Based Camp： Life Extension vs Experience Extension
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
194.0434
Summary
In this episode, Simone and Malcolm discuss the benefits of life extension vs. experience extension. They discuss the biological and psychological benefits of both, and how they can be applied to your life and your memories. Malcolm and Simone discuss the pros and cons of each.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
And when you are doing a task that you've done over and over and over again, your brain
00:00:03.820
will erase that and begin to, so suppose on a weekend, right?
00:00:08.300
If I'm always watching movies and drinking and doing about the same thing over a weekend,
00:00:12.680
my brain compresses all those experiences together.
00:00:14.760
But if one weekend I do something different, like go to a petting zoo with my kids, my
00:00:19.420
brain will distinctly remember that more than if I had done the same thing I'd been doing
00:00:27.560
And through this knowledge, you can actually expand your remembered life or experienced
00:00:34.820
life more than you can than through traditional life extension.
00:00:40.640
So if through traditional life extension today, like being healthy in many ways and stuff like
00:00:44.600
that, you're increasing your lifespan by like 25%, you can easily get your memories up 50
00:00:57.940
We're going to do a lightning round on life extension versus experience extension.
00:01:03.980
So it's something we talk about a lot, and I figured it might be fun to chat about it
00:01:09.060
So when people often meet us, they go, oh my gosh, it's like you guys have lived 20 lifetimes.
00:01:13.700
How have you done all of this and still be so young?
00:01:19.340
And we look at all the things that we've done in our life.
00:01:23.660
We have done a lot more than a lot of other people.
00:01:26.280
And it's because of the way we compact and manage our time.
00:01:29.600
But it also means to a very meaningful extent that we have more memories.
00:01:36.140
So when I look at the different chunks of my life, I remember them as chunks.
00:01:46.200
So a lot of people, they might think of their time in college, for example.
00:01:50.920
And it can feel like a full and separate life, even though it's only four years.
00:01:55.520
I mean, if you're an adult, think about what you were doing four years ago.
00:02:00.540
If you're not constantly changing where you live, changing the jobs you're in, et cetera.
00:02:04.960
But in addition to that, there's also a biological and measurable part of this.
00:02:09.180
So let's talk about reminiscence bumps really quickly.
00:02:12.160
A reminiscence bump is a tendency to remember more during your late adolescence,
00:02:17.640
And people have like a much clearer memory of these things.
00:02:20.200
However, reminiscence bumps can be created at different times of your life
00:02:23.380
when a person really changes their environment.
00:02:26.380
So you also see reminiscence bumps after immigration to new countries and stuff like that.
00:02:31.560
People are literally remembering more because they recently went through a major change.
00:02:39.640
When a person is experiencing something new or different, they will record it more.
00:02:46.780
And when somebody is experiencing something they've done a hundred times,
00:02:49.180
again, road hypnosis, something we brought up on the podcast before,
00:02:52.860
road hypnosis is a phenomenon where when you drive,
00:02:55.460
especially this route you've done a bunch of times,
00:02:57.460
your brain will actually just completely erase that entire thing as if you were asleep or something.
00:03:02.560
And when you are doing a task that you've done over and over and over again,
00:03:05.980
your brain will erase that and begin to, so suppose on a weekend, right?
00:03:10.900
If I'm always watching movies and drinking and doing about the same thing over a weekend,
00:03:15.280
my brain compresses all those experiences together.
00:03:17.640
But if one weekend I do something different, like go to a petting zoo with my kids,
00:03:21.780
my brain will distinctly remember that more than if I had done the same thing I'd been doing over and over again.
00:03:30.160
And through this knowledge, you can actually expand your remembered life or experience the life
00:03:37.960
more than you can than through traditional life extension.
00:03:43.340
So if through traditional life extension today, like being healthy in many ways and stuff like that,
00:03:49.360
You can easily get your memories up 50 to 100%.
00:03:58.180
I think for older adults now, there's still now this really easy way to kind of sanity test this
00:04:04.860
concept with the pandemic, because all of us just recently experienced a year in which life was
00:04:11.260
violently different, no matter how old or like entrenched your habits were suddenly non-consensually,
00:04:17.260
everyone's habits, pretty much everyone's habits were really significantly changed.
00:04:21.980
And it, I mean, to a certain extent, added more life to a lot of people, ironically,
00:04:33.640
We were just reading an article on life extension by Susie Weiss,
00:04:38.060
and one of the life extensionists quoted at the beginning of the article,
00:04:41.800
she describes him as having this unhurried way that he's not like in a rush to get things done.
00:04:47.000
And I see that and I'm like, yeah, I mean, it doesn't matter how many eons you live.
00:04:53.360
If you're going to be slow about things, you're going to wait to work on something.
00:04:57.380
It doesn't matter how many years you live, you're going to have a lot less life.
00:05:02.480
I think there's another benefit to the concept of living many different lives.
00:05:08.520
And I think the way that you maximize this is you don't necessarily have to move.
00:05:13.560
There are many different ways that people extend lives by, for example,
00:05:17.120
taking vacations to really, really different places.
00:05:19.520
So I would argue that all of our vacations, for example,
00:05:24.660
I would say that like most of our Edinburgh vacations kind of blend together.
00:05:30.300
Most of our visits to New York City kind of blend together
00:05:33.640
because we go a lot to entertain friends and stuff.
00:05:38.760
like when we went to Morocco, when we went to Africa,
00:05:45.900
Like, yeah, these violently different experiences.
00:05:53.160
But also anyone could like change the bedroom they sleep in,
00:06:00.380
I think an underrated benefit to these that shows up in two different areas
00:06:05.540
is the ability to change your behavior and use these as what we would call
00:06:13.360
So one thing that I read in this book called Inside the Nudge Unit,
00:06:17.000
which was this office, the United Kingdom government,
00:06:20.960
designed to implement small policy changes that could change behavior in a significant way
00:06:28.560
They realized that, for example, in intervening with parenting methods,
00:06:33.760
it really only made sense to reach out to first-time mothers
00:06:37.040
because they were completely changing their lives, totally changing their identities.
00:06:40.400
This is their time becoming a first-time mother.
00:06:42.620
They could actually really significantly change their behavior for the better
00:06:47.780
And they discovered that along some other lines.
00:06:49.740
And then you also hear about people, for example,
00:06:51.540
when they need to quit smoking or something else,
00:06:53.560
that they might like go to Japan, like go somewhere else to be in a totally different area.
00:06:58.520
And in the Pragmatist Guide to Life, we talk about using these flux periods
00:07:01.840
to reinvent your internal model of self, to reinvent your public identity,
00:07:09.380
So by living all these violently different periods,
00:07:12.500
either through travel or moving or changing careers
00:07:14.840
or changing your social network or whatever it might be,
00:07:17.440
you also have the ability to genuinely change yourself,
00:07:21.640
not just experience more lived experience, but fix major problems.
00:07:33.280
It's also interesting to think about how you optimize for this, right?
00:07:38.080
but occasionally we'll do one because we're like,
00:07:49.060
it would be healthier and it would be more comfortable.
00:07:52.020
And obviously it would cost a lot less if we were just at home doing work,
00:08:04.500
we may as well do this sort of peak capitalism things while we can,
00:08:12.200
And it was funny, when I went on the cruise ship,
00:08:13.640
the first thing I was reminded of is the last time I was on a cruise ship,
00:08:17.480
I was in my teen year around college or something like that.
00:08:21.140
And my entire optimization function on the cruise ship was basically sleep with people.
00:08:28.120
I'm managing my time around meeting people who I can sleep with
00:08:35.760
because I've got four or five days to execute on this, right?
00:08:40.400
You could just plow through people on a cruise.
00:08:41.880
When you're a young guy and you're really horny all the time.
00:08:45.720
But then I got there now and it was so interesting to be like,
00:08:55.760
And so we went into this sort of moment where it's like,
00:09:01.100
because those are the memories that we'll remember.
00:09:03.680
So let's section the cruise experience into individual unique memories
00:09:07.860
and capture and fully experience as many of those with each other
00:09:16.740
that can be done less expensively on a cruise ship
00:09:18.860
because you get all these all-expense-paid things on cruise ships.
00:09:30.460
We cast upon it is what we called it in terms of unique memories,
00:09:42.980
there were times where we really didn't want to do something,
00:09:45.360
but we did it anyway because we knew it would create a memory.
00:09:48.160
For example, there was one morning where it was an ocean day on the cruise.
00:09:58.240
However, the water slides were open and there were no lines.
00:10:01.060
And so we got in our swimsuits and screamed very loudly in pain
00:10:06.780
while doing all of the water slides multiple times.
00:10:15.280
I think a lot of people do travel for that reason.
00:10:18.000
And maybe they're even more self-aware about it now.
00:10:20.520
You see all this Instagram versus reality nonsense,
00:10:22.980
you know, where people are clearly going to these locations
00:10:28.620
I was actually making a problem with some sites now.
00:10:29.960
I was watching a video at Windover Production did
00:10:35.240
because people are going to them just to do these Instagrams.
00:10:38.360
Well, but I think people have come to understand
00:10:49.520
and also that would start to blend together, right?
00:10:51.580
If every trip you take is about getting photos,
00:10:53.480
all of your memories are going to be about getting the right shot
00:10:58.800
And you see this also, like when you go on a vacation,
00:11:05.400
they look hot, they look tired, they look bored,
00:11:15.360
like in the sand, covered in sun and clearly like drunk.
00:11:27.340
are actually having fun on these vacations either.
00:11:34.620
I gained genuine enjoyment and happiness from exploration.
00:11:40.400
and it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective
00:11:41.860
that you would have this gated period of like happiness
00:11:45.340
and fulfillment that could be gained from exploration.
00:11:53.600
they are doing things that they used to gain happiness from
00:12:02.240
or no longer outputting that at significant volumes.
00:12:08.500
In the same way that I could have gone on a cruise
00:12:10.860
and been, I suppose I wasn't married or something
00:12:13.240
I'm just going to sleep with as many people as possible
00:12:32.980
You want to go on a, it's a hard to get cruise.
00:12:46.300
and I just wouldn't have gained much happiness from it
00:12:49.260
they're just not going to gain the same level of happiness
00:12:51.620
as they do when they're a younger person sleeping around
00:12:54.260
as they do when they're an older person sleeping around.
00:12:59.540
It's the same, I think, even with aping lifestyles
00:13:15.260
that your brain just doesn't release when you're older.
00:13:16.780
And people are trying to get happiness from things
00:13:19.980
that they just, their biology has moved past them.
00:13:26.260
Like, what am I gaining genuine happiness from on the cruise?
00:13:51.280
Why life had just become this sort of monotonous on rail thing
00:14:03.500
Or could it be that a huge portion of the population
00:14:12.980
It's that we're the weird ones that it turned off in us.
00:14:16.200
And now it's just completely focused around our kids.
00:14:21.420
though maybe everyone has like irritable resting faces.
00:14:30.320
But I also don't I don't know if I experience happiness
00:14:41.660
What do you mean to say is you're an evil sociopath?
00:15:01.440
Simone, you created the thing that's my source of happiness.
00:15:05.220
you were afraid that I would like start loving you less
00:15:10.020
And now that seems like such an insane thing to fear.
00:15:24.260
I feel very satisfied when I see you loving on our kids
00:15:31.000
And you probably feel something similar with me and our kids.
00:15:46.260
People will see inside videos and stuff like that.