Bryan Johnson
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 9 minutes
Words per Minute
185.33078
Summary
brian johnson is 46 years old but no matter his chronological age he's striving for the biological age of an 18 year old . His team of 30 doctors utilize all the latest tech the plan is rigorous at two million dollars a year a life like this is out of reach for almost everyone . He once injected himself with his son's plasma it's part of his quest to live forever .
Transcript
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so it is the most basic truth of biology that the second you reach maturity you exit adolescence
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and become an adult you start dying you degrade and then you expire this is called the aging
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process and you maybe first start noticing it in your 40s long after it's already begun
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because there are visible symptoms you get wrinkly and bald and if you can't stay away
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from the pizza you get a little fat and that's kind of inevitable or we've been told it's inevitable
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but a man called brian johnson has decided it's not necessarily inevitable he was a very large
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figure in the tech world made a ton of dough and then started thinking about his body and the nature
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of life and the future of human existence and has become pretty famous recently for saying that he
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has in a way begun to reverse the aging process and maybe even cracked the code that limits the human
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lifespan but watch him explain it's hard to believe tech millionaire brian johnson is 46 years
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old but no matter his chronological age he's striving for the biological age of an 18 year old his team
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of 30 doctors utilize all the latest tech the plan is rigorous at two million dollars a year a life like
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this is out of reach for almost everyone and this is what i take on a daily basis of supplements it's
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alphabetized and we have a year supply of everything we do he calls his all-encompassing protocol
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project blueprint blueprint was born out of trying to fix my own problems but then taking care of my
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family my kids and my parents my friends it's generated a steady churn of shock headlines he once
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injected himself with his son's plasma it's part of his quest to live forever which he believes
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may happen in our lifetime seems a little spooky but also interesting and we're doing this interview
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because one of our smartest friends suggested i talked to this guy brian johnson he's genuinely
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interesting and he seems to be he is the founder and ceo among other companies a company called
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kernel that creates devices that can monitor brain activity and he joins us now on set brian great to
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see you great to see you as well thanks for having me so i've got a bunch of different questions
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some practical some philosophical let's start with the practical ones um you're how old are you
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46 46 46 you don't look it i will say famously um so how as a practical matter what's your regimen
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for slowing or reversing the aging process what we do is we measure every organ of my body my heart my
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lungs my liver my pancreas my brain and we biologically age each organ so you say how old is the heart so
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even though i'm 46 my heart is 37. my left ear is 64. my lung capacity is age 18. my cardiovascular capacity
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is the top 1.5 of 18 year olds and so you need to know where your baseline is and so we've measured
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my entire body i've become the most measured person in history and once you have all those numbers then
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you can go to therapies and say can you slow the speed of aging and can you reverse the aging damage
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that has happened and that's been the project for the past three years and you can you think you can yeah
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for example i slowed my speed of aging so inside your body there's a clock with how fast you're aging
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and that clock is determined by dna methylation i have reduced my speed of aging by the equivalent of
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31 years so i now age uh in a more generalized way to say it 7.6 months for every 12 months that pass
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okay so i get the remaining months for free which is i've slowed down my speed of aging so the damage
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that accumulates in my body is much slower and so we've done this through diet and exercise and sleep
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and a bunch of other therapies but yes we can quantifiably measure how fast my aging what are
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the age uh age of my bio of my organs and then we can use therapies to go about it and so we do
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everything according to science and data this is not me offering an opinion this is my entire body
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on display for the world of what happens when you apply the world's best science into a body
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so i'm assuming you quit smoking yeah i never started but you never started okay okay good
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so that's like step one quits exactly right fine just to make sure we have that on the record
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what specifically do you eat uh i have three meals a day so breakfast is broccoli cauliflower black
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lentils garlic and ginger the next meal of the day is uh pea protein pomegranate juice macadamia nuts
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walnuts flaxseed sunflower lecithin and the final meal of the day is berries nuts uh fruits okay um so
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pizza and oreo is totally out yeah they are not in supply at the house so um why like if you could
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narrow down the foods that actually do reduce your lifespan and the quality of your life would
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be yeah we what we tried to do with the diet is we said if you take the frame that every calorie you
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put into your body has to fight for its life what would that be and so we went through we referenced
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all the scientific literature we said what has the best evidence and we put into my body then we measure
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so if a given thing is supposed to do a thing in the body it stays and if it does it it stays if not
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it's out and so what i told you is where every calorie is precisely designed and these are population
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level studies this is not just me this is could be applicable to you as well yeah and so yeah we are
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very particular about what goes into my body and not a single calorie goes in that's not backed by
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science what are the ones you you definitely would not eat like period uh basically the standard american
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diet yeah yeah it's bad it's really it's i knew it was bad like like we all know it's bad i didn't know
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how bad like once you understand the biochemical processes of what happens in your body when you
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eat these things it's awful like what i mean it increases your speed of aging like you've got this
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clock and it's saying how fast are you going to how fast until disease develops or something goes
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wrong and this clock just you know it will increase if you don't eat the right things if you eat the
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right things it will slow down the wrong things speed it up let me just push you a little a little
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more on this question so like what are the things you just would not put in your mouth specifically
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um i pizza donuts junk food fast food processed food pizza is number one uh yeah i you know i don't
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eat red meat uh i'm vegan but you know nothing against meat so people can add meat to their diet
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but you know like red meat is not at the top of the things that makes the cut for science of wanting to
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extend life interesting um how much time do you spend exercising uh one hour a day that's it yeah
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what do you do uh cardiovascular weights and stretching so would it be fair to say that someone
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who followed your diet and your exercise regimen would have similar effects to the ones you've enjoyed
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yes so i've done this i've made my entire project open source it's for free for everybody i post my data
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my recipes my processes my therapies everything is shared with everyone and so tens of thousands
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of people around the world are doing this and they're seeing remarkable results so i've tried
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to reduce what i do into very simple things that are affordable for everybody um those would not
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include injecting yourself with your son's blood right that's right okay why'd you do that so it was
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we were looking into therapy so the way we approached blueprint is we said so what human humans have
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generated a lot of science over the past a couple decades and we said let's take all the science
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let's rank them according to power laws of the best science ever done let's grade the evidence
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then we'll see what we can apply from those into my body and plasma infusions were one that was
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interesting and so i was looking at it myself and one day i was talking to my dad and he said i need
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to tell you i had this really scary situation where he he's in the legal profession he said i wrote a brief
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i walked away i came back and i saw that my words were a jumbled mess i was experiencing cognitive lapse
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and i wasn't aware of it he's 71. he said i'm terrified of losing my mind yes and i said dad how
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interesting that you bring this up because right now the team and i are talking about plasma infusions
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and that some of the studies are looking at the effects on alzheimer's and parkinson's and other
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kinds of things like that and so i said if you're interested i'm happy to give you a liter of my
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plasma and then my 17 year old son was there and he's like hey if you guys are doing it i'm in right
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great we'll make this a family affair and so my son sharing the plasma yeah so my son gave me a liter
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of plasma i gave my dad a liter of plasma and the data showed that in me there was no effect that my
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biomarkers didn't change but in my dad his speed of aging reduced by 25 years so he was aging at the
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rate of a 71 year old and after the plasma infusion and continued for six months it lessened to a 45
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year old so his clock dramatically slowed down interesting did he feel better he did and his
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colleagues were saying what's up this is you're you're you're hot you're on fire why what's happening
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and it was plasma from his son the only therapy that he did does it need to be a blood relative
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no just blood typed okay so now we're getting into the theories about taking the blood of children
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i mean so this is very common we do organ transplants we all donate blood like we've had
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that experience in our life so it's just in a slightly different frame but it's very much a
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part of well it's a recognizable frame and by the way i'm not endorsing any of this yeah but there is a
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frame to use your word uh on the internet of like super rich tech billionaires living forever in the
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blood of children yeah not an appeal not a super appealing frame i would say yeah this is that uh yeah and
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we did it openly we made a video out of it we we made fun of it we made a meme out of it so yeah
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we this is how we've done the entire project is everything's open sourced it's always discussed we
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share all the data but yes it definitely feeds into many of the of the um there's a lot of theories
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about what happens behind the scenes with rich people yeah and not all of them seem baseless i guess
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that's a lot of people said is like well we finally got a glimpse so you're showing us what's
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happening kind of like the tech oligarch taking the blood of children yeah i'm just yeah um interesting
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so i wonder as i was reading about you the effect on you and your life like
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what's it like to focus on your body that much yeah oh i love it it's uh there's one thing about
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building a product like we oftentimes think of our as our work as our immortality what we produce
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in our careers our reputation our accomplishments and when you think about it this way you are the
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product you are your own best creation and so it's been energizing i've loved being consumed by it
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i think that um yeah it's one of the happiest endeavors i've done in my life really i've taken
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the opposite approach and i'm not claiming it's superior to yours um but i had my appendix swole
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up and burst and i never and i had it of course taken out i never asked like what the appendix is
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because i didn't really want to know i don't know what a spleen is like i've really made an effort to
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not focus on those things because it seems like a lot of self-focus and it seems like a short trip
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from there to say narcissism which is obviously death so are you worried about that uh my observation
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really is philosophical i did this thought experiment where i was when i was 21 i came
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back from ecuador i had i'd lived among extreme poverty for two years and i had this burning
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on a mormon mission on a mormon mission yes and i had this burning desire to be useful to the world
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i didn't know what or how and so i thought i'll make a whole bunch of money by age of 30 and then when
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i'm 30 years old and have a whole bunch of money i'll decide what to do then and so i've been searching for
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this mission my entire life and upon doing that i i had i organized dinners with my smartest friends
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and i said let's imagine we're existing in 2050 and this was 2016 at the time and the world is amazing
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what did we do in 2016 that would make that possible and then i listened very intently to
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everybody's responses and then i put them in a box and i um i made a rule that i can't do anything
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inside that box i have to do something outside that box and what nobody was working on was trying
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to solve death that it was always inconceivable that you could try to legitimately conquer death
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and that's what i set my side on tucker says it best the credit card companies are ripping americans
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00:13:01.120
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00:13:06.640
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and now okay so we're the philosophical part of this and my friend who recommended this interview said you
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know he's really interesting on the the practical stuff the serum transfers and all that but he's
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much more interesting on the philosophical questions and i think you will be so let me ask you grew up in
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a world a mormon world um that believed and taught you that it had already solved the question of death
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exactly through jesus exactly you no longer think that uh it would be helpful if there was some evidence
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yeah okay um so you so you've abandoned that world view or at least you're agnostic i guess would be
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the word on that world view right not to get too personal but i'm just interested because a lot of
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people would say you know religious people christians would say well we've already solved death right
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you know don't need to solve that it's solved um but there's also of course no evidence that eternal
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life is possible in a corporal sense physical sense right because it's never been done so what gives you
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faith that you can do it yeah if you look at the speed in which artificial intelligence is advancing
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we are gaining new abilities we've never had before in every domain of society you pair that with our
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ability that we now in this moment we can predictably design biology and the physical world atom by atom
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you bring those things together for the first time in human history one can say with a straight face
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that we may be able to go after death now i'm not saying we can i'm not saying it's guaranteed i'm
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saying that it is rational and reasonable and supported by where the realities are today and so
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with what i've been trying to do is to show a glimmer of hope that because what i'm really trying to do is
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demonstrate age escape velocity that is so when one year of time passes i remain the same biological age
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so we're never going to arrest aging altogether but if i let's say i age 0.4
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and then i can reverse that 0.4 with therapies and stay the same age biologically right now
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i'm 0.64 so i've already started at one and i'm all the way down to 0.64 if we keep on inching down
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it might change everything you know it's it's one thing to have a philosophical conversation
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it's another thing to say i can be youthful and have energy and feel great i think everybody wants that
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uh 100 live long and prosper for sure and that seems like a virtuous goal and what you're doing
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to that extent is virtuous i just wonder if as someone who grew up in a religious community
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if part of you maybe deep inside fears that when you start to say things like we can defeat death
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that you won't be smoked down by the god of the universe yeah for assuming yeah his role yeah
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do you worry about that uh not in the least bit
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never crossed you're either very brave or very foolish never crossed my mind really so when you
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say i can defeat death aren't you saying i'm god um i'm saying that the universe speaks in irony
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that's for sure and that the story we've told is that god created us and the actual story may be
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that we are going to create god what kind of god this is the question we face the species i mean right
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now we have organized society around capitalism we we strive to make money have power and wealth
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we engage in warfare you know everyone's angling for their best interest and i'm suggesting that this
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is not about me trying to live forever this is me trying to answer the most pressing question in existence
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what do we do as a species now when death is inevitable you're going to have an answer like
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well i'm going to live fast and die young or i'm going to conquer territories and be immortal for my
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quest or i'm going to make up your your meaning of life game but if death is not inevitable we can
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extend our lifespans to some unknown horizon the meaning making games we have the species all change
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of course and that's what i'm suggesting where there this moment is that i mean there you know
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many people through history have reached similar conclusions but not with similar technology exactly
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those conclusions right so um or those outcomes but um you know history laughs at those people and
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the story of history is men addled with hubris being humiliated yes uh and so i mean i would say there's
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a great deal of evidence that you will be crushed and humiliated for saying that just based and i
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hope i hope that's not the case of course but but everyone every other living person who's reached
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the conclusion that you've reached has been crushed and humiliated in the end and we laugh at them so
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what makes you different yeah i mean i think it's likely inevitable that i will die the most ironic death
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yes that is guaranteed by the way that's the message of the new test i mean that's the sermon
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on the mount it's it's it's the irony yes book yes you know the first will be last the meek shall
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inherit the earth no you're so i will we agree on that i'll get hit by a bus or i will choke taking
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a pill or you'll die of a broccoli od yeah exactly so it's guaranteed to happen so me aside uh i think
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the okay now i like you i think that's just a wonderful thing to say right that that is wisdom
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it it's guaranteed to happen and so hopefully this lives past me but i think if like if you
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if you have another do another thought experiment with me let's imagine we're hanging out in the 25th
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century we're listening to what they're saying about the early 21st century now in the same way
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we look at the 15th century we compress that entire century into 10 things 15 things yes that's right
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right right 99 of what happened then is just washed away of course we don't care it's just
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there's no record of it either exactly yes and this moment the same is going to be true we have
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more recording of course of our of our existence they did but we're still going to be compressed
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in time and so 99 of what we do will be washed away there'll be a small fraction that actually
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matters to future generations yes and so if you ask what they'll even know about or have any way of
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knowing about or they'll care about yes that's right so if you pose that question from the 25th
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century and so that really for me creates this clarity of thought like if you try to really
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clear your head of all the noise happening now what do they say right now that we did as a species in
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this moment that allowed intelligence to thrive in this part of the galaxy and this is what i would say
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is this is when homo sapiens realized that they reached a technological threshold where the only objective
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of existence was to continue to exist at the basic level so this is don't die
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that when a when we're on the eve of giving birth to super intelligence and we have to ask all the basic
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questions of our existence who are we why do we exist how do we operate in society do i have a job do i
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don't like what are the answers to these basic questions and what i'm suggesting is our existence
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is going to be compressed into one statement we can all say which is don't die and don't die is the
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most played game by everybody on planet earth every second of every day we breathe every few seconds we
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look both ways before we cross the street we throw out moldy food so don't die is played more than
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capitalism don't die is played more than religion the most played game in existence and that's the thing we
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can rally behind in this moment it's it's interesting though i mean the fact that you i think that's
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partly true but the fact that you have to articulate it suggests it's not entirely true
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in other words the way that people human beings differ from other animal species is not just language
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and the imposable thumb it's that humans are the only animal that kill themselves they need to be
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convinced that life is worth living yeah and i wonder what you make of that i don't have the answer to
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that i don't know why but that does has always struck me as the main distinction between people and say
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dogs or pigs or horses or any other animal why or monkeys for that yeah why why do people kill
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themselves why do they need to be convinced not to die yeah we i mean in some way in some ways we're
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brilliant in many ways we are idiotic and insane you're like i had this problem where i would overeat
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every night at 7 p.m to deal with the stresses of the day i would eat too much food junk food i was 60
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pounds heavier than i am now why did i do that why did i inflict this harm upon myself every
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night and afterwards i'd say i'm changing tomorrow this is my last day no more but i did it anyways
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i just couldn't stop myself from these self-destructive behaviors it's such a weird thing
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and so now what i did is i but hold on what do you make of that i mean and every person has
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experienced that whether it's drinking or sex or food is very very common in this country
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um but why does that happen because it kind of puts a lie to the to use your term frame again
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to the evolutionary biology frame that we use to explain human behavior yes right yes why do we act
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against ourselves and is it us acting against ourselves or is it a force outside of ourselves
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acting on us like so what's the answer agreed and we we treat planet earth the same way we treat our
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own bodies of course we treat each other but why exactly i mean i understand look every evolutionary
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biology common sense explains why i might hurt you yeah to steal your stuff exactly and to make it more
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likely that you know my kids reproduce and my line continues i mean it's not hard it's wrong but it's
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understandable why do i hurt myself in ways that don't bring me pleasure that are purely destructive
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you can see what people believe in demons yeah i don't think you do believe in demons so what do you
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believe what is that yeah i mean on this question there's probably many answers on why the solution
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that i've come up with is i endeavor to build an algorithm that could take better care of me than
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i can myself but you still have to follow it and you still right you have you have to want to build it
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so but it you're alighting over and i am too i don't have the answer i don't want to pretend i do i think
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they're clearly demonic forces they're evil spirits that are doing this to people that's my view is it
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that's my view but so i've kind of explained it without any evidence at all noticing but it seems
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to me that you have to explain it too like what is that how could we ever act knowingly act against
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our own interest where do those compulsions come from you say they're biological what does that even
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mean it doesn't mean anything what is the answer i don't know the answer i would suggest it's a flaw
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yeah and i would suggest that this is what we will solve with our technology but it still requires
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the decision which is a conscious decision that that's a good thing that's preferable to self
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destruction yeah sometimes though like think about think of this like ozambic so let's just put a set
00:25:35.680
aside side effect profile let's set aside any of those questions if i can take a pill that turns off my
00:25:42.480
hunger i don't have to be fat anymore i'm in you know like well but if you're approaching i mean
00:25:49.280
that's a whole separate conversation um but if you're approaching it logically you you couldn't
00:25:54.240
turn off um the data of as you put the side effect profile like what's the downside that's part of the
00:26:00.320
calculation is it not yeah i mean let's assume the drug will get better we'll minimize side effects and
00:26:05.200
like in time but what i'm saying is all of us understand that these self-destructive behaviors
00:26:11.520
are not good why do why do we assume that like where's that moral framework come from there's no
00:26:18.400
god i don't i don't get that i mean even the basics like we just feel bad in the morning we feel cloudy
00:26:24.160
we feel grumpy we feel depressed we feel anxious and it's because we don't sleep well and we're stressed
00:26:28.880
and we eat terrible food and we don't exercise so like we don't do the positive things we know we feel
00:26:33.920
great when we do it and we do the bad things that make us feel bad continually so we all just know
00:26:38.000
intuitively that we do i'm not oh of course and we all feel that way i felt that way this morning
00:26:42.960
actually if i mentioned it um but i wonder if it's not reductionist to assume that they're all biological
00:26:49.600
in cause and sooth maybe there's a spiritual component maybe i'm not living my life the right way
00:26:55.360
maybe i have done wrong yeah and haven't repented of it i mean there are other potential causes no
00:27:00.960
agreed and this is what i'm suggesting that no matter where someone is coming from
00:27:05.600
whatever your origin the game to play as a species right now in this moment is don't die
00:27:12.240
right now we play capitalism and make money and earn i'm with you there that's obviously a hollow
00:27:17.280
stupid dead end and it's not actually even working so i mean it's not working by its by its own terms
00:27:23.520
it's not working right you don't have a middle class anymore so clearly that's not working right
00:27:26.960
i i couldn't agree with you i couldn't agree with your skepticism more when you conclude that like
00:27:32.800
the current program is yes absurd clearly it is we need a better way i'm just but i do think it's
00:27:38.960
like at the core of your assumptions is an unanswered question which is why is living better than dying
00:27:44.480
why do people seek to kill themselves what the hell is going on yeah yeah why yeah yeah i mean so um
00:27:52.880
i have gone through my life in a series of moments that has led me to distrust almost everything
00:28:02.240
including my mind so initially growing up in a religion wise wise i mean i i mean i grew up in a
00:28:08.480
religion and then i found out that that entire thing had been packaged in a way where it's like
00:28:12.720
we're good and everyone else is bad and then i went through a process of behavioral psychology where i
00:28:17.360
realized that i have all these shortcuts of hypocrisy and irrationality that i am a disaster as a human yes i'm
00:28:22.720
blind to my own behavior i went through it with authorities that i trusted in other ways and so
00:28:27.920
i don't know what to trust in reality outside of you know things that i find more stable like physics
00:28:34.960
and math and so if if i try to ground myself in reality of what can i trust my mind is very far down
00:28:43.920
the list yes things i trust i agree and so when i pose the question to myself of do i want to live or
00:28:48.800
do i want this or that i don't trust what i have to say ever and so i don't know are we really the
00:28:54.560
authority on what we want have we ever been accurate in making those guesses no so why would
00:29:01.520
and i have to say i i disagree i think very strongly with your conclusions but i so admire the way you're
00:29:07.680
reaching them because i think it's i mean the root of wisdom is knowing not to trust yourself i always say
00:29:12.720
to my kids that i know one guy i don't trust is me because because it's true yeah and so i really
00:29:19.120
admire your honesty you seem like you're coming at this as honestly as you possibly can but i
00:29:26.640
anyway whatever i have a lot of thoughts but um i don't mean to interrupt you so um you what would
00:29:32.960
happen if people lived forever yeah why would that be good i mean the accumulated sadness of life is hard
00:29:39.520
to take you talk to do you talk to old people at all i do yeah and so there is like ships in a harbor
00:29:45.520
barnacles yeah attach and the weight of that over time becomes immense yeah and you know memories
00:29:51.680
and there's just a lot in the human life that um is hard and again it accumulates and so
00:29:59.760
why would you want to extend that so imagine we travel back in time one million years yes and
00:30:06.080
we're hanging out with homo erectus yes they have an axe in their hand yes and we say where's shelter
00:30:12.000
where's food and where's danger we listen if we say now wax poetic on the future of our of the species
00:30:21.360
what is the future of intelligence we laugh they have nothing to say about computers
00:30:27.680
or the internet or that there's a microscopic world or how large the universe is they have no idea
00:30:33.920
and in this moment if we contemplate that we may be just as primitive as homo erectus
00:30:41.840
we think we are at the apex of intelligence is that true we're giving birth to super intelligence could
00:30:47.600
that intelligence relative to us make us caveman like in a similar fashion or more so and this is what
00:30:55.920
i'm saying in this moment it's a absolute invitation for humility that we may know nothing about existence
00:31:06.880
or very little or that what's coming our way may transform existence to ways we can't even fathom
00:31:12.400
that that's how significant that's how significant the change is going to be
00:31:17.520
in the coming years and decades it's unfathomable to us
00:31:31.040
so this is one of those interesting conversations i've had in a while because you're saying things
00:31:34.480
that i think are almost beautiful in their wisdom this is an invitation to humility yes all of life is
00:31:41.040
an invitation to humility that's the root of wisdom and the root of happiness but then your conclusion is
00:31:46.160
let's live forever no but no no the conclusion is don't die that's it that that is the sole
00:31:56.240
objective and so i want to live tomorrow i've got stuff going on tomorrow i'm excited about tomorrow
00:32:01.120
yeah so it's not to live forever it's this because we understand things on these short time frames and
00:32:07.360
you know humans will do things like a person doesn't want to die when walking across the street
00:32:12.880
but they'll smoke a cigarette while doing so i've done it yeah so we have these really weird
00:32:18.160
behaviors but we we don't want to die just not now yeah i just i wish and i'll stop with this but i just
00:32:25.040
wish we had a better handle on why we have those impulses i feel like it's very hard to proceed with
00:32:30.320
any assumption at all until we understand what just happened or why what's happening now why we're acting
00:32:34.400
the way that we are and if we don't have a consensus on why people hurt themselves
00:32:38.400
pretty hard to make any future plans at all based on human behavior i do wonder though if you if we
00:32:45.600
could actually look at a self-destruction score across time you know would our time and place
00:32:52.320
have a disproportionately high level because of how effective food companies are at a thickness there's
00:32:59.280
no question how good drug companies are making drugs and how you know social media that that we
00:33:03.840
basically are in this dystopic yes capture it's totally true of self-destruction it's a hundred
00:33:09.440
percent true of course i mean i'm only i'm not that much older than you are we both grew up in a
00:33:13.040
country that was nowhere near this self-destructive i mean you grew up in a mormon community in utah
00:33:16.960
not particularly self-destructive people actually right and i mean that's a high compliment
00:33:21.200
but the whole country was less self-destructive of course we respond to our circumstances our
00:33:25.680
environment and animals do too you cage them they kill each other i mean i get it yeah
00:33:30.240
but the impulse may be exacerbated in certain periods by the environment but the impulse is
00:33:37.360
constant through time yeah okay so let's ask this through another frame here's a thought experiment for
00:33:42.800
you so if you had access to an algorithm that could give you the best physical mental and spiritual health
00:33:52.000
of your life but in exchange for that you needed to follow the algorithm suggestions go to bed on time
00:33:58.080
when it said go to bed when it said eat what it said would you say yes or would you say no of course
00:34:04.160
i would say no i'm not getting bossed around by a machine sorry and i also don't think that any any
00:34:09.280
philosophy that doesn't include god can improve my spiritual health because like what does that even
00:34:12.800
mean what does that mean actually how can how can your spiritual health improve if you don't
00:34:17.680
acknowledge the supernatural yes i've been i've been holding dinners at my house for the past couple
00:34:22.720
years i get 10 to 12 people together and i pose this question and then we have a two and a half hour
00:34:29.520
dialogue about the future of existence and your response is perfect because you told me no way no
00:34:36.560
way you're doing it and you gave me a list of things i'm not letting the toaster oven boss me around
00:34:40.800
either it's not now so what's interesting is the next question i ask in this conversation is now imagine
00:34:46.640
the 21st century is observing our conversation right now and they observe your answers what do
00:34:53.120
they observe are the characteristics and morals and ethics of the early 21st century so it flips
00:34:58.800
people's mindset from the knee-jerk reaction of i hate this idea to being observational on what are
00:35:06.400
the characteristics of being human now and i do this because it is so hard to see time and place we look
00:35:13.360
at the 15th century right no i agree very clear and clean we're like oh they're idiots for this and
00:35:17.920
like maybe they were onto this but we have this blindness to ourselves in this moment yes and so
00:35:24.000
we have to do these thought experiments you have to tease yourself out very slowly people's responses
00:35:28.880
like they tell me they experience multiple existential crises in that dinner they did down they come back
00:35:35.840
up for air dip back down come back up it it's a really challenging experience because it challenges
00:35:41.520
everything you understand about existence do people keep accepting your dinner invitations i mean
00:35:46.960
that i'm going to eat at brian's house but have an existential crisis before the entree is served that's
00:35:51.600
a lot people say it's the one of if not the most consequential conversations of their entire life
00:36:01.680
well that doesn't surprise me actually because you you have one quality which i again really admire
00:36:06.560
which is your dedication to seeing things outside of your own the narrow tube that we all live in
00:36:12.640
yeah seeing the bigger picture and i love that i think it's so important and wonderful to hear it
00:36:18.400
you made a bunch of allusions to super intelligence presumably the ai we keep hearing about yeah and
00:36:24.960
since you're in that business and this is what you think about describe what that means exactly what is
00:36:30.480
what will ai mean how fast like in 10 years like specifically nobody knows what we do know is that
00:36:42.080
software can be programmed and mathematical functions can be organized to do things that we humans do and
00:36:50.000
they can do it much better and even do things that we humans can't do so um we've seen this where
00:36:55.440
they're getting i just took my first uh self-driving car ride in san francisco last week held it got
00:37:04.080
in entirely autonomous and that's a remarkable feat that is capable of driving a car it reads medical
00:37:11.280
imagery right it it um flies airplanes so we know algorithms are very good at doing many things
00:37:17.120
and they're getting better all the time and so what i'm observing is i'm saying that
00:37:22.320
ai is progressing at a at a speed that is impressive and maybe even unfathomable to how we can observe
00:37:29.920
it much faster that's right and it's doing these things that we humans do and it's going to increasingly
00:37:35.840
do those things and it will help us achieve our objectives so we're going to say yes to it
00:37:39.600
now when these algorithms become as good or better at being us than we are then it creates an invitation
00:37:46.240
to say who are we and that's what i'm saying is ai is going to create a series of existential crises for
00:37:53.760
the species it'd be basic ones like um do we trust our government who is in authority who verifies
00:38:02.160
identity all these basic things we've settled as society roughly it's going to call into question
00:38:08.400
everything in in at a speed that won't allow a cycle time to really fill it out and so we're going to
00:38:14.960
have this feeling of bewilderment where it's moving very fast we can't keep up how do we stop
00:38:19.840
ourselves from falling into anarchy now when that happened we happens we say what games we play as a
00:38:25.280
species what do we do and that's why i'm saying it's time to rally around this don't die concept
00:38:30.800
don't die individually don't kill each other don't kill the planet and align ai with don't die
00:38:36.000
that our singular objective is a species even though this sounds unimaginable right now like from our
00:38:41.680
vantage point that's like that's no way impossible you just look at the underlying characteristics of
00:38:46.960
how this is progressing to me it feels inevitable over some time frame is it two years to 10 years
00:38:52.560
to 20 50 i don't know but it's basically now i mean there's no question you're right if the
00:39:00.000
industrial revolution the steam-powered loom in england gave rise to marxism in the first and second world
00:39:06.720
wars and vietnam and korea and every other conflict for 100 years and the deaths of hundreds of millions
00:39:11.360
of people you know technological change yes causes displacement yes the fall of religions the fall of
00:39:20.240
empires the murder of millions so what way i do exactly right i couldn't agree more um i just
00:39:28.640
i just wonder like what does it mean to be a human being if you have no autonomy i'm an adult man what
00:39:39.360
does that mean it's not just a measure of my age it's a measure of my ability to make decisions about
00:39:46.240
what i want to do and what i think and how i live and how my family lives and so without that what is
00:39:51.200
the point of living yeah in other words i said i don't want to be bossed around by a machine which is
00:39:55.040
a pretty shallow answer but it's i i understand i didn't explain it because i don't fully understand
00:40:00.000
it yeah how i feel about it but something in my in my dog sense my gut level tells me i don't want to
00:40:06.720
live that life i'd rather be dead yeah does that make sense it absolutely does i absolutely empathize
00:40:12.720
with your reaction and so the thought experiment is to provoke that exact emotion it's meant to say
00:40:19.440
i hate this idea and here's all the reasons why yes and then once you get those on the table you can
00:40:24.960
then have some kind of detachment and say why do i think those things like what is this concept of
00:40:31.120
me making decisions let's just break that apart and that's why it takes two and a half hours to get
00:40:36.720
through this you need to hear other people's perspective i agree people need to say i hate
00:40:40.720
it some people say i love it and be like but hold tight like here's an example that you do already
00:40:45.680
that challenges your notion on this ability to make decisions you're like oh damn good point
00:40:50.000
so it it really takes time to work through your own beliefs and understandings because oftentimes
00:40:55.360
it's just packed so deep you can't get through it and we give each thought five seconds in our
00:41:01.440
modern society yes we can't get deep and so i understand your reaction and tucker if you come
00:41:06.080
to the dinner i promise you'll leave with a changed understanding of existence if this is not an easy
00:41:13.040
topic it really takes time to cycle through it to be open-minded to hear other people but um
00:41:19.360
everyone gets there like every single time everyone gets there um what do you serve is it all broccoli
00:41:26.560
i do serve blueprint food yeah so it's it's um the two dishes i told you about yeah well i'm getting
00:41:32.240
in and out before i come but whatever that's just me um so i said when when you asked like would
00:41:38.240
i be willing to follow the instructions of the algorithm and i blurted out without thinking about it
00:41:42.880
no yeah and then i admitted in the interest of honesty that i don't really have any reasons for
00:41:47.040
saying no other than my animal sense tells me no that's slavery you can't live like that you'd rather
00:41:53.200
be dead which is how i feel my that was my instinct speaking which i regard as a kind of co-equal
00:42:01.120
with my rational sense right i don't think it's just like some dumb impulse i think it's worth paying
00:42:07.360
attention to do you feel that way do you have instincts do you follow them do you attach meaning to
00:42:11.360
them i do um every time i engage in a thought i observe the first four to five thoughts my brain
00:42:21.760
has yes incorrect interesting they're usually almost almost almost always wrong and it's like there's a
00:42:28.480
bias attached to this one this one's coming out from a preconceived notion this one has you know like
00:42:32.720
some self-interest and so i i'm constantly trying to be aware of what's wrecking my ability to see
00:42:40.320
things clearly at all points in time and so um yeah i learned this i was chronically depressed for
00:42:47.360
a decade a decade a decade the decade that you were succeeding in business yeah that's right i was
00:42:53.200
building a startup i had three little babies i was trying to leave my religion i was in a challenging
00:42:57.920
relationship so it just all packed into a tight yeah and that's when i was overeating every night to
00:43:04.080
try to try to soothe my own what were you eating by the way my uh well we always had some sweets in
00:43:12.000
the house my partner had a sweet tooth and so it was always you know brownies or cookies or leftover cake
00:43:17.680
or so it was always like you know just one bite and then led to a second bite then tomorrow we'll work
00:43:25.120
out really hard and work off all the calories did that work it didn't i failed every single night
00:43:32.880
and i the only thing that gave me liberation is one night i was just desperate i mean i was so miserable
00:43:39.200
i hated myself i just i felt so ashamed that i couldn't stop this terrible
00:43:44.640
behavior i said evening brian you're fired you make my life miserable because in the morning i would
00:43:50.480
work out i would eat a really great breakfast all day i would be disciplined great and then
00:43:56.080
night time would come i would bathe the kids get them to bed tell them stories and then that moment
00:44:01.680
would come like the brownies you know just one bite of the brownies because this is like the mormon
00:44:08.080
version you know what i mean you're not like going to the crack house oh that's funny the whole stable
00:44:14.160
of hookers yeah you're eating the brownies yeah and so i i basically created a character of myself and
00:44:19.200
so i would say all right when i saw evening brian pull up and he'd give me all these really compelling
00:44:23.760
reasons like tonight's the last night you know like tomorrow morning we'll work out extra hard
00:44:28.720
and i'd say i'm sorry that's not going to happen so i fired him so 5 pm to 10 pm i remove my ability
00:44:34.880
to eat just like no matter what it doesn't matter what the occasion is you cannot eat food and so i
00:44:40.720
started playing with my different characters of brian dad brian work brian evening brian and i found it
00:44:46.720
really liberating that i'm not the behavior i'm not that actual practice and so this is what i
00:44:51.440
started doing blueprint as well if i could i construct an algorithm that actually improved
00:44:56.720
me because i spent all day building technology in my company braindrieve mo you would write the code
00:45:02.240
and the technology and improve it and then you'd improve it again and again version two version three
00:45:07.280
version four so all day my technology got better and every day i got worse and i couldn't fix my own
00:45:14.640
problems and it was such a weird juxtaposition where technology is improving radically and i'm
00:45:19.840
getting worse so it's like this difference and i thought this is wild that as a species we're so
00:45:25.920
focused on the improvement our technology and we are this self-destructive species in every regard
00:45:32.560
like what is happening well that's the question that's the unanswered the question that remains
00:45:38.320
unanswered and of course every religion answers it very neatly and sensibly i would say and every
00:45:44.160
religion always has and it does strike me if you're looking back into history that this is the only
00:45:50.000
period post-war post-world war ii where you've had a society at scale that assumes that there's nothing
00:45:55.440
beyond itself and so that raises a lot of questions but the first is like why did every previous
00:46:00.960
generation assume there was a god but we don't like were they all insane like where did that come
00:46:04.800
from you know if someone believes in god or not or an afterlife or not that's great like i don't
00:46:10.880
think i personally think everyone come together on this uh it's we already agree on don't die all of us
00:46:18.960
do so whether we have a story about what happens in the afterlife what it doesn't really matter what
00:46:24.160
we do agree upon right now is none of us want to die right now not in this moment so let's build
00:46:30.400
upon what we agree upon in this very second no i i don't know that we do agree actually because
00:46:36.000
there's no meaning without a power beyond ourself is there i mean there's only this sort of like
00:46:42.480
shallow silly or sets meaning that we attach to various things like sex or living longer or feeling
00:46:47.680
good or whatever but there's no meaning beyond our physical momentary experience whereas
00:46:52.800
a person who acknowledges a power beyond himself attaches ultimate moral meaning yeah two events
00:47:02.080
right so like you have a like no god no meaning or am i missing something it's like what's the point
00:47:12.560
i guess i try to speak in the world um that i can operate practically and so your thought of meaning
00:47:25.520
is a biochemical process in your brain it's a thought you have it's a biochemical state you experience
00:47:30.880
whether it's love or whether it's meaning making or whether it's belief in death you're experiencing this
00:47:35.600
thing as a human we can engineer this with predictability we can engineer atoms and molecules
00:47:43.360
and organisms we can do this in the form of creating drugs today we do this in the way of creating you
00:47:48.480
know um various medicines we do this in creating implants like we're getting increasingly good at doing
00:47:54.160
this and so much of our reality is going to become increasingly engineered so we know and so we're heading down
00:48:01.920
this path where our digital reality our physical reality all realities now we have the source code
00:48:10.080
to do this and this is why i'm saying that if you take any preconceived notion about being human
00:48:15.920
any ideas we have about reality their representation of what we've been doing for thousands of years
00:48:21.840
some of that may carry over but maybe not and so i'm inviting the conversation to say
00:48:27.760
this moment is not like the previous moments right very very different but but here's here's the
00:48:34.720
practical um and i just want to restate i respect what you're saying and i think you seem really honest
00:48:40.320
and open-minded so this is in no way a slight but the but the core problem however is that in a moment of
00:48:46.960
technological change really revolution unimaginable everything you said sounds right to me
00:48:51.760
you need a framework by which or with the help of which you make important practical decisions we
00:48:59.280
used to call them moral decisions yes so if there's no acknowledged power beyond people
00:49:05.600
or only the power that we create through these machines and there are giant data centers um
00:49:11.440
then how can we say if i feel like killing you yeah because it pleases me right how can we oppose that
00:49:19.600
how can we say that's wrong we can't actually say that's wrong we can say it's inconvenient or it's
00:49:24.080
you know detracts from gdp or it's unhelpful but we can't say it's wrong yeah how could we
00:49:29.440
yep right i agree so we've we basically we've settled many of these questions today like if you
00:49:36.720
want to kill somebody and you actually do it there's consequences but why uh it's the way we've resolved
00:49:42.640
the moral and ethical question in our society on what basis agreed but we've solved it somehow we
00:49:47.440
haven't solved it it was just like the government has said you can't kill people right but by your
00:49:51.920
own description governments are going away clearly they are i don't even think they really exist now
00:49:56.640
what are countries it's meaningless right i agree of course so um so like some dude in a far away
00:50:02.960
city says i can't do that well says who yeah so i doesn't have any meaning at all except the extent
00:50:07.840
you can punish me because you feel like it and but but there's no way to say it is wrong or right
00:50:14.800
in an absolute sense there's no way to say anything is wrong or right in an absolute sense
00:50:18.080
yeah okay i agree uh what you're saying is um what i'm hearing you say is the technological
00:50:24.080
revolution or disruption opens up the space for these questions to be asked anew even though we
00:50:29.440
don't even know where it came from in the beginning no what i'm saying is we're gonna have a lot more
00:50:33.760
questions practical questions about how to proceed that need to be answered now yes and without any
00:50:42.160
authority above ourselves on what basis are we going to answer those i see okay okay this is what
00:50:47.120
i am proposing is that just like when america was founded yes it was this concept of hey the monarchy
00:50:54.480
has been doing its thing for quite some time not great we think we can do this really new weird thing
00:51:00.480
of democracy and vote people in we have these two representative bodies and half the people thought
00:51:05.760
that's insane half the body's like kind of cool let's try it so we chose democracy as a form of
00:51:10.480
governance that was supposedly better than the monarch and so in that moment we chose a new form of
00:51:16.720
governance in trying to do that now we've been trying to solve the thorny questions of democracy
00:51:23.360
for over 200 years in fact we fight about it every single day right but it's still this basic idea that
00:51:30.000
democracy was superior to monarchy and what i'm suggesting right now is we are walking into a new
00:51:37.440
phase of existence where we have to answer these questions anew and we don't know what the answer
00:51:44.560
is but the the foundational observation is don't die so don't die individually don't kill each other
00:51:50.320
don't kill the planet align ai with don't die after that we're going to spend the next unknown period of
00:51:55.680
time fighting about what it means to don't die but as a species if you take if you birth artificial
00:52:03.280
intelligence what do you use it for is it to become better at war do you become better at killing
00:52:17.280
look i couldn't agree with your conclusions more i mean i strongly agree with them i'm just wondering
00:52:21.360
about the basis upon which you reach them and so without god how can we say and why would we say
00:52:30.240
that life is better than death i mean the religious person the christian says life is better than death
00:52:34.800
because god creates life and only he can and by the way that's still true we could for all the
00:52:39.200
tinkering we do to life we can't create it there's no evidence we'll ever be able to create it so that's
00:52:44.160
might be a tell that we're not god right there um in my view but you can disagree but we still can't
00:52:49.520
create it and there's no evidence we'll ever be able to so the christian looks at this and says
00:52:52.960
life is better than death because life is god's creation but why would the the atheist accept that
00:53:00.320
is true on what basis life is better because i've got an awesome life some person might say i've got a
00:53:06.240
shitty life like death is better like i don't understand if there's no common agreement that there's
00:53:12.160
a force beyond ourselves why we would reach that conclusion yeah or yeah maybe reframed it's a person's
00:53:18.640
option to life that that they can choose whether they want to have that or not whereas right now
00:53:24.720
death is inevitable we don't get to choose we don't get to choose disease or death right okay
00:53:29.840
so it's the option two so in many ways i'm currently working to create a don't die nation state so if you
00:53:37.520
are if you're serious about not dying and this again not for immortality but just for the purpose of
00:53:43.840
we're at the dawn of a new era as a species and we're going to try to create some stable structure
00:53:50.000
for birthing super intelligence yes then you can walk into that and no government in the world is
00:53:56.320
helping its citizens not die really basic things like blood draws and therapies and medical care
00:54:03.360
it's very much treat the symptoms when they arise or when you're near end of life let's keep you alive for
00:54:08.720
some short duration time but otherwise we don't do a good job and so i'm trying to figure out
00:54:14.640
how to create a new societal structure that has the sole objective a nation state of helping its
00:54:20.320
citizens not die um well of course the first order of business would be to construct a military to defend
00:54:27.360
yourselves against people who wanted to kill you anyway because not everyone agrees uh that you should
00:54:33.200
get to live of course but yeah yeah so but let me ask you like maybe there's a shortcut to all this
00:54:39.440
and i i so admire your energy and your willingness to think about questions that most people don't
00:54:45.120
bother to think about but can feel are important yeah everything you've said i can feel it's important
00:54:49.360
like this is not nonsense what you're saying at all but why wouldn't it just be a lot easier to
00:54:57.680
blow up all the processing centers save ourselves like the massive
00:55:01.920
climate change inducing energy draw that ai really is if you're worried about the planet
00:55:05.920
we got to stop this crap immediately because we can't we can't generate the power for it
00:55:09.680
and arrest everyone who's getting rich imposing this revolution on the world like what that's a lot
00:55:16.080
easier yeah you could do that with in an afternoon with nuclear weapons and why wouldn't you if you
00:55:20.400
thought it would help us quote not yeah yeah i mean the the systems we have as a society today
00:55:27.520
enables those things are like the ability to create a corporation to make money to use that money to
00:55:35.600
acquire more power these are systems that humans have created it's how the world was sure and what
00:55:42.080
it was auschwitz i mean so so what i'm saying is that um ai is going to improve at a speed that's
00:55:50.720
going to challenge how these how these structures are i couldn't agree more and when that happens
00:55:56.720
there's going to be an opening there's going to be a power vacuum and we're not it's not going to be
00:56:01.840
very clear anymore who's in charge yes who has authority who can verify identity where can you keep
00:56:09.520
money is money secure yes all these basic questions of society and so what i'm suggesting is as a
00:56:15.920
species we increase our probability of surviving if we can rally around one thing that we can all agree
00:56:24.560
upon now that don't die if we disagree one layer above great i get it i totally get it but and i hate
00:56:32.000
to like reduce everything to the if you could kill baby hitler would you but it is sort of a question like
00:56:36.080
that because like you would not disagree if i said here's what we know we know that ai is likely to
00:56:43.200
spawn some improvements also certain to kill millions of people millions will die because
00:56:46.960
of this and there's any doubt about it the chaos alone right will cause that i'd bet my house on that
00:56:52.000
that's going to happen why let that happen want to just strangle this puppy in the crib like seriously
00:56:58.480
what why wouldn't you as a rich guy fund a bunch of saboteurs to blow up the data centers
00:57:02.800
and to take out the people pushing this crap and to try and end it go full unabomber like honestly
00:57:06.880
why couldn't you justify that it would be a question who what path do you think creates a higher
00:57:18.640
probability of survival do we think that technology or do we think we humans are a better path i mean for
00:57:27.760
example i look at my own self-destructive behaviors and not trusting myself do we really think that we
00:57:34.480
humans are trustworthy to chart a path where we survive ourselves i don't know i mean it's that's
00:57:41.920
it's of course hard to know potentially not for sure and i definitely don't trust myself as noted
00:57:46.960
but i have a soul and a machine doesn't and so that gives me kind of an advantage i would say a moral
00:57:51.840
advantage over the machine and therefore i'm a preferable father for example to my children
00:57:57.520
than my ipad would be yeah because i have a soul and the ipad doesn't and so but again just as a but
00:58:03.440
that's a theological distinction but as a practical matter like there's no way you can look into the
00:58:10.080
camera and say ai is not likely to kill millions of people because you know that it is the effect of
00:58:14.240
it will kill people for sure the displacement that you described the power vacuum you described the
00:58:18.720
chaos that you described correctly you're predicting that's all that's real in my view so millions will
00:58:24.000
die because of that so why wouldn't you just take your money and try to blow it up in the name of
00:58:31.680
saving millions i think the probabilities of our survival are higher with ai oh even though millions will die
00:58:42.080
uh i don't accept the premise you don't you really don't i really don't um uh you know like uh millions
00:58:50.080
are dying because of the food industry yeah millions are dying because of environmental toxins uh millions
00:58:56.240
are dying because uh it's certainly death is happening at a societal scale for a lot of things
00:59:03.200
that we humans are doing now sometimes it's not born of malice like we're just trying to improve i agree
00:59:07.200
i totally agree with everything you just yeah that's all true yeah but i think this is back to
00:59:11.440
your statement though tucker um so you actually think ai so i i think i've misread what you were
00:59:16.960
saying i thought you were saying this historically transformative thing is about to happen and we've
00:59:22.880
got to prepare ourselves for it and the implication would be that's a kind of bad and scary thing but
00:59:27.440
you're saying actually for all the displacement and suffering it's going to cause it's still better than
00:59:31.120
if we didn't have it exactly and i'm and i'm specifically i'm saying that when i listen to
00:59:36.560
what the world is saying so we're giving birth to the super intelligence what do we do the only
00:59:42.080
argument i've heard is universal basic income well that's that's just childish like that's it's not a
00:59:48.160
solution that we have that's the midwit solution that's the i'm running for president as the fake
00:59:52.480
smart tech guy maybe we should have ubi okay we have no plan we've given no thought i agree and we
00:59:59.440
don't even know we can't even uh fully comprehend how big of a problem this is and on what scale
01:00:04.880
and so what i'm trying to do is get out in front of this to say it's big it's serious and wait a
01:00:10.400
second you're contradicting yourself brian johnson you just said a minute ago you think it'll be an
01:00:15.360
improvement over what we currently have yes okay but then you're saying a sentence later that it's such
01:00:21.200
a huge problem that we need to like mobilize all forces to fix it it's a problem because it's going to
01:00:27.600
create chaos among humans yeah and humans in uncertain circumstances are very dangerous i
01:00:34.800
totally agree and so what i'm suggesting is if you are if we're trying to improve the likelihood that
01:00:40.960
we survive as a species that we do our children do their children do and i'm trying to say how do we
01:00:47.280
optimize that then yes but i still just want to go back to like why not save ourselves i mean there's
01:00:52.320
something sort of classically american or western or overfed too much money passive the society that
01:00:59.840
i live in and all of us live in we're just like well it's gonna happen it's like why doesn't somebody
01:01:05.280
stop it yeah why even go through all this drama these are just machines like let's go full luddite
01:01:12.000
and just take them out i'm serious and arrest these creepy people who are trying to impose this
01:01:17.120
dystopia on our yeah children so there's another way i understand what you're saying there's another
01:01:22.160
way to think about it though it doesn't include blowing up data centers and arresting these people
01:01:27.920
i mean okay so let's just say at what point in time have humans known all things so we walk back through
01:01:37.120
history and say what did humans know then um and what do we know now and there's been a track record of
01:01:44.880
we haven't known all things in fact we've known a very shallow set of things like even if you said
01:01:51.200
how big is reality a few hundred years ago you wouldn't be able to say oh there's a microscopic
01:01:56.240
world down to you know the nanoscale and beyond there's this big universe on this scale at this size
01:02:02.160
you you wouldn't say there's an electromagnetic world that's a trillion times bigger than what we can
01:02:07.040
see you wouldn't be able to say reality is like trillions of times bigger than what we experience
01:02:11.680
and so if you say what could our conscious experience be what could existence be
01:02:19.280
in a few decades it may be orders of magnitude larger than what we have now so i realize we come
01:02:25.680
at this now with this fear response we're saying we can pattern things that we've seen but going forward
01:02:32.160
we may be cavemen and have no idea what we're talking about
01:02:39.600
right i mean i think that's where we are now we don't have any idea what we're talking about we
01:02:44.320
can't anticipate the future we're limited in our foresight and our knowledge and particularly our
01:02:48.640
wisdom completely agree with all of that but the idea that harnessing the computing power of machines
01:02:56.720
will inform us to a greater degree ignores what just happened over the last 30 years where
01:03:01.040
everyone now has the encyclopedia britannica which as we used to call it in his pocket in the form of
01:03:06.080
an iphone where all human information is available and like people are way more ignorant than they were
01:03:09.680
30 years ago yeah and moreover the machine any machine we create will never be able to answer the
01:03:14.960
questions that actually matter like why is my wife mad at me or how that's not that no machine can ever
01:03:21.040
determine that and with certainty and or even explain like how does life begin so right well
01:03:27.920
i can ai answer can ai tell me why my wife is mad at me yes i mean you yeah come on you you give it
01:03:34.320
some time and you're going to get a readout of here's her hormone levels here's her biochemical state
01:03:39.920
this is her sleep score this is her diet here's her exercise protocol tucker given these variables
01:03:45.680
here's the best course of that that's the mechanistic answer that it create but but it
01:03:51.040
translates to tucker what would be nice is right words of encouragement and of softness and of
01:03:56.320
inquiring how how sure but again that's mecca i mean i guess i guess we're back to where we started
01:04:02.640
and i'll stop at this before i make reservations to come to your house for a broccoli dinner and
01:04:06.800
have five existential crises before the dessert there's no dessert right there's no dessert
01:04:10.880
uh i'll come anyway but anyway the point is this ignores an entire universe which may be the most
01:04:19.440
important universe which is the spiritual universe and every civilization that left any trace of itself
01:04:28.800
has believed in that universe but for the last 80 years we haven't and we're proceeding into the
01:04:33.600
future on the basis of no belief in that and it seems like you ignore like questions of right and wrong
01:04:39.040
of sin and virtue yeah of redemption like all those totally missing and that plays a role too it's
01:04:45.440
not just how much exercise did you get how many hours did you sleep what you eat feelings are not
01:04:50.880
just the result of biochemical processes they're the result of forces that yeah exist outside of us no
01:04:56.160
spiritual forces unseen forces i agree with you and this may be the most spectacular spiritual existence
01:05:03.600
in our history like this is absolutely like you and i have the same conscious experience of reality we may
01:05:09.440
have different ideas about reality but we experience it in a very similar way and what i'm suggesting is
01:05:14.720
the promise of this time and point is we may be on the cusp of the most spectacular existence in this
01:05:22.480
part of the galaxy we don't know that intelligent lives lives anywhere in the galaxy we can't find it
01:05:28.320
maybe it does maybe it doesn't we're the only life we can see and we're now giving birth to super
01:05:33.920
intelligence this moment may be the time to set aside our petty little things and say really it's us in
01:05:41.920
this moment and we get to experience a spiritual nature that is just mind-boggling this is our
01:05:47.600
moment well why is there any i'm so rooting for the future you describe i really am i just speaking
01:05:55.440
you said at the outset that you were no longer a believer because there's no evidence which i think
01:05:59.680
is a fair thing to say i just i disagree but i i respect your evidence-based standard okay um where's the
01:06:07.440
evidence that technology has ever brought people closer together has ever done anything but enable
01:06:14.320
people to be people which is to use it in part for good ends you know better food more food and evil
01:06:21.600
ends nuclear weapons yeah like i i just don't think that there's any evidence for what you're saying
01:06:27.440
yeah it's because humans have been playing the game die so it's not that technology has virtue or is
01:06:35.200
without virtue technology is neutral humans have used it for their purposes of war and power
01:06:42.720
acquisition and wealth what we've always been doing and that's what i'm suggesting that's what
01:06:48.000
we need to eliminate from society the causes of death and that includes warfare it includes fast food it
01:06:55.840
includes all the things we do to ourselves and to each other and the planet but until we can account
01:07:00.480
for why we do it to ourselves we're probably not going to change it but i think the most obvious
01:07:04.800
explanation is we're being acted on by demons who's and this is how every religion i'm aware
01:07:10.160
of has described it correctly in my opinion yeah acts on my demons whose goal is to destroy and kill
01:07:15.600
people and they're counterbalanced by god but if you don't agree with that then you need to substitute
01:07:22.640
another explanation in its place in order to proceed in the hope that we can change otherwise we're just in
01:07:28.720
this cycle with more powerful technology that allows us to do the same evil things but at a greater scale
01:07:34.320
i mean am i not a demon are you not a demon you don't you don't seem like one i'm my my demon
01:07:41.120
assessment abilities aren't great i mean like have have we correctly labeled ourselves angels or the
01:07:49.520
good guys and incorrectly labeled the demons the bad actors am i not the demon i i don't know i i guess
01:07:57.040
what i'm um i mean you know you know it's all in the definition but i guess the the core observation
01:08:03.280
remains the same which is people are subject to forces outside of themselves which are unseen
01:08:08.720
not all this is the product of sleep cycles or or carbon take or maybe it is i don't i don't see any
01:08:15.200
evidence of that because it's remained constant throughout all time that we're aware of this pattern
01:08:20.960
has never changed and it's existed in times when people are getting massive amounts of aerobic exercise
01:08:25.120
because they had to walk through the fields all day when they were eating no carbs and they were
01:08:29.120
hunter gatherers or whatever it's like it's always been true so like what's why what's your guess
01:08:37.760
well my certainty is that we are being acted on by spiritual forces that we cannot see
01:08:43.120
that there is a war going on all around us out of our sight not perceived by our senses most of the time
01:08:48.960
between good and evil yeah and and i'm that's hardly an original insight i'm with you so what you're
01:08:56.560
with me i'm with you what what i heard you say is there's more to reality than we can see yes there's
01:09:02.560
forces which we can identify and we should address those we're on the same page after the same thing
01:09:09.600
what are those forces yeah that's what i'm saying that's what we need to figure out that's the whole
01:09:13.600
objective of this endeavor is to identify what we cannot see and reconcile with and eliminate the
01:09:21.120
forces that deteriorate our life experience well in all this capacity spiritual physical all of it
01:09:31.680
we're saying the same thing after the same it's gonna take me a day to process that it does
01:09:37.440
brian johnson i will see you at dinner great thank you for that conversation i really appreciate it