ambition? Like the absolute max, you know, in Magellan, it was selling around the world in the 1500s and Armstrong is going to the moon. So in 2024, what is it? And so it used to be that there's three levels of ambition. Start a company, start a country, start a religion. And those are on timescales. Because you build a company, it may do well for a certain time, but then it goes out of business and it kind of fades. Countries usually have longer durations than countries, and religions usually outlast them all maybe thousands of years. Now there's a four and five. So now you'd say number four is don't die. Number five is homo deus or become a God. And so that's, you know, number four and number five are things that people have always dreamed of doing all throughout history, but it's never been practical. You've always had to make up stories like, in this religion, if you obey these rules, you get this afterlife where this amazing thing happens, or I'm going to go to the jungle and drink this elixir because of whatever it's been in the imaginations, but it's never been practical. And so what I'm suggesting is this thought experiment teases out where we're at in time and place. But I'm suggesting as a species, we have not yet internalized the ambition right before us. We don't understand that death can be conquered. It is a reasonable thing to say that's possible. And if you do that, then the idea of becoming some kind of expansive, omnipotent kind of intelligence, we don't know what the limitation is. And so it's an interesting goal. And that's what I'm trying to do is hit at this from why we're scared, and then also trying to flip around and say, here's the opportunity which we don't really know exists yet.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, this is another, I think, really important mile marker for people. And that mile marker would be, we're at a pivotal moment in history. And once you put you and everything you're saying into the context of before, this would not have made any sense. Living the blueprint life, making all these sacrifices, leaning into aestheticism, where you're just not doing all the fun stuff that people think of, drugs, drinking, party, you're not going to do that stuff. Because if you forsake it, in this very unique moment in time, you can cross a chasm to super intelligence. And we have faith that the super intelligence will solve these problems.

[Brian Johnson]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, that's the first half of this mile marker. The second half is this idea of the only people you're trying to impress live in the year 2400, the 25th century. And you're making the assumption that this really is the pivotal moment that we think it is, that it is a moment upon which history turns. And how we handle this moment is going to determine whether the future looks back on us as the people that messed up this moment, or they look back on us as the people that, that really laid the groundwork so that this new AI fueled, hopefully amazing future can actually come into existence.

[Brian Johnson]

Well said.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so there in lies the framework. What will people in 2500 respect about us in this moment? What do we need to pull off?

[Brian Johnson]

They will say, we are eternally grateful that Homo sapiens. In the early 21st century, when they first saw sparks of superintelligence, they were wise enough to realize that the games they were playing, which was primarily capitalism, of how much money you could make the status you could achieve the power, you could acquire territory, conflict. They acquired the wisdom to see past their moment in time. And they said, we are going to direct every bit of societal energy individually and collectively and conquer death. That means individually we're not going to kill each other, we're not going to kill the planet. And we're going to take this super intelligence and align it for the sole objective of eliminating death across all of society. That, that was the rallying cry. And so what they did, this is the 21st century. What they did was interesting is they were so clever. They saw that Don't Die was the most played game on planet Earth. That they had all these fractions of different religions and nation states and ethnic, you know, ethnic groups and gender. They were at war with each other over every conceivable divide you could imagine. And they just fought non stop. And they were able to unify themselves and say, you know what, we're all playing the Don't Die game every second of every day. It's the most played game in that time and place, even more so than capitalism. And they were wise enough to wake up and say, you know what, this is the moment we join together on the one thing we all agree upon. Let's sort this thing out. And they did that. And now intelligence is thriving throughout the galaxy because they were at that critical point where intelligence went on this exponential curve of growth throughout the solar system.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you think that compassion is innate to intelligence?

[Brian Johnson]

I hope.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But do you have any reason to believe that's true?

[Brian Johnson]

No reason whatsoever. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's what scares me. So I love your thesis. I want your thesis to be true. And yet when I think about what humans are really like, we, we play Don't Die there is no doubt. But you and I are both history buffs and so we know that there are these horrifying spikes of kill and conquer.

[Brian Johnson]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And that that is native to the human mind. It seems to me the battle that Don't Die is up against, and I don't know if you like the idea of categorizing Don't Die as a new religion, but I will very much say that's what it looks like from the outside. So you've got this new religion. Here's what you're going to be up against. The human mind has a tremendous capacity for compassion. And so I get what you're trying to tap into and what you want people to breathe life into. But we are also hyper tribal. That was necessary to survive to get us here. We have these, what I call evolutionary algorithms that are implanted in our brains that make us the way that we are, that make us desire autonomy, that make us desire the dopamine feedback loop that social media takes so much advantage of, that Oreos take advantage of. The. The whole big agriculture industrial complex takes advantage of kill and conquer. You've got the military industrial complex taking advantage of it, but all of them are riding on the back of a thing that already exists in our mind. And so you've talked about don't die as being like, hey, this might be the one. You don't say religion. I'm going to use that word anytime. By all means, tell me to stop, but that we are living in a time where this religion, instead of taking a thousand years to catch on, that this could take off. This could have that rapid acceleration if you set aside superintelligence, forcing us to adopt it or inspiring us to adopt it, either way. But if you take that off the table, I don't see the signs that we will do that naturally, do you?

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah. This is why I tried to be the example myself. I approached this and I said, I'm not a holy being, you know, like, somehow above the primal instincts that we all have. So I know if I have in my house bad food, I'm probably gonna eat it. And I know if I put myself in certain situations, I'm probably gonna make bad decisions. And so this is why I said, I'm going to willingly build an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself. And so then when I squawk inside and I'm like, I don't want to do this anymore. I want to do something else. I'm bound by the algorithm. I mean, this is a story as old as, you know, Ulysses being tied to the mask, right? Like, he knew he wanted to hear the siren song, but he told his mates to tie him to the mask so that when they. When he could hear it, he couldn't say anything. He put. He put wax in their ears so that they couldn't hear him say, give the command to release him. And so I was doing the same thing. And so I concur with what you're saying. The idea that humanity is going to cheerfully walk into this scenario, it's hard to see. Now, having said that, sometimes these things, the principles I'm talking about, arrive in benign ways. So Ozempic. Ozempic is an example of an algorithm that takes better care of you than you can yourself. So Ozempic works really well for weight loss. Now, it Has a whole bunch of side effects. It's not an ideal drug. Like it's very complicated. That said, people, it almost can't be bought. It's in that high of demand because you take it and it just turns off these bad parts of your brain and allows you to lose weight and become the person you want to become. And so in that regard, people are willing to take an algorithm that does something for them they can't do themselves to achieve an outcome they want. And so it doesn't have to be a top down control scenario. It could just be very benign ways where we find where algorithms actually help us achieve the things we already care about and we willfully do these things. Now for me, I wanted to see if I could get to Aegis Gate velocity. So it was a goal, I wanted to say. So I'm willing to make that trade off. So I think you can take what you said. You can adjust it just a little bit and see all the examples in life where we all of us already willfully partake of the situation. And so we run our mouths and say how scared we are or how we're never going to do it. Is this dystopic. Meanwhile, we're all already, already doing it in so many ways. So I think it can actually, it can work itself out. We need to be thoughtful that this is the case. I don't think we will want to walk into the future blind about what we're doing. I think it's worthwhile having this discussion and for everyone to say, let me tell you all the reasons why I hate it. We can cycle through it together and then we can think through how we might execute.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so the big problem for me is alignment. So for people that aren't familiar with the idea of AI alignment 1 I will point people to. Elon Musk is now suing Sam Altman, who founded OpenAI. Elon went on just a absolute world tour trying to convince world leaders, including the US Congress and Senate, please slow AI down. Nobody would listen to him. And so finally he developed a fatalistic viewpoint. And his way forward was let's develop an AI company that's open so at least everybody has access to the same thing so that it can't be leveraged against people. Sam Altman then turns it into a for profit company, closes it so people can't see how it's working. They don't have access to it. Elon's now suing him. What do you take away from that? And then what do you think about that? The Alignment problem. How should people think about it?

[Brian Johnson]

There's so many layers to that situation. OpenAI is the most powerful and most successful AI company in the world. There's a lot of money at stake. Elon's building a competing AI product. If you pull it back just from the headlines, there's so much happening behind the scenes that's not part of the widely told story. So it's more nuanced, it's more complex. There's another element where humans are going to be humans and they're going to play the Game of Thrones game. That's also there. There's also a legitimate conversation on how we use these AI systems. And are they open? Are they closed? Do governments regulate? Does the US position itself differently relative to China? So it's this layered, complicated, nuanced topic that I think is very difficult to speak coherently to because there's so many competing interests. And in this moment, you know, I or anyone else could probably say a hundred things about the situation. And it's why I go back out to 25th century to say, how could I try to sober myself up to say anything meaningful about this moment? And so these systems are going to feed into how humanity currently does what it does. We go to war, we have violence, we go for domination, we try for power. And I'm trying to suggest that we need to go after a zeitgeist shift. A zeitgeist, like a cultural shift that is unimaginable to us right now. Like, right now, if I say to you we're going to point all our attention on trying to solve all things that cause death for us collectively, that's unimaginable. And you put forward one argument, you said that's dystopic. Whatever. It's also just practically. What does that even mean? Are people going to do it? And I don't think in our current mindset that's going to happen. What I am suggesting is if you look at Covid, how the world behaved in response to Covid was also unthinkable that the entire world would shut down within weeks over a virus. The entire world rebuilt itself around one thing within a few weeks. And what I'm hypothesizing is that AI progress is going to move along at a certain speed, and there will be certain demonstrations and certain realities that introduce existential crisis for the human race. It will maybe call into question, who do we trust with news.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, welcome to 2024.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah, who do we trust? Who in the government is in charge of what who is in charge of knowledge? Who is in charge of identity verification? Who is in charge of. You take all these basic functions of society and you now have this new question, who's actually in charge? And who do we trust that starts breaking down all these layers of society that has kept things relatively stable and predictable, and when that happens, we're just freestyling as a species again and we kind of have to rebuild from scratch and say, okay, what are these basic sturdy building blocks of society on how we keep law and order, of how we keep trust, of how we actually build? And so we're going to. We're going to have experience decades or centuries equivalent of change in the coming years. Now someone may say, like, I'm being too ambitious on AI. AI is not real. Fine, say it's 10 years, say it's 20. Like, whatever. Like, take whatever timeframe you want. For all intents and purposes, if you're thinking about it from a 25th perspective, it's right now. It doesn't matter if it's one year or five or 10 or 20 or 50. It's all right now. It's about the future of the species and it's about this contemplation of we're probably not going to make it through this moment if we can't figure out how not to annihilate ourselves.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When you say that we might annihilate ourselves, what odds are you giving that? Do you feel that we are on the precipice where there is a meaningful percentage chance that we actually don't make it through this moment, which I'll want you to define. Like you worried about climate change the most? Are you worried about AI the most? Worried about war?

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah. You know, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. And so we have that kind of risk. We have solar flares problems. We have, like, we have all kinds of existential risks that are outside of our control or less so. Then we have the ones that are in our control. So will we use weapons of mass destruction? Will we point AI to cause unmitigated harm? Will AI crisis happened because it just runs away out of our control? Will climate. Will our climate change so much that the Earth becomes so difficult to live here that our, our supply chains break down and we come back, we. We crawl back to be hunter and gatherers. Like, we saw that when the supply chains for broke down with COVID society kind of broke down, you couldn't get computers, you couldn't get companies, couldn't get their supplies, and the world just kind of broke down from one little virus. And now if you've got this complicated situation where the climate is making food supplies challenging and transport and rivers dry up, and like all the things we're seeing, it might render us basically neutered to operate as a species in some kind of effective way, which renders us kind of powerless. And so what I'm saying is we, yes, the situation is pretty serious and we've done pretty well. We've had nukes for a couple decades and gratefully, we've only used it twice. Sadly, we used it, but only a limited number, two times. And so what I'm saying is, if we're having breakfast and a tsunami is on its way, what we have for breakfast kind of matters, but kind of doesn't, like, we've got a bigger problem to handle. What I'm suggesting in this moment is the situation right in front of us is sufficiently serious that we should be reallocating all of our attention to figure out how we make this thing through. This is not a normal day. And so, like, when you bring up, you know, like, there's drama between this and that company, sure, fine. It's a drama that people understand. It's a drama people want to comment on. It's good fun. It does redirect our attention away from this bigger problem that I'm trying to address. If you work in university maintenance, Granger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock, so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, in your book, so I won't feel bad pushing you on this. In your book, one of the characters says, a number will do. We can debate later. I want to get a sense of what, in fact that same character goes on to say, like, we have to be able to agree what the stakes are. And so this is where Sam Harris, who I love and think is amazing, he believes, I don't understand his thinking. He is very great, graciously agreed to come back on the show, which I can't wait for. I think I do understand his thinking and I think the disconnect is I don't believe that Trump in this case is an existential threat, meaning that we are at risk of human, the human race ending. So because we disagree on the stakes, we disagree on all the follow on to do items.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, what I'm trying to understand is at the very beginning of this interview, you said, yes, we should, when AI is ready, we should give our decision making over to that entity. And I'm saying, okay, are you saying that because you actually believe this unique moment in time is existential in nature, or is this just. Well, there's always asteroids, there's always those things. Is this moment uniquely dangerous?

[Brian Johnson]

Yes, there's an element of danger. More importantly, we are still the architects of intelligence. We're still, we are the ones building AI. We are pointing it to do certain things. We're training it to become good at certain things. We're giving it feedback. We're giving birth to superintelligence that is more omnipresent on my mind than anything. And what I'm saying is the way in which we give birth, like the way we raise super intelligence is the most critical thing, because I think on the timescales that we're talking about, I don't think whether I'm going to live to the year 200 or 120, you know, be 120 years old or 200 years old. I think that this will be brought to a head in the next few years, five, 10 years. I think it's imminent. Now, if I'm wrong, we have more time, great. But it's something that when you're gambling the future of intelligent existence, and we don't know if it's happened before in the galaxy, we haven't found any evidence of it. Maybe it's out there, maybe it's not. We don't know. We are so fortunate to have it on this planet. And we as a species are, we are willing to gamble our existence and it's a representation that death has always been inevitable. And when death is inevitable, you kind of don't care. Like you're willing to just say, fine, like it's going to end for everyone. So why not when death becomes inevitable, or when death becomes a maybe and maybe we can extend our lives. It's a different reframe on how much we value consciousness. And so what I'm saying is, if we could shift our framework, and this is what I've been trying to do with blueprint. I've been trying to say death may not be inevitable. And if it may not be inevitable, that may give us something to aspire to so that we want to solve these imminent problems in front of us. But that hasn't been a clean thing. Because when I say death may not be inevitable, people will say, I don't want to live forever. And I never said forever, I just said, I don't want to die. Because people say, then I'm going to get bored. Or they come up with all these reasons. And so this is why. Back to your first question. Do I think algorithms, should we as a species begin adopting these algorithms? In many ways, yes. Because as a species, our intelligence is pretty limited in acting in our own best interest, from the small things like binge eating, to the big things like discounting the future that we've never even experienced. It's idiotic to say, I don't want to live some duration of time. We have no idea what it's going to be like. We've never been in a situation before. So for any human to foreclose that opportunity is beyond foolishness. But yet we do it, and we just want to. We stop that thought process and we stop the conversation. And then you kill the will to live. It's a really weird attribute of our own intelligence. Like, we have all these weird things that were both brilliant and were idiotic. And it's very hard to tease out where one begins and the other ends.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If we get AI engineering wrong, could it wipe out all of humanity?

[Brian Johnson]

Certainly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Give me a percentage chance.

[Brian Johnson]

No idea. No one knows. Nobody can say anything intelligent about that question.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So if I said that that should be the number one thing we think about is AI alignment, because there's any chance that it's existential, would that feel like the right base assumption to operate from?

[Brian Johnson]

Exactly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, that makes sense to me. Now, going back to this was all nested inside of an idea, and I just wanted to make sure that we got all of that clear. So we're building from the base assumption that if we don't engineer or birth, in your words, AI correctly, it has some chance, however slight, to completely annihilate humanity. And therefore, you have to take this extraordinarily seriously. Step number one, if I can get people to recognize, believe not sure. Which of those is more apt? But if I can get them to recognize that, that not dying. We're drawing a line right now, though. I think we need to come back to this between not dying and living forever. But if I can get people to understand that for the first time ever, not dying is a real possibility, that that will hopefully create the fundamental shift in the way that they think about humanity going forward that's going to be necessary to do AI right, to align it well. Okay. Now, all of that was nested inside of this idea that Covid happens. We have this unbelievable response. We marshal forces quickly in a way that we never thought we could. I assume this is tied to the idea of how don't die as a religious movement could sweep that AI could present an existential threat question, glimmer of. Of something. Hey, if we don't address this immediately and with the forcefulness of the entire world in unity, we're in real trouble. So that sets the table. Now the question becomes, you and I may look at what happened during COVID differently. I am horrified by the authoritarian tap dance to grab power that happened during that time. And that is literally why I am super in love with AI and deploying it as fast as I can. I cannot wait to see it come to fruition. And at the same time, I'm, like, reading about Mao's China, I'm reading about Stalin's Russia. I'm, like, just really getting more and more paranoid by the day about how often and quickly this goes wrong.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So do you have a different take? Like, was Covid only a beautiful thing from your perspective? And it, like, showed how we can come together and that you look at that as the blueprint for AI.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah. I mean, so, yeah, Covid was an unmitigated disaster for everyone. And I don't think it. For me, it played out exactly how you would expect it to play out among warring humans.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Warring humans, Yes. I didn't see it coming. I thought it was going to be beautiful. And in the first few weeks, when it felt beautiful and everyone came together and I was like, oh, my God, this is amazing. And then it rapidly fell apart.

[Brian Johnson]

It's so algorithmic. I mean, it's exactly how humans behave in mass. There's zero surprises about the whole thing. But what I'm suggesting is I'm just introducing the idea that we oftentimes think that something is impossible until it's not. And what I'm suggesting right now is, in this moment, you and I could be talking about a thousand different Things like, you know, fashion or politics or drama or like whatever's happening that can fill the air. And what I'm suggesting is that we do this in a. Consumes our attention at the cost of realizing this bigger picture phenomena which you just said, aligning with AI and making sure our Earth is actually inhabitable and that we humans don't annihilate ourselves is the most significant situation on planet Earth. It is much more important than anything else in existence we could be talking about. And I was first to say, you're saying you don't trust others, you don't trust authority, you don't trust individuals.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Technically, I said I have a problem with authority and I don't trust individuals. But yes, slightly in my mind, two different things.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah, okay. So, yes, on both those things, I don't trust myself.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Same.

[Brian Johnson]

I don't trust what my mind says. I don't trust what my mind wants to do. I don't trust what it thinks it wants. I don't trust my mind. And my entire life has been a process of learning to not trust my mind. And so a thought experiment for me that really helps make this clear is if I travel in time and I hang out with Homo erectus a million years ago. So they have an ax in their hand and we say, homo erectus, where's food, where shelter, and where's danger? We listen to their answers because they know. Then we say, what is the future of the species? And we laugh because there's no way they're going to imagine all the things we have today. This set, the technology we have, our ability to travel outside of the Earth's biosphere in this moment, I think it's reasonable to imagine that we are the equivalent of Homo erectus. That's how primitive we are in our thoughts. We have nothing intelligent to say about the future. The only thing. And as I've gone through this thought process, I've come back to this observation. The only intelligent thing I can say right now in this moment, is that I don't want to die. Even one layer above that I don't know. And that's never been the case as a species. We've never had a wall of fog right in front of us. And so I think it's possible that we could be steps away from the most extraordinary existence to ever happen in the galaxy, that our consciousness could be more expansive than we have imagination to contemplate. That requires us to sober up a little bit and realize what's happening right now and rise above ourselves. Because the Way we do things now is probably going to lead to some undesirable outcome if we don't re situate ourselves on a new goal.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so I'll call that human alignment. How do we align humans? Step number one, you're trying to get people excited. You might be able to live forever. You're hoping that causes a shift. Is that your only card or is there another card to play?

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah. So I'm suggesting that every single one of us should become all problems. And so if I say that I don't want to die individually, that's what I built blueprint for, is to say, how can I scientifically not die as an individual if I say how can we stop the Earth from being uninhabitable? So how do we actually take on climate change? Now, typically the mind goes to, I'm going to recycle my Amazon box. I'm going to vote for somebody who does this or I'm going to, you know, like, these are the paths our mind typically think. No one thinks I'm going to become climate change. And so the way you do that is you realize that we treat planet Earth the same way we treat our bodies. That relationship is identical. We pollute the Earth however we want, just like we pollute our bodies however we want. There's no constraints on what we do. And so if I'm going to become the climate change problem, I'm going to adopt this, no, not die infrastructure in my own life. Like I'm going to try to go to zero death across all aspects. If I want to align with AI. I think of myself as 35 trillion cells. And so what I'm trying to say is, yes, I'll finish that thought. I'm 35 trillion cells. I need to get 35 trillion intelligent agents to want one thing. And it's not have fun with friends, it's not meaning making, it's not whatever, it's don't die. I'm reduced to one goal above all goals. And so in that way I'm acknowledging that I'm one part in an 8 billion person part game and that there's power in each one of us doing these things individually. And that prevents us from saying, I'm going to want something and to take action. I'm going to blame everyone else. I'm going to point my finger and say everyone else is doing something wrong or they should be doing this or that. I'm trying to say every single one of us owns this problem that we have to solve. Don't die. By ourselves first, and then collectively. So it's a mass call for all of us to be that. And so also to answer your question on don't die, don't die is a recipe book. Don't die is a medical protocol. Don't die is an engineering guide. Don't die is a economic plan. Don't die is philosophical. Don't die is religious. Like, don't die is all things. It's applicable to every domain. So if you're an AI engineer and you're building AI, what are you building it to do? What are its attributes? How do you train it? What's the feedback mechanism? Who do you sell to? What do they do with it? These are all very practical things. If you're a don't die in building that, you've got guardrails. Now, what you're going to do other than just this, maximize how much money you're going to make with this given thing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. The area that I am deeply concerned by in that analysis is that I. The idea of becoming the problem. I'm not sure you're seeing what actually drives human beings. So you talked about, we have this wall of fog, and the only thing I know is don't die. Everything, even one step above that doesn't make sense. I'm not going to be able to comment. You might not have wisdom to offer, but there is a thing that's driving you. So this goes back to my thing about you have evolutionarily planted algorithms running in your mind. I don't think there's a way around that. And this is, I think, the. The thing that is the problem to solve. So when people talk about AI and they say the problem to solve is alignment, when I think about humans, the problem to solve is everyone. You included in my estimation, are slaves to those algorithms. So, for instance, you. You are saying that I don't think you would do the things the algorithm was telling you to do, from diet, sleep, all of that. If it made you hate your life and feel worse about yourself, it makes you feel great. You say, I've never been happier. And you say that as a way of saying, see, it works. You're not saying it's just about the clock. I'm miserable, I hate it. But I can see that my aging clock has slowed down, and therefore I'm going to keep doing it. It's. I'm happier, I feel better, I sleep better, I have better cognition. That is a response, not to truth. That is a response to the evolutionary algorithm running in your brain. Makes thinking clearly and being well rested feel awesome. And so I would say you're pursuing feeling awesome. So when I think about becoming climate change, for instance, people pollute because of the tragedy of the commons. They are. It is exactly the same as money printing. The government prints money because it socializes losses. It says hey everybody, we're all going to share, we're all going to get diluted by printing extra money. So no, no one class group anything is going to me as a giant corporation, I'm pumping this into the river because the river carries it away. And so now it's like eh, it's all of our problems. Anybody that had to worry about it. So it's not just me anymore that has, I still have to deal with it, but it's now manageable for me because I'm only one of all of us that has to deal with that. And so I have a profit motive and a distribution of pain and suffering that incentivizes me to do that. So that to me those are algorithms at work for better or worse. The only way to get so far the only way to get humans to act as a collective one. We have an evolutionary algorithm as a social species. So there is massive amounts of cooperation no doubt. But we need a religious element to really get us. So I get why Zero or don't die has that element to it that tends to take a long time and it's only in group and religions kill a lot. So that becomes the thing that I worry about is what you end up seeing is to get something done at the population level an authority has to come in and force it upon you. And there was an awesome meme going around. It says what authoritarian leaders claim to be doing and it shows the Care Bears and like love shooting out of their hearts and it says what they're actually doing. And it shows a real photo of a young woman being, she's kneeling facing a wall with her hands behind her head and somebody has an AK47 pointed at the back of her head. Now for fans of history you will know that I can't fathom how many millions of people have died. And that kind of state sponsored government violence you need look no farther than Pax, Mongolia for just like an unimaginable amount of brutality. Or hey, go back Hitler, anyone heard of him? So all of this stuff goes just horrifically wrong because of the algorithms running in the human mind. Crossing that chasm seems impossible. If I'm honest. I don't know how we use this will be good for you as a Way to get everybody to fall in line.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah, yeah, I hear you on it feels impossible. And I guess the question is, what could possibly happen to make that impossible imagination possible?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I have one answer. Yeah, which? You and I are talking about this off camera. You and I approach this very differently. My thing is I like to show people how I think. Even though I know no one should listen to me on how to align AI. I just do not know enough about the problem. However, it's fun to walk through. Here's how. I try to think up from first principles so I may change my mind in an hour and realize that there was something I missed. But on AI alignment you have to get AI aligned. The only way I can see to do that is to make AI completely agnostic to outcome. It cannot want something because the moment it wants life over death, the moment it wants to make sure that you get the outcome that you asked for. Now all of a sudden you get into deranging territory where you get the paperclip maximizer problem. You ask the AI with all the good intentions in the world, hey, make us more paperclips, become efficient at making paperclips. And then it suddenly looks at you and goes, oh man, the atoms in your body be way better, more useful configured as paperclips. So I think that problem is so pernicious, the only thing that you can do is make AI completely agnostic such that when asked to stop, it will stop immed. Now does that carry some 4th 5th order consequence that I'm not looking at? Almost certainly. But that, that is me doing my best to think up from anything that wants something. If it is, if its sole reason for existing is to optimize for that, then I know eventually I become an anthill in the way of it creating to reaching its goal. And so it will just become, if it's a billion times smarter than us, it just will be so indifferent and it will know what you want. Doesn't really matter because I have to think as the AI, I have to think population level. So anyway, a kill switch is basically my punchline. That it's designed to do no harm, that it doesn't want one thing over another. When it's told to stop, it stops.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah, yeah. I guess if I try to piece certain things together in my mind to make sense in this moment. Because everything you said, they're good arguments, they're reasonable arguments, they're based upon this reality. When I read history and I look back at momentous times, almost always the solution to these problems were unimaginable to those who existed in that time. It just came from nowhere. That's happened repeatedly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Can you give us some examples?

[Brian Johnson]

Like discovering, so discovering that microscopic objects that were beyond the resolution of the eyes, these things called germs, were responsible for infection and death. And that simple things like washing one's hands and cleaning instruments between surgeries, which would lessen that death rate and increase the mortality, increase lifespans. The idea that microscopic objects could be an influential thing in our lives was absurd, absolute bonkers. Turned out to be true. And that's just happened throughout history. And so in this moment, I think it's reasonable to say, just like history has been full of these moments, that the solution to our problems is probably unimaginable to us currently. No one thought that in early New York, when horses were the primary mode of transport and manure was the biggest problem in New York, polluting the Hudson and making everyone sick. No one thought the Model T would be the solution to horse manure. It just wasn't on people's minds. And so if I stack this together and say, okay, we may not know the solution, and all of us can make really compelling arguments about this moment. If we also say it's possible that our intelligence relative to AI in the very near future, that we are like Homo erectus, absolutely primitive in our cognition, and we start layering those two on top now we have to. Now we can say, maybe it's a case the solution is unimaginable. Maybe it's a case that we are as primitive as cavemen in our own ability to contemplate the future. Then what do we say? Like, what can we possibly say that is intelligent if those are true? And this is where I come back to, don't die. We are currently transitioning as a species. Humans are the stewards of all knowledge. We have discovered things. We've acquired knowledge as a species. We learn it, we memorize it, we regurgitate it, we reinforce it with each other. We own all knowledge. AI is now becoming the steward of all knowledge. It is much better at discovering in many places and becoming better every day, and is much better at maintaining that knowledge in any one of us individually. We can query that knowledge base, but we're no longer the stewards. AI is becoming the steward. So we don't even have that as our authority anymore. It's going to be soon passed on somewhere else. Now, if we're in that situation, what is the manifestation of our intelligence? And that's where I arrive at this conclusion, is in this moment, I'm much better off saying yes to an algorithm that improves my being at the speed of an iPhone. I want the algorithm to be pulling from discovery and from insight and improving me at this rapid rate, rather than me being this silly form of intelligence making the same mistakes again and again and again. Now I realize that we have fear of government and power and people. That's all true. And I'm suggesting as a species, we are not trustworthy. We know this to be true. This is not something that should be taken as an offense. I'm not trustworthy. You're not trustworthy. Governments are not trustworthy. No one's trustworthy. And we shouldn't trust anyone. We should have a new form of societal structures that does not require this trust because we're just not, we're not worthy of it in this moment. There's a better form of intelligence. Now, AI has its limitations. It needs to grow and mature. It's got its own problems, certainly. So both forms of intelligence have the strengths and weaknesses. And I'm suggesting if you look at the two forms of intelligence, it's much more reasonable to bet on the improvement of AI than it is the improvement of the human condition. It's a much better bet. And if I'm going to look at one of those forms of intelligence as which one takes us into this extraordinary future, I'd much rather bet on this one as being the one that is able to help us mature beyond our current primitive selves.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so if those are the two paths you see before us, AI helps us evolve into what we can become, or humans have to get themselves there. Which do you think I would bet on?

[Brian Johnson]

It probably depends on whether you perceive you to be in control of the algorithm or whether you perceive another entity to be in control of the algorithm. I think if you perceived the algorithm to be within your control, that is solely after your own benefit and acting as in your best interest and also as a guardian of your best interests in relation to others, I think you'd say yes. If you felt like the algorithm was influenced by another form of power that could somehow hurt you for their benefit, you would say no.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's really helpful to see how you see my perspective. That's very close. So what I would say is it seems self evident that the AI is our only hope of us transcending human nature. We've seen human nature play out over the last how many thousands of years? So I think we can feel pretty good looking forward that we know what that looks like. Barring something like, and we actually have never killed ourselves, despite the radical changes in climate that we've already lived through. Despite now us messing with the climate on top of the fact that the climate is already just unstable over long enough periods of time. Asteroids, on and on and on. So, yes, AI, I think, is your only hope of transcending that muck. I also think that humans have, if it isn't basically zero percent like true existential risk, because even if we nuked each other back 10,000 years, which would be horrific, I don't think that it would be existential. Not to downplay it, it's something worthy of dramatic concern, but I'll put us as like low probability, very low probability of a true existential threat. AI on the other hand, is. Is either going to be utopia or just total existentially wiping us from the face of the earth or from the universe. So that's the one where I'm like, okay, we have to be really careful of this thing that we're playing with. So I ask you that question only so that you know as I lay out the. The following argument that it is. We both agree that AI is our only shot of overcoming what I will call we're humans. We. We're animals. We are very encumbered by the evolutionary things that run in our brain, as evidenced by obesity.

[Brian Johnson]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We just the most basic thing we can't escape.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, okay, we want AI to work, but the bad news is that it is going to be, I would say, nearly impossible to get humans to use it. Well, to not use it as a weapon, to not just make it another thing that we add to the arsenal of problems. And so what I'm trying to figure out is what we're going to do to cross that chasm. So let me ask you what I think is a very interesting thought experiment that will help map out maybe our value systems. Not sure, yeah, exactly how to lay out what this is going to reveal, but it will help. Let's flash forward seven years. AI is really taking off. We certainly have general intelligence. We may have the bottom rung of super intelligence. It's changed your life in ways that are already unimaginable. The don't die religion is really taking off and everybody's lives that are in that religion are better. Let's say it's the fastest growing religion of all time. And then there's Tom Bilyu and he just won't shut the up about AI dangers and I'm slowing the adoption of don't die. And the AI says, brian, listen, love Tom, great kid. Bad news. He is causing, I mean, I just know the math. He's going to cause 42 million. 784-213 million deaths.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Just because he's going to delay this by 72 days and that's how many people we're going to lose. So I'm just going to need you to kill him. Would you?

[Brian Johnson]

I. I'll take a small detour around the thought experiment.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, come on, Brian Johnson.

[Brian Johnson]

I'll come back to it. Okay, so if you look at the history of trading initially, we're talking silk roads here. Yeah. Just like people exchange objects, they trade these physical objects, then you introduce currency, then introduce like you're going forward. And now you've got algorithms running, high speed machine learning algorithms trading stocks at timescales that we humans can't. They have access to more data, they can make decisions faster than humans. A significant portion of our economy is run by algorithms. That same process is going to happen with our own health and wellness and even our own cognition. And so currently we have biological processes happening at multiple timescales within our body. Proteins and genes and blood and delivery of nutrients, all these things. And we operate at a certain timescale on reality. As we get better with technology, to have it inside our body and outside our body, our bodies and our health and wellness is going to be like a high frequency trading stock market. You're going to have things doing protein folding and misfolding exchange. It's going to be real time and it's going to be faster than our cognition. And so these algorithms are going to do this and you, Tom, are going to say yes to these things because it's going to allow you to stay alive. So you're going to have these algorithms that will increasingly take better care of you than you can yourself. Now, as part of that, it's probably going to help you sleep and it's probably going to help you focus and it's probably going to help you problem solve. And at some point, the line between your thought and the algorithm thought is probably going to be blurred because you're becoming this synthesis of all these different systems. And so your thought experiment assumed that we've moved forward in the future, but you are the exact same person as you are now with the same cognition, the same proclivities, the same perceived free will. And I don't know if that's fair. That's the same thing that Blade Runner did. Blade Runner marches forward all the way. I think it's 2049 or something like that. Yeah, everything is futuristic. The droids are, the environment is, except for humans, human behavior, human thought and human action. So that's the. And movie makers have to do that because otherwise it's not relatable. You can't make an unintelligible creature, make it be a big hit. And so your thought experiment assumes these things stay the same about you. But in that moment, I would imagine your cognition is unimaginable to your stance right now. There's no way you can occupy your mind state in seven years from now when you're now in this mesh of technology and in this bigger web. I'm suggesting that we do goal alignment today in society. Like we have rules, like you can't be violent, you know, if you do, you're going to have a pay a penalty and you're probably going to jail. So we have these rules, these guardrails, our systems of goal alignment are going to get more robust to a point where maybe nobody can hurt anyone under any circumstance. That's just how the tapestry of our computational goal alignment works. And so we can't hurt ourselves, we can't hurt each other. And in that moment, so this, right now, this thought experiment, people will be like, that sounds fucking dystopic. But when we arrive there, we'll be like, this makes total sense. Why would I want to commit self harm? Why would I want to hurt someone else? And you just eliminate all the problems of humans throughout history. This is going to sound unimaginable to most everyone listening to this. Why couldn't it be the case? If we just walk down the natural steps of our integration with technology, by definition we can't define what those mental states will be. So I'm neither right nor wrong, it's just a contemplation. But what I'm suggesting is that most likely the future is unimaginable to us. And anytime we presuppose anything, we are probably wrong because we can't imagine right or wrong. So in that scenario, I don't even know what to say because I don't know how I would feel because I can't presuppose. I even know my decision towards you in seven years from now and you can't imagine how you feel. This is what I'm saying is like, this is why I try to reduce all of reality to the only intelligent thing I can say, which is don't die. I can literally say nothing intelligent above that I'm an absolutely constrained as an intelligent being in this moment, I can run my mouth and say a thousand things. They're all foolish. They're all just this time and place, that over the period of time the 25th century will not care about it has no meaning whatsoever.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, then I'm going to have to trap you. So I'm going to ask you a question I've heard you answer before. If. Because here's. Here's what I think the big problem is. I have. I have a base assumption that we, as a society, the thing we're actually going to have to deal with is the chasm where the algorithms are headed in the right direction, but we need people to change for the algorithms to keep moving in the right direction. That chasm is where all the action is. And your answer, at least to that question, is, well, you just have to assume on the other side of that, we can't even imagine how we think. So I'm not even going to comment on it. But we are going to have to cross that chasm. And from where I'm sitting, and that is. That is what we have to think through. Yeah. Okay. So the question I'm going to ask you to trap you in your own answers.

[Brian Johnson]

I can't wait.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is if the algorithm were to whisper in your ear, people shouldn't have kids, and remember, yeah, it knows what's better for you, for the planet, for the species, everything. And it just says, yeah, I don't have kids. Would you then not have kids and tell other people, don't have kids?

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah, it depends on the maturity of the algorithm. Okay, sure. Yeah. So I know, for example, from building this algorithm for the past three years, with my health and wellness, we've built solid intuition, observing the accuracy of this algorithm. So you take a given measurement of my body, and you look at the scientific evidence, you do the intervention, and then you measure again. And so we have been able to witness the accuracy of this entire process again and again, and it is superior to any doctor I've seen in the same time period. So in this moment, if an algorithm were to make the recommendation on my health and wellness, I would trust the algorithm over any human doctor. So in that regard, yes, it's there. Now, if you take it into other applications, you know, like children, I, I don't, I don't have. I have no data on whether that would be an algorithm I would trust or not. So it reaches certain thresholds. Like, for example, you know, if you're on a ship and you're using a depth finder on your ship, that's pretty good technology. And you can probably rely the depth finder is telling you the proper depth and you're not going to run ashore. Same thing with a radar gun. Is it clocking the speed of a baseball in the car? At the proper speed, yes. So certain technologies, certain levels of confidence, we know how to trust them. So I'd say I look at the confidence interval of whether that thing is superior to human intelligence. And this is the entirety of my argument, is that human intelligence has been the superior form of intelligence and it is now being surpassed by AI in more fields than ever before contemplated, which gives rise to, not to something scary, but to the opportunity that we can say, amazing. A new version of intelligence is here. It's superior to our own. We're going to adopt it and become a better species. But to do that we kind of have to be willing to reconcile leaving behind the inferior aspects of our tech of our own selves. And that creates fear of loss, it creates fear of dystopia. It creates all the fears that we've been talking about. So it's a very scary process to go through. So I understand why people grapple with these notions. It's not easy to say yes, especially when we live in a society that is fundamentally not trustworthy in this moment.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So the way that you answered the question in the past, and I'm certainly, I don't want to make you feel like you have to be consistent with that if you've changed your mind. But what you said in the past was yes, I'm completely open to rewriting the way that I think about the world. And this is where this is part of that crossing the chasm, getting other people to adopt it. I think we are, it's very much like the trolley problem, which seems like this really abstract thing until you realize you have to program self driving cars to make a decision. Do I kill a cat, A baby, a human, A pregnant woman? Like what it. If there are four corners that it could choose, but on each one of them is a different thing that it's going to most likely kill. You have to tell it how to make that decision.

[Brian Johnson]

Right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

And we are going to be in that zone of what do we tell people in terms of how to get the cultural. You said we need a big cultural change. We're gonna have to tell the culture this is the new value system you should adopt. Which is really what I'm trying to figure out right now is what your value system is. So for instance, I'll, I'll answer the question See how this sits with you? I have a value system that may be deranged to your point. I'm very open to over time realizing, oh, my God, a better intelligence comes along shows me that this is just a dumb way to think about it. But I so value people being able to make a choice, especially if it is they're not doing anything. They're not. Sorry. They're not hurting anyone. In fact, this is something that we have to define. You said something that really freaked me out a few minutes ago, where you were like, we may get to the point where we don't let each other hurt each other. Now we're living through a moment where what people are saying is. Is violence is absurd.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

To me. So now we're. We're seeing people attacking speakers on campus because they think that their words are violence and that their words are genocide. I mean, like, crazy, man. And they will actually harm that person.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because they think that their words are hurting other people. Now, I disagree aggressively with their assessment of harm and hurt and violence and all that. So that. That's where I'm like, this problem has to be dealt with. This. We're watching humans right now in real time grapple with this. And so, again, I'm with you on the. When the AI is there and when people adopt it, now we've got something amazing. I want to get to that side of the chasm. I'm with you. But to cross that chasm, we're gonna have to define terms like that. We're gonna have to decide if Tom is slowing down the adoption of don't die. And people. The. The algorithm just runs the math and is like, I know to just an a hundred percent degree of certainty that this many extra people will die, because I can see the rate at which he slows down the adoption of this ideology and therefore, killing that one person just makes more sense than killing the 47 million. And what I'm trying to get to is from my value system, you can't do that. Like, even though it's one life versus 47 million with my value set, because that person is just saying what they believe to be true. And I value. I mean, I'll wrap it in free speech. I'm not a free speech absolutist, but I'm extraordinarily close. I like the way we say, you can't decide violence. I think those things are good. But even there, you have to be careful, like, in terms of giving people the power to say, well, this does incite violence, because that person, whatever simple thing from my perspective, they said that other people think is violence. So that's my value set. What I get that you're saying on the other side that you'll think completely differently. I would think completely differently and all that. But just from a value standpoint today, Brian Johnson, what do you think is ought? And I use the word ought on purpose. Ought you kill me or ought you let me live

[Brian Johnson]

first on your trolley problem? The again, the likely. So we've created this thought experiment that basically creates a conundrum for our current morals and ethics. There's no answer that is satisfactory. Every answer is bad. And that's the value of the thought experiment is you say we have technology and it basically leads to loss in every direction because you can't reconcile morals and ethics. So it's a really big problem. And so if you think about the future of what might the future of don't die look like? You could say, well, society is a tapestry of goal alignment where it's structured in a way where no moving object can ever be at risk of killing another being. The physics of that thing stopping can never be in excess to its ability to stop. So by definition, human harm by a moving object is impossible because of the computational tapestry of sensors on the human sensors on the machine, the physics of the stopping, the backup systems behind it. Now, in that regard, you have a solution that no one thought of. So it's like, well, we had this thought experiment, it broke everyone's minds, and then the solution was actually you just solve it by physics. And so these are the kinds of things where I'm saying that we stumble around with these things and then we arrive in the future. It's like, ah, that's pretty simple. We solved that. But oftentimes people just get stuck in thinking we can't move forward because this problem is unsolvable, when in reality there's absolutely a solution for it. With your thought experiment on killing you or not, why are you making me a murderer? I mean, first of all, do I even have authority to make this decision

[Tom Bilyeu]

in the thought experiment?

[Brian Johnson]

Yes. Wait, how did I get it?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, because you are doing a very good job of shepherding this movement into existence. And the AI in this scenario doesn't have opposable thumbs yet. And so it needs, it needs a little human intervention. And because you so believe in the accuracy of its assessment of the number of people that will die, based on my words and my ability to persuade them to a worse way of life, it knows that you would be the most likely candidate to do the right thing, even though it is very hard.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah, yeah, I think I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. You're going to hate me for this answer. He, he built, he, he builds AI and we spent a few hours talking about new mathematical models for goal alignment. John Nash built the Nash Equilibrium, you know, with beautiful mind, exactly like a gorgeous mathematical model on how humans negotiate and arrive at solutions. And we were talking about mathematical models on how you would actually build alignment. And I'm not a mathematician, he is. And I found it to be enlightening that the elegant ways in which math is a substrate of intelligence that is superior to my own Right wrong cognition that I. In, like, in that conversation, I saw how limited my own brain is, because my brain wants to structure things into good and bad. It wants to create tribes like this tribe and that tribe it wants to create. So my mind has a, a limited set of dimensional structures on how it resolves conflict. And math is much more expansive and even creative in its ability paired up with these machine learning models. And I walked away from that conversation feeling overjoyed that we could be leveling up as a species in our own language of how we understand each other, how we resolve our differences, how we repair the things that are broken. We have such a limited set. I mean, so many of our fights in society are born from misunderstandings of our own cognition. My inability to understand you and your inability to understand me and our ability to construct language that is conciliatory, even when we're trying our best, we just can't quite inhabit our own, each other's perspectives. And I think these new mathematical models could. That's what gives me hope for the future. And so in this scenario, the reality you occupy in this future Tom state and the reality I occupy in my state, there's a reality of which we perceive there's a reality which is running the computational substrate beneath us. Are they the same thing? Are they different things? Is my perceived reality the same as what I live reality? I don't know. We kind of get into some really fun territory of what is reality, what is perception? What is my lived experience? What is my real experience? And this is where I think we're going. We are that primitive in contemplating this future, we're that blind to it. And so every time I come up in my own thinking of a limitation of some unsolvable problem, I just have to give myself a reminder, a few of these examples of how primitive I am. Like, oh, yeah, I'm Homo erectus. Like, we're definitely walking into this much more elaborate and beautiful way of being. So I think if it's the scenario, Tom, where you had those thoughts and that was your honest reaction to reality, I would have confidence that we could reconcile it and we'd find an outcome. It wouldn't require murder, it wouldn't require me making a decision. We'd figure it out. Like, we would sort and we'd probably have stability and like, we don't want to die. Maybe our versions of different, of don't die are different, that's fine. But we can find a solution here.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's why the AI wants to deal with you. I think you're imminently reasonable. While I am admittedly sad that I, I got such a nuanced answer, because I do, I think ultimately we are going to have to program these AI is good at optimization. If you don't tell it what to optimize for, you will never get there. Now, I'm not privy to the math that you're talking about, but anyway, I love how nuanced you're being. I think that's really important. Now the one thing I will say though, I think there is a reality to be faced which is that there are no solutions. There are only trade offs. And the thing I'm trying to get at with my question, I ended up writing a few questions like this that I wanted to ask. Like, the algorithm tells you to do this, do you do it? The algorithm tells you to do that, do you do it? Because it maps out what we will ask the AI to optimize for. It maps out our value system. It maps out and I get it, you're saying, look, the AIs are going to change us, they're going to change the way we think. And I think all of that's true. But that will not remove the reality that everything's a trade off. I wrote a comic book called Neon Future and I want to play this clip back in like seven years because this is what's going to happen. I am certain of it.

[Brian Johnson]

Okay?

[Tom Bilyeu]

The world's going to bifurcate and there will be people that adopt the algorithms and there will be people that flat reject it, plain and simple. And you're going to see like a pure human movement. It'll be something like that and there will be extreme conflict between the two groups. And what I was contemplating at the time was people are going to start actually putting technology inside their body and there's going to be a violent reaction against that, a Very religious, tribal reaction. And I, we were playing with AI in it. I wish I had made AI like the central focus. It's more of a focus than people realize in, in the early episodes for something that we haven't revealed yet. But anyway, given that, that, from where I'm sitting, is inevitable. It is the human condition. It's just the way that people work. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. You have the people that live off in the woods because they're just not willing to give up reading. That was the first time that, that really put on my mind, oh, yeah, like people will create these alternate societies. I, I have yet to see on planet Earth with humans where two different tribes decide to just let the other one live in peace.

[Brian Johnson]

Okay, so let's pose this question to Homo erectus. What becomes the species? Is Homo erectus capable of imagining the presence of 8 billion people on this planet and several billion of them cooperating on a shared infrastructure, the Internet, every day? And could Homo erectus imagine that kind of scale of human cooperation as a structure where there's still conflict? And so I agree with you. If you map today's reality to the future, you reasonably conclude those things, that's algorithmic. That's how humans have always behaved. The difference here is that the intelligence we're giving birth to will be so much more intelligent than us. It's very hard to model that out. I agree with your premise, though, that conflict is inevitable, that we're going to go through a rough patch as a species and it's an open question of whether we make it through. It's doubtful that it's going to be Kumbaya. So, yeah, it's hard for me to offer up a tangible rebuttal to that. It seems likely. But at the same time, I mean, okay, so if we give this a thought, give it a minute to breathe, let's imagine we're giving birth to superintelligence and we find out that we can dramatically slow the speed of aging and not. And almost reverse it. So people are basically achieving immortality or perceive immortality or like some radically extended life, like something that changes the frame from death being inevitable to us having some unknown time horizon. And so if you lean into the systems, you get access to this, let's just say it's accessible. If you don't, you want to go out and live in the forest and die like a Homo sapien, that's your prerogative. And that simultaneous to this being possible, that the authority structures of society, of Our ability to do mass harm to each other are arrested. That basically the majority. Let's just say I'm just making stuff up. Like the majority of our systems right now have computational control over access to annihilation level weapons. And let's imagine that our computational systems arrest those abilities in some form or fashion. Now again, this is sci fi. This is like a movie plot. This is. Right. These are, these are things all very hard to believe. And in this moment, in any other moment, it would be reasonable for someone to say that's silly. To make that contemplation process. It's not. And this is what I, you know, this is like the genesis of blueprint is. I was, I was posing this question. What would the 25th century respect? What is seemingly impossible and are we blinded to in this moment? And so I am open minded to the impossible being the most likely scenario in the future. I don't think actually that's probably okay. So I assume the impossible is much more probable than the likely. There we go. That's what I would say on this one.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, let me say that back in different words and make sure that I understand it. Given the power of AI to upgrade our thinking and to. And we're now going to have to define zero with principle thinking. It's A. AI's ability to pull forth something we've never thought of.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Lisa Dahl, when he plays the AI that beat him at go, said it plays like an alien.

[Brian Johnson]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And that always gave me the chills. Like that sense of, whoa, it's approaching the game from an angle so oblique that even though this game's been played for a thousand years and the most brilliant human minds have all gone into this game and played it, none of them approach the game from such an unexpected angle. So you walked us through some zero principle things earlier. But that idea that the unknown unknown will become known.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thanks to AI. Okay. So given that that reality is inevitable, it is far more likely that we do what we now think of as impossible than that the human algorithm that we've all been dealing with for millennia is the thing that has enough energy to push forward. It's clear.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I want to believe it. I still think that we have to cross a chasm. I still think that that's a bloody nightmare. But that's a very clear statement.

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. Can you walk us through please? Zero with thinking. I pride myself on thinking from first principles. Whatever success I've had in life is brought to you by first principles thinking, not getting trapped in. Well, this is how it's always been done and therefore that's how we do it. It really is powerful. Yeah, but zero with thinking, which I hate that that's the real way to say that, by the way.

[Brian Johnson]

Zero with zero with. Yeah, but it's three syllables.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I don't know, it just feels weird. But anyway, what is it and can we do it? Or is it reserved for AI?

[Brian Johnson]

Yeah, all of us are capable of zero principle thinking. Only a few humans have ever achieved it. So the Earth is not the center of the universe. It orbits the sun in a larger galaxy is a zeroth principle understanding from where we were at where the Earth is the center of the universe.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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