← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Immortality Is Closer Than You Think: AI, War, Religion, Consciousness & Elon Musk | Bryan Johnson PT 2
01:32:22
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- [00:01]
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Today's guest believes the rate of progress in AI means our only goal should be to stay alive long enough for AI to take over. He believes that algorithms may hold the key to living forever. Welcome back for part two with Brian Johnson. Do you have to use first principles to to get to a zero with principle insight?
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Brian Johnson
Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes it's entirely a new primitive like Einstein's discovery of special theory of relativity that there's a new dimension building on Newtonian physics. It's hard to get there through first principles thinking or you know, from Euclid's elements to Cartesian geometry. So sometimes these ones to zeros are very hard to get to. You just you're plucking them out of another dimension. So I mean like with go, you know, could humans have discovered the, the moves that, that AlphaGo played? Probably. Did they? No. Where was Alphago able to discover more game changing moves in the game go faster than any human? Yes. You know, like a stunning degree. And so yeah, first principle thinking is you learn everything you can, you make the fewest number of assumptions given a time frame and you act with that knowledge. And so that's how you go from version one to version two to version three. It's a systematic process to improve based upon what you know. Zeroth principle thinking, you're working with unknown unknowns so you don't know what you're missing. And when a so just like if you're a physicist and you're working in Newtonian physics, you don't know another dimension exists in the model of physics until Einstein discovers it now rebuilds our entire model of physics. If you're a doctor in the 1870s and your patients are dying at a high rate, you through first principle thinking, you're not discovering these microscopic objects called germs causing infection. To discover there's this microscopic world of germs is a zero principle insight. And so typically these kinds of insights have come every century or a few decades. They've been pretty sporadic throughout human history. And AI is a zero manufacturer. It manufactures zero principal insights. And so you're humans, we're good at first principles thinking. Every once in a while we do a zero principle insight. You bring AI online and it just starts manufacturing zeros. And what happens when zeros hit society is it changes our understanding of reality. And we humans have a natural time to adopt new understandings of reality. We're not very fast at it. Sometimes it takes a lifetime, sometimes a few lifetimes, sometimes a few generations. And so what the observation is on zeroth principle thinking is that AI is going to move society forward at a speed that will be unintelligible to us and be faster than we can imagine and will give us. Basically make us dizzy and nauseous because we won't be able to keep up with change. And so this goes back to this idea that we are the stewards of knowledge. We are first principles thinking species. Zeros come, we incorporate it into our knowledge, we rebuild reality, but we get ourselves re situated for the next insight. As AI drops more and more zeros, it becomes not only the steward of first principles thinking, but and of the new zero knowledge and of doing new knowledge on top of that. And so we're moving from a species of knowing to not knowing. That is such a significant. Change in our understanding of reality because our existence is premised on us knowing. Every time we talk, we presume we know or we're offering something we know, or we're sharing knowledge and we're moving to a state where we don't know. We had to query these intelligent systems to know. And yeah, so zero principal insight is I, I had a. I personally was struggling. I was obsessed about thinking about the future of existence. And I, I saw in my own mind, I would walk up to the frontier and go as far as I could. And then I hit a wall of fog. And my intelligence couldn't punch past the wall of fog. And I got so frustrated with my own limitations and my own intelligence. I went to bed one night and I was thinking, how do I solve this problem? And I had a dream about zeroth principle thinking. And it was like one of the most joyous moments of my entire life where it just broke this for me that my intelligence could push beyond the fog through the framework of zero principle thinking. And Then, yeah, it's become a pillar of my understanding of reality. And much of what we've talked about today is practicing zeroth principal thinking of this idea that the trolley problem or the thought experiment of do we kill Tom or not, first principles would lead you to arrive at a certain observation. But zeroth principle thinking takes you down an entirely different path, just opens up so much more optionality or the new math of goal alignment. That is a leveling up of our cognition past our simplistic thinking of good and bad and tribes and, you know, the context we have right now.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Okay, so I wish I were smart enough to really understand 0th principle thinking, because when I go to reach for it, what I come up against is I understand the descriptions that Einstein gave about his thought experiments that led him to have the insights that he had, but they sound just like intuition. They. They aren't. I don't understand the building blocks well enough to say whether he was or wasn't building from first principles. Like, I know these things to be true. And therefore, if those are true, the following has to be true, like quantum physics is first principles thinking from Einstein's equations. Now, the great irony is that Einstein himself did not believe his own equations. And he has since been proven incorrect on one thing for sure so far, which is our universe is not locally real. That's crazy. I don't want to derail the conversation on that, but I will just say that is the one thing that makes me go, maybe we really are in a simulation. But is. So you said that zero with principal thinking takes you down a path. Can you actually walk us down that path? Or is it that it triggers an intuition in people smart enough to have these kinds of intuitions?
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Brian Johnson
Yeah, I mean, so if we just. There's a great book that. It's my favorite book. The biography of a dangerous idea. So it's about zero and the number zero. The number zero? Yeah. We assume zero is obvious. We have. We've had it our entire lives. But that wasn't true for most of human history. The number zero wasn't really needed. You didn't need zero fish or zero bread. And so zero had to be discovered. And zero. It took humans hundreds of years to understand zero as it relates to math, as it relates to philosophy, as it relates to art, as it relates to every aspect of society. Zero is the. The number zero. And the concept of zero is the biggest revolutionary to exist in society.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
It's not immediately intuitive for people. I saw the interview that you did on flagrant, and you Stopped pushing the point. You said, I concede your point. Because Andrew Schultz was like, look, people understand they don't have fish. Like, they get it. They know they don't have any. You know, whatever. They're not getting laid. They have zero women. Whatever it was, he gave a bunch of different examples. And finally you were like, look, I concede the point, but I still think the idea may be more radical than that. Yes. In that, yes, people had an idea of not having a thing, but they didn't think of it as something you could put in a ledger, is how I've always read.
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Brian Johnson
Like it.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
There's no way to use it in math kind of thing. Why is it a dangerous idea? Why is it one of the biggest breakthroughs ever? I actually don't understand. I. I have not read that book.
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Brian Johnson
I mean, so philosophically, zero was accepted in the east and rejected in the west because in the east, their religious ideas were open to nothingness. And in the west, that was the most fearful thing to think about, existentially or spiritually. And so the west rejected zero as a concept of nothingness. There's always something, and the east embraced it. And so you divided these religious spheres in the Renaissance, the vanishing point that allows you to do dimensions is a zero. You can't do dimensions in art until you have a vanishing point. And so if you look throughout history, whether it be in philosophy, whether it be in mathematics, whether it be in art, whether it be in the language of computers, of zeros and ones, you can't have the modern world without the number zero.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
That's really interesting. I'm going to say it in another way. Tell me if you think this gets at the heart of it, because I can feel this be the kind of thing that would bring forth cries of heresy, which in a modern lens doesn't seem like a big deal. And then you flash back 500 years and the guy you killed, that there is a difference between, I don't have any apples, but apples still exist, versus nothingness.
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Brian Johnson
Yeah.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
No universe, no God.
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Brian Johnson
Exactly.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Nothing, nothing, nothing. Yeah, that's really interesting. I definitely never thought of that before.
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Brian Johnson
And even going from, like, basic math, like Euclid's Elements, to Cartesian geometry, I don't.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
I'm too stupid in math. I don't. Can you walk me through? The audience may tune out, but I'm actually really keen.
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Brian Johnson
You. Yeah, there's several chapters. There's actually. I think it's my favorite part of the book. There's several level ups in mathematical constructs because of zero. Not worth getting to it now. But math hit certain points in history, and then they hit a wall and nobody could punch through. And you had these breakthroughs of building our understanding of math over time, which has allowed us to do these inconceivable things with math today that previous generations couldn't. So I'd say it's worth a read because we, you know, again, like, we are born into the world, and we have these elegant mathematical models at our disposal to do all things. But humanity had to struggle very hard to punch through these barriers at certain times, and 0 played a critical role.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Okay, so. But the path of thinking in a zero principle way. What. So in first principles, in fact, maybe this is a good place to start. So here's how I think from first principles. How do I escape analogy? How do I get down to what is. So if you think about even just building up from the physical world or like, what is marketing? Marketing is psychology. Oh, so marketing isn't funnels. Yeah, Marketing is understanding the human mind wanting them to do a thing and then getting them to do that thing. So now it's like, oh, I could send an email, I suppose, or I could go on social media.
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Brian Johnson
Right.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
And so people that understand that marketing is psychology, they don't get tricked into thinking it's a phone call or. Or it's a billboard. Th. Those are just ways in which you can reach the person whom you're trying to influence. But if this is a game of influence now, it becomes anything could become a song. It could be getting a basketball player to wear a pair of shoes. Nike. I'm looking at you, right? And so now all of a sudden, when you're thinking from first principles, you're not trapped by what came before you. You can actually lead because you understand the essence of the thing at its most fundamental level, where, again, you're not thinking from analogy. Okay, so that's first principles. You just think up from that, what is this thing at its essence? And then, boom. How can this play out? Okay, so if that's first principles, what is zero with principle? What's the path I walk?
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Brian Johnson
Yeah. I'll make this related to our blueprint and our conversation on the algorithm. So if you take the 13 colonies and America, it was run by the British monarchy. And so from a first principles perspective, if the US colonies are unhappy, the 13 colonies are unhappy with the Monarch. You say first principles. How are we going to make the Monarch better? We need better information flows. We need better decision making, we need committees. We need, like, Whatever. You can come up with a whole long list of how do you be a better monarch to these 13 colonies? And the 13 colonies came up with. And there's. There's a gradient between 1 and 0. Like some. It's not that something is absolute zero and something is an absolute one. You can be somewhere on the spectrum. The 13th colony said, we kind of have this zeroth idea where our own citizens are going to manage our affairs. Now we don't. We can't fully understand how bonkers that was because that's, you know, Monarchy was the only way to. To manage something. Like the idea that you and your fellows are going to run your own institution was something no one had ever done before. And they did it. And so that was a radical departure from the Monarchy. So first principle is you just try to perpetually improve the Monarchy. Zero. You're like, no, no, we're going to figure out an entirely new form of governance with these representation structures and people voting and like all these different things. And we've been sorting that problem for the past 200 years. I did the same thing with my body. I said, okay, if I want to be in better health, I can read books, listen to blogs. I can, you know, do this, I can do that. I can use my mind to do it. I can exercise willpower. If I want to eat a dessert, I can say, I'm not going to do it, or I'm going to exercise every day. That's the Monarch running me. And I said, I'm going to do a zero, and I'm going to build an algorithm that runs me because it's going to be better at being me than I am. And so I flipped it on its head. And so that's. It's such a radical departure from what is. And if you think about. If you listen to how humans talk about health, wellness, decision making, self improvement, anything we do as humans, it's entirely assumed that our mind is the best form of intelligence. Always. We always know what we want to do. We always trust what we want to do. We always trust the decision, and we always have an excuse for why we did it. And I said, that's out. Like, my mind is an inferior form of intelligence relative to this new technology I built to take better care of me than I can myself. That's a zero. And then the same is true for what I'm suggesting for the species, which is we've always thought our minds were the best thing, which it has been true. It's the best thing we've had. But now we're on the precip of something being better. And the idea that our minds wouldn't be in charge of all things all the time under any circumstance. And then we can tell stories about whatever we did to make sense of it is unthinkable to people. And this is what my thought experiment provokes. It demonstrates the unthinkability of doing anything different than what we have right now. And the most basic assumption that we all have about life is that our mind makes every decision in every moment, no matter what. And the future of our existence may be the exact opposite of that thing which, which brings back to the point of the future is most likely the thing we cannot imagine and least likely to be the thing we imagine.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Okay, very interesting. I'm going to see if there is a line between first principles thinking and zero thinking or if zero thinking is really first principles thinking when it yields a thing that is so radically transformative that it feels alien just to use that word. Okay, so AI is going to be a Zero Factory Lisa doll going back to the GO champion that lost to the AI Says playing this AI felt alien. Now, I have a feeling that what the AI was doing and I. I have not looked at this, so if you know it better, please let me know. But I have a feeling, because I know how the game played out, that it. What the AI did was just something that the human mind, it can't do. And it said if I do this move, there's a.0012% over 50% likelihood that I will win this game. And so it just stacks moves like that where there's just a slight advantage. Slight advantage, Slight advantage. And because the human mind can't daisy chain them like that, it goes for more blunt instruments. If I do this move, you know, my percentage of winning goes up by a much larger number that's easier for a human mind to track. That isn't as many DAIS chained items. And so again, it. The. The AI is. Is using first principles. And what makes it feel alien is that it's doing a thing that humans can't do.
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Brian Johnson
Exactly.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
The invention of zero. Is that something that is truly unique? I don't know. That's where my intellect begins to break down. And I can't tell because if. If I were to walk away from here and. And I had to think in a zero with way.
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Brian Johnson
Yeah.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
What I would do is anchor on first principles thinking and simply remind myself that there's an answer that may be so unmoored to anything I've ever thought of before and hope that that remembrance allows for an intuition. And I use that word on purpose to come in that I might not have otherwise had, but I wouldn't know how to force myself to invent a zero.
- [19:33]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, yeah, it's. And again, it's. It's helpful to relax the definition between 0 and 1, because if you get too firmly caught up in 0 and 1, it gets confusing. And so there's, like, certain levels of obviousness. And so when I went through, after I sold Braintree Venmo, I was in search for a zero. I didn't know to use that name at the time. And so I convened a whole bunch of dinners with my most capable friends, and I would pose a thought experiment. So we're in 2017. Imagine we arrive at 2050. We're thriving as a species. Like, we're just blown away at how marvelous existence is. What did we focus on in 2017 to make 2050 so magnificent? And then I would just intently listen to everyone's perspectives. What were they working on? What did they believe? What were their models? What were they anticipating? And I created a map of basically all the knowledge of people who I trusted and really respected. And then I said, okay, all of this is off limits. I can't do anything in this circle. What's outside the circle? What is no one focusing on? What is the zero? And that's when I tried. I determined I'm going to solve death. Death individually, death collectively. And if you solve death, you open up opportunity to some infinite horizon. Because if the goal of intelligence is continued existence, all the energies we previously allocated towards deathlike activities get put back into the system for expansive activities. That's when you have an explosion, a thriving of intelligence in this part of the galaxy. And so for me, it was a fun journey to go from what can I map to what doesn't exist to how to identify that, and then build up the scaffolding to do it.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
You mentioned the galaxy a few times. Do you think that there is intelligent life? Are there aliens, Brian Johnson, outside of our galaxy?
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Brian Johnson
You know, like, there's. There is an economy of podcasts that basically speculate on this answer, right? Like, it's. There are thousands of people having this conversation. If I add my words to this conversation, I'm just like thousands of people. If I stop myself and say, I have no fucking idea, I'm different. And I think I actually size up appropriately my level of intelligence. Now, I know that people, when they watch these conversations are like, God damn, that's interesting. What a fun perspective. And how amazing would it be there's anything like. Sure. Like, go have your fun, do your thing. The role I'm playing in society. I'm trying to be. I'm trying my very best to be the voice of reason, of wisdom and of insight from the 25th century. I'm not trying to play any game that's happening today. No conversation really interests me. The politics don't interest me. Current dramas don't interest me. None of it does. I want thriving the species to unimaginable levels. That's the only thing I'm trying to do. And if I otherwise go back, you know, I can't distinguish my thought process from anyone else. I'm just blurred in this mesh of opinion.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Interesting. Why do you prize being different so much?
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Brian Johnson
Throughout history, I've observed that certain people can identify impossibly hard to see things and see them through which become normal for the future. And we live in existence that benefits from all their contributions. I see myself in a chain of people endeavoring to do that. I may fail, but I am. That's what I admire of people in the past, is what I hope people in the future will admire of our time. And that's the role I see myself trying to play. It's really. I mean, this is a thing I find interesting. If you're an intelligent, resourceful, ambitious person. And you're trying to train your attention on a given thing, what do you do? And every century has had its examples of people who go through that thought process. And they say a given thing. And I'm trying to raise to our collective awareness that this is our shared moment. To push aside our pettiness, our primitive dispositions and raise our sights to understand what's right before us. It's extraordinary. And like there's so many powers that keep us glued to this present moment. And we blind ourselves to these opportunities. But man consciousness is extraordinary. I love to exist so much, I don't know what it's like to be dead. I can find out at some future point. Right now. The sacredness of conscious existence is something we should fight for with everything we have. And we're pretty fickle right now about that. And I think it's just a snapshot of our time and place. In the future, I think we will value consciousness with a level of sacredness and care that we can't even contemplate. It's. I think it's just. I think that's where we will be on how we understand our privilege of Being on this ball, floating in space as conscious beings, I so take for
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
granted that being dead is exactly like it was before I was born. Do you have an intuition that they are different?
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Brian Johnson
I mean, that's zero. Right. Zero is nothingness. So we were a zero. Right. And the idea is you become a zero, and then at some time in between zero and zero, you're something.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
You said I have no idea what it's like to be dead.
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Brian Johnson
Yeah. Which is zero. A zero.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
But when you think about before you were alive.
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Brian Johnson
Yeah.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
That. That doesn't. Scratch that itch for you.
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Brian Johnson
It's unknowable to me on either side of the spectrum. It's a zero. I mean, zero is both. Zero is nothingness and zero is infinity.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Zero is nothingness and zero is infinity. I don't know that I can track that.
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Brian Johnson
It's infinite in both directions.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
It's just absence.
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Brian Johnson
I mean, you're going from zero to positive. You're going from zero to negative zeros on the scale of infinite infinity.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Like, I guess what I'm getting at is you draw a distinction between the time before you were alive, which feels palpable to me in its. It feels palpable and soothing in its just absence. There just is nothing.
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Brian Johnson
Yeah.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Which, look, I get. I'm not a religious person, and so maybe some people find anxiety in that. The. I. I have tremendous anxiety around leaving my wife alone through death. I have tremendous anxiety around dying painfully. That does not sound fun. But I have zero anxiety about not existing. None. And the reason that I have zero anxiety about no longer existing is the just absolute sense of peace I get when I think about what my life was like before I was born.
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Brian Johnson
Yeah.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
There's just nothing.
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Brian Johnson
Yeah.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Is there a difference for you between before you were born and the thought of dying?
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Brian Johnson
Yeah. So, I mean, reframed a different way. So let's imagine right now I'm speaking to Tom in this exact moment in 2024. You are the authority for you. Now, let's imagine in a different version of reality, where baby Tom, from day zero, day one, to your death, let's imagine I'm speaking to the collection of all those Toms at the same time. And I'm inquiring of your opinion, Tom. And so you just play with me in imagination that you're this emergent phenomena of all these Toms over that duration of time. So all those people's interests are represented. So it's hard for you. Let's imagine you can live to the age of 142 the technologies get good enough where you can do that. Let's now imagine that Tom at 140, and you died by an accident, not because of old age. By 142, you're actually younger than you are right now because of technologies.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
I love it already.
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Brian Johnson
So 141. Tom is now in this conversation, offering his perspective about your wife, about existing, not existing, about new developments that have happened in our understanding of intelligence, of existence, etc. If you can channel that thought experiment, you can realize how narrow our contemplations are at any given moment, because we can't reach into the future and ask all the future versions of ourselves, their enlightened dispositions, and we forget the previous versions of ourselves, of their state of beings. And this is why it's so dangerous for us in this moment. This is like what humans have always done, but going forward. This is why it's so dangerous for us to give ourselves too much authority at any given time is when death is inevitable. All you have is the moment. If death is not inevitable, you have the expanse. And when you have the expanse, there's more stakeholders than just you.
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
In this moment, that already seems true to me in terms of I am trying to be kind to my future self. I don't think about my past selves a lot, but I certainly try to be kind to my future self. I try to make choices now where my knees aren't going to regret it later or, you know, whatever. I'm not going to mess myself up in a thousand ways. You just brought up the expanse. So you said something really early in the conversation about you're very careful to tell people, this isn't about living forever. This is about don't die. Is that because people have that negative reaction to that? Because I want to talk about the expanse. Like, that's the thing. So, as somebody who just gave birth to a religion, congratulations, by the way. I think you have to. You or someone in the movement has to paint a picture of what that looks like, Right? So you grew up Mormon, and you said it was actually a wonderful childhood. Follow these rules and you get credits towards this everlasting life. And that was really awesome. That felt really good. Super simple to follow. And you got this huge upside. I think people are gonna need, at least in the early days before they're really integrating with the AI and it's changing the very way they think, uh, they're gonna need that vision. What does living forever? What does that expanse look like to you?
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Brian Johnson
Yeah, there's a. A few layers Why I use the negative? Because a very common reaction to someone who hears don't die is they say, why the negative? Right? Like why not the positive? Like live long, live forever, live great, whatever. Because when you make the positive statement of live long, for example, the person's going to immediately say, fuck yeah, I'm doing it. Everyone does. If you say don't die, you invite the person to collapse everything they understand about reality and have to rebuild from scratch. If you take the don't die admonition seriously, you have to reconstruct everything from about your existence. You have to reconcile that you believe death is inevitable. You have to believe that your choice to engage in debauchery is living life. You have to. Everything is about. And so people are not consciously aware of how deeply programmed death is into their existence and therefore it sits blindly. So live long. Yeah, they just carry on with life and give it no thought. Don't die. They have to say, I either believe that we're heading towards a path where we may not die, or I have to say I am going to die. But you create a fork for decision making and it creates a real psychological and practical conundrum. Do you continue debauchery or do you say, I'm going to try this new thing? And so I love it that it cracks reality in a way that forces people to reconcile their existence. And number two is don't die is omnipresent, practical. You and I are doing don't die right now. We breathe every few seconds whereas the future is so far away of, you know, what is the expanse, what is this and what is that? Our minds immediately discount it because we don't know if it's true. We don't know if it's going to arrive. We think it's something of sci fi and maybe a fun imagination, but I can't act on that now. And so we do future discounting where it's like, I'm just going to have a beer and chill. And so it's not actionable, it's not omnipresent. And so you have. So don't die creates a crack where they have to reconcile existence and immediately actionable one second later for the decision they make next.
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- [34:43]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Okay, but the Expanse. What about the Expanse?
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Brian Johnson
So the Expanse. So there's a few easy ones for us to imagine. If an algorithm has access to our body to do readouts and it has the ability to deliver interventions, and our AI is now doing scientific discovery at speeds that we haven't been able to do, it's pretty easy to imagine us stepping into a future where our body is doing repair in real time and getting access to therapies in real time. That we become the improvement rate of our technology. So just like we get new releases on our smartphones all the time, we're getting constant updates all the time through our technology. So you can imagine something that's reasonable to say we are in near perfect health all the time. That that's just a our systems run that way. And then you can easily take the next step. And you say, well, if our bodies are maintaining themselves in near perfect health, then you could easily say, now what does enhancement look like?
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Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Yeah, buddy, yeah.
- [35:45]
Brian Johnson
So that's very easy to do. We know where that goes. And then if you take the next step where you say, what kind of controls are we going to have on our cognition? Well, as a baseline, we have the ability to engineer atoms and molecules and organisms. Like, we can design the physical and biological elements of our reality, including our conscious states. Like when we, you know, when we drink alcohol or when we take a psychedelic, or when we fall in love, these are biochemical states that we have, we can start constructing consciousness. And now when you pair, because they're just biochemical states, and when you pair AI in doing that, where you have this real time feedback loop, you then begin, you have this really fun question, how big is consciousness?
- [36:32]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
You say, how big? What do you mean?
- [36:34]
Brian Johnson
Like right now, you know what it's like to sit down and have a conversation. You know what it's like to fall in love. You know what it's like to have a Fight, you know?
- [36:41]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Do you mean how many variations are
- [36:43]
Brian Johnson
there of interpreting stimulus, of versions, versions of reality? Like you start off as a kid and you go through life and you have all these experiences slightly different, right? What is the, what is the scale of consciousness? Like if you said, you take this back in time and you ask a human, how big is reality? They can say, well, I have five senses, I can see, I have surroundings around me, I can see there's like something in the sky, there's stars, like you're trying to size it up. And then we arrive at the modern day, we say, actually the microscopic is near infinite. Like when you go down to the smallest things and then you say you go out to the edge of the universe, how big can you go out? And so then you create a map and say, how big and how small is reality? It's gigantic, like so big it boggles our mind. So we've discovered through scientific, the scientific process that the reality is really, really big. We haven't had the tools to play with our own consciousness. So if you were to pose the same question, like right now, I know what it's like to feel drunk and I to, to be happy and sad of these certain varieties of fall in love, but how big is consciousness? Is it. Are we going to have the same kind of expanse? So if our bodies are in perfect health, if we're now playing with enhancement, and now we're just simply playing games of cognition, could we walk into a scenario where our minds are absolutely, unimaginably different than what we have right now? Like, so far removed from our current state of consciousness that we are unrecognizable creatures? I don't know why that wouldn't be possible. In the same way, like we Homo erectus has some form of cognition. It had some similarities to us, but definitely not exactly like us and not with the expansive tools we have of what we can do today. So we've been on this evolutionary track and now we have much more powerful tools to expand our conscious states. And so in the same way, like when someone does a psychedelic, they'll report that, you know, they, they experienced dimensions and experiences and possibilities they never thought possible.
- [39:00]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Can I. So there's a quote. You actually have it in your book. I think his name is Frederick Pole, and he said the job of a science fiction writer is not to predict the automobile, but instead to predict the traffic jam.
- [39:14]
Brian Johnson
Right.
- [39:15]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Let me predict a traffic jam. Tell me what you think about this. So I have never thought about how big consciousness could be that is a really interesting idea. My head goes somewhere dark immediately. So I am really entranced by the hypothesis that we could be living in a simulation. And the first question I had though was, why would somebody simulate something that takes so much time? And then the answer was, well, what if all of this, we have a perception of time that's, you know, a day is a day and we all know what that feels like. But if a million years to the person watching the simulation only takes a week now it's like you wake up every day, oh my God, look, nuclear weapons. How cool. And it becomes a very meaningful simulation for them to run. If the scales of time are dramatically different and, and you'll hear people talk about, I was in surgery and it felt like I was there for three years or whatever. One of the most terrifying things I ever heard about the future of digital worlds is that you would have hackers that would hack somebody's mind and slow their sense of time down so that they feel like they've been trapped for a thousand years. And you'll see that pop up every now and then in sci fi. But that is really, really interesting. If you were going to predict a traffic jam, which I know you're going to be hesitant to do because of course you can't accurately do it. I get it, I get it. But it is so interesting. Are there traffic jams that you've predicted?
- [40:47]
Brian Johnson
I think the most motivating goal we could have as a species is consciousness exploration. And the reason why I think that is most of us do that right now. We do that when we seek out novel experience. We do that when we learn new things, we do that when we have children, we're experiencing new things. We're exploring new feelings, emotions, intellect. Like we're, all of us are basically experiencing the conscious mind. And some of us do it more actively than others. But that's what we're basically doing when we watch entertainment, you know, watch new movies or scrolling or we're trying to explore stimuli. And currently that system is set up as a drug. It's drugged us into this addictive closed loop thing. In other things we've imagined, our greatest adventure is going to Mars. So we've been to the moon. We're saying we're going to go one step further and go to this place. Consciousness is not yet on the radar as something that we can explore with the same vigor. And so I would say the potential traffic jam is if we can sort through getting don't die as the guiding philosophy for the 21st century that we lock in as a species and say, let's just stay alive and let's walk into this super intelligent future together, because it may be pretty interesting to do. And to kill each other anymore would be really primitive, like that's not our thing. And so then let's say that super intelligence is expanding at a certain speed and we bump up against some practical limitations of what our brains are capable of. So even if we do things like we're playing with the biochemicals, even if we have access to all these different molecules, like I say, we're inventing brand new molecules, we're inventing brand new psychological states, we're inventing brand new appendages, the body. Like we're doing all these things with enhancement. How big is that space? And so the traffic jam may be that we bump up against discovery limitations on a new place to explore that satisfies our wants. So if we say don't die, then we're going to say we want to play. And then we say if we want to play, what's the playground look like? And the playground needs to be sufficiently interesting for us to play.
- [43:30]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Do you know the. There's a name for it, but, like the fact that aliens have never come, despite how big it is. Oh, God. Do you remember the name of that?
- [43:42]
Brian Johnson
The Dark Force Forest.
- [43:43]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
No, no, but that's also, that's very, very interesting. There, there's a name for it. The, the equation as to why nobody ordered the paradox. Is it Drake's equation? Anyway, the, the fact that we haven't found aliens despite the absolute, just sheer massiveness of the universe. And why is that? One hypothesis that I've had about that is, and I think this is actually true, and it's interesting that you bring up exploring consciousness is that I have a feeling it is far easier and probably ultimately more satisfying to collapse inside the mind into virtual worlds that are piped directly into our brains than it is to go out and deal with radiation and all that stuff and to have to generate enough energy to open a wormhole. Like, it just seems like civilizations that get sufficiently advanced would end up looking inwards.
- [44:35]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, agreed. Yeah. Like, I think it's like actually tangibly representative where our brain is hidden on the other side of our eyes. And so we look forward and we see everything where we want to go. We forget what's right behind it. And so I think the, the two things I'm personally betting on that will be the exact opposite of what most people think. One is, I think that the next Era of exploration is not out. It's in. And number two is, it's not our minds that will run reality, it's the algorithm. And our minds will. Will sit in some relationship to these algorithms. Even though algorithms are running us, we may feel like it's us. We may not know the difference. And so I had this experience where I was talking to this woman when I was building Kernel, who had a brain implant for her neural degenerative condition. And she had her cognitive experience before she got the implant, and the implant changed her cognition. And she spoke about it though, that it was a unified thing. That was her. It wasn't that the chip and the algorithm was one thing and that she was another. She was it. She was merged with it.
- [46:03]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Me and people listening are. That sounds like the technology is so much more, farther advanced than I realized. What is the chip capable of doing?
- [46:13]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, there's 300,000 people in the world who have brain implants. They've been around. Yeah, it's a. It's a thing that's been around for, I think, maybe two decades. And they do what the most the implants are for Parkinson's. It's, you know, people have these uncontrollable convulsions, and it helps them steady state, and so it delivers the electrical stimulation, and so it brings them back to, you know, totally or semi normal function. And so, yeah, brain implants have been going on for quite some time.
- [46:43]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
But when she says that it's changing her cognition, is it reading as. The tremors felt like they were outside of me, but now that I have this thing inside my brain, I feel like I'm capable of calming myself. And that's where she feels like it is her.
- [46:57]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, she was commenting that before she was in this uncontrolled state where her body was doing something that she didn't want it to do, that made living very hard. She got this implant and it changed her body to perform as it normally would. And she didn't view that as other. She viewed that as self. And so even though there was an actual mechanical object implanted in her brain doing the simulation, it's a pretty crude technology, right? Like just doing stimulation. It's not like it's this elaborate mesh in the brain still. For her, it was fully her conscious self existing. It wasn't like there was some other intervention by a mechanical chip doing a certain thing. And so she fully embraced the technology, she became one with it, and there was no change to her conscious existence. So when I talk about this thing of like blueprint running me actually making decisions for me on my sleep and my diet and all these things. I do the same thing. I don't see it as other, I just see it as me. And so it sounds dystopic to someone else of like, I don't want to do that. That sounds like the worst thing ever. It's a knee jerk reaction that we have to new ideas. But once you experience it, it's like, oh, of course, like, and I'm so much better because of it. And this is why I am bullish on this situation of that we run our mouths because we're terrified of new ideas. It threatens our identities, it gives us, it creates loss aversion where we want to hold tight to our vices and how things are. And we're scared and we don't know what we're getting in exchange or it's even scary. So everything about us wants to shut it down as fast as possible. It's very human, but you know, when you get to the side of it, it's like, yep, all good.
- [48:48]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
How do you keep yourself so open to new ideas?
- [48:52]
Brian Johnson
I assume that everything, my mind, in any given prompt, anything that my mind generates is probably wrong. So I watch the first three or four thoughts land and I'll look at them and say, that's wrong in this direction, that's wrong in that direction. It takes my mind about five or six thoughts to kind of get stabilized and then I'll come up with something maybe interesting, but the first thought's always wrong. Same with the second, same with the third. The, the, the brain just vomits in response and it's like a knee, say a knee jerk reaction to a, to a stimuli.
- [49:29]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
And so when you say that something is wrong compared to what do you have a, like I base everything off a goal. So something is right or wrong based on this is my goal. Did it move me towards my goal? If yes, it's right. If no, it's wrong.
- [49:40]
Brian Johnson
Yeah.
- [49:40]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Do you have something like that that you use?
- [49:42]
Brian Johnson
Well, like the, like the trolley problem. You know, the trolley problem presents a quandary where there can be no correct answer. In our current framework of morals and ethics, no one can make the argument that you should kill the elder man over the mother and a child. You can't. I mean, if you say we're going to sacrifice age for youth, that's just not acceptable to us. And so in that moment I have to take stock that my brain has to wrestle with this problem for a certain duration of time and it's going to misfire. So several times. And so I just know it. And it's like every time I get to a new idea, I make a rule to myself. I can't express an opinion for at least the first few thoughts because once you form a conclusion, you're locked in and your only incentive is to then justify why you made that observation. And so I don't feel any need whatsoever for internal consistency. If I need to contradict myself, that's great. Like I want to find where I've been wrong in previous versions of myself. And you'll see, like in this conversation, the majority of the comments in, you know, in, in the section will be people's initial reaction watching this. They'll hear a first few minutes and they'll say something like, this guy's a quack, this guy's a cult leader. This guy is not living life, this guy. Like, they're so predictable because that's the knee jerk reaction that a new idea landed in their inbox and their mind wanted to violently crush it and lower my status and power in the world by insulting me in the comment section. And then others want to hit the thumb, thumb up on the content because they further want to, they want to harm me and lower my status and my ability. So the insults will be pretty vicious and they'll stack on each other. There'll be a few people who'll say maybe, like maybe this guy has something interesting to say. I agree on this, I disagree on that. Like, but the comment section is like 95% predictable to this kind of conversation.
- [51:58]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
And just to recap, because they're afraid of new ideas, they shut it down. Like, why want to lower your power in the world? Is that just humans?
- [52:08]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, because they, if this is why don't die. If, if don't die is possible, it invites them to reconcile their existence because everything they do right now assumes death is inevitable. Every vice they have, every life decision they've made, every thought process they have assumes life is it is or death is inevitable. If don't die is a reality, they have to re examine their life and that is uncomfortable. You've got to stare down change, You've got to stare down your thought processes, you have to stare down your friends, you have to stare down everything you, you are about yourself. Which I think maps to why the reaction to me has been so violent in the world over the past year.
- [52:59]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
It's been hysterical.
- [53:00]
Brian Johnson
It's totally hysterical. And it's predictable because it is so uncomfortable to grapple so people take cheap shots at me, which again, is great. Like, I love it, it's fine. I'm very happy about it. It doesn't bother me one bit. It's algorithmic, so I don't blame them. They're just dealing with the brains they have and they're trusting that the thoughts their brains are dropping are, you know, the correct assessment. And so they're just going through their own process. It's fine. But yeah, it's really. Is. Don't die is the most threatening thing. So it's ironic. Don't die is the most threatening thing you can say to a human in this moment.
- [53:39]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
That is hilarious. One of our mutual friends wanted me to ask you, in the face of all that criticism, how does it not bother you emotionally?
- [53:49]
Brian Johnson
Oh, I love it. Not only does it not bother me, I have an absolute love of it.
- [53:54]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
That seems impossible. Even I. And I know your punchline on this. It just seems like, do you use a, a negative response as like a jujitsu move to remind yourself, oh, this is hilarious. And I'm looking at myself in the perspective of the 21st century, or when you read the most vicious, unending wall of shit thrown at you, your actual first emotional response is, this is hilarious.
- [54:24]
Brian Johnson
I legitimately am playing for the respect of the 25th century. I'm playing for the most magnificent existence in the galaxy. These ideas are sufficiently powerful enough that it evokes that reaction over that kind of sustained time period. It's an absolute victory dance. It's the best thing to happen. The worst thing would be silence. No one cares. That is the absolute. That's. That's what would be dead. So that would be the most painful thing to me because it means no one cares. It means that the ideas are wrong. It means somehow that the ideas won't make an impact. It means that somehow this does not bridge to anyone's reality. And so this is why I've talked. You know, my. I've had so many people approach me about the haters because it bothers them so badly. It just, it wrecks their day, it wrecks their life. They can't even look at the comment section. It just ruins them psychologically. And these are really smart, capable people that are doing things that have the power to change the world. And then they're diminished by, you know, 20%, 60%, 80% because of how beaten down they feel from those. They, they want their respect, but they can't get them. And it's just sad. And so I've become like this therapist of sort of walking people through of like how they can remap their disposition that if they're not getting if to evaluate, are they getting enough hate now? You don't want to seek it out and be silly. You don't want to seek it out just to create it. You want to tune your ideas and your projects so they're sufficiently innovative that they actually move the needle forward. And hate is a wonderful indicator on this space you're creating for innovation. It's almost like you're playing on the zero to one scale. Like you want to really move that back and forth. And so you want an appropriate level of hate for anything you're doing. Again, don't go out and be an asshole to create hate. Create hate with the quality of the idea.
- [56:44]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
How would you feel if the 25th century clowned on you?
- [56:49]
Brian Johnson
I gave it my best. Like I give it my best shot.
- [56:51]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Would that sting though?
- [56:52]
Brian Johnson
No, like I am doing my very best as an intelligent being. I feel primitive. I can see my limitations of my own intelligence. I've given it my very best. And so if they clown on me like I'm satisfied. I have genuinely given it my very best shot of everything inside of me to be useful to intelligence, to be useful for intelligence.
- [57:16]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
That's interesting. Talk to me about what's real today, what's possible today. So you founded a company called OS Fund. I think you invested $100 million into the most cutting edge building blocks, building with atoms kind of stuff. How much can we engineer our reality today?
- [57:37]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, it's more, I think it's a. Actually a more revealing question to ask. What can't we do? We're that far along.
- [57:51]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
I don't have an interface with that reality.
- [57:55]
Brian Johnson
So.
- [57:55]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Yeah, so help me understand because that. I want that to be true. The sci fi writer in me wants that to be true. Um, don't get me wrong, the modern world is unbelievable.
- [58:07]
Brian Johnson
Yeah.
- [58:08]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
But.
- [58:09]
Brian Johnson
Okay, so I'll give you like a couple practical examples, which I'll give you an example. Okay.
- [58:17]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
So your, your ear, your left ear.
- [58:19]
Brian Johnson
Yeah.
- [58:20]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Has your left ear. Is at the age of a 62 year old, if I remember correctly. And you can't find a way to fix it.
- [58:27]
Brian Johnson
Yes. Yeah.
- [58:29]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
That does not seem like a reality that we can just engineer our way out of.
- [58:32]
Brian Johnson
Oh, I see. Yep. I mean, if you just break it down to first principles. So you say, how are auditory signals, how do they enter the ear? How do those get converted into electrical signals that the brain then understands as sound? It's Right. It's a very understandable process mechanically, biologically. Like, we know the mechanisms and we know. Well, we just, we know exactly how it works and we know how you would need to repair it. So it's just getting to work and solving it. Now there's a space where we don't know. How do you actually engineer a solution is not known. But in terms of do. Can we. Can we construct mechanical objects to perform the function? Yes. Can we change biology to accommodate the situation? Yes. Can we program genes to do a certain situation? Yes. Like, we can do all those things. So it's just a matter of time of applying our efforts to try to solve it. But it's not like we're up against the speed of light where it's like, can you travel faster than the speed of light? Physics currently doesn't have an answer for that. We know there's a solution here. We can program it. We can just need some time to figure it out. And this is why I'm so bullish on don't die. We're not up against the law of physics. We increasingly understand these systems of biology. We have the mechanical physical world infrastructure and the biology danger of these solutions. So. And then you bring AI online and now you've got more and more intelligence all the time come to play. These are solvable things.
- [60:12]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
What's the most shocking thing you've been able to repair on your body that you were just like, whoa, is it foll statin?
- [60:19]
Brian Johnson
Is that.
- [60:20]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Is that the banger? Is it something else?
- [60:23]
Brian Johnson
Yeah. So, yeah, I had my first longevity gene therapy and what this company did, mini circle, is gene therapy is a thing that's going to break through the ceiling of our 120ish lifespans because you can only get so far with sleep, diet and exercise.
- [60:39]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Are you reprogramming your genes?
- [60:41]
Brian Johnson
No. So what they did is so typically so you can change your actual genes. You can, you know, use CRISPR or some other technology. This one, you're getting a plasmid injected as the delivery vector and then a protein F statin. It just sets up shop inside the nucleus and it produces more folletin for
- [61:00]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
people that don't know. Myostatin gene controls the amount of muscle that you have. If you've ever seen a double muscled cow, you can do a search for it. Uh, it's crazy. Bodybuilders, some percentage of them, a huge number of them, are gonna have myostatin deficiencies. You will starve to death if you have too much muscle on you. From an evolutionary perspective and there's no vons around the corner. Uh, so not putting on too much muscle has been an evolutionary challenge. You had to solve for it. That's the myostatin gene follow statin. As far as I understand, it mitigates the dampening effects of myostatin so that it's easier to put on and maintain muscle.
- [61:37]
Brian Johnson
Yes, yes and yeah. And a bunch of other stuff. And so what's cool about the stuff that matters or yeah, like the what this company is seeing from some of the participants. It's not. These are not the study results yet, but some of the answer reports they're seeing a slowing of the speed of aging, they're seeing telomerase increase, they're seeing telomeres increase, they're seeing epigenetic age reduce, they're seeing other, other effects. So there's all kinds of benefits are seeing. But the thing like even this therapy was great. But what I love about it is that it introduces low cost therapy gene therapy for a whole bunch of other applications. So take out Folletin and put in Milestone or Clotho or put in H Tert to extend telomeres.
- [62:21]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
H what?
- [62:23]
Brian Johnson
H Tert. So just like it's to increase.
- [62:26]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
I heard something else.
- [62:27]
Brian Johnson
It's to increase the telomeres, your end caps on the chromosomes. Okay. But what I like about it is it's a gene delivery, it's gene therapy delivery system that is safe, it has a kill switch and it can be applied to all sorts of technologies. And so what I'd like is it introduces the idea that we could now routinely get gene therapy for a variety of things. Testosterone, brain function, muscle, like, you name it, we can play with it. And so once you get these platforms built, it just opens up this, this new possibility. And so what I like about the field is we're now getting to a point with these therapies where we're starting to really push up and out over and outside of diet, sleep and exercise or the reprogramming the Yamanaka factors. So it's getting really close. And so we haven't yet had a moment in longevity where it's like that's it. Like we just did the impossible thing in a human and these results are incontrovertible. And so prior to getting there, I'm suggesting that don't die. So I'm trying, what I'm trying to say is we don't need to prove radical life extension before fully adopting don't die. We can do them at the same Time, it's not contingent, but yeah. I mean, the stuff we're seeing in the field right now, even last week there was a. Last month there was a paper where a company did some cell reprogramming. They took a mouse that was 124 weeks. It was going to die at 128 weeks. It extended their life by a hundred. By 109%. With this. Yeah. In their 124th week with the cell reprogramming. So they're taking like.
- [64:07]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
So wait, maybe I'm just bad at math. So if the average human life is 84 or whatever, you're saying it lived double that?
- [64:14]
Brian Johnson
No. So just in the last. It doubled its remaining lifespan. So.
- [64:18]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Got it.
- [64:19]
Brian Johnson
Yeah. So 124 was gonna die at 128, but extended it by 109.
- [64:23]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Got it.
- [64:24]
Brian Johnson
Because they just. For this experiment, they're just taking very end of life and saying, what can you do at very end of life of reprogramming these cells for that specific study?
- [64:32]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
What were they reprogramming the cell to do?
- [64:35]
Brian Johnson
So, yeah, they. This is. You take cells back to ipsc, you take cells back to their pluripotent state where they can then differentiate into a whole bunch of different cell types. So you're. You're enabling the most interesting cellular reprogramming where you're taking it back to its more youthful state. And so the Yamanaka factors. And so I, I think we're actually in a really interesting spot that we could see some pretty big breakthroughs in the coming years that get people excited about this.
- [65:04]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Will we ever be able to make men taller? I mean, that's like, dude, the more I get into like modern dating and stuff, it's crazy. That matters.
- [65:13]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, it does.
- [65:13]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
It didn't. But, like, you just get filtered out.
- [65:16]
Brian Johnson
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know why we'd say no. What. What would we say no to? What. What are the limitations that we can't overcome? And why are there limitations? I think is the more relevant question
- [65:31]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
that, though, so there's the fantasy of like, AI is going to solve it all, so. Sure. But is there, like, I did an episode not too long ago, I was literally shocked to find out you can actually enlarge a penis. I was like, what? Like, I legitimately, My wife has said absolutely not. Which I was very sad by because I was like, if this shit's real, I'm going ham. She was like, no, absolutely not. I don't. She was. She reacted so Violently negative. That.
- [66:04]
Brian Johnson
Yeah.
- [66:04]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
I was saddened is the honest answer. But why? Why was I sad?
- [66:10]
Brian Johnson
No, no, why was she?
- [66:11]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
I don't know. Well, I mean, just from the perspective of I. My penis is nothing to write home about. I'll just be very honest with you. But it fits perfectly with the person that I'm married to. And so she is not enthusiastic about more.
- [66:26]
Brian Johnson
Does she have data? Does she have. Does she AB test?
- [66:29]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
She has AB tested, yeah. Yeah. So for what it's worth, I. I would, I would. If it were possible, I would have one I could throw over my shoulder. So I'll just be very honest. That sounds awesome. But my wife is not impressed by the idea.
- [66:46]
Brian Johnson
Yeah.
- [66:47]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
So. But anyway, I didn't know it was possible. I really thought that was like total bs, Absolute make believe. Had a urologist on the show. She's like, no, it's real. Did a bunch of research. Because honestly, when I first started researching her, I was like, there's no way she's making this up. And a bunch of people like, yeah, it's actually real. There's studies. I read the study.
- [67:03]
Brian Johnson
Yeah.
- [67:03]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
And I was like, God, I can't believe this is actually real.
- [67:06]
Brian Johnson
Yeah.
- [67:07]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
So that's like a Today thing.
- [67:10]
Brian Johnson
Yeah.
- [67:10]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
That I was shocked to find out. But going back to like, should men really care? That one. Even though guys care a lot about it. From a get a mate perspective, if you're a heterosexual, it's not just it ranks so low on what they care about, but they. Women really do care about height. So that one seems like if there was something that we could do, you'd have a lot of people uptake. Now you can literally, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. You can break the bone and it will grow back and you will get taller.
- [67:40]
Brian Johnson
But.
- [67:40]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Whoa, that sounds rough.
- [67:43]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, I mean, I think like, getting taller sounds like a. From first glance, a much easier thing to solve than say, for example, increasing the number of neurons in your brain. Hmm. Like, you know, you got. We have very practical limitations of skull size, of neuron density. Like it's. The brain's a much more complicated organ. So I mean, if you, if you pose a question, what is possible, you probably could back into the constraints and then rank them, like how hard each one is to imagine being able to overcome. Not that that's a conclusive thing, but the. Yeah, but getting taller, it doesn't seem to me like it would be among the top of the hardest things to do.
- [68:21]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
That is incredibly interesting. So here is a question that most of my guests can rest assured I will not ask. But tell me about your penis.
- [68:30]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, yeah, I think it's the most quantified penis in the world.
- [68:37]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
That is very interesting. So what are we quantifying and to what end can, why, why care? What, what is the direction that we want to take it?
- [68:48]
Brian Johnson
Yeah. So if you ma, if you take to where we've been of how do you create the most extraordinary existence out, you know, possible and you go back and back and back and back and back, it ends up with penis quantification
- [69:01]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
as one would expect.
- [69:02]
Brian Johnson
The same thing. Yeah. So one day with the team, I said, hey, you know, we've been doing assessment of heart health, lung health, brain health. Why don't we do penis health next? And what would it take for me to have the most quantified penis in the world? And we went out and we looked at all the scientific literature. We said, here's all the validated ways to measure a penis, like to quantify a penis. And one of the things we did is we measured nighttime erections. And so that's just something that people don't realize is a thing. You know, you as a man, you realize you have nighttime erections. As a kid, you get a lot of them. As you get older, you get fewer of them. And so I did my baseline measurement. 2 hours and 12 minutes was my baseline, which was roughly average for my age, 46. And then I did a few therapies, Focus shockwave therapy and Botox. And my recent measurement was, was 179 minutes. To put that in context, the movie Titanic is just over three hours. So I'm having nighttime erections about the same duration of time as the Titanic every night. And that is better than that is
- [69:56]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
quite the analogy or the comparison better
- [69:59]
Brian Johnson
than the average 18 year old. And so I reversed the functional biological age of my penis from roughly a 46 year old to better than the average 18 year old in six months time.
- [70:13]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Okay, all algorithm led or this is you guys going rogue.
- [70:20]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, we did the same process measurement, scientific literature therapy measurement, and we just repeat again and again and again. And it probably helps, you know, of course that my sleep is, is routine, that my diet is tuned in, my exercise is consistent. So it probably helps that I have these other basics in place. But yeah, if nighttime erections is a significant indicator, it's biological age predictor of cardiovascular health, psychological health and sexual function. So it's actually a really. It's not, it's not a glamour stat. It's actually a reliable Health marker for men.
- [70:58]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
And that's because the size of the vasculature in the penis is very small. And so if you have a problem there, it's a very early indicator that you're going to start having problems in the bigger veins down the road. So what are the things that you do that help?
- [71:14]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, I mean, so for example, the reason why. So as evidence of it being a function of health or of well being, be sleep deprived for one night or even a few nights, nighttime erections vanish.
- [71:28]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Is that from a. There's something going wrong with your vasculature or the brain is just like, we don't have time to play with that. I just have to deal with everything.
- [71:36]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, the body is prioritizing other essential functions. And so, yeah, it evaporates almost instantaneously when the basics are not in place. And so you really need to be in top tier health. So it's a good. Yeah, it's like a weather gauge for how you're doing with your health and then overall for your other sexual function, psychological function. And so what was your question?
- [71:57]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
What do you do to improve it?
- [71:59]
Brian Johnson
Oh, we did two therapies. So we did Focus Shockwave, which is a wand that you put on the penis. It can be used for the entire body. So when people tear an acl, they're doing rehabilitation. You can use Focus Shockwave. It improves healing processes. So you can use it anywhere by creating micro damage? Basically, yeah. Okay, so you can do it painful.
- [72:18]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Pain management.
- [72:19]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Pain management. People do it for pain management. And so you put on the penis, it's, you can do it on the shaft and the tip. So you, it's, it's pretty painful. I mean, you, you. And there's different levels of power. You can go low or go high. And it's especially painful in the tip.
- [72:37]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Yeah, that sounds less fun. We have people off camera even chuckling on that one. Yeah, yeah. So you've talked about. One of the things you have to think about as you get older is you begin losing sensation. That includes in the penis. Regardless of body part. What do you do to try to get that sensitivity back? Is it blasted with shock waves? I mean, that seems a little counterintuitive.
- [73:03]
Brian Johnson
Yeah. So I don't know the answer on this one. I've been measuring nerve sensitivity on my body for the past couple years and specifically my hill. So we do this test where I'm, I'm laying down, I can't see anything. And then there's a contraption where you're Measuring, you have two points and you increase in distance until you get to a point where I can't, I'm sorry, you start, you start wide and you narrow and then you get to a point where I can't distinguish that it's two points and not one. So it's 2, 1, 2, 1. And so I'm seeing if I can discern. So I've been measuring my nerve sensitivity to see if I can distinguish between two points on my hill. And the same thing is true with the penis. So you can basically do the same nerve sensitivity test, doing that. And as you age, you become less sensitive, you lose your feelings. Like on an 80 year old, I think the data was something like they can only distinguish between 2 and 1 points at something like 2 or 3 centimeters. It's a pretty big difference. I didn't realize how much loss they would have at that age. But yeah, so that was a new measurement for me. So same thing on the tip of the penis, though your sexual satisfaction over time diminishes because your sensitivity also goes down.
- [74:12]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Okay. All the things you do. There is a lot of self denial. There is a lot of, I mean, getting your penis shock waved, it's not fun. Like there's a lot of pain management, there's to be measured as frequently as you are constantly drawing blood. I mean, it's just a lot, a lot, a lot. The idea of handing over my life choices to an algorithm, the one thing this all comes down to for me is I assume you're optimizing for a good life, but then the question becomes, what is a good life? And can you, are you living it now? Can you program that into AI so that the AI actually knows based on the data it can collect? I actually am steering you to the good life.
- [75:01]
Brian Johnson
Yeah. If you pose the question, what is a good life throughout all of time? And let's just say you take data points for every year for the past 20, 24 years, you'll get an answer that's different. I mean, that will change over time. And every in the year, for example, 37 A.D. or the year 1037 A.D. you'll get a different answer on what a good life means. And in any situation, their response is not truth, it's a mirror to their time and place. And so there is no such thing as a good life. It's just simply a phenomena that emerges in time and place with a given culture. And when death is inevitable, you play a good life game because we're all going to die when death becomes potentially not inevitable. It becomes a different thing. And so I'm not playing the 2024 version of a good life. I'm playing for the infinite horizon. And this is why everyone dings me, because they say, this guy has not conformed to the norms of the 2024 Good Life, which include, you know, the following things. And that's why they. They want to dunk on me and they want to minimize me because they want to. They want their version of a good life to be superior to the game I'm playing, which is the infinite horizon. And so it's just different. We just see the reality different, differently.
- [76:34]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Okay. I imagine, though, you're just trying to get past this moment. Would you want to play the. The Don't Die game forever? Or are you. Do you believe that Don't Die gets you to. And now the good life begins.
- [76:52]
Brian Johnson
Yeah. So this is the thing is like, we. We may lock in as a species on Don't Die in a shockingly short period of time. Like, this could be. I introduced the concept of Don't Die in November of or December of 2023. It's only three or four months old. And if you look at history over time, of when ideas were introduced, when they were adopted into some kind of mainstream, and then they became continuous, typically hundreds of years for them to kind of find their way through society, this idea could find its way to be the guiding philosophy of the species in a matter of a decade or shorter. And this is because AI is going to create existential crisis. It's going to call into question everything we understand about reality. It's going to open up this. The opening where something's going to jump in for a new thing. And I'm playing for when crisis happens, for Don't Die to drop in that we played as a species. And so could it happen in a year or three years or five years? Yes. And if we lock in on Don't Die and we say like, oh my God, that's insane. We were talking about this the other day like it was impossible. And it's just here and it's omnipresent. And let's just say we lock in as a species and we're playing that and we get really good at it in a couple. A couple years, and then seven years from now, we're off to a different reality. Like, who knows what the game is? Like Don't Die is just now part of the fabric of existence. Like, zero is we don't even think about it. Like, no one's committing Self harm, no one's harming each other. We have a sacredness for conscious existence we've never had before. And now we're off playing brand new games of how big is consciousness? That's why that's where the brightest minds are, is what are the boundary conditions for consciousness and how do we punch through those limitations?
- [78:42]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Religions need rituals. They need things that bond people together. They need movements that you share, things that really make you feel like a tribe. You guys don't have, unless you're pointing to AI, like a deity, which maybe you are. You don't have the obvious things that Catholicism, you know, had hundreds of years to cobble together. And how are you going to make this sticky?
- [79:10]
Brian Johnson
Oh, we do. Yeah. So I'm working right now on trying to build a don't die nation state. So if you, if you take this don't die diffuse seriously.
- [79:21]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Yes.
- [79:22]
Brian Johnson
Then you say, okay, I'm in. What do I do now? No government in the world is helping its citizens not die. And so a government, a nation state needs to actually perform the basic functions including testing and medical services and therapies and access to all kinds of things you can't get. And so I want to build. It'd be amazing if I could do something like a 20 million person don't die nation state in less than a year where you have 20 million people locked in as citizens. And they say, we don't want to die, but to do that we need to, we need proper sleep, we need exercise, we need blood draws, we need medical care. And so I want to provide the basic infrastructure for people to take care of themselves in ways that their governments don't allow currently.
- [80:17]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Okay, that is a massive can of worms. So let's dive right in. Are you doing a nation state or are you doing a network state? Allah Balaji Srinivasan.
- [80:29]
Brian Johnson
Yes, both. So I mean, I, I use nation state. So yes, network, Network state. I say nation state because it's a more understandable word. Yeah.
- [80:37]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
But it also comes with like if, if you're really trying to build a nation state, my next question is geography. Are you taxing what are you doing to fight off the nations that are going to crush you for trying to start a nation? Yeah, network state for people that don't know Balaji. He's been a guest on the show. I highly encourage you to watch that episode. But he, he believes that now, and even more so into the future, that people will be non geographically tied through basically a belief system. They'll use cryptocurrency as, like the, the way that they interact on financial rails and that even though they're distributed all over the world, they will have a unifying identity code of ethics, so on and so forth. Okay, so nation state, you say, just so people sort of get what you're talking about, but you really mean network state.
- [81:25]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, Embology is a friend.
- [81:26]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Yes. I listened to your episode. I didn't know how well you knew
- [81:29]
Brian Johnson
each other, but yeah, yeah, and we're working together on this. Okay.
- [81:31]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Yeah, we all, as soon as you said, I was like, okay, wait, that biology episode makes a lot more sense now.
- [81:37]
Brian Johnson
We, we, we see the world in very similar ways and we both see the new trinity being AI on chain and don't die like that. That's the structure that builds society on chain. You get the computational scaffolding of systematic build. Don't die gives you the directional attention of what you're actually playing. And AI is the intelligence fuel in the system. That's the new structure of reality. And so the chain gives you a reliable foundation to build methodically and mathematically and allows you to imagine a situation where you have goal alignment that is computationally aligned. Like right now, we willy nilly decide what we're going to do and say to someone else. It's like a pretty random process in our brains and our behaviors. When you have this mesh, it's a different game. And so, yeah, it's basically a network state. And we can walk into this to say we share these things together in common of these basic health practices. And then you walk up to increasingly more sophisticated things as a network state. So. So initially no geography, but there's no reason why we couldn't spin up geography and multiple regions. There's no reason why we couldn't be negotiating with other governments to do various things. So it's just a baby step. But it's a tangible step to say if we contemplate don't die as a philosophical exercise, which is fun, the next step is, what time am I going to bed this evening? And what am I going to have for breakfast? And how do I address some kind of medical problem I have? As you just need to be extremely practical. Religion has not served the purpose of solving practical problems. Religion solves a problem of soothing you that your practical problems are insignificant in the larger scale of things. False.
- [83:41]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Okay, don't eat pork. Why trigonosis? There are reasons why. So if you can buy into the idea that traditions are experiments that worked. Religion is the, the medium by which the meme spreads so you need a way. And look, maybe it's not serving us in a modern context. And I am not religious, but I get why they have worked for thousands of years and I get why there is a new movement that I see coming that I'm calling the radicalization of people, where people are going to try to go backwards, they're going to try to reintroduce religion as a thing that people ought to embrace. And I understand what they're trying to address, which is, you know, just to channel a little Nietzsche, God will die, we will have killed him, and there will be so much blood on our hands, we will never be able to wash it away. Meaning that it, it does damage when people no longer have that the medium by which the meme can spread. So it isn't like the only way that you can be moral is to believe in religion. And this is one thing I meant to bring up earlier and didn't get a chance. All of the things that you're saying presume that people have your level of intellect. You're north of 130 for sure. You might be north of 150. Dude, most people just can't hang like they need that propagation medium of religion for them to orient to the world to know, oh, I don't do this thing because God told me not to. Like they need that.
- [85:20]
Brian Johnson
Right.
- [85:21]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Religion, as far as I can tell, is the only thing that works for hyper intelligent people and for people that are. That struggle. And, and I don't even want to be derogatory there before the grace of God go. I, um, so that, that to me, like religion certainly was for a very long time hyper practical, but for the same reasons that I'm paranoid about AI, I'm paranoid about religions. They kill a lot of people, but they do like a thing. Like they have a. They, they have existed. You even said that they tend to outlast nation states for a reason.
- [85:56]
Brian Johnson
Yeah. Oh yeah. It's like, it's one of, it's one of, if not the most ambitious thing that anybody could have done in the first, a few centuries, the past few centuries to start a religion.
- [86:08]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Yeah.
- [86:09]
Brian Johnson
Oh yeah.
- [86:10]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
It's interesting you anchor that around ambition. For me, the, the more interesting thing about religion is just how it galvanizes gigantic groups of people and will give them a fervor that can be amazing or terrifying.
- [86:28]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, I mean this is so we're saying the same thing. So what I'm saying is if you, if you look at intelligence on this earth and let's just say you're doing some form of calculation of like, what, what's the impact of influence on all intelligence on this Earth? And you're looking at influence in the way of like, where the species moved, what it did, how it thought, whether it progressed or not, in that larger contemplation. Religion is one of the most influential things on the body of intelligence on planet Earth because it feeds into state, it feeds into culture, it feeds into invention, it feeds into everything. And so country accompanies come and go, individuals come and go. But religion has this staying power which is unique. And so if you're, if you're someone who's playing the biggest game of ambition to say, how do you move this body of intelligence on this planet? You wouldn't rule out religion as a mechanism doing it. You would actually say that actually is probably the most powerful technology ever created by the humans until the arrival of AI. And so now we have this new point in time where you're saying, if you're ambitious and you're playing with the body of intelligence on planet Earth, what do you do? And so a lot of people look at don't die and they immediately want to tag it as a cult and they want to say it in a, in a demeaning way, and they want to call it a religion in a demeaning way. I don't say it's a religion, I don't say it's not a religion. I'm saying it's something practical. And wherever you want to take it with your definition of whether you want to be demeaning or supportive, I don't care like it's whatever you interpret it to be. I'm talking about it from something extremely practical that informs what I eat for breakfast, how I understand ideas, how AI engineers, engineer intelligence. It's full stack. And so my comment to you was religions have not tried to practically solve death. It was never in their power to do so. The technology has never been present. They've been trying to soothe the reality that death is inevitable.
- [88:58]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
It's interesting. That is a very valid interpretation. I get why you're saying that. But in some ways, if they believe the book, the religion at a, at a organism level, if you think of all of the people in the religion, all the people that contributed to the books, all that, if you think of that as an organism, the organism has tried to solve for death by telling you that if you believe when you die, you will live on.
- [89:25]
Brian Johnson
Sure.
- [89:26]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Now I think you and I both think that that is just inaccurate factually. But I mean that really pretty impressive when you think about, I don't know if you've ever felt this, but I, um. Let's say that something happens to someone I love. I don't believe in God and I wish I did because I want to pray. I want there to be someone I can appeal to. That situation, you know, it's like such a powerful impulse and so if you're about to die or someone you love is about to die, that impulse is so strong.
- [89:59]
Brian Johnson
Yeah.
- [89:59]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
That it, it is a while. Yes. It's soothing. It's soothing by creating a place in consciousness going back to your earlier thing that exists and is real and that you maybe can't access it the way you want. But it's pretty interesting. I remember because I used to believe when I was a kid and when my grandmother died I really had this profound sense of she's watching you. And it got weird when I wanted to masturbate. But it was cool to know the grandma was alive, you know?
- [90:34]
Brian Johnson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [90:38]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
It's a trip.
- [90:38]
Brian Johnson
Yeah.
- [90:39]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
The way that it works on our minds. Let me ask, so how do you think governments are going to respond to network states?
- [90:46]
Brian Johnson
It's, I mean you could model it out and I can't imagine it wouldn't be predictable. Yeah.
- [90:52]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
It doesn't. I'm worried on chain worries me.
- [90:56]
Brian Johnson
Yeah. I mean this is so your content. Your, your question is how are existing power structures going to goal align or how are they going to reconcile with new power conflicts? Yeah.
- [91:12]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
I think governments are going to get upended.
- [91:14]
Brian Johnson
Yeah.
- [91:15]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
And they're going to freak out.
- [91:16]
Brian Johnson
Sure. Yeah.
- [91:17]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
And freak out means shoot people.
- [91:19]
Brian Johnson
Yeah. Yeah. I mean so that's what humans do. Yeah. Yeah. And this is again why don't die is so important is because you know, if you again zoom out to say what are the patterns at play? There's so few surprises in our reality. We humans are so predictable in our thoughts, in our responses, in our behaviors. We are individually, we are collectively. It's like we, we think we're living this novel experience. We're not were patterns and were repeatable patterns. So you just take, you zoom out far enough and you see the patterns. It's not novel. So of course that's what's going to happen. And so that's what I'm saying is like you, it doesn't take a lot of creativity to imagine how we as a species are going to play out with increasingly more powerful weapons at our disposal or our willingness to commit self destructive harm and ruin our planet. It's not like we can't stop our vice, we can't take corrective actions. We can't save ourselves from death. It is a limitation of our intelligence. And if we're sober enough, we can acknowledge that. And so something has to change if we're going to stop ourselves from annihilation. Now you can take a different approach and say, be optimistic. Like we as a species, we've always done it before, we're going to do it again. Like, okay, like, I'm open to that. But the probabilities to me, like, the, the situation we're in with, with climate change, like, we're, we may already be past a point of no return. We don't know. We cannot model these weather systems with a whole lot of accuracy. Not like we have been repeatedly surprised over the past few years at how fast and how significant the changes have been. We don't know. Like, this idea is like, if we can turn things around before 2030, we may be okay. We don't know. And so as a species, if we were actually intelligent, we would stop everything we're doing and say, first job is take care of our planet. If we don't have an inhabitable home, we're all dead. But we don't. We prioritize making money and economic interests above all things. So the species were extremely full bullish and we just, we need to reconcile with that and just accept it for what is and then address the problem because we're not going to change until AI arrives.
- [93:44]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Brian Johnson. Man, has this been interesting. Where can people follow you?
- [93:48]
Brian Johnson
I hang out on all the social channels. I'm on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter. Hit me up.
- [93:54]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
Yeah, there it is. All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out this other conversation with Peter Diamandis. The bowhead whale, the largest mammal, can live 200 years. Greenland shark can live 500 years and
- [94:14]
Brian Johnson
have pups at 200 years old. And the question is, if they can
- [94:17]
Host (Tom Bilyeu)
live that long, why can't we?