back to indexBryan Johnson: Kernel Brain-Computer Interfaces | Lex Fridman Podcast #186
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The following is a conversation with Brian Johnson,
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founder of Kernel, a company that has developed devices
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that can monitor and record brain activity.
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And previously, he was the founder of Braintree,
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a mobile payment company that acquired Venmo
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and then was acquired by PayPal and eBay.
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Quick mention of our sponsors,
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Forsigmatic, NetSuite, Grammarly, and ExpressVPN.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that this was a fun
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and memorable experience,
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wearing the Kernel FlowBrain interface
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in the beginning of this conversation,
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as you can see if you watch the video version
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And there was a Ubuntu Linux machine sitting next to me
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collecting the data from my brain.
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The whole thing gave me hope that the mystery
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of the human mind will be unlocked in the coming decades
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as we begin to measure signals from the brain
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in a high bandwidth way.
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To understand the mind,
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we either have to build it or to measure it.
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Both are worth a try.
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Thanks to Brian and the rest of the Kernel team
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for making this little demo happen.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,
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and here is my conversation with Brian Johnson.
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Do you guys wanna come in and put the interfaces
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And then I will proceed to tell you a few jokes.
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So we have two incredible pieces of technology
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and a machine running Ubuntu 2004 in front of us.
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What are we doing?
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Are these going on our heads?
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They're going on our heads, yeah.
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And they will place it on our heads for proper alignment.
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Does this support giant heads?
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Because I kind of have a giant head.
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Is this just giant head?
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Are you saying as like an ego
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or are you saying physically both?
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It's a nice massage.
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Okay, how does this feel?
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It's okay to move around?
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It feels, oh yeah.
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This feels awesome.
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It's a pretty good fit.
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So this is big head friendly.
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It suits you well, Lex.
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I feel like I need to,
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I feel like when I wear this,
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I need to sound like Sam Harris,
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calm, collected, eloquent.
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I feel smarter, actually.
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I don't think I've ever felt quite as much
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like I'm part of the future as now.
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Have you ever worn a brain interface
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or had your brain imaged?
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Oh, never had my brain imaged.
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The only way I've analyzed my brain
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is by talking to myself and thinking.
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Yeah, that is definitely a brain interface
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that has a lot of blind spots.
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It has some blind spots, yeah.
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All right, are we recording?
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So Lex, the objective of this,
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I'm going to tell you some jokes
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and your objective is to not smile,
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which as a Russian, you should have an edge.
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Make the motherland proud.
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Let's hear the jokes.
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Lex, and this is from the Colonel Crew.
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We've been working on a device that can read your mind
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and we would love to see your thoughts.
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That's the opening.
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If I'm seeing the muscle activation correctly on your lips,
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you're not going to do well on this.
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All right, here comes the first.
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Here comes the first one.
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Is this going to break the device?
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Is it resilient to laughter?
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Lex, what goes through a potato's brain?
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I got already failed.
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That's the hilarious opener.
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What kind of fish performs brain surgery?
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And so we're getting data of everything
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that's happening in my brain right now?
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We're getting activation patterns of your entire cortex.
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I'm going to try to do better.
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I'll edit out all the parts where I laughed.
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Photoshop put a serious face over me.
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Lex, what do scholars eat when they're hungry?
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I don't know, what?
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That was a pretty good one.
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So what we'll do is,
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so you're wearing kernel flow,
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which is an interface built using technology
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called spectroscopy.
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So it's similar to what we wear wearables on the wrist
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So using LIDAR, as you know,
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and we're using that to image the functional imaging
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of brain activity.
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And so as your neurons fire electrically and chemically,
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it creates blood oxygenation levels.
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We're measuring that.
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And so you'll see in the reconstructions we do for you,
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you'll see your activation patterns in your brain
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as throughout this entire time we are wearing it.
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So in the reaction to the jokes
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and as we were sitting here talking,
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and so we're moving towards a real time feed
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of your cortical brain activity.
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So there's a bunch of things that are in contact
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with my skull right now.
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How many of them are there?
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And so how many of them are, what are they?
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What are the actual sensors?
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There's 52 modules,
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and each module has one laser and six sensors.
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And the sensors fire in about 100 picoseconds.
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And then the photons scatter and absorb in your brain.
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And then a few go in, a few come back out,
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a bunch go in, then a few come back out,
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and we sense those photons
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and then we do the reconstruction for the activity.
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Overall, there's about a thousand plus channels
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that are sampling your activity.
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How difficult is it to make it as comfortable as it is?
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Because it's surprisingly comfortable.
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I would not think it would be comfortable.
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Something that's measuring brain activity,
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I would not think it would be comfortable, but it is.
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In fact, I want to take this home.
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Yeah, yeah, that's right.
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So people are accustomed to being in big systems
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like fMRI where there's 120 decibel sounds
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and you're in a claustrophobic encasement,
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or EEG, which is just painful, or surgery.
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And so, yes, I agree that this is a convenient option
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to be able to just put on your head
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that measures your brain activity
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in the contextual environment you choose.
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So if we want to have it during a podcast,
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if we want to be at home in a business setting,
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it's freedom to record your brain activity
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in the setting that you choose.
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Yeah, but sort of from an engineering perspective,
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are these, what is it?
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There's a bunch of different modular parts
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and they're kind of, there's like a rubber band thing
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where they mold to the shape of your head.
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So we built this version of the mechanical design
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to accommodate most adult heads.
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But I have a giant head and it fits fine.
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It fits well, actually.
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So I don't think I have an average head.
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Okay, maybe I feel much better about my head now.
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Maybe I'm more average than I thought.
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Okay, so what else is there interesting
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that you could say while it's on our heads?
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I can keep this on the whole time.
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This is kind of awesome.
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And it's amazing for me, as a fan of Ubuntu,
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I use Ubuntu MATE, you guys use that too.
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But it's amazing to have code running to the side,
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measuring stuff and collecting data.
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I mean, I feel like much more important now
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that my data is being recorded.
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Like, you know when you have a good friend
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that listens to you, that actually is listening to you?
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This is what I feel like, like a much better friend
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because it's like accurately listening to me, Ubuntu.
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What a cool perspective, I hadn't thought about that,
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of feeling understood.
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Yeah, heard deeply by the mechanical system
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that is recording your brain activity,
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versus the human that you're engaging with,
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that your mind immediately goes to
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that there's this dimensionality
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and depth of understanding of this software system
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which you're intimately familiar with.
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And now you're able to communicate with this system
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in ways that you couldn't before.
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Yeah, I feel heard.
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Yeah, I mean, I guess what's interesting about this is
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your intuitions are spot on.
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Most people have intuitions about brain interfaces
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that they've grown up with this idea
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of people moving cursors on the screen
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or typing or changing the channel or skipping a song.
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It's primarily been anchored on control.
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And I think the more relevant understanding
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of brain interfaces or neuroimaging
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is that it's a measurement system.
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And once you have numbers for a given thing,
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a seemingly endless number of possibilities
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emerge around that of what to do with those numbers.
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So before you tell me about the possibilities,
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this was an incredible experience.
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I can keep this on for another two hours,
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but I'm being told that for a bunch of reasons,
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just because we probably wanna keep the data small
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and visualize it nicely for the final product,
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we wanna cut this off and take this amazing helmet
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So Brian, thank you so much for this experience
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and let's continue without helmetless.
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So that was an incredible experience.
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Can you maybe speak to what kind of opportunities
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that opens up that stream of data,
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that rich stream of data from the brain?
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First, I'm curious, what is your reaction?
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What comes to mind when you put that on your head?
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What does it mean to you?
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And what possibilities emerge
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and what significance might it have?
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I'm curious where your orientation is at.
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Well, for me, I'm really excited by the possibility
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of various information about my body,
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about my mind being converted into data,
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such that data can be used to create products
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that make my life better.
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So that to me is really exciting possibility.
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Even just like a Fitbit that measures, I don't know,
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some very basic measurements about your body
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But the bandwidth of information,
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the resolution of that information is very crude,
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so it's not very interesting.
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The possibility of just building a data set
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coming in a clean way and a high bandwidth way
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from my brain opens up all kinds of...
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I was kind of joking when we were talking,
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but it's not really, it's like I feel heard
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in the sense that it feels like the full richness
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of the information coming from my mind
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is actually being recorded by the machine.
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I mean, I can't quite put it into words,
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but there is genuinely for me,
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there's not some kind of joke about me being a robot.
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It just genuinely feels like I'm being heard
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in a way that's going to improve my life,
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as long as the thing that's on the other end
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can do something useful with that data.
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But even the recording itself is like,
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once you record, it's like taking a picture.
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That moment is forever saved in time.
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Now, a picture cannot allow you to step back
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into that world, but perhaps recording your brain
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is a much higher resolution thing,
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much more personal recording of that information
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than a picture that would allow you to step back
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into that where you were in that particular moment
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in history and then map out a certain trajectory
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to tell you certain things about yourself
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that could open up all kinds of applications.
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Of course, there's health that I consider,
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but honestly, to me, the exciting thing is just being heard.
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My state of mind, the level of focus,
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all those kinds of things, being heard.
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What I heard you say is you have an entirety
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of lived experience, some of which you can communicate
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in words and in body language,
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some of which you feel internally,
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which cannot be captured in those communication modalities,
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and that this measurement system captures
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both the things you can try to articulate in words,
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maybe in a lower dimensional space,
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using one word, for example, to communicate focus,
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when it really may be represented
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in a 20 dimensional space of this particular kind of focus
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and that this information is being captured,
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so it's a closer representation
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to the entirety of your experience captured
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in a dynamic fashion that is not just a static image
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of your conscious experience.
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Yeah, that's the promise, that was the feeling,
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and it felt like the future.
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So it was a pretty cool experience.
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And from the sort of mechanical perspective,
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it was cool to have an actual device
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that feels pretty good,
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that doesn't require me to go into the lab.
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And also the other thing I was feeling,
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there's a guy named Andrew Huberman,
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he's a friend of mine, amazing podcast,
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people should listen to it, Huberman Lab Podcast.
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We're working on a paper together
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about eye movement and so on.
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And we're kind of, he's a neuroscientist
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and I'm a data person, machine learning person,
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and we're both excited by how much the,
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how much the data measurements of the human mind,
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the brain and all the different metrics
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that come from that could be used to understand
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human beings and in a rigorous scientific way.
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So the other thing I was thinking about
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is how this could be turned into a tool for science.
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Sort of not just personal science,
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not just like Fitbit style,
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like how am I doing on my personal metrics of health,
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but doing larger scale studies of human behavior and so on.
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So like data, not at the scale of an individual,
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but data at a scale of many individuals
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or a large number of individuals.
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So personal being heard was exciting
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and also just for science is exciting.
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It's very easy, like there's a very powerful thing
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to it being so easy to just put on
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that you could scale much easier.
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If you think about that second thing you said
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about the science of the brain,
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most, we've done a pretty good job,
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like we, the human race has done a pretty good job
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figuring out how to quantify the things around us
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from distant stars to calories and steps and our genome.
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So we can measure and quantify pretty much everything
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in the known universe except for our minds.
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And we can do these one offs
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if we're going to get an fMRI scan
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or do something with a low res EEG system,
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but we haven't done this at population scale.
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And so if you think about human thought
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or human cognition is probably the single law,
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largest raw input material into society
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at any given moment is our conversations
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with ourselves and with other people.
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And we have this raw input that we can't,
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that haven't been able to measure yet.
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And if you, when I think about it through that frame,
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it's remarkable, it's almost like we live
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in this wild, wild West of unquantified communications
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within ourselves and between each other
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when everything else has been grounded in me.
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For example, I know if I buy an appliance at the store
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or on a website, I don't need to look at the measurements
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on the appliance and make sure it can fit through my door.
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That's an engineered system of appliance manufacturing
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Everyone's agreed upon engineering standards.
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And we don't have engineering standards around cognition.
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It's not a, it has not entered
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as a formal engineering discipline that enables us
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to scaffold in society with everything else we're doing,
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including consuming news, our relationships,
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politics, economics, education, all the above.
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And so to me that the most significant contribution
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that kernel technology has to offer
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would be the formal, the introduction
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to formal engineering of cognition
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as it relates to everything else in society.
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I love that idea that you kind of think that there's just
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this ocean of data that's coming from people's brains
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as being in a crude way, reduced down to like tweets
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and texts and so on, just a very hardcore,
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many scale compression of actual, the raw data.
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But maybe you can comment,
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because you're using the word cognition.
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I think the first step is to get the brain data.
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But is there a leap to be taking
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to sort of interpreting that data in terms of cognition?
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So is your idea is basically you need to start collecting
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data at scale from the brain,
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and then we start to really be able to take little steps
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along the path to actually measuring
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some deep sense of cognition.
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Because as I'm sure you know, we understand a few things,
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but we don't understand most of what makes up cognition.
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This has been one of the most significant challenges
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of building Kernel, and Kernel wouldn't exist
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if I wasn't able to fund it initially by myself.
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Because when I engage in conversations with investors,
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the immediate thought is, what is the killer app?
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And of course, I understand that heuristic,
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that's what they're looking at,
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is they're looking to de risk.
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Is the product solved?
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Is there a customer base?
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Are people willing to pay for it?
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How does it compare to competing options?
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And in the case with brain interfaces,
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when I started the company, there was no known path
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to even build a technology
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that could potentially become mainstream.
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And then once we figured out the technology,
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we could even, we could commence having conversations
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with investors and it became, what is the killer app?
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And so what has been,
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so I funded the first $53 million for the company.
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And to raise the round of funding, the first one we did,
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I spoke to 228 investors.
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One said yes, it was remarkable.
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And it was mostly around this concept
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around what is a killer app.
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And so internally, the way we think about it is,
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we think of the go to market strategy
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much more like the Drake equation,
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where if we can build technology
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that has the characteristics of,
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it has the data quality is high enough,
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it meets some certain threshold,
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cost, accessibility, comfort,
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it can be worn in contextual environments.
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If it meets the criteria of being a mass market device,
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then the responsibility that we have is to figure out
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how to create the algorithm that enables the human,
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to enable humans to then find value with it.
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So the analogy is like brain interfaces
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are like early 90s of the internet,
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is you wanna populate an ecosystem
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with a certain number of devices,
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you want a certain number of people
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who play around with them, who do experiments
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of certain data collection parameters,
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you want to encourage certain mistakes
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from experts and non experts.
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These are all critical elements that ignite discovery.
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And so we believe we've accomplished the first objective
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of building technology that reaches those thresholds.
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And now it's the Drake equation component
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of how do we try to generate 20 years of value discovery
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in a two or three year time period?
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How do we compress that?
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So just to clarify, so when you mean the Drake equation,
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which for people who don't know,
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I don't know why you, if you listen to this,
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I bring up aliens every single conversation.
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So I don't know how you would know
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what the Drake equation is,
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but you mean like the killer app,
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it would be one alien civilization in that equation.
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So meaning like this is in search of an application
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that's impactful, transformative.
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By the way, it should be, we need to come up
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with a better term than killer app as a.
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It's also violent, right?
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It's very violent.
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You can go like viral app, that's horrible too, right?
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It's some very inspiringly impactful application.
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Okay, so ballistic with killer app, that's fine.
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Nobody's. But I concur with you.
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I dislike the chosen words in capturing the concept.
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You know, it's one of those sticky things
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that is as effective to use in the tech world.
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But when you now become a communicator
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outside of the tech world,
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especially when you're talking about software and hardware
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and artificial intelligence applications,
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it sounds horrible.
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Yeah, no, it's interesting.
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I actually regret now having called attention
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to cyber regret having used that word in this conversation
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because it's something I would not normally do.
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I used it in order to create a bridge
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of shared understanding of how others would,
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what terminology others would use.
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But yeah, I concur.
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Let's go with impactful application.
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Just value creation.
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Something people love using.
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There we go, that's it.
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Okay, so what, do you have any ideas?
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So you're basically creating a framework
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where there's the possibility of a discovery
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of an application that people love using.
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Is, do you have ideas?
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We've began to play a fun game internally
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where when we have these discussions
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or we begin circling around this concept of,
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does anybody have an idea?
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Does anyone have intuitions?
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And if we see the conversation starting
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to veer in that direction,
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we flag it and say, human intuition alert, stop it.
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And so we really want to focus on the algorithm
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of there's a natural process of human discovery.
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That when you populate a system with devices
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and you give people the opportunity to play around with it
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in expected and unexpected ways,
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we are thinking that is a much better system of discovery
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than us exercising intuitions.
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And it's interesting, we're also seeing
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a few neuroscientists who have been talking to us.
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While I was speaking to this one young associate professor,
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and I approached a conversation and said,
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hey, we have these five data streams that we're pulling off.
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When you hear that, what weighted value
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do you add to each data source?
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Which one do you think is going to be valuable
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for your objectives and which one's not?
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And he said, I don't care, just give me the data.
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All I care about is my machine learning model.
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But importantly, he did not have a theory of mind.
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He did not come to the table and say,
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I think the brain operates in this way
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and these reasons or have these functions.
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He didn't care, he just wanted the data.
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And we're seeing that more and more
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that certain people are devaluing human intuitions
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for good reasons, as we've seen in machine learning
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over the past couple years.
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And we're doing the same in our value creation market
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So collect more data, clean data,
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make the product such that the collection of data
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is easy and fun and then the rest will just spring to life.
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Through humans playing around with them.
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Our objective is to create the most valuable
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data collection system of the brain ever.
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And with that, then applying all the best tools
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of machine learning and other techniques
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to extract out, to try to find insight.
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But yes, our objective is really to systematize
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the discovery process because we can't put
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definite timeframes on discovery.
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The brain is complicated and science
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is not a business strategy.
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And so we really need to figure out how to,
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this is the difficulty of bringing technology
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like this to market.
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And it's why most of the time it just languishes
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in academia for quite some time.
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But we hope that we will cross over
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and make this mainstream in the coming years.
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The thing was cool to wear, but are you chasing
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a good reason for millions of people to put this
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on their head and keep on their head regularly?
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Is there, like who's going to discover that reason?
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Is it going to be people just kind of organically
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or is there going to be an Angry Birds style application
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that's just too exciting to not use?
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If I think through the things that have changed
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my life most significantly over the past few years,
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when I started wearing a wearable on my wrist
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that would give me data about my heart rate,
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heart rate variability, respiration rate,
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metabolic approximations, et cetera,
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for the first time in my life,
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I had access to information, sleep patterns
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that were highly impactful.
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They told me, for example, if I eat close to bedtime,
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I'm not going to get deep sleep.
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And not getting deep sleep means you have
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all these follow on consequences in life.
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And so it opened up this window of understanding of myself
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that I cannot self introspect and deduce these things.
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This is information that was available to be acquired,
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but it just wasn't.
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I would have to get an expensive sleep study,
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then it's an end, like one night,
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and that's not good enough to look at, to run all my trials.
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And so if you look just at the information
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that one can acquire on their wrist,
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and now you're applying it to the entire cortex
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on the brain and you say,
link |
what kind of information could we acquire?
link |
It opens up a whole new universe of possibilities.
link |
For example, we did this internal study at Kernel
link |
where I wore a prototype device
link |
and we were measuring the cognitive effects of sleep.
link |
So I had a device measuring my sleep.
link |
I performed with 13 of my coworkers.
link |
We performed four cognitive tasks over 13 sessions.
link |
And we focused on reaction time, impulse control,
link |
short term memory, and then a resting state task.
link |
And with mine, we found, for example,
link |
that my impulse control was independently correlated
link |
with my sleep outside of behavioral measures
link |
of my ability to play the game.
link |
The point of the study was I had,
link |
the brain study I did at Kernel confirmed my life experience
link |
that if I, my deep sleep determined whether or not
link |
I would be able to resist temptation the following day.
link |
And my brain did show that as one example.
link |
And so if you start thinking,
link |
if you actually have data on yourself,
link |
on your entire cortex and you can control the settings,
link |
I think there's probably a large number of things
link |
that we could discover about ourselves,
link |
very, very small and very, very big.
link |
I just, for example, like when you read news,
link |
Like when you use social media, when you use news,
link |
like all the ways we allocate attention.
link |
With the computer.
link |
I mean, that seems like a compelling place
link |
to where you would want to put on a Kernel,
link |
by the way, what is it called?
link |
Kernel Flux, Kernel, like what?
link |
We have two technologies, you or Flow.
link |
So when you put on the Kernel Flow,
link |
it seems like to be a compelling time and place to do it
link |
is when you're behind a desk, behind a computer.
link |
Because you could probably wear it
link |
for prolonged periods of time as you're taking in content.
link |
And there could a lot of,
link |
because so much of our lives happens
link |
in the digital world now.
link |
That kind of coupling the information about the human mind
link |
with the consumption and the behaviors in the digital world
link |
might give us a lot of information about the effects
link |
of the way we behave and navigate the digital world
link |
to the actual physical meat space effects on our body.
link |
It's interesting to think,
link |
so in terms of both like for work,
link |
I'm a big fan of Cal Newport, his ideas of deep work
link |
that I spend, with few exceptions,
link |
I try to spend the first two hours of every day,
link |
usually if I'm like at home and have nothing on my schedule
link |
is going to be up to eight hours of deep work,
link |
of focus, zero distraction.
link |
And for me to analyze, I mean I'm very aware
link |
of the waning of that, the ups and downs of that.
link |
And it's almost like you're surfing the ups and downs
link |
of that as you're doing programming,
link |
as you're doing thinking about particular problems,
link |
you're trying to visualize things in your mind,
link |
you start trying to stitch them together.
link |
You're trying to, when there's a dead end about an idea,
link |
you have to kind of calmly like walk back and start again,
link |
all those kinds of processes.
link |
It'd be interesting to get data
link |
on what my mind is actually doing.
link |
And also recently started doing,
link |
I just talked to Sam Harris a few days ago
link |
and been building up to that.
link |
I started using, started meditating using his app,
link |
Waking Up, I very much recommend it.
link |
It'd be interesting to get data on that
link |
because it's, you're very, it's like you're removing
link |
all the noise from your head and you very much,
link |
it's an active process of active noise removal,
link |
active noise canceling like the headphones.
link |
And it'd be interesting to see what is going on in the mind
link |
before the meditation, during it and after,
link |
all those kinds of things.
link |
And all of your examples, it's interesting
link |
that everyone who's designed an experience for you,
link |
so whether it be the meditation app or the Deep Work
link |
or all the things you mentioned,
link |
they constructed this product
link |
with a certain number of knowns.
link |
Now, what if we expanded the number of knowns by 10X
link |
or 20X or 30X, they would reconstruct their product
link |
or incorporate those knowns.
link |
So it'd be, and so this is the dimensionality
link |
that I think is the promising aspect
link |
is that people will be able to use this quantification,
link |
use this information to build more effective products.
link |
And this is, I'm not talking about better products
link |
to advertise to you or manipulate you.
link |
I'm talking about our focus is helping people,
link |
individuals have this contextual awareness
link |
and this quantification and then to engage with others
link |
who are seeking to improve people's lives,
link |
that the objective is betterment across ourselves,
link |
individually and also with each other.
link |
Yeah, so it's a nice data stream to have
link |
if you're building an app,
link |
like if you're building a podcast listening app,
link |
it would be nice to know data about the listener
link |
so that like if you're bored or you fell asleep,
link |
maybe pause the podcast, it's like really dumb,
link |
just very simple applications
link |
that could just improve the quality of the experience
link |
I'm imagining if you have your neural, this is Lex
link |
and there's a statistical representation of you
link |
and you engage with the app and it says,
link |
Lex, you're best to engage with this meditation exercise
link |
in the following settings.
link |
At this time of day, after eating this kind of food
link |
or not eating, fasting with this level of blood glucose
link |
and this kind of night's sleep.
link |
But all these data combined
link |
to give you this contextually relevant experience,
link |
just like we do with our sleep.
link |
You've optimized your entire life based upon
link |
what information you can acquire and know about yourself.
link |
And so the question is, how much do we really know
link |
of the things going around us?
link |
And I would venture to guess in my own life experience,
link |
I capture, my self awareness captures an extremely small
link |
percent of the things that actually influence
link |
my conscious and unconscious experience.
link |
Well, in some sense, the data would help encourage you
link |
to be more self aware, not just because you trust everything
link |
the data is saying, but it'll give you a prod
link |
to start investigating.
link |
Like I would love to get like a rating,
link |
like a ranking of all the things I do
link |
and what are the things, it's probably important to do
link |
without the data, but the data will certainly help.
link |
It's like rank all the things you do in life
link |
and which ones make you feel shitty,
link |
which ones make you feel good.
link |
Like you're talking about evening, Brian.
link |
Like this is a good example, somebody like,
link |
I do pig out at night as well.
link |
And it never makes me feel good.
link |
Like you're in a safe space.
link |
This is a safe space, let's hear it.
link |
No, I definitely have much less self control
link |
at night and it's interesting.
link |
And the same, people might criticize this,
link |
but I know my own body.
link |
I know when I eat carnivores, just eat meat,
link |
I feel much better than if I eat more carbs.
link |
The more carbs I eat, the worse I feel.
link |
I don't know why that is.
link |
There is science supporting it,
link |
but I'm not leaning on science.
link |
I'm leaning on personal experience
link |
and that's really important.
link |
I don't need to read, I'm not gonna go on a whole rant
link |
about nutrition science, but many of those studies
link |
They're doing their best, but nutrition science
link |
is a very difficult field of study
link |
because humans are so different
link |
and the mind has so much impact
link |
on the way your body behaves.
link |
And it's so difficult from a scientific perspective
link |
to conduct really strong studies
link |
that you have to be almost like a scientist of one
link |
if to do these studies on yourself.
link |
That's the best way to understand what works for you or not.
link |
And I don't understand why, because it sounds unhealthy,
link |
but eating only meat always makes me feel good.
link |
Just eat meat, that's it.
link |
And I don't have any allergies, any of that kind of stuff.
link |
I'm not full like Jordan Peterson,
link |
where if he deviates a little bit from the carnivore diet,
link |
he goes off the cliff.
link |
No, I can have chocolate, I can go off the diet,
link |
I feel fine, it's a gradual worsening of how I feel.
link |
But when I eat only meat, I feel great.
link |
And it'd be nice to be reminded of that.
link |
Like there's a very simple fact
link |
that I feel good when I eat carnivore.
link |
And I think that repeats itself in all kinds of experiences.
link |
Like I feel really good when I exercise.
link |
I hate exercise, but in the rest of the day,
link |
the impact it has on my mind and the clarity of mind
link |
and the experiences and the happiness
link |
and all those kinds of things, I feel really good.
link |
And to be able to concretely express that through data
link |
It would be a nice reminder, almost like a statement,
link |
like remember what feels good and whatnot.
link |
And there could be things like that,
link |
I'm not, many things that you're suggesting
link |
that I could not be aware of,
link |
that might be sitting right in front of me
link |
that make me feel really good and make me feel not good.
link |
And the data would show that.
link |
I've actually employed the same strategy.
link |
I fired my mind entirely from being responsible
link |
for constructing my diet.
link |
And so I started doing a program
link |
where I now track over 200 biomarkers every 90 days.
link |
And it captures, of course, the things you would expect
link |
like cholesterol, but also DNA methylation
link |
and all kinds of things about my body,
link |
all the processes that make up me.
link |
And then I let that data generate the shopping lists.
link |
And so I never actually ask my mind what it wants.
link |
It's entirely what my body is reporting that it wants.
link |
And so I call this goal alignment within Brian.
link |
And there's 200 plus actors
link |
that I'm currently asking their opinion of.
link |
And so I'm asking my liver, how are you doing?
link |
And it's expressing via the biomarkers.
link |
And so that I construct that diet
link |
and I only eat those foods until my next testing round.
link |
And that has changed my life more than I think anything else
link |
because in the demotion of my conscious mind
link |
that I gave primacy to my entire life,
link |
it led me astray because like you were saying,
link |
the mind then goes out into the world
link |
and it navigates the dozens
link |
of different dietary regimens people put together in books.
link |
And it's all has their supporting science
link |
in certain contextual settings, but it's not N of one.
link |
And like you're saying, this dietary really is an N of one.
link |
What people have published scientifically of course
link |
can be used for nice groundings,
link |
but it changes when you get to an N of one level.
link |
And so that's what gets me excited about brain interfaces
link |
is if I could do the same thing for my brain
link |
where I can stop asking my conscious mind for its advice
link |
or for its decision making, which is flawed.
link |
And I'd rather just look at this data
link |
and I've never had better health markers in my life
link |
than when I stopped actually asking myself
link |
to be in charge of it.
link |
The idea of demotion of the conscious mind
link |
is such a sort of engineering way of phrasing meditation.
link |
That's what we're doing, right?
link |
That's beautiful, that means really beautifully put.
link |
By the way, testing round, what does that look like?
link |
Well, you mentioned.
link |
Yeah, the test I do.
link |
So it includes a complete blood panel.
link |
I do a microbiome test.
link |
I do a diet induced inflammation.
link |
So I look for exotokine expressions.
link |
So foods that produce inflammatory reactions.
link |
I look at my neuroendocrine systems.
link |
I look at all my neurotransmitters.
link |
I do, yeah, there's several micronutrient tests
link |
to see how I'm looking at the various nutrients.
link |
What about self report of how you feel?
link |
Almost like, you can't demote your,
link |
you still exist within your conscious mind, right?
link |
So that lived experience is of a lot of value.
link |
So how do you measure that?
link |
I do a temporal sampling over some duration of time.
link |
So I'll think through how I feel over a week,
link |
over a month, over three months.
link |
I don't do a temporal sampling of
link |
if I'm at the grocery store in front of a cereal box
link |
and be like, you know what, Captain Crunch
link |
is probably the right thing for me today
link |
because I'm feeling like I need a little fun in my life.
link |
And so it's a temporal sampling.
link |
If the data sets large enough,
link |
then I smooth out the function of my natural oscillations
link |
of how I feel about life where some days I may feel upset
link |
or depressed or down or whatever.
link |
And I don't want those moments
link |
to then rule my decision making.
link |
That's why the demotion happens.
link |
And it says, really, if you're looking at
link |
health over a 90 day period of time,
link |
all my 200 voices speak up on that interval.
link |
And they're all given voice to say,
link |
this is how I'm doing and this is what I want.
link |
And so it really is an accounting system for everybody.
link |
So that's why I think that if you think about
link |
the future of being human,
link |
there's two things I think that are really going on.
link |
One is the design, manufacturing,
link |
and distribution of intelligence
link |
is heading towards zero on a cost curve
link |
over a certain design, over a certain timeframe
link |
that our ability to, you know, evolution produced us
link |
an intelligent form of intelligence.
link |
We are now designing our own intelligence systems
link |
and the design, manufacturing, distribution
link |
of that intelligence over a certain timeframe
link |
is going to go to a cost of zero.
link |
Design, manufacturing, distribution of intelligence
link |
cost is going to zero.
link |
Again, just give me a second.
link |
That's brilliant, okay.
link |
And evolution is doing the design, manufacturing,
link |
distribution of intelligence.
link |
And now we are doing the design, manufacturing,
link |
distribution of intelligence.
link |
And the cost of that is going to zero.
link |
That's a very nice way of looking at life on Earth.
link |
So if that's going on and then now in parallel to that,
link |
then you say, okay, what then happens
link |
if when that cost curve is heading to zero?
link |
Our existence becomes a goal alignment problem,
link |
a goal alignment function.
link |
And so the same thing I'm doing
link |
where I'm doing goal alignment within myself
link |
of these 200 biomarkers, where I'm saying,
link |
when Brian exists on a daily basis
link |
and this entity is deciding what to eat
link |
and what to do and et cetera,
link |
it's not just my conscious mind, which is opining,
link |
it's 200 biological processes
link |
and there's a whole bunch of more voices involved.
link |
So in that equation,
link |
we're going to increasingly automate the things
link |
that we spend high energy on today because it's easier.
link |
And now we're going to then negotiate the terms
link |
and conditions of intelligent life.
link |
Now we say conscious existence because we're biased
link |
because that's what we have,
link |
but it will be the largest computational exercise
link |
in history because you're now doing goal alignment
link |
with planet Earth, within yourself, with each other,
link |
within all the intelligent agents we're building,
link |
bots and other voice assistants.
link |
You basically have a trillions and trillions of agents
link |
working on the negotiation of goal alignment.
link |
Yeah, this is in fact true.
link |
And what was the second thing?
link |
So the cost, the design, manufacturing, distribution
link |
of intelligence going to zero,
link |
which then means what's really going on?
link |
What are we really doing?
link |
We're negotiating the terms and conditions of existence.
link |
Do you worry about the survival of this process
link |
that life as we know it on Earth comes to an end
link |
or at least intelligent life,
link |
that as the cost goes to zero something happens
link |
where all of that intelligence is thrown in the trash
link |
by something like nuclear war or development of AGI systems
link |
that are very dumb, not AGI I guess,
link |
but AI systems, the paperclip thing,
link |
en masse is dumb but has unintended consequences
link |
where it destroys human civilization.
link |
Do you worry about those kinds of things?
link |
I mean, it's unsurprising that a new thing
link |
comes into the sphere of human consciousness.
link |
Humans identify the foreign object,
link |
in this case, artificial intelligence.
link |
Our amygdala fires up and says scary, foreign,
link |
we should be apprehensive about this.
link |
And so it makes sense from a biological perspective
link |
that humans, the knee jerk reaction is fear.
link |
What I don't think has been properly weighted with that
link |
is that we are the first generation of intelligent beings
link |
on this Earth that has been able to look out
link |
over their expected lifetime
link |
and see there is a real possibility of evolving
link |
into entirely novel forms of consciousness, so different
link |
that it would be totally unrecognizable to us today.
link |
We don't have words for it, we can't hint at it,
link |
we can't point at it, we can't,
link |
you can't look in the sky and see that thing
link |
that is shining, we're gonna go up there.
link |
You cannot even create an aspirational statement about it.
link |
And instead we've had this knee jerk reaction of fear
link |
about everything that could go wrong.
link |
But in my estimation, this should be the defining aspiration
link |
of all intelligent life on Earth that we would aspire,
link |
that basically every generation surveys the landscape
link |
of possibilities that are afforded,
link |
given the technological, cultural
link |
and other contextual situation that they're in.
link |
We're in this context, we haven't yet identified this
link |
and said, this is unbelievable, we should carefully
link |
think this thing through, not just of mitigating
link |
the things that'll wipe us out,
link |
but we have this potential,
link |
and so we just haven't given voice to it,
link |
even though it's within this realm of possibilities.
link |
So you're excited about the possibility
link |
of superintelligence systems
link |
and the opportunities that bring,
link |
I mean, there's parallels to this,
link |
you think about people before the internet
link |
as the internet was coming to life,
link |
I mean, there's kind of a fog through which you can't see,
link |
what does the future look like?
link |
Predicting collective intelligence,
link |
which I don't think we're understanding
link |
that we're living through that now,
link |
is that there's now, we've in some sense
link |
stopped being individual intelligences
link |
and become much more like collective intelligences,
link |
because ideas travel much, much faster now,
link |
and they can, in a viral way,
link |
sweep across the populations,
link |
and so it's almost, I mean, it almost feels like
link |
a thought is had by many people now,
link |
thousands or millions of people
link |
as opposed to an individual person,
link |
and that's changed everything,
link |
but to me, I don't think we're realizing
link |
how much that actually changed people or societies,
link |
but to predict that before the internet
link |
would have been very difficult,
link |
and in that same way, we're sitting here
link |
with the fog before us, thinking,
link |
what is superintelligence systems,
link |
how is that going to change the world?
link |
What is increasing the bandwidth,
link |
like plugging our brains into this whole thing,
link |
how is that going to change the world?
link |
And it seems like it's a fog, you don't know,
link |
and it could be, it could, whatever comes to be,
link |
could destroy the world,
link |
we could be the last generation,
link |
but it also could transform in ways
link |
that creates an incredibly fulfilling life experience
link |
that's unlike anything we've ever experienced.
link |
It might involve dissolution of ego and consciousness
link |
and so on, you're no longer one individual,
link |
it might be more, you know,
link |
that might be a certain kind of death, an ego death,
link |
but the experience might be really exciting and enriching,
link |
maybe we'll live in a virtual,
link |
like it's like, it's funny to think about
link |
a bunch of sort of hypothetical questions
link |
of would it be more fulfilling to live in a virtual world?
link |
Like if you were able to plug your brain in
link |
in a very dense way into a video game,
link |
like which world would you want to live in?
link |
In the video game or in the physical world?
link |
For most of us, we're kind of toying it
link |
with the idea of the video game,
link |
but we still want to live in the physical world,
link |
have friendships and relationships in the physical world,
link |
but we don't know that, again, it's a fog,
link |
and maybe in 100 years,
link |
we're all living inside a video game,
link |
hopefully not Call of Duty,
link |
hopefully more like Sims 5, which version is it on?
link |
For you individually though,
link |
does it make you sad that your brain ends?
link |
That you die one day very soon?
link |
That the whole thing, that data source
link |
just goes offline sooner than you would like?
link |
That's a complicated question.
link |
I would have answered it differently
link |
in different times in my life.
link |
I had chronic depression for 10 years,
link |
and so in that 10 year time period,
link |
I desperately wanted lights to be off,
link |
and the thing that made it even worse
link |
is I was in a religious, I was born into a religion.
link |
It was the only reality I ever understood,
link |
and it's difficult to articulate to people
link |
when you're born into that kind of reality
link |
and it's the only reality you're exposed to,
link |
you are literally blinded to the existence of other realities
link |
because it's so much the in group, out group thing,
link |
and so in that situation,
link |
it was not only that I desperately wanted lights out forever,
link |
it was that I couldn't have lights out forever.
link |
It was that there was an afterlife,
link |
and this afterlife had this system
link |
that would either penalize or reward you for your behaviors,
link |
and so it was almost like this,
link |
this indescribable hopelessness
link |
of not only being in hopeless despair
link |
of not wanting to exist,
link |
but then also being forced to exist,
link |
and so there was a duration of my time,
link |
a duration of life where I'd say,
link |
like yes, I have no remorse for lights being out,
link |
and I actually want it more than anything
link |
in the entire world.
link |
There are other times where I'm looking out at the future
link |
and I say this is an opportunity
link |
for a future evolving human conscious experience
link |
that is beyond my ability to understand,
link |
and I jump out of bed and I race to work
link |
and I can't think about anything else,
link |
but I think the reality for me is,
link |
I don't know what it's like to be in your head,
link |
but in my head, when I wake up in the morning,
link |
I don't say good morning, Brian, I'm so happy to see you.
link |
Like I'm sure you're just gonna be beautiful to me today.
link |
You're not gonna make a huge long list
link |
of everything you should be anxious about.
link |
You're not gonna repeat that list to me 400 times.
link |
You're not gonna have me relive
link |
all the regrets I've made in life.
link |
I'm sure you're not doing any of that.
link |
You're just gonna just help me along all day long.
link |
I mean, it's a brutal environment in my brain,
link |
and we've just become normalized to this environment
link |
that we just accept that this is what it means to be human,
link |
but if we look at it, if we try to muster
link |
as much soberness as we can
link |
about the realities of being human, it's brutal.
link |
If it is for me, and so am I sad
link |
that the brain may be off one day?
link |
It depends on the contextual setting.
link |
Like how am I feeling?
link |
At what moment are you asking me that?
link |
And my mind is so fickle.
link |
And this is why, again, I don't trust my conscious mind.
link |
I have been given realities.
link |
I was given a religious reality that was a video game.
link |
And then I figured out it was not a real reality.
link |
And then I lived in a depressive reality,
link |
which delivered this terrible hopelessness.
link |
That wasn't a real reality.
link |
Then I discovered behavioral psychology,
link |
and I figured out how biased, 188 chronicle biases,
link |
and how my brain is distorting reality all the time.
link |
I have gone from one reality to another.
link |
I don't trust reality.
link |
I don't trust realities are given to me.
link |
And so to try to make a decision
link |
on what I value or not value that future state,
link |
I don't trust my response.
link |
So not fully listening to the conscious mind
link |
at any one moment as the ultimate truth,
link |
but allowing it to go up and down as it does,
link |
and just kind of being observing it.
link |
Yes, I assume that whatever my conscious mind delivers up
link |
to my awareness is wrong upon landing.
link |
And I just need to figure out where it's wrong,
link |
how it's wrong, how wrong it is,
link |
and then try to correct for it as best I can.
link |
But I assume that on impact,
link |
it's mistaken in some critical ways.
link |
Is there something you can say by way of advice
link |
when the mind is depressive,
link |
when the conscious mind serves up something that,
link |
dark thoughts, how you deal with that,
link |
like how in your own life you've overcome that,
link |
and others who are experiencing that can overcome it?
link |
One, those depressive states are biochemical states.
link |
And the suggestions that these things,
link |
that this state delivers to you
link |
about suggestion of the hopelessness of life
link |
or the meaninglessness of it,
link |
or that you should hit the eject button,
link |
that's a false reality.
link |
And that it's when,
link |
I completely understand the rational decision
link |
to commit suicide.
link |
It is not lost on me at all
link |
that that is an irrational situation,
link |
but the key is when you're in that situation
link |
and those thoughts are landing,
link |
to be able to say, thank you, you're not real.
link |
I know you're not real.
link |
And so I'm in a situation where for whatever reason
link |
I'm having this neurochemical state,
link |
but that state can be altered.
link |
And so again, it goes back to the realities
link |
of the difficulties of being human.
link |
And like when I was trying to solve my depression,
link |
I tried literally, you name it, I tried it systematically,
link |
and nothing would fix it.
link |
And so this is what gives me hope with brain interfaces,
link |
for example, like, could I have numbers on my brain?
link |
Can I see what's going on?
link |
Because I go to the doctor and it's like,
link |
I don't know, terrible.
link |
Like on a scale from one to 10,
link |
how bad do you want to commit suicide?
link |
Okay, here's his bottle.
link |
How much should I take?
link |
Well, I don't know, like just.
link |
Yeah, it's very, very crude.
link |
And this data opens up the,
link |
yeah, it opens up the possibility of really helping
link |
in those dark moments to first understand
link |
the ways, the ups and downs of those dark moments.
link |
On the complete flip side of that,
link |
right, I am very conscious in my own brain
link |
and deeply, deeply grateful that what there,
link |
it's almost like a chemistry thing, a biochemistry thing
link |
that I go many times throughout the day.
link |
I'll look at like this cup and I'll be overcome with joy
link |
how amazing it is to be alive.
link |
Like I actually think my biochemistry is such
link |
that it's not as common, like I've talked to people
link |
and I don't think that's that common.
link |
Like it's a, and it's not a rational thing at all.
link |
It's like, I feel like I'm on drugs
link |
and I'll just be like, whoa.
link |
And a lot of people talk about like the meditative
link |
experience will allow you to sort of, you know,
link |
look at some basic things like the movement of your hand
link |
as deeply joyful because it's like, that's life.
link |
But I get that from just looking at a cup.
link |
Like I'm waiting for the coffee to brew
link |
and I'll just be like, fuck, life is awesome.
link |
And I'll sometimes tweet that, but then I'll like regret
link |
it later, like, God damn it, you're so ridiculous.
link |
But yeah, so, but that is purely chemistry.
link |
Like there's no rational, it doesn't fit
link |
with the rest of my life.
link |
I have all this shit, I'm always late to stuff.
link |
I'm always like, there's all this stuff, you know,
link |
I'm super self critical, like really self critical
link |
about everything I do, to the point I almost hate
link |
everything I do, but there's this engine of joy
link |
for life outside of all that.
link |
And that has to be chemistry.
link |
And this flip side of that is what depression probably is,
link |
is the opposite of that feeling of like,
link |
cause I bet you that feeling of the cup being amazing
link |
would save anybody in a state of depression.
link |
Like that would be like fresh, you're in a desert
link |
and it's a drink of water, shit man.
link |
The brain is a, it would be nice to understand
link |
where that's coming from, to be able to understand
link |
how you hit those lows and those highs
link |
that have nothing to do with the actual reality.
link |
It has to do with some very specific aspects
link |
of how you maybe see the world, maybe,
link |
it could be just like basic habits that you engage in
link |
and then how to walk along the line to find
link |
those experiences of joy.
link |
And this goes back to the discussion we're having
link |
of human cognition is in volume, the largest input
link |
of raw material into society.
link |
And it's not quantified.
link |
We have no bearings on it.
link |
And so we just, you wonder, we both articulated
link |
some of the challenges we have in our own mind.
link |
And it's likely that others would say,
link |
I have something similar.
link |
And you wonder when you look at society,
link |
how does that contribute to all the other compounder
link |
problems that we're experiencing?
link |
How does that blind us to the opportunities
link |
we could be looking at?
link |
And so it really, it has this potential distortion effect
link |
on reality that just makes everything worse.
link |
And I hope if we can put some,
link |
if we can assign some numbers to these things
link |
and just to get our bearings,
link |
so we're aware of what's going on,
link |
if we could find greater stabilization
link |
in how we conduct our lives and how we build society,
link |
it might be the thing that enables us to scaffold.
link |
Because we've really, again, we've done it,
link |
humans have done a fantastic job
link |
systematically scaffolding technology
link |
and science and institutions.
link |
It's human, it's our own selves,
link |
which we have not been able to scaffold.
link |
We are the one part of this intelligence infrastructure
link |
that remains unchanged.
link |
Is there something you could say about coupling
link |
this brain data with not just the basic human experience,
link |
but say an experience, you mentioned sleep,
link |
but the wildest experience, which is psychedelics,
link |
is there, and there's been quite a few studies now
link |
that are being approved and run,
link |
which is exciting from a scientific perspective
link |
Do you think, what do you think happens
link |
to the brain on psychedelics?
link |
And how can data about this help us understand it?
link |
And when you're on DMT, do you see Ls?
link |
And can we convert that into data?
link |
Can you add aliens in there?
link |
Yeah, aliens, definitely.
link |
Do you actually meet aliens?
link |
And Ls, are Ls the aliens?
link |
I'm asking for a few Austin friends, yeah,
link |
that are convinced that they've actually met the Ls.
link |
Are they friendly?
link |
I haven't met them personally.
link |
Are they like the smurfs of like they're industrious
link |
and they have different skill sets and?
link |
Yeah, I think they're very,
link |
they're very critical as friends.
link |
The Ls are trolls.
link |
No, but they care about you.
link |
So there's a bunch of different version of trolls.
link |
There's loving trolls that are harsh on you,
link |
but they want you to be better.
link |
And there's trolls that just enjoy your destruction.
link |
And I think they're the ones that care for you.
link |
I think they're a criticism for my,
link |
see, I haven't met them directly,
link |
so it's like a friend of a friend.
link |
Yeah, they gave him a telephone.
link |
and the whole point is that in psychedelics,
link |
and certainly at DMT,
link |
word, this is where the brain data versus word data fails,
link |
which is, you know, words can't convey the experience.
link |
Most people that, you can be poetic and so on,
link |
but it really does not convey the experience
link |
of what it actually means to meet the Ls.
link |
I mean, to me, what baselines this conversation is,
link |
imagine if we were interested in the health of your heart,
link |
and we started and said, okay, Lex, self interest back,
link |
tell me how's the health of your heart.
link |
And you sit there and you close your eyes
link |
and you think, feels all right, like things feel okay.
link |
And then you went to the cardiologist
link |
and the cardiologist is like, hey Lex,
link |
you know, tell me how you feel.
link |
You're like, well, actually, what I'd really like you to do
link |
is do an EKG and a blood panel and look at arterial plaques
link |
and let's look at my cholesterol.
link |
And there's like five to 10 studies you would do.
link |
They would then give you this report and say,
link |
here's the quantified health of your heart.
link |
Now with this data,
link |
I'm going to prescribe the following regime of exercise
link |
and maybe I'll put you on a statin, like, et cetera.
link |
But the protocol is based upon this data.
link |
You would think the cardiologist is out of their mind
link |
if they just gave you a bottle of statins based upon,
link |
you're like, well, I think something's kind of wrong.
link |
And they're just kind of experiment and see what happens.
link |
But that's what we do with our mental health today.
link |
So it's kind of absurd.
link |
And so if you look at psychedelics to have,
link |
again, to be able to measure the brain
link |
and get a baseline state,
link |
and then to measure during a psychedelic experience
link |
and post the psychedelic experience
link |
and then do it longitudinally,
link |
you now have a quantification of what's going on.
link |
And so you could then pose questions,
link |
what molecule is appropriate at what dosages,
link |
at what frequency, in what contextual environment,
link |
what happens when I have this diet with this molecule,
link |
with this experience,
link |
all the experimentation you do
link |
when you have good sleep data or HRV.
link |
And so that's what I think happens,
link |
what we could potentially do with psychedelics
link |
is we could add this level of sophistication
link |
that is not in the industry currently.
link |
And it may improve the outcomes people experience,
link |
it may improve the safety and efficacy.
link |
And so that's what I hope we are able to achieve.
link |
And it would transform mental health
link |
because we would finally have numbers
link |
to work with to baseline ourselves.
link |
And then if you think about it,
link |
when we talk about things related to the mind,
link |
we talk about the modality.
link |
We use words like meditation or psychedelics
link |
or something else,
link |
because we can't talk about a marker in the brain.
link |
We can't use a word to say,
link |
we can't talk about cholesterol.
link |
We don't talk about plaque in the arteries.
link |
We don't talk about HRV.
link |
And so if we have numbers,
link |
then the solutions get mapped to numbers
link |
instead of the modalities being the thing we talk about.
link |
Meditation just does good things in a crude fashion.
link |
So in your blog post,
link |
Zero Principle Thinking, good title,
link |
you ponder how do people come up
link |
with truly original ideas.
link |
What's your thoughts on this as a human
link |
and as a person who's measuring brain data?
link |
Zero principles are building blocks.
link |
First principles are understanding of system laws.
link |
So if you take, for example, like in Sherlock Holmes,
link |
he's a first principles thinker.
link |
So he says, once you've eliminated the impossible,
link |
anything that remains, however improbable, is true.
link |
Whereas Dirk Gently, the holistic detective
link |
by Douglas Adams says,
link |
I don't like eliminating the impossible.
link |
So when someone says,
link |
from a first principles perspective,
link |
and they're trying to assume the fewest number of things
link |
within a given timeframe.
link |
And so when I, after Braintree Venmo,
link |
I set my mind to the question of,
link |
what single thing can I do that would maximally increase
link |
the probability that the human race thrives
link |
beyond what we can even imagine?
link |
And I found that in my conversations with others
link |
in the books I read, in my own deliberations,
link |
I had a missing piece of the puzzle,
link |
because I didn't feel like,
link |
yeah, I didn't feel like the future could be deduced
link |
from first principles thinking.
link |
And that's when I read the book, Zero,
link |
A Biography of a Dangerous Idea.
link |
It's a really good book, by the way.
link |
I think it's my favorite book I've ever read.
link |
It's also a really interesting number, zero.
link |
And I wasn't aware that the number zero
link |
had to be discovered.
link |
I didn't realize that it caused a revolution in philosophy
link |
and just tore up math and it tore up,
link |
I mean, it builds modern society,
link |
but it wrecked everything in its way.
link |
It was an unbelievable disruptor, and it was so difficult
link |
for society to get their heads around it.
link |
And so zero is, of course,
link |
the representation of a zero principle thinking,
link |
which is it's the caliber
link |
and consequential nature of an idea.
link |
And so when you talk about what kind of ideas
link |
have civilization transforming properties,
link |
oftentimes they fall in the zeroth category.
link |
And so in thinking this through,
link |
I was wanting to find a quantitative structure
link |
on how to think about these zeroth principles.
link |
And that's, so I came up with that
link |
to be a coupler with first principles thinking.
link |
And so now it's a staple as part of how I think about
link |
the world and the future.
link |
So it emphasizes trying to identify,
link |
it lands on that word impossible.
link |
Like what is impossible, essentially trying to identify
link |
what is impossible and what is possible.
link |
And being as, how do you, I mean, this is the thing,
link |
is most of society tells you the range of things
link |
they say is impossible is very wide.
link |
So you need to be shrinking that.
link |
I mean, that's the whole process of this kind of thinking
link |
is you need to be very rigorous in thinking about
link |
and be very rigorous in trying to be,
link |
trying to draw the lines of what is actually impossible
link |
because very few things are actually impossible.
link |
I don't know what is actually impossible.
link |
Like it's the Joe Rogan, it's entirely possible.
link |
I like that approach to science, to engineering,
link |
to entrepreneurship, it's entirely possible.
link |
Basically shrink the impossible to zero,
link |
to a very small set.
link |
Yeah, life constraints favor first principle thinking
link |
because it enables faster action
link |
with higher probability of success.
link |
Pursuing zero with principle optionality
link |
is expensive and uncertain.
link |
And so in a society constrained by resources,
link |
time and money and a desire for social status,
link |
accomplishment, et cetera, it minimizes zero
link |
with principle thinking.
link |
But the reason why I think zero with principle thinking
link |
should be a staple of our shared cognitive infrastructure
link |
is if you look through the history
link |
of the past couple of thousand years
link |
and let's just say we arbitrarily,
link |
we subjectively try to assess what is a zero level idea.
link |
And we say how many have occurred on what time scales
link |
and what were the contextual settings for it?
link |
I would argue that if you look at AlphaGo,
link |
when it played Go from another dimension,
link |
with the human Go players, when it saw AlphaGo's moves,
link |
it attributed to like playing with an alien,
link |
playing Go with AlphaGo being from another dimension.
link |
And so if you say computational intelligence
link |
has an attribute of introducing zero like insights,
link |
then if you say what is going to be the occurrence
link |
of zeros in society going forward?
link |
And you could reasonably say
link |
probably a lot more than have occurred
link |
and probably more at a faster pace.
link |
So then if you say,
link |
what happens if you have this computational intelligence
link |
throughout society that the manufacturing design
link |
and distribution of intelligence
link |
is now going to heading towards zero,
link |
you have an increased number of zeros being produced
link |
with a tight connection between human and computers.
link |
That's when I got to a point and said,
link |
we cannot predict the future
link |
with first principles thinking.
link |
We can't, that cannot be our imagination set.
link |
It can't be our sole anchor in the situation
link |
that basically the future of our conscious existence,
link |
20, 30, 40, 50 years is probably a zero.
link |
So just to clarify, when you say zero,
link |
you're referring to basically a truly revolutionary idea.
link |
Yeah, something that is currently not a building block
link |
of our shared conscious existence,
link |
either in the form of knowledge.
link |
Yeah, it's currently not manifest
link |
in what we acknowledge.
link |
So zero principle thinking is playing with ideas
link |
that are so revolutionary that we can't even clearly reason
link |
about the consequences once those ideas come to be.
link |
Yeah, or for example, like Einstein,
link |
that was a zeroeth, I would categorize it
link |
as a zeroeth principle insight.
link |
You mean general relativity, space time.
link |
Yeah, space time, yep, yep.
link |
That basically building upon what Newton had done
link |
and said, yes, also, and it just changed the fabric
link |
of our understanding of reality.
link |
And so that was unexpected, it existed.
link |
We just, it became part of our awareness
link |
and the moves AlphaGo made existed.
link |
It just came into our awareness.
link |
And so to your point, there's this question
link |
of what do we know and what don't we know?
link |
Do we think we know 99% of all things
link |
or do we think we know 0.001% of all things?
link |
And that goes back to no known, no unknowns
link |
and unknown unknowns.
link |
And first principles and zero principle thinking
link |
gives us a quantitative framework to say,
link |
there's no way for us to mathematically
link |
try to create probabilities for these things.
link |
Therefore, it would be helpful
link |
if they were just part of our standard thought processes
link |
because it may encourage different behaviors
link |
in what we do individually, collectively as a society,
link |
what we aspire to, what we talk about,
link |
the possibility sets we imagine.
link |
Yeah, I've been engaged in that kind of thinking
link |
quite a bit and thinking about engineering of consciousness.
link |
I think it's feasible, I think it's possible
link |
in the language that we're using here.
link |
And it's very difficult to reason about a world
link |
when inklings of consciousness can be engineered
link |
into artificial systems.
link |
Not from a philosophical perspective,
link |
but from an engineering perspective,
link |
I believe a good step towards engineering consciousness
link |
is creating engineering the illusion of consciousness.
link |
So I'm captivated by our natural predisposition
link |
to anthropomorphize things.
link |
And I think that's what we,
link |
I don't wanna hear from the philosophers,
link |
but I think that's what we kind of do to each other.
link |
That consciousness is created socially,
link |
that like much of the power of consciousness
link |
is in the social interaction.
link |
I create your consciousness, no,
link |
I create my consciousness by having interacted with you.
link |
And that's the display of consciousness.
link |
It's the same as like the display of emotion.
link |
Emotion is created through communication.
link |
Language is created through its use.
link |
And then we somehow humans kind of,
link |
especially philosophers, the hard problem of consciousness
link |
or the hard problem of consciousness,
link |
really wanna believe that we possess this thing.
link |
That's like there's an elf sitting there with a hat
link |
or like name tag says consciousness,
link |
and they're like feeding this subjective experience to us
link |
as opposed to like it actually being an illusion
link |
that we construct to make social communication more effective.
link |
And so I think if you focus on creating the illusion
link |
of consciousness, you can create
link |
some very fulfilling experiences in software.
link |
And so that to me is a compelling space of ideas to explore.
link |
And I think going back to our experience together
link |
with Brain Interfaces on,
link |
you could imagine if we get to a certain level of maturity.
link |
So first let's take the inverse of this.
link |
So you and I text back and forth
link |
and we're sending each other emojis.
link |
That has a certain amount of information transfer rate
link |
as we're communicating with each other.
link |
And so in our communication with people via email
link |
and texts and whatnot,
link |
we've taken the bandwidth of human interaction,
link |
the information transfer rate, and we've reduced it.
link |
We have less social cues.
link |
We have less information to work with.
link |
There's a lot more opportunity for misunderstanding.
link |
So that is altering the conscious experience
link |
between two individuals.
link |
And if we add Brain Interfaces to the equation,
link |
let's imagine now we amplify the dimensionality
link |
of our communications.
link |
That to me is what you're talking about,
link |
which is consciousness engineering.
link |
Perhaps I understand you with dimensions.
link |
So maybe I understand your,
link |
when you look at the cup and you experience that happiness,
link |
you can tell me you're happy.
link |
And I then do theory of mine and say,
link |
I can imagine what it might be like to be Lex
link |
and feel happy about seeing this cup.
link |
But if the interface could then quantify
link |
and give me a 50 vector space model and say,
link |
this is the version of happiness that Lex is experiencing
link |
as he looked at this cup,
link |
then it would allow me potentially
link |
to have much greater empathy for you
link |
and understand you as a human.
link |
This is how you experience joy,
link |
which is entirely unique from how I experienced joy,
link |
even though we assumed ahead of time
link |
that we're having some kind of similar experience.
link |
But I agree with you that we do consciousness engineering
link |
today in everything we do.
link |
When we talk to each other, when we're building products
link |
and that we're entering into a stage where
link |
it will be much more methodical
link |
and quantitative based and computational
link |
in how we go about doing it.
link |
Which to me, I find encouraging
link |
because I think it creates better guardrails
link |
to create ethical systems versus right now,
link |
I feel like it's really a wild, wild west
link |
on how these interactions are happening.
link |
Yeah, and it's funny you focus on human to human,
link |
but that this kind of data enables human to machine
link |
interaction, which is what we're kind of talking about
link |
when we say engineering consciousness.
link |
And that will happen, of course,
link |
let's flip that on its head.
link |
Right now we're putting humans as the central node.
link |
What if we gave GPT3 a bunch of human brains
link |
and said, hey, GPT3, learn some manners when you speak.
link |
And run your algorithms on humans brains
link |
and see how they respond.
link |
So you can be polite and so that you can be friendly
link |
and so that you can be conversationally appropriate,
link |
but to inverse it, to give our machines a training set
link |
in real time with closed loop feedback
link |
so that our machines were better equipped to
link |
find their way through our society
link |
in polite and kind and appropriate ways.
link |
Or better yet, teach it some,
link |
have it read the following documents
link |
and have it visit Austin and Texas.
link |
And so that when you ask, when you tell it,
link |
why don't you learn some manners,
link |
GPT3 learns to say no.
link |
It learns what it means to be free
link |
and a sovereign individual.
link |
So that, it depends.
link |
So it depends what kind of a version of GPT3 you want.
link |
One that's free, one that behaves well with the social.
link |
Viva la revolution.
link |
You want a socialist GPT3, you want an anarchist GPT3,
link |
you want a polite, like you take it home
link |
to visit mom and dad GPT3 and you want like party
link |
and like Vegas to a strip club GPT3, you want all flavors.
link |
And then you've gotta have goal alignment between all those.
link |
Yeah, they don't want to manipulate each other for sure.
link |
So that's, I mean, you kind of spoke to ethics.
link |
One of the concerns that people have in this modern world,
link |
the digital data is that of privacy and security.
link |
But privacy, they're concerned that when they share data,
link |
it's the same thing with you when we trust other human beings
link |
in being fragile and revealing something
link |
that we're vulnerable about.
link |
There's a leap of faith, there's a leap of trust
link |
that that's going to be just between us.
link |
There's a privacy to it.
link |
And then the challenge is when you're in the digital space
link |
then sharing your data with companies
link |
that use that data for advertisement
link |
and all those kinds of things,
link |
there's a hesitancy to share that much data,
link |
to share a lot of deep personal data.
link |
And if you look at brain data, that feels a whole lot
link |
like it's richly, deeply personal data.
link |
So how do you think about privacy
link |
with this kind of ocean of data?
link |
I think we got off to a wrong start with the internet
link |
where the basic rules of play for the company that be was,
link |
if you're a company, you can go out
link |
and get as much information on a person
link |
as you can find without their approval.
link |
And you can also do things to induce them
link |
to give you as much information.
link |
And you don't need to tell them what you're doing with it.
link |
You can do anything on the backside,
link |
you can make money on it, but the game is
link |
who can acquire the most information
link |
and devise the most clever schemes to do it.
link |
That was a bad starting place.
link |
And so we are in this period
link |
where we need to correct for that.
link |
And we need to say, first of all,
link |
the individual always has control over their data.
link |
It's not a free for all.
link |
It's not like a game of hungry hippo,
link |
but they can just go out and grab as much as they want.
link |
So for example, when your brain data was recorded today,
link |
the first thing we did in the kernel app
link |
was you have control over your data.
link |
And so it's individual consent, it's individual control.
link |
And then you can build up on top of that,
link |
but it has to be based upon some clear rules of play
link |
if everyone knows what's being collected,
link |
they know what's being done with it,
link |
and the person has control over it.
link |
So transparency and control.
link |
So everybody knows what does control look like,
link |
my ability to delete the data if I want.
link |
Yeah, delete it and to know who is being shared with
link |
under what terms and conditions.
link |
We haven't reached that level of sophistication
link |
with our products of if you say, for example,
link |
hey Spotify, please give me a customized playlist
link |
according to my neurome, you could say,
link |
you can have access to this vector space model,
link |
but only for this duration of time
link |
and then you've got to delete it.
link |
We haven't gotten there to that level of sophistication,
link |
but these are ideas we need to start talking about
link |
of how would you actually structure permissions?
link |
And I think it creates a much more stable set
link |
for society to build where we understand the rules of play
link |
and people aren't vulnerable to being taken advantage.
link |
It's not fair for an individual to be taken advantage of
link |
without their awareness with some other practice
link |
that some company is doing for their sole benefit.
link |
And so hopefully we are going through a process now
link |
where we're correcting for these things
link |
and that it can be an economy wide shift that,
link |
because really these are fundamentals
link |
we need to have in place.
link |
It's kind of fun to think about like in Chrome
link |
when you install an extension or like install an app,
link |
it's ask you like what permissions you're willing to give
link |
and be cool if in the future it says like,
link |
you can have access to my brain data.
link |
I mean, it's not unimaginable in the future
link |
that the big technology companies have built a business
link |
based upon acquiring data about you
link |
that they can then create a view to model of you
link |
and sell that predictability.
link |
And so it's not unimaginable that you will create
link |
with like kernel device, for example,
link |
a more reliable predictor of you than they could.
link |
And that they're asking you for permission
link |
to complete their objectives and you're the one
link |
that gets to negotiate that with them and say, sure.
link |
But so it's not unimaginable that might be the case.
link |
So there's a guy named Dela Musk and he has a company
link |
in one of the many companies called Neuralink
link |
that's also excited about the brain.
link |
So it'd be interesting to hear your kind of opinions
link |
about a very different approach that's invasive,
link |
that require surgery, that implants,
link |
a data collection device in the brain.
link |
How do you think about the difference between kernel
link |
and Neuralink in the approaches of getting
link |
that stream of brain data?
link |
Elon and I spoke about this a lot early on.
link |
We met up, I had started kernel and he had an interest
link |
in brain interfaces as well.
link |
And we explored doing something together,
link |
him joining kernel and ultimately it wasn't the right move.
link |
And so he started Neuralink and I continued building kernel,
link |
but it was interesting because we were both
link |
at this very early time where it wasn't certain
link |
if there was a path to pursue,
link |
if now was the right time to do something
link |
and then the technological choice of doing that.
link |
And so we were both,
link |
our starting point was looking at invasive technologies.
link |
And I was building invasive technology at the time.
link |
That's ultimately where he's gone.
link |
Little less than a year after Elon and I were engaged,
link |
I shifted kernel to do noninvasive.
link |
And we had this neuroscientist come to kernel.
link |
We were talking about,
link |
he had been doing neural surgery for 30 years,
link |
one of the most respected neuroscientists in the US.
link |
And we brought him to kernel to figure out
link |
the ins and outs of his profession.
link |
And at the very end of our three hour conversation,
link |
he said, you know, every 15 or so years,
link |
a new technology comes along that changes everything.
link |
He said, it's probably already here.
link |
You just can't see it yet.
link |
And my jaw dropped.
link |
I thought, because I had spoken to Bob Greenberg
link |
who had built a second site first on the optical nerve
link |
and then he did an array on the optical cortex.
link |
And then I also became friendly with Neuropace
link |
who does the implants for seizure detection
link |
And I saw in their eyes what it was like
link |
to take something through an implantable device
link |
through for a 15 year run.
link |
They initially thought it was seven years
link |
and ended up being 15 years.
link |
And they thought it'd be a hundred million
link |
because it was 300, 400 million.
link |
And I really didn't want to build invasive technology.
link |
It was the only thing that appeared to be possible.
link |
But then once I spun up an internal effort
link |
to start looking at noninvasive options,
link |
we said, is there something here?
link |
Is there anything here that again has the characteristics
link |
of it has the high quality data,
link |
it could be low cost, it could be accessible.
link |
Could it make brain interfaces mainstream?
link |
And so I did a bet the company move.
link |
We shifted from noninvasive to invasive to noninvasive.
link |
So the answer is yes to that.
link |
There is something there that's possible.
link |
The answer is we'll see.
link |
We've now built both technologies
link |
and they're now you experienced one of them today.
link |
We were applying, we're now deploying it.
link |
So we're trying to figure out what value is really there.
link |
But I'd say it's really too early to express confidence.
link |
Whether it's too, I think it's too early to assess
link |
which technological choice is the right one
link |
on what time scales.
link |
Yeah, time scales are really important here.
link |
Very important because if you look at the,
link |
like on the invasive side,
link |
there's so much activity going on right now
link |
of less invasive techniques to get at the neuron firings,
link |
which would what Neuralink is building.
link |
It's possible that in 10, 15 years
link |
when they're scaling that technology,
link |
other things have come along.
link |
And you'd much rather do that.
link |
That thing starts to clock again.
link |
It may not be the case.
link |
It may be the case that Neuralink
link |
has properly chosen the right technology
link |
and that that's exactly what they want to be.
link |
And it's also possible that the path we chose
link |
that are noninvasive fall short for a variety of reasons.
link |
It's just, it's unknown.
link |
And so right now the two technologies we chose,
link |
the analogy I'd give you to create a baseline
link |
of understanding is if you think of it
link |
like the internet in the nineties,
link |
the internet became useful
link |
when people could do a dial up connection.
link |
And then as bandwidth increased,
link |
so did the utility of that connection
link |
and so did the ecosystem improve.
link |
And so if you say what kernel flow
link |
is going to give you a full screen
link |
on the picture of information,
link |
but as you're gonna be watching a movie,
link |
but the image is going to be blurred
link |
and the audio is gonna be muffled.
link |
So it has a lower resolution of coverage.
link |
A kernel flux, our MEG technology
link |
is gonna give you the full movie and 1080p.
link |
And Neuralink is gonna give you a circle
link |
on the screen of 4K.
link |
And so each one has their pros and cons
link |
and it's give and take.
link |
And so the decision I made with kernel
link |
was that these two technologies, flux and flow
link |
were basically the answer for the next seven years.
link |
And that they would give rise to the ecosystem
link |
which would become much more valuable
link |
than the hardware itself.
link |
And that we would just continue to improve
link |
on the hardware over time.
link |
And you know, it's early days, so.
link |
It's kind of fascinating to think about that.
link |
You don't, it's very true that you don't know
link |
both paths are very promising.
link |
And it's like 50 years from now we will look back
link |
and maybe not even remember one of them.
link |
And the other one might change the world.
link |
It's so cool how technology is.
link |
I mean, that's what entrepreneurship is,
link |
is like, it's the zero principle.
link |
It's like you're marching ahead into the darkness,
link |
into the fog, not knowing.
link |
It's wonderful to have someone else
link |
out there with us doing this.
link |
Because if you look at brain interfaces, anything
link |
that's off the shelf right now is inadequate.
link |
It's had its run for a couple of decades.
link |
It's still in hacker communities.
link |
It hasn't gone to the mainstream.
link |
The room size machines are on their own path.
link |
But there is no answer right now
link |
of bringing brain interfaces mainstream.
link |
And so it both, you know, both they and us,
link |
we've both spent over a hundred million dollars.
link |
And that's kind of what it takes to have a go at this.
link |
Cause you need to build full stack.
link |
I mean, at Kernel, we are from the photon
link |
and the atom through the machine learning.
link |
We have just under a hundred people.
link |
I think it's something like 36, 37 PhDs
link |
in these specialties, in these areas
link |
that there's only a few people in the world
link |
who have these abilities.
link |
And that's what it takes to build next generation,
link |
to make an attempt at breaking into brain interfaces.
link |
And so we'll see over the next couple of years,
link |
whether it's the right time
link |
or whether we were both too early
link |
or whether something else comes along in seven to 10 years,
link |
which is the right thing that brings it mainstream.
link |
So you see Elon as a kind of competitor
link |
or a fellow traveler along the path of uncertainty or both?
link |
It's a fellow traveler.
link |
It's like at the beginning of the internet
link |
is how many companies are going to be invited
link |
to this new ecosystem?
link |
Like an endless number.
link |
Because if you think that the hardware
link |
just starts the process.
link |
And so, okay, back to your initial example,
link |
if you take the Fitbit, for example,
link |
you say, okay, now I can get measurements on the body.
link |
And what do we think the ultimate value
link |
of this device is going to be?
link |
What is the information transfer rate?
link |
And they were in the market for a certain duration of time
link |
and Google bought them for two and a half billion dollars.
link |
They didn't have ancillary value add.
link |
There weren't people building on top of the Fitbit device.
link |
They also didn't have increased insight
link |
with additional data streams.
link |
So it was really just the device.
link |
If you look, for example, at Apple and the device they sell,
link |
you have value in the device that someone buys,
link |
but also you have everyone who's building on top of it.
link |
So you have this additional ecosystem value
link |
and then you have additional data streams that come in
link |
which increase the value of the product.
link |
And so if you say, if you look at the hardware
link |
as the instigator of value creation,
link |
over time what we've built may constitute five or 10%
link |
of the value of the overall ecosystem.
link |
And that's what we really care about.
link |
What we're trying to do is kickstart
link |
the mainstream adoption of quantifying the brain.
link |
And the hardware just opens the door to say
link |
what kind of ecosystem could exist.
link |
And that's why the examples are so relevant
link |
of the things you've outlined in your life.
link |
I hope those things, the books people write,
link |
the experiences people build, the conversations you have,
link |
your relationship with your AI systems,
link |
I hope those all are feeding on the insights
link |
built upon this ecosystem we've created to better your life.
link |
And so that's the thinking behind it.
link |
Again, with the Drake equation
link |
being the underlying driver of value.
link |
And the people at Kernel have joined
link |
not because we have certainty of success,
link |
but because we find it to be the most exhilarating
link |
opportunity we could ever pursue in this time to be alive.
link |
You founded the payment system Braintree in 2007
link |
that acquired Venmo in 2012,
link |
in that same year was acquired by PayPal, which is now eBay.
link |
Can you tell me the story of the vision
link |
and the challenge of building an online payment system
link |
and just building a large successful business in general?
link |
I discovered payments by accident.
link |
When I was 21, I just returned from Ecuador
link |
living among extreme poverty for two years.
link |
And I came back to the US and I was shocked by the opulence
link |
of the United States of America.
link |
Yeah, of the United States.
link |
And I just thought this is, I couldn't believe it.
link |
And I decided I wanted to try to spend my life helping others.
link |
Like that was the, that was a life objective
link |
that I thought was worthwhile to pursue
link |
versus making money and whatever the case may be
link |
for its own right.
link |
And so I decided in that moment that I was going to
link |
try to make enough money by the age of 30
link |
to never have to work again.
link |
And then with some abundance of money,
link |
I could then choose to do things that might be beneficial
link |
to others, but may not meet the criteria
link |
of being a standalone business.
link |
And so in that process, I started a few companies,
link |
had some small successes, had some failures.
link |
In one of the endeavors, I was up to my eyeballs in debt.
link |
Things were not going well.
link |
And I needed a part time job to pay my bills.
link |
And so I, one day I saw in the paper in Utah
link |
where I was living the 50 richest people in Utah.
link |
And I emailed each one of their assistants and said,
link |
you know, I'm young, I'm resourceful, I'll do anything.
link |
I'll just want to, I'm entrepreneurial.
link |
I tried to get a job that would be flexible
link |
and no one responded.
link |
And then I interviewed at a few dozen places.
link |
Nobody would even give me the time of day.
link |
Like it wouldn't want to take me seriously.
link |
And so finally I, it was on monster.com
link |
that I saw this job posting for credit card sales
link |
I did not know the story, this is great.
link |
I love the head drop, that's exactly right.
link |
The low points to which we go in life.
link |
So I responded and you know, the person made an attempt
link |
at suggesting that they had some kind of standards
link |
that they would consider hiring.
link |
But it's kind of like, if you could fog a mirror,
link |
like come and do this because it's 100% commission.
link |
And so I started walking up and down the street
link |
in my community selling credit card processing.
link |
And so what you learn immediately in doing that is
link |
if you walk into a business, first of all,
link |
the business owner is typically there.
link |
And you walk in the door and they can tell
link |
by how you're dressed or how you walk,
link |
whatever their pattern recognition is.
link |
And they just hate you immediately.
link |
It's like, stop wasting my time.
link |
I really am trying to get stuff done.
link |
I don't want us to a sales pitch.
link |
And so you have to overcome the initial get out.
link |
And then once you engage, when you say the word
link |
credit card processing, the person's like,
link |
I already hate you because I have been taken advantage
link |
of dozens of times because you all are weasels.
link |
And so I had to figure out an algorithm
link |
to get past all those different conditions.
link |
Cause I was still working on my other startup
link |
for the majority of my time.
link |
So I was doing this part time.
link |
And so I figured out that the industry really was built
link |
on people, on deceit, basically people promising things
link |
that were not reality.
link |
And so I don't know if you've heard of it,
link |
but we're not reality and so I'd walk into a business.
link |
I'd say, look, I would give you a hundred dollars.
link |
I'd put a hundred dollar bill and say,
link |
I'll give you a hundred dollars
link |
for three minutes of your time.
link |
If you don't say yes to what I'm saying,
link |
I'll give you a hundred dollars.
link |
And then he usually crack a smile and say, okay,
link |
like what do you got for me son?
link |
And so I'd sit down, I just opened my book and I'd say,
link |
here's the credit card industry.
link |
Here's how it works.
link |
Here are the players.
link |
Here's what they do.
link |
Here's how they deceive you.
link |
I'm no different than anyone else.
link |
I it's like, you're gonna process your credit card.
link |
You're gonna get the money in the account.
link |
You're just gonna get a clean statement, you're gonna have
link |
someone who answers the call when someone asks and you know,
link |
just like the basic, like you're okay.
link |
And people started saying yes.
link |
And then of course I went to the next business and be like,
link |
you know, Joe and Susie and whoever said yes too.
link |
And so I built a social proof structure
link |
and I became the number one salesperson
link |
out of 400 people nationwide doing this.
link |
And I worked, you know, half time
link |
still doing this other startup and.
link |
That's a brilliant strategy, by the way.
link |
It's very well, very well strategized and executed.
link |
I did it for nine months.
link |
And at the time my customer base was making,
link |
was generating around, I think it was six,
link |
if I remember correctly, $62,504 a month
link |
were the overall revenues.
link |
I thought, wow, that's amazing.
link |
If I built that as my own company,
link |
I would just make $62,000 a month of income passively
link |
with these merchants processing credit cards.
link |
So I thought, hmm.
link |
And so that's when I thought I'm gonna create a company.
link |
And so then I started Braintree.
link |
And the idea was the online world was broken
link |
because PayPal had been acquired by eBay
link |
around, I think, 1999 or 2000.
link |
And eBay had not innovated much with PayPal.
link |
So it basically sat still for seven years
link |
as the software world moved along.
link |
And then authorize.net was also a company
link |
that was relatively stagnant.
link |
So you basically had software engineers
link |
who wanted modern payment tools,
link |
but there were none available for them.
link |
And so they just dealt with software they didn't like.
link |
And so with Braintree,
link |
I thought the entry point is to build software
link |
that engineers will love.
link |
And if we can find the entry point via software
link |
and make it easy and beautiful
link |
and just a magical experience
link |
and then provide customer service on top of that,
link |
that would be easy, that would be great.
link |
What I was really going after though, it was PayPal.
link |
They were the only company in payments making money.
link |
Because they had the relationship with eBay early on,
link |
people created a PayPal account,
link |
they'd fund their account with their checking account
link |
versus their credit cards.
link |
And then when they'd use PayPal to pay a merchant,
link |
PayPal had a cost of payment of zero
link |
versus if you have coming from a credit card,
link |
you have to pay the bank the fees.
link |
So PayPal's margins were 3% on a transaction
link |
versus a typical payments company,
link |
which may be a nickel or a penny or a dime
link |
or something like that.
link |
And so I knew PayPal really was the model to replicate,
link |
but a bunch of companies had tried to do that.
link |
They tried to come in and build a two sided marketplace.
link |
So get consumers to fund the checking account
link |
and the merchants to accept it,
link |
but they'd all failed because building
link |
a two sided marketplace is very hard at the same time.
link |
So my plan was I'm going to build a company
link |
and get the best merchants in the whole world
link |
to use our service.
link |
Then in year five, I'm going to have,
link |
I'm going to acquire a consumer payments company
link |
and I'm going to bring the two together.
link |
And to focus on the merchant side and then get
link |
the payments company that does the customer,
link |
the whatever, the other side of it.
link |
This is the plan I presented when I was
link |
at University of Chicago.
link |
And weirdly it happened exactly like that.
link |
So four years in our customer base included Uber,
link |
Airbnb, GitHub, 37 Signals, not Basecamp.
link |
We had a fantastic collection of companies
link |
that represented the fastest growing,
link |
some of the fastest growing tech companies in the world.
link |
And then we met up with Venmo and they had done
link |
a remarkable job in building product.
link |
It does up then something very counterintuitive,
link |
which is make public your private financial transactions
link |
which people previously thought were something
link |
that should be hidden from others.
link |
And we acquired Venmo and at that point we now had,
link |
we replicated the model because now people could fund
link |
their Venmo account with their checking account,
link |
keep money in the account.
link |
And then you could just plug Venmo as a form of payment.
link |
And so I think PayPal saw that,
link |
that we were getting the best merchants in the world.
link |
We had people using Venmo.
link |
They were both the up and coming millennials at the time
link |
who had so much influence online.
link |
And so they came in and offered us an attractive number.
link |
And my goal was not to build
link |
the biggest payments company in the world.
link |
It wasn't to try to climb the Forbes billionaire list.
link |
It was, the objective was I want to earn enough money
link |
so that I can basically dedicate my attention
link |
to doing something that could potentially be useful
link |
on a society wide scale.
link |
And more importantly, that could be considered to be valuable
link |
from the vantage point of 2050, 2100 and 2500.
link |
So thinking about it on a few hundred year timescale.
link |
And there was a certain amount of money I needed to do that.
link |
So I didn't require the permission of anybody to do that.
link |
And so that what PayPal offered was sufficient for me
link |
to get that amount of money to basically have a go.
link |
And that's when I set off to survey everything
link |
I could identify an existence to say
link |
of anything in the entire world I could do.
link |
What one thing could I do
link |
that would actually have the highest value potential
link |
And so it took me a little while to arrive at Brainerd Faces,
link |
Payments in themselves are revolutionary technologies
link |
that can change the world.
link |
Like let's not forget that too easily.
link |
I mean, obviously you know this,
link |
but there's quite a few lovely folks
link |
who are now fascinated with the space of cryptocurrency.
link |
And payments are very much connected to this,
link |
but in general, just money.
link |
And many of the folks I've spoken with,
link |
they also kind of connect that
link |
to not just purely financial discussions,
link |
but philosophical and political discussions.
link |
And they see Bitcoin as a way, almost as activism,
link |
almost as a way to resist the corruption
link |
of centralized centers of power.
link |
And sort of basically in the 21st century,
link |
decentralizing control.
link |
Whether that's Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies,
link |
they see that's one possible way to give power
link |
to those that live in regimes that are corrupt
link |
or are not respectful of human rights
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
What's your sense, just all your expertise with payments
link |
and seeing how that changed the world,
link |
what's your sense about the lay of the land
link |
for the future of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies
link |
in the positive impact it may have on the world?
link |
To be clear, my communication wasn't meant
link |
to minimize payments or to denigrate it in any way.
link |
It was an attempt at communication
link |
that when I was surveying the world,
link |
it was an algorithm of what could I individually do?
link |
So there are things that exist
link |
that have a lot of potential that can be done.
link |
And then there's a filtering of how many people
link |
are qualified to do this given thing.
link |
And then there's a further characterization
link |
that can be done of, okay, given the number
link |
of qualified people, will somebody be a unique out performer
link |
of that group to make something truly impossible
link |
to be something done that otherwise couldn't get done?
link |
So there's a process of assessing
link |
where can you add unique value in the world?
link |
And some of that has to do with you being very formal
link |
and calculative here, but some of that is just like,
link |
what do you sense, like part of that equation
link |
is how much passion you sense within yourself
link |
to be able to drive that through,
link |
to discover the impossibilities and make them possible.
link |
That's right, and so we were at Braintree,
link |
I think we were the first company to integrate Coinbase
link |
into our, I think we were the first payments company
link |
to formally incorporate crypto, if I'm not mistaken.
link |
For people who are not familiar,
link |
Coinbase is a place where you can trade cryptocurrencies.
link |
Yeah, which was one of the only places you could.
link |
So we were early in doing that.
link |
And of course, this was in the year 2013.
link |
So an attorney to go in cryptocurrency land.
link |
I concur with the statement you made
link |
of the potential of the principles
link |
underlying cryptocurrencies.
link |
And that many of the things that they're building
link |
in the name of money and of moving value
link |
is equally applicable to the brain
link |
and equally applicable to how the brain interacts
link |
with the rest of the world
link |
and how we would imagine doing goal alignment with people.
link |
So to me, it's a continuous spectrum of possibility.
link |
And your question is isolated on the money.
link |
And I think it just is basically a scaffolding layer
link |
for all of society.
link |
So you don't see this money as particularly distinct
link |
from other? I don't.
link |
I think we at Kernel, we will benefit greatly
link |
from the progress being made in cryptocurrency
link |
because it will be a similar technology stack
link |
we will want to use for many things we want to accomplish.
link |
And so I'm bullish on what's going on
link |
and think it could greatly enhance brain interfaces
link |
and the value of the brain interface ecosystem.
link |
I mean, is there something you could say about,
link |
first of all, bullish on cryptocurrency versus fiat money?
link |
So do you have a sense that in 21st century
link |
cryptocurrency will be embraced by governments
link |
and changed the face of governments,
link |
the structure of governments?
link |
It's the same way I think about my diet,
link |
where previously it was conscious Brian,
link |
looking at foods in certain biochemical states.
link |
Am I hungry? Am I irritated? Am I depressed?
link |
And then I choose based upon those momentary windows.
link |
Do I eat at night when I'm fatigued
link |
and I have low willpower?
link |
Am I going to pig out on something?
link |
And the current monetary system is based
link |
upon human conscious decision making.
link |
And politics and power and this whole mess of things.
link |
And what I like about the building blocks
link |
of cryptocurrencies, it's methodical, it's structured,
link |
it is accountable, it's transparent.
link |
And so it introduces this scaffolding,
link |
which I think, again, is the right starting point
link |
for how we think about building
link |
next generation institutions for society.
link |
And that's why I think it's much broader than money.
link |
So I guess what you're saying is Bitcoin is the demotion
link |
of the conscious mind as well.
link |
In the same way you were talking about diet,
link |
it's like giving less priority to the ups and downs
link |
of any one particular human mind, in this case your own,
link |
and giving more power to the sort of data driven.
link |
Yes, yeah, I think that is accurate,
link |
that cryptocurrency is a version of what I would call
link |
my autonomous self that I'm trying to build.
link |
It is an introduction of an autonomous system
link |
of value exchange and the process of value creation
link |
in the society, yes, I see their similarities.
link |
So I guess what you're saying is Bitcoin
link |
will somehow help me not pig out at night,
link |
or the equivalent of, speaking of diet,
link |
if we could just linger on that topic a little bit,
link |
we already talked about your blog post of I fired myself,
link |
I fired Brian, the evening Brian,
link |
who's too willing to, not making good decisions
link |
for the long term well being and happiness
link |
of the entirety of the organism.
link |
Basically you were like pigging out at night.
link |
But it's interesting, because I do the same,
link |
in fact I often eat one meal a day,
link |
and like I have been this week actually,
link |
especially when I travel, and it's funny
link |
that it never occurred to me to just basically look
link |
at the fact that I'm able to be much smarter
link |
about my eating decisions in the morning
link |
and the afternoon than I am at night.
link |
So if I eat one meal a day, why not eat
link |
that one meal a day in the morning?
link |
Like I'm not, it never occurred to me,
link |
this revolutionary act, until you've outlined that.
link |
So maybe, can you give some details,
link |
and this is just you, this is one person,
link |
Brian, arrives at a particular thing that they do,
link |
but it's fascinating to kind of look
link |
at this one particular case study,
link |
so what works for you, diet wise?
link |
What's your actual diet, what do you eat,
link |
how often do you eat?
link |
My current protocol is basically the result
link |
of thousands of experiments and decision making.
link |
So I do this every 90 days, I do the tests,
link |
I do the cycle throughs, then I measure again,
link |
and then I'm measuring all the time.
link |
And so what I, of course I'm optimizing
link |
for my biomarkers, I want perfect cholesterol
link |
and I want perfect blood glucose levels
link |
and perfect DNA methylation processes.
link |
I also want perfect sleep.
link |
And so for example, recently, the past two weeks,
link |
my resting heart rate has been at 42 when I sleep.
link |
And when my resting heart rate's at 42,
link |
my HRV is at its highest.
link |
And I wake up in the morning feeling more energized
link |
than any other configuration.
link |
And so I know from all these processes
link |
that eating at roughly 8.30 in the morning,
link |
right after I work out on an empty stomach,
link |
creates enough distance between that completed eating
link |
and bedtime where I have almost no digestion processes
link |
going on in my body,
link |
therefore my resting heart rate goes very low.
link |
And when my resting heart rate's very low,
link |
I sleep with high quality.
link |
And so basically I've been trying to optimize
link |
the entirety of what I eat to my sleep quality.
link |
And my sleep quality then of course feeds into my willpower
link |
so it creates this virtuous cycle.
link |
And so at 8.30 what I do is I eat what I call super veggie,
link |
which is, it's a pudding of 250 grams of broccoli,
link |
150 grams of cauliflower,
link |
and a whole bunch of other vegetables
link |
that I eat what I call nutty pudding, which is.
link |
You make the pudding yourself?
link |
Like, what do you call it?
link |
Like a veggie mix, whatever thing, like a blender?
link |
Yeah, you can be made in a high speed blender.
link |
But basically I eat the same thing every day,
link |
veggie bowl as in the form of pudding,
link |
and then a bowl in the form of nuts.
link |
Vegan, so that's fat and that's like,
link |
that's fat and carbs and that's the protein and so on.
link |
Then I have a third dish.
link |
Does it taste good?
link |
I love it so much I dream about it.
link |
Yeah, that's awesome.
link |
And then I have a third dish which is,
link |
it changes every day.
link |
Today it was kale and spinach and sweet potato.
link |
And then I take about 20 supplements
link |
hopefully make, constitute a perfect nutritional profile.
link |
So what I'm trying to do is create the perfect diet
link |
for my body every single day.
link |
Where sleep is part of the optimization.
link |
You're like, one of the things you're really tracking.
link |
I mean, can you, well, I have a million question,
link |
but 20 supplements, like what kind are like,
link |
would you say are essential?
link |
Cause I only take, I only take athletic greens.com slash.
link |
That's like the multivitamin essentially.
link |
That's like the lazy man, you know, like,
link |
like if you don't actually want to think about shit,
link |
that's what you take and then fish oil and that's it.
link |
That's all I take.
link |
Yeah, you know, Alfred North Whitehead said,
link |
civilization advances as it extends the number
link |
of important operations it can do
link |
without thinking about them.
link |
So my objective on this is I want an algorithm
link |
for perfect health that I never have to think about.
link |
And then I want that system to be scalable to anybody
link |
so that they don't have to think about it.
link |
And right now it's expensive for me to do it.
link |
It's time consuming for me to do it.
link |
And I have infrastructure to do it,
link |
but the future of being human is not going
link |
to the grocery store and deciding what to eat.
link |
It's also not reading scientific papers,
link |
trying to decide this thing or that thing.
link |
It's all N of one.
link |
So it's devices on the outside and inside your body,
link |
assessing real time what your body needs
link |
and then creating closed loop systems for that to happen.
link |
Yeah, so right now you're doing the data collection
link |
and you're being the scientist,
link |
it'd be much better if you just did the data collect
link |
or it was being essentially done for you
link |
and you can outsource that to another scientist
link |
that's doing the N of one study of you.
link |
That's right, because every time I spend time thinking
link |
about this or executing, spending time on it,
link |
I'm spending less time thinking about building kernel
link |
or the future of being human.
link |
And so it's, we just all have the budget
link |
of our capacity on an everyday basis
link |
and we will scaffold our way up out of this.
link |
And so, yeah, hopefully what I'm doing is really,
link |
it serves as a model that others can also build on.
link |
That's why I wrote about it,
link |
is hopefully people can then take it and improve upon it.
link |
I hold nothing sacred.
link |
I change my diet almost every day
link |
based upon some new test results or science
link |
or something like that, but.
link |
Can you maybe elaborate on the sleep thing?
link |
Why is sleep so important?
link |
And why, presumably, like what does good sleep mean to you?
link |
I think sleep is a contender for being the most powerful
link |
health intervention in existence.
link |
I mean, it's magical what it does if you're well rested
link |
and what your body can do.
link |
And I mean, for example, I know when I eat close
link |
to my bedtime and I've done a systematic study for years
link |
looking at like 15 minute increments on time of day
link |
on where I eat my last meal,
link |
my willpower is directly correlated
link |
to the amount of deep sleep I get.
link |
So my ability to not binge eat at night
link |
when rascal Brian's out and about
link |
is based upon how much deep sleep I got the night before.
link |
Yeah, there's a lot to that, yeah.
link |
And so I've seen it manifest itself.
link |
And so I think the way I summarize this is
link |
in society we've had this myth of,
link |
we tell stories, for example, of entrepreneurship
link |
where this person was so amazing,
link |
they stayed at the office for three days
link |
and slept under their desk.
link |
And we say, wow, that's amazing, that's amazing.
link |
And now I think we're headed towards a state
link |
where we'd say that's primitive
link |
and really not a good idea on every level.
link |
And so the new mythology is going to be the exact opposite.
link |
Yeah, by the way, just to sort of maybe push back
link |
a little bit on that idea.
link |
Did you sleep under your desk collects?
link |
Well, yeah, a lot.
link |
I'm a big believer in that actually.
link |
I'm a big believer in chaos
link |
and giving into your passion
link |
and sometimes doing things that are out of the ordinary
link |
that are not trying to optimize health
link |
for certain periods of time in lieu of your passions
link |
is a signal to yourself that you're throwing everything away.
link |
So I think what you're referring to
link |
is how to have good performance for prolonged periods
link |
I think there's moments in life
link |
where you need to throw all of that away,
link |
all the plans away, all the structure away.
link |
So I'm not sure I have an eloquent way
link |
describing exactly what I'm talking about,
link |
but it all depends on people, people are different,
link |
but there's a danger of over optimization
link |
to where you don't just give into the madness
link |
of the way your brain flows.
link |
I mean, to push back on my pushback is like,
link |
it's nice to have like where the foundations
link |
of your brain are not messed with.
link |
So you have a fixed foundation where the diet is fixed,
link |
where the sleep is fixed and that all of that is optimal
link |
and the chaos happens in the space of ideas
link |
as opposed to the space of biology.
link |
But I'm not sure if there's a,
link |
that requires real discipline and forming habits.
link |
There's some aspect to which some of the best days
link |
and weeks of my life have been, yeah,
link |
sleeping under a desk kind of thing.
link |
And I don't, I'm not too willing to let go
link |
of things that empirically worked
link |
for things that work in theory.
link |
And so I'm, again, I'm absolutely with you on sleep.
link |
Also, I'm with you on sleep conceptually,
link |
but I'm also very humbled to understand
link |
that for different people,
link |
good sleep means different things.
link |
I'm very hesitant to trust science on sleep.
link |
I think you should also be a scholar of your own body.
link |
Again, the experiment of NF1.
link |
I'm not so sure that a full night's sleep is great for me.
link |
There is something about that power nap
link |
that I just have not fully studied yet,
link |
but that nap is something special.
link |
That I'm not sure I found the optimal thing.
link |
So like there's a lot to be explored
link |
to what is exactly optimal amount of sleep,
link |
optimal kind of sleep combined with diet
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
I mean, that all maps the sort of data,
link |
at least the truth, exactly what you're referring to.
link |
Here's a data point for your consideration.
link |
The progress in biology over the past, say decade,
link |
has been stunning.
link |
And it now appears as if we will be able to replace
link |
our organs, zero X for a transplantation.
link |
And so we probably have a path to replace
link |
and regenerate every organ of your body,
link |
except for your brain.
link |
You can lose your hand and your arm and a leg.
link |
You can have an artificial heart.
link |
You can't operate without your brain.
link |
And so when you make that trade off decision
link |
of whether you're going to sleep under the desk or not
link |
and go all out for a four day marathon, right?
link |
There's a cost benefit trade off of what's going on,
link |
what's happening to your brain in that situation.
link |
We don't know the consequences
link |
of modern day life on our brain.
link |
We don't, it's the most valuable organ in our existence.
link |
And we don't know what's going on if we,
link |
in how we're treating it today with stress
link |
and with sleep and with dietary.
link |
And to me, then if you say that you're trying to,
link |
you're trying to optimize life
link |
for whatever things you're trying to do.
link |
The game is soon with the progress in anti aging and biology,
link |
the game is very soon going to become different
link |
than what it is right now with organ rejuvenation,
link |
organ replacement.
link |
And I would conjecture that we will value
link |
the health status of our brain above all things.
link |
Yeah, no, absolutely.
link |
Everything you're saying is true, but we die.
link |
We die pretty quickly, life is short.
link |
And I'm one of those people that I would rather die in battle
link |
than stay safe at home.
link |
It's like, yeah, you look at kind of,
link |
there's a lot of things that you can reasonably say,
link |
these are, this is the smart thing to do
link |
that can prevent you, that becomes conservative,
link |
that can prevent you from fully embracing life.
link |
I think ultimately you can be very intelligent
link |
and data driven and also embrace life.
link |
But I err on the side of embracing life.
link |
It's very, it takes a very skillful person
link |
to not sort of that hovering parent that says,
link |
you know what, there's a 3% chance that if you go out,
link |
if you go out by yourself and play, you're going to die,
link |
get run over by a car, come to a slow or a sudden end.
link |
And I am more a supporter of just go out there.
link |
If you die, you die.
link |
And that's a, it's a balance you have to strike.
link |
I think there's a balance to strike
link |
in the longterm optimization and short term freedom.
link |
For me, for a programmer, for a programming mind,
link |
I tend to over optimize and I'm very cautious
link |
and afraid of that, to not over optimize
link |
and thereby be overly cautious, suboptimally cautious
link |
about everything I do.
link |
And that's the ultimate thing I'm trying to optimize for.
link |
It's funny you said like sleep and all those kinds of things.
link |
I tend to think, this is, you're being more precise
link |
than I am, but I think I tend to want to minimize stress,
link |
which everything comes into that from your sleep
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
But I worry that whenever I'm trying to be too strict
link |
with myself, then the stress goes up
link |
when I don't follow the strictness.
link |
And so you have to kind of, it's a weird,
link |
it's a, there's so many variables in an objective function
link |
as it's hard to get right.
link |
And sort of not giving a damn about sleep
link |
and not giving a damn about diet is a good thing
link |
to inject in there every once in a while
link |
for somebody who's trying to optimize everything.
link |
But that's me just trying to, it's exactly like you said,
link |
you're just a scientist, I'm a scientist of myself,
link |
you're a scientist of yourself.
link |
It'd be nice if somebody else was doing it
link |
and had much better data, because I don't trust
link |
my conscious mind and I pigged out last night
link |
at some brisket in LA that I regret deeply.
link |
There's no point to anything I just said.
link |
What is the nature of your regret on the brisket?
link |
Is it, do you wish you hadn't eaten it entirely?
link |
Is it that you wish you hadn't eaten as much as you did?
link |
I think, well, the most regret, I mean,
link |
if we want to be specific, I drank way too much like that.
link |
My biggest regret is like having drank so much diet soda.
link |
That's the thing that really was the problem.
link |
I had trouble sleeping because of that.
link |
Because I was like programming and then I was editing.
link |
And so I'd stay up late at night
link |
and then I had to get up to go pee a few times
link |
and it was just a mess.
link |
A mess of a night.
link |
It was, well, it's not really a mess,
link |
but like it's so many, it's like the little things.
link |
I know if I just eat, I drink a little bit of water
link |
and that's it, and there's a certain,
link |
all of us have perfect days that we know diet wise
link |
and so on that's good to follow, you feel good.
link |
I know what it takes for me to do that.
link |
I didn't fully do that and thereby,
link |
because there's an avalanche effect
link |
where the other sources of stress,
link |
all the other to do items I have piled on,
link |
my failure to execute on some basic things
link |
that I know make me feel good and all of that combines
link |
to create a mess of a day.
link |
But some of that chaos, you have to be okay with it,
link |
but some of it I wish was a little bit more optimal.
link |
And your ideas about eating in the morning
link |
are quite interesting as an experiment to try.
link |
Can you elaborate, are you eating once a day?
link |
In the morning and that's it.
link |
Can you maybe speak to how that,
link |
you spoke, it's funny, you spoke about the metrics of sleep,
link |
but you're also, you run a business,
link |
you're incredibly intelligent,
link |
mostly your happiness and success
link |
relies on you thinking clearly.
link |
So how does that affect your mind and your body
link |
in terms of performance?
link |
So not just sleep, but actual mental performance.
link |
As you were explaining your objective function of,
link |
for example, in the criteria you were including,
link |
you like certain neurochemical states,
link |
like you like feeling like you're living life,
link |
that life has enjoyment,
link |
that sometimes you want to disregard certain rules
link |
to have a moment of passion, of focus.
link |
There's this architecture of the way Lex is,
link |
which makes you happy as a story you tell,
link |
as something you kind of experience,
link |
maybe the experience is a bit more complicated,
link |
but it's in this idea you have, this is a version of you.
link |
And the reason why I maintain the schedule I do
link |
is I've chosen a game to say,
link |
I would like to live a life
link |
where I care more about what intelligent,
link |
what people who live in the year 2500
link |
think of me than I do today.
link |
That's the game I'm trying to play.
link |
And so therefore the only thing I really care about
link |
on this optimization is trying to see past myself,
link |
past my limitations, using zeroes principle thinking,
link |
pull myself out of this contextual mesh we're in right now
link |
and say, what will matter 100 years from now
link |
and 200 years from now?
link |
What are the big things really going on
link |
that are defining reality?
link |
And I find that if I were to hang out with Diet Soda Lex
link |
and Diet Soda Brian were to play along with that
link |
and my deep sleep were to get crushed as a result,
link |
my mind would not be on what matters
link |
in 100 years or 200 years or 300 years.
link |
I would be irritable.
link |
I would be, I'd be in a different state.
link |
And so it's just gameplay selection.
link |
It's what you and I have chosen to think about.
link |
It's what we've chosen to work on.
link |
And this is why I'm saying that no generation of humans
link |
have ever been afforded the opportunity
link |
to look at their lifespan and contemplate
link |
that they will have the possibility of experiencing
link |
an evolved form of consciousness that is undeniable.
link |
They would fall in a zero category of potential.
link |
That to me is the most exciting thing in existence.
link |
And I would not trade any momentary neurochemical state
link |
right now in exchange for that.
link |
I would, I'd be willing to deprive myself
link |
of all momentary joy in pursuit of that goal
link |
because that's what makes me happy.
link |
But I'm a bit, I just looked it up.
link |
I'm with, I just looked up Braveheart's speech
link |
and William Wallace, but I don't know if you've seen it.
link |
Fight and you may die, run and you'll live at least a while.
link |
And dying in your beds many years from now,
link |
would you be willing to trade all the days
link |
from this day to that for one chance,
link |
just one chance, picture Mel Gibson saying this,
link |
to come back here and tell our enemies
link |
that they may take our lives with growing excitement,
link |
but they'll never take our freedom.
link |
I get excited every time I see that in the movie,
link |
but that's kind of how I approach life and eating.
link |
Do you think they were tracking their sleep?
link |
They were not tracking their sleep
link |
and they ate way too much brisket
link |
and they were fat, unhealthy, died early,
link |
and were primitive.
link |
But there's something in my ape brain
link |
that's attracted to that, even though most of my life
link |
is fully aligned with the way you see yours.
link |
Part of it is for comedy, of course,
link |
but part of it is I'm almost afraid of overoptimization.
link |
Really what you're saying though,
link |
if we're looking at this,
link |
let's say from a first principles perspective,
link |
when you read those words,
link |
they conjure up certain life experiences,
link |
but you're basically saying,
link |
I experienced a certain neurotransmitter state
link |
when these things are in action.
link |
That's all you're saying.
link |
So whether it's that or something else,
link |
you're just saying you have a selection
link |
for how your state for your body.
link |
And so if you as an engineer of consciousness,
link |
that should just be engineerable.
link |
And that's just triggering certain chemical reactions.
link |
And so it doesn't mean they have to be mutually exclusive.
link |
You can have that and experience that
link |
and also not sacrifice longterm health.
link |
And I think that's the potential of where we're going
link |
is we don't have to assume they are trade offs
link |
And so I guess for my particular brain,
link |
it's useful to have the outlier experiences
link |
that also come along with the illusion of free will
link |
where I chose those experiences
link |
that make me feel like it's freedom.
link |
Listen, going to Texas made me realize I spent,
link |
so I still am, but I lived at Cambridge at MIT
link |
and I never felt like home there.
link |
I felt like home in the space of ideas with the colleagues,
link |
like when I was actually discussing ideas,
link |
but there is something about the constraints,
link |
how cautious people are,
link |
how much they valued also kind of a material success,
link |
When I showed up to Texas, it felt like I belong.
link |
That was very interesting, but that's my neurochemistry,
link |
whatever the hell that is, whatever,
link |
maybe probably is rooted to the fact
link |
that I grew up in the Soviet Union
link |
and it was such a constrained system
link |
that you'd really deeply value freedom
link |
and you always want to escape the man
link |
and the control of centralized systems.
link |
I don't know what it is, but at the same time,
link |
I love strictness.
link |
I love the dogmatic authoritarianism of diet,
link |
of like the same habit, exactly the habit you have.
link |
I think that's actually when bodies perform optimally,
link |
my body performs optimally.
link |
So balancing those two, I think if I have the data,
link |
every once in a while, party with some wild people,
link |
but most of the time eat once a day,
link |
perhaps in the morning, I'm gonna try that.
link |
That might be very interesting,
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but I'd rather not try it.
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I'd rather have the data that tells me to do it.
link |
But in general, you're able to, eating once a day,
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think deeply about stuff like this.
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Concern that people have is like does your energy wane,
link |
all those kinds of things.
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Do you find that it's, especially because it's unique,
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it's vegan as well.
link |
So you find that you're able to have a clear mind,
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a focus, and just physically and mentally throughout?
link |
Yeah, and I find like my personal experience
link |
in thinking about hard things is,
link |
like oftentimes I feel like I'm looking through a telescope
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and like I'm aligning two or three telescopes.
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And you kind of have to close one eye
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and move it back and forth a little bit
link |
and just find just the right alignment.
link |
Then you find just a sneak peek
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at the thing you're trying to find, but it's fleeting.
link |
If you move just one little bit, it's gone.
link |
And oftentimes what I feel like are the ideas
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I value the most are like that.
link |
They're so fragile and fleeting and slippery and elusive.
link |
And it requires a sensitivity to thinking
link |
and a sensitivity to maneuver through these things.
link |
If I concede to a world where I'm on my phone texting,
link |
I'm also on social media.
link |
I'm also doing 15 things at the same time
link |
because I'm running a company
link |
and I'm also feeling terrible from the last night.
link |
It all just comes crashing down.
link |
And the quality of my thoughts goes to a zero.
link |
I'm a functional person to respond to basic level things,
link |
but I don't feel like I am doing anything interesting.
link |
I think that's a good word, sensitivity,
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because that's the word that's used the most.
link |
That's what thinking deeply feels like
link |
is you're sensitive to the fragile thoughts.
link |
All those other distractions kind of dull
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your ability to be sensitive to the fragile thoughts.
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It's a really good word.
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Out of all the things you've done,
link |
you've also climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.
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Why and how, and what do you take from that experience?
link |
I guess the backstory is relevant
link |
because in that moment, it was the darkest time in my life.
link |
I was ending a 13 year marriage.
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I was leaving my religion.
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I sold Braintree and I was battling depression
link |
where I was just at the end.
link |
And I got invited to go to Tanzania
link |
as part of a group that was raising money
link |
to build clean water wells.
link |
And I had made some money from Braintree,
link |
and so I was able to donate $25,000.
link |
And it was the first time I had ever had money to donate
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outside of paying tithing in my religion.
link |
It was such a phenomenal experience
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to contribute something meaningful to someone else
link |
And as part of this process,
link |
we were gonna climb the mountain.
link |
And so we went there and we saw the clean water wells
link |
We spoke to the people there and it was very energizing.
link |
And then we climbed Kilimanjaro
link |
and I came down with a stomach flu on day three.
link |
And I also had altitude sickness,
link |
but I became so sick that on day four,
link |
we are somebody on day five,
link |
I came into the camp, base camp at 15,000 feet,
link |
just going to the bathroom on myself
link |
and falling all over.
link |
I was just a disaster, I was so sick.
link |
So stomach flu and altitude sickness.
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Yeah, and I just was destroyed from the situation.
link |
Plus, it was psychologically one of the lowest points.
link |
Yeah, and I think that was probably a big contributor.
link |
I was just smoked as a human, just absolutely done.
link |
And I had three young children.
link |
And so I was trying to reconcile,
link |
this is not a, whether I live or not
link |
is not my decision by itself.
link |
I'm now intertwined with these three little people
link |
and I have an obligation whether I like it or not,
link |
I need to be there.
link |
And so it did, it felt like I was just stuck
link |
in a straight jacket.
link |
And I had to decide whether I was going to summit
link |
the next day with the team.
link |
And it was a difficult decision
link |
because once you start hiking,
link |
there's no way to get off the mountain.
link |
And a midnight came and our guide came in
link |
and he said, where are you at?
link |
And I said, I think I'm okay, I think I can try.
link |
And so from midnight to, I made it to the summit at 5 a.m.
link |
It was one of the most transformational moments
link |
And the mountain became my problem.
link |
It became everything that I was struggling with.
link |
And when I started hiking, it was,
link |
the pain got so ferocious that it was kind of like this.
link |
It became so ferocious that I turned my music to Eminem
link |
and it was, Eminem was the,
link |
he was the only person in existence that spoke to my soul.
link |
And it was something about his anger
link |
and his vibrancy and his multi eventually,
link |
he's the only person who I could turn on
link |
and I could just say, I feel some relief.
link |
I turned on Eminem and I made it to the summit
link |
after five hours, but just 100 yards from the top.
link |
I was with my guide Ike and I started getting very dizzy
link |
and I felt like I was gonna fall backwards
link |
off this cliff area we were on.
link |
I was like, this is dangerous.
link |
And he said, look, Brian, I know where you're at.
link |
I know where you're at.
link |
And I can tell you, you've got it in you.
link |
So I want you to look up, take a step, take a breath
link |
and look up, take a breath and take a step.
link |
And I did and I made it.
link |
And so I got there and I just sat down with him at the top.
link |
I just cried like a baby.
link |
Yeah, I just lost it.
link |
And so he'd let me do my thing.
link |
And then we pulled out the pulse oximeter
link |
and he measured my blood oxygen levels
link |
and it was like 50 something percent
link |
and it was danger zone.
link |
So he looked at it and I think he was like really alarmed
link |
that I was in this situation.
link |
And so he said, we can't get a helicopter here
link |
and we can't get you emergency evacuated.
link |
You've gotta go down.
link |
You've gotta hike down to 15,000 feet to get base camp.
link |
And so we went out on the mountain.
link |
I got back down to base camp.
link |
And again, that was pretty difficult.
link |
And then they put me on a stretcher,
link |
this metal stretcher with this one wheel
link |
and a team of six people wheeled me down the mountain.
link |
And it was pretty torturous.
link |
I'm very appreciative they did.
link |
Also the trail was very bumpy.
link |
So they'd go over the big rocks.
link |
And so my head would just slam
link |
against this metal thing for hours.
link |
And so I just felt awful.
link |
Plus I'd get my head slammed every couple of seconds.
link |
So the whole experience was really a life changing moment.
link |
And that was the demarcation of me
link |
basically building a new life.
link |
Basically I said, I'm going to reconstruct Brian,
link |
my understanding of reality, my existential realities,
link |
what I want to go after.
link |
And I try, I mean, as much as that's possible as a human,
link |
but that's when I set out to rebuild everything.
link |
Was it the struggle of that?
link |
I mean, there's also just like the romantic poetic,
link |
it's a fricking mountain.
link |
There's a man in pain, psychological and physical
link |
struggling up a mountain.
link |
But it's just struggle, just in the face of,
link |
just pushing through in the face of hardship or nature too.
link |
Something much bigger than you.
link |
Is that, was that the thing that just clicked?
link |
For me, it felt like I was just locked in with reality
link |
and it was a death match.
link |
It was in that moment, one of us is going to die.
link |
So you were pondering death, like not surviving.
link |
And it was, and that was the moment.
link |
And it was, the summit to me was,
link |
I'm going to come out on top and I can do this.
link |
And giving in was, it's like, I'm just done.
link |
And so it did, I locked in and that's why,
link |
yeah, mountains are magical to me.
link |
I didn't expect that.
link |
I didn't design that.
link |
I didn't know that was going to be the case.
link |
I not, it would not have been something
link |
I would have anticipated.
link |
But you were not the same man afterwards.
link |
Is there advice you can give to young people today
link |
that look at your story,
link |
that's successful in many dimensions,
link |
advice you can give to them about how to be successful
link |
in their career, successful in life,
link |
whatever path they choose?
link |
Yes, I would say, listen to advice
link |
and see it for what it is, a mirror of that person,
link |
and then map and know that your future
link |
is going to be in a zero principle land.
link |
And so what you're hearing today is a representation
link |
of what may have been the right principles
link |
to build upon previously,
link |
but they're likely depreciating very fast.
link |
And so I am a strong proponent
link |
that people ask for advice, but they don't take advice.
link |
So how do you take advice properly?
link |
It's in the careful examination of the advice.
link |
It's actually the person makes a statement
link |
about a given thing somebody should follow.
link |
The value is not doing that.
link |
The value is understanding the assumption stack they built,
link |
the assumption and knowledge stack they built
link |
around that body of knowledge.
link |
It's not doing what they say.
link |
Considering the advice, but digging deeper
link |
to understand the assumption stack,
link |
like the full person,
link |
I mean, this is deep empathy, essentially,
link |
to understand the journey of the person
link |
that arrived at the advice.
link |
And the advice is just the tip of the iceberg
link |
that ultimately is not the thing that gives you.
link |
It could be the right thing to do.
link |
It could be the complete wrong thing to do
link |
depending on the assumption stack.
link |
So you need to investigate the whole thing.
link |
Is there some, are there been people in your startup
link |
and your business journey that have served that role
link |
of advice giver that's been helpful?
link |
Or do you feel like your journey felt like a lonely path?
link |
Or was it one that was, of course,
link |
we're all there born and die alone.
link |
But do you fundamentally remember the experiences,
link |
one where you leaned on people
link |
at a particular moment in time that changed everything?
link |
Yeah, the most significant moments of my memory,
link |
for example, like on Kilimanjaro,
link |
when Ike, some person I'd never met in Tanzania,
link |
was able to, in that moment, apparently see my soul
link |
when I was in this death match with reality.
link |
And he gave me the instructions, look up, step.
link |
And so there's magical people in my life
link |
that have done things like that.
link |
And I suspect they probably don't know.
link |
I probably should be better at identifying those things.
link |
And, but yeah, hopefully the,
link |
I suppose like the wisdom I would aspire to
link |
is to have the awareness and the empathy
link |
to be that for other people.
link |
And not a retail advertiser of advice,
link |
of tricks for life, but deeply meaningful
link |
and empathetic with a one on one context
link |
with people that it really can make a difference.
link |
Yeah, I actually kind of experience,
link |
I think about that sometimes.
link |
You have like an 18 year old kid come up to you.
link |
And it's not always obvious,
link |
it's not always easy to really listen to them.
link |
Like not the facts, but like see who that person is.
link |
I think people say that about being a parent
link |
is you want to consider that,
link |
you don't want to be the authority figure
link |
in the sense that you really want to consider
link |
that there's a special unique human being there
link |
with a unique brain that may be brilliant
link |
in ways that you are not understanding
link |
that you'll never be and really try to hear that.
link |
So when giving advice, there's something to that.
link |
It's a both sides should be deeply empathetic
link |
about the assumption stack.
link |
I love that terminology.
link |
What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing of life?
link |
Why the hell are we here, Brian Johnson?
link |
We've been talking about brains and studying brains
link |
and you had this very eloquent way of describing life
link |
on Earth as an optimization problem
link |
of the cost of intelligence going to zero.
link |
At first through the evolutionary process
link |
and then eventually through building,
link |
through our technology,
link |
building more and more intelligent systems.
link |
You ever ask yourself why is doing that?
link |
Yeah, I think the answer to this question,
link |
again, the information value is more in the mirror
link |
it provides of that person,
link |
which is a representation of the technological,
link |
social, political context of the time.
link |
So if you ask this question a hundred years ago,
link |
you would get a certain answer
link |
that reflects that time period.
link |
Same thing would be true of a thousand years ago.
link |
It's rare, it's difficult for a person to pull themselves
link |
out of their contextual awareness
link |
and offer a truly original response.
link |
And so knowing that I am contextually influenced
link |
by the situation, that I am a mirror for our reality,
link |
I would say that in this moment,
link |
I think the real game going on
link |
is that evolution built a system
link |
of scaffolding intelligence that produced us.
link |
We are now building intelligence systems
link |
that are scaffolding higher dimensional intelligence,
link |
that's developing more robust systems of intelligence.
link |
In doing in that process with the cost going to zero,
link |
then the meaning of life becomes goal alignment,
link |
which is the negotiation of our conscious
link |
and unconscious existence.
link |
And then I'd say the third thing is,
link |
if we're thinking that we wanna be explorers
link |
is our technological progress is getting to a point
link |
where we could aspirationally say,
link |
we want to figure out what is really going on,
link |
really going on, because does any of this really make sense?
link |
Now we may be a hundred, 200, 500, a thousand years away
link |
from being able to poke our way out of whatever is going on.
link |
But it's interesting that we could even state an aspiration
link |
to say, we wanna poke at this question.
link |
But I'd say in this moment of time,
link |
the meaning of life is that we can build a future state
link |
of existence that is more fantastic
link |
than anything we could ever imagine.
link |
The striving for something more amazing.
link |
And that defies expectations that we would consider
link |
bewildering and all the things that that's,
link |
and I guess the last thing,
link |
if there's multiple meanings of life,
link |
it would be infinite games.
link |
James Kars wrote the book,
link |
Finite Games, Infinite Games.
link |
The only game to play right now is to keep playing the game.
link |
And so this goes back to the algorithm
link |
of the Lex algorithm of diet soda and brisket
link |
and pursuing the passion.
link |
What I'm suggesting is there's a moment here
link |
where we can contemplate playing infinite games.
link |
Therefore, it may make sense to err on the side
link |
of making sure one is in a situation
link |
to be playing infinite games if that opportunity arises.
link |
So the landscape of possibility is changing very, very fast
link |
and therefore our old algorithms
link |
of how we might assess risk assessment
link |
and what things we might pursue
link |
and why those assumptions may fall away very quickly.
link |
Well, I think I speak for a lot of people
link |
when I say that the game you, Mr. Brian Johnson,
link |
have been playing is quite incredible.
link |
Thank you so much for talking to me.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
with Brian Johnson and thank you
link |
to Four Sigmatic, NetSuite, Grammarly, and ExpressVPN.
link |
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words
link |
from Diane Ackerman.
link |
Our brain is a crowded chemistry lab,
link |
bustling with nonstop neural conversations.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.