28 - Network State Conference 2024 - Fireside with Bryan Johnson and Balaji

We. What did you say when we were first talking about like why haven't we been friends for like 20 years or something like that? Yeah, we met in December, that's almost a year ago. And we talked like 60 Minutes. And it was remarkable that we had arrived at the exact same conclusions about reality but from entirely different vantage points. We used different words, he had different constructs, different information sources, but we had arrived the animal observations. And what's funny is you started in financial technology with Braintree and then you got into or as you can call fintech. Right, that's what you call it, Fintech. At that time it was also called by that name. And then you got into bio and I actually started bioinformatics and genomics and statute, which is my original, original background. And then I got into crypto and my reason. I'd love to hear yours. I know what it is. But I saw what the free Hill Jerry state was when I was in five minutes and I'm like, oh, okay, that's actually an important problem. And it's not about developing new stem cells or having your skill back up. Real jersey and Bitcoin at one stroke essentially breaks our regulatory state because it's including biome and seller for everything. Now I'd like to hear why did you go backwards? Why did you go from finding the financial technology to buy? I did this thought experiment where I sold a gold bridge and sold was actually achievement of a goal at half 21 years old, which was build something, make a whole bunch of money. Very helpful in the world. And trying to figure out what to do. I did a sonic store where I imagined being present in the 25th. So a few hundred years into the future and there you are present and you're listening to them talk in whatever way intelligent exists at that moment. And they're saying it's amazing that we exist in such an extraordinary existence. Like we're so expanding all the stars of teeny images and you know, whatever they're saying. And they point back to the early 21st century and specifically this moment in the early 2000s. And they say we're so grateful that Homo sapiens, as privileged as they were, they did blank the loud intelligence of thriving from the galaxy. I really thought about that question non stop for years. What did they say? What did we do? That reminded us of the individual hybrid quote where talent is the ability to be the target no one can. Genius is the ability to target, no one can see. What is the genius move for us as a species? What can we do are we already doing that we just need to go faster? Or is there something we are not doing that we need to trans the world so that really infect many of our structural agreements? Basically. I think they say basically humans figured out that they were transitioning from death being evil to being able to extend their lifespans to somehow not that we solved immortality, but that was the moment where existence became the highest virtue. Yes. And I think, you know what's interesting about that is with AI we reduce everything that prompts prompt. It's like a direction in a very high dimensional space. You're like pointing this thing where it's going and it goes really fast in that direction. But are you asking to write cooking recipes? Are you asking to design a carburetor or whatever? Right. So what you're talking about is the direction setting, right. Which is actually very high dimensional. I mean even in three dimensions you can point all these different directions in K dimensions. Right. And that is not yet something that we know at all that's actually done what form? What would it look like if you. I had a few years history where I was trying to become the most bone diapers that I know in history. Like how do you try to measure every organ in my body, baseline biological age, and then apply the bedside. It's either slowing my state, debating it, or reverse aging the others that haven't. And I spent three years doing this, millions of dollars with all these different doctors trying to piece this all together. We thought wouldn't it be cool this entire thing built into a little city. People arrive and the measurements are done, the food shows up, it's non toxic, you have water which is very clean, you have the lab reports in real time. So we're trying to think through what does it look like for somebody to walk in and it just be a ton of self help that's just automated. Which every year truth is fairly decentralized, right. Because Newton and Leibniz can go to stubborn calculus, because there's some truth out in the world and you're discovering it. And so usually if two people, three people, five people have come to the same conclusion, like in math, for example, wherever you can calculate the same quantity two very different ways, it's often like some fundamental theorem, there's some shape or object that's underlying that. Right. With health monitoring stuff, the way to do how I came as a, you start with one scaled out, I started in the other direction. The reason I got out of academia in part was that if you have, let's say a Million dollars for a grant and every genome at the time, I mean now say it's like a thousand plus $1,000, but the genome is $1,000. Then you can seal it's thousands before you run out of money. But if you made even $50 profit, you can see the civilian. And so I wanted actually margin in order to explain how do you feel? This is plenty of good things going on through them. I think all of you know that if you want to be healthy, it's really hard. You have to chase down everything individually. You have to find a food clean source. Food source clean a food source, they clean a water source. You have to test things. You have to know which supplement to take. You have to know are they clean or not. Do they have things the ingredients they say to do. You have to find a doctor, you have to know if the doctor's accurate. To do at the end of 20 equals one game is so hard. And so it really is so obvious that we feel as a society that you just like do exist in systems that have all these economy on scale, the house and dishonor that just makes, you know, magic. You just exist and you get all the benefits. You don't have to think about it. It's funny because, you know, I've actually often thought of this as similar to the running water problem. Like it's easier to eat unhealthy than to eat healthy. Because unhealthy food, cookies, snacks, etc. It actually preserves on your shelf, right? So to actually eat healthy is a supply chain problem where you buy fresh produce and if you go to the store, that's a tax on your time and energy. And then it comes back and it goes stale in a few days. Right? If you're working hard, that's actually exceedingly more of a tax on your time. Those hidden taxes are time to be healthy and often it also costs more. Right? So you want to almost think like the running water problem was trying to tap and get clean water on demand, right? You want it to be like, okay, get fresh energies on demand. That's actually like a last mile digital problem that we haven't even articulated. Now we can start solving everything of it as a problem. Go down a little further than you. We just created a Don't Die app. So you get a daily Don't Die score and it's basically hacking. So basically you get a score every day. Because science begins with counting and human gameplay begins with counting whenever there's numbers and there's competition. Humans do very well in that Kind of environment. So the gender dump dashboard based upon a few simple variables like C sleep, exercise and activity throughout the day. We could add more variables including blood. And how about imaging from MRI and mycoplastics and other variables. Tell her about all this stuff. Like what's just a whole battery of all the measurements. You were actually going through all those papers now today in AI you could probably parse them like at 100x and speed, you know, amazing engines that'll just work through the literature. But you know, how are you. What were you doing your systematic review or literature. What were you doing there? What did you pick? It's actually surprising how much the world's changed in four years. Just from the metaphor of the world of how laborious it was. We talked through every single scientific publication ever done on how spent life's been. We had to go through and look at the FDD's text sizing, how long did it extend lives. And then we had to look at the evidence to say do we believe this evidence? Why do we create young and simple? And so yeah, it's funny if Aristotle said actually succeeded in this project. Actually inside of kind of has right side's amazing site, but really amazing. It should be legal. It should, you know, it should win. That's where you can get three academic papers. You have to be a fugitive justice for this. But think about the enormous benefit of all those papers who are actually public and be used for an AI on all of them. Like we're literally talking about trillions of dollars in health benefits because a few people are making a few billion dollars off the publishing racket. Right? Anyway, people are sorry. That they want to this parallel to where they ingest data. And so they're always looking for a proprietary source of information that gives them some unique advantage in the market by using arbitrage information. And if we were to know the body. Basically I'm a collection of 35 trillion cells. I have all these metabolic reactions every day. I have all these interactions with food and environment. So we're basically trying to run a high frequency train system inside the body. Like taking arbitrage, slowing those speed of aging to do arbitrage reversing agent damage. And so you can imagine a world where it has these paper gets so good to give us a starting point. The measurement improves where you have not only just blood, but you have much more granular with the mri you have microplastics and everything else. So you need proprietary data sources that you have this closed loop system where you get increasingly Better and better. So as regulate improves, as data improves, as the algorithms improve, you can see that we can get down to like a protein misfolded in the body to a very granular degree. I suspect that that's what our bodies will look like in the coming years. It's these computational systems where the health conversions are happening on our behalf. So this version we're doing in network schools take a very basic approach of how do you make everything just easy, such as batching the gory water, but then also there's much more advanced things of how do you take it to the next level? So, for example, my speed of aging is 0.64, which means roughly that my birthday is every 19 months. The only thing about this is, I'm sure you've got is to optimize a metric. Does it just correlate with the actual underlying thing? Pretty much what we see all the time is CO2 counters around. Possibly, yeah. So you can take some good health networkers like around cardiovascular health and cholesterol, et cetera. But yeah, it certainly could happen. You know, this is. I'm so speaking avatar here, but organoids can be interesting. You can take a cell culture yourself, right? Basically grow it and then you can race mini brine clones, like little pieces of. You know, it's amazing, by the way, how subculture organoids can tell about you as human, right? Like you would sometimes bring allergies and stuff like that. So that's a way of sort of cloning yourself and submitting yourself to a variety of different. This is a big. It reminds me of. Recently I published a GSI leaderboard where we started the basics that one cigarette costs a little bit of price. So I was doing some math just to back that up on math. Roughly one, a fast food bill also cost $1,000. So burger, shake and fries. And it backfired on me because people are like, that's actually a cost savings because to cook broccoli lentils is like 30 minutes. So I'm sitting in my stomach. This is a good deal. I'm putting in a few bubbles. If we have organized, we're not going to be able to society. We'll get into boxer society. What does it matter if I ruin my kidney? I've got a dual entire waiting for me. I have two votes for that. First is there's an interesting, albeit dystopian movie called I think in Time where it's exactly that. Where your time is your money and you spend your life to buy things. The thing is, it actually is There is a mapping error because you trade hours of work for currency and so it loses their life savings. They've lost some portion of their healthy awake hours in accumulating that pile. Which is why, you know, this is actually another thing we talked about in the following, which was the crypto community will be one of your biggest supporters because that was just not in your radar, if I'm not mistaken. Right. Like a year ago. And now I think that thesis can be validated. I agree. Yes. So and my argument, and I think it was worth trying to experiment and see is. Well, there's two arguments. The first is Bitcoin is about stopping the state from slowly draining your wealth. And don't die is about stopping the state from slowly draining your health. Right. And they're actually very parallel because in the legacy system it assumes a basic rate of 2% inflation. Like yeah, high ear inflation is bad, but actually also deflation is bad. So a little bit of small betas who lost, well, careers could have. And this current system, medical system says we have sudden death is bad, but trying to live forever, that's weird. So you change some time a little bit every year. Right. And so it's really the same logic as the Fed. Right. The Fed is, you know, and they want you dead, you know, just a little bit every year. Right. And so we resist that and we stand against that. Yeah. I think there's like this, if we are all psychologically honest, I think we maybe have an addiction to dying. When death is inevitable, we go our way into existence. So it's like the reaction to don't die is like you're squeezing, trying to deny you don't live life. So we go up these clever arguments on wanting to defend debaucherous behavior, things that actually accelerate and have. And we don't have a clear mind, it's blurry, we can't see it. But I think if you take vantage point maybe 20, 30, 2040, at some near term time frame, we look back at this time of day to just be aghast. We can't believe we actually accepted bad dice or that we would run or some dragon, or that we would drink or smoke or do anything, or that as a society we would not have our water particularly clean and, and the food supply wouldn't be vetted. I think it's very, very, very rare that would be the case that we'll flip and just be like an absolute different reality and look at this moment and we'll view ourselves very primitive back in the days when we Were doing this slow foil suicide. Yeah. I think, I mean, Spoony, because for the vast majority of human existence can fly and we could fly 100 and some years ago. That's being the best analogy for couldn't do it, couldn't do it, couldn't do it. Then it just works. And it's like an eye blink in human history. Right. And it's because, hey, we discovered scientific principles. You get left. I think you understand what I understand what we're understanding. The numbers rule is getting to your genetic limits and then surpassing them. So first get to your genetic limits, whatever those are, and then with all the metrics and so on, push one step further. But we're not even close to that at that level right now. I love experiments. You can probably tell one thing that they get really excited about is imagining the presence of a Homo erectus several years ago. So they've got an axe in their hand and you want to ask them something. They know if you don't. You say where's food and where's water and where's shelter? They want to know those three things give you a robust answer. But then you say, can you please tell me about the future of existence? What do we evolve into? What is the potential? And it's obviously impossible for all artists to articulate that. One day you'd hold a little wine pill in your head and swallow it and it would solve an infection. Where you have this magic box where you talk to the world with the idea of computation. And so in this moment, as we're building AI and some trajectory, I do wonder is it basically the managing box? You can talk to anybody in the world that has no wires. It's actually insane. What powers that you can see the system. You can talk to someone in South America, you can talk to someone in Japan. You can have on a conference call and be mad that it's got some rag and you know, it's magic box. It's not so magic. You know, the question does it make? It will with AI is growing very quickly, faster than we comprehend. And so this question of is our intelligence relative to what we're giving birth to? An AI make us basically equal to home? Or that we are so primitive it's laughable that we would imagine say anything intelligent about the future. So the genetic potential that we can even begin to imagine what we're capable of as an intelligent being, we may know nothing. And so we may be undervaluing the potential of conscious existence by a thousand or a million fold. We just don't know, GCL or sort of under misrepresented like actually the talk I gave at best comment the other day. Actually it probably made similar arguments independently before, but probably one of the biggest ones you get. I'll give my answer, but here I'd like to hear yours, which is, oh, this is so unnatural. Oh my God, what are you doing? You just need to die slowly. Which doesn't sound that appetizing when you think about it. Like you first. But what is your counterargument to that? I'll give some thoughts. When you read history, you realize that 99.9% of any given population, any time period was oblivious to the future. The future is always present. The future is here, right now. The question is, can we discern that it exists like we see it? And so I come back to. Or probably just oblivious to what that is. So I come back very strongly that I just don't know. That's the most intelligently I can possibly say. Okay, so maybe, I don't know, some issues are a good cop and a bad cop. I don't like to be a bad cop, but I like it less than other people don't. So my view would basically be for someone who's saying that, oh my God again, since human nature, I would say that human nature is technology. That's the same. Which is why don't we have claws and tangs? Well, we put that into spears. Evolution put that into spears and stone tools. Why don't we have fur? Well, evolution gives us our brain and we can use that to get clothes. And actually more subtly why don't we have the same anopheny digested enzymes that other animals do. This is a book by Richard Rango about cooking and semen which makes the case that we actually outsource that to fire. And fire was our metabolism. And so each of these things what it does is it frees up more scarce resources for the inception pollution for humans to get smarter. The whole concept of putting everything into software has been going on for millennia. Rather than doing it in hardware with fangs, rather than doing it in hardware with fur or rather doing it in hardware with digestive events that we put into software. And so everything we're doing is exactly the same how ages the software have less. And so AI is just the next step in that in this long ascent from nothing to Homo erectus to home tickets, whatever it will become. I mean obviously to me the most anti human thing you could do is arrest that. That's our tradition is innovation. I agree. It's good. Well said. Cheers. We need to have actually new rituals. You talk about this like going to sleep on time. It sounds much. The issue is that early bedtime is simply not the culture and the number of different things in the two rewires have like early bedtime, early rise, like speak a secret or something like that. I wonder if you put some thought into that. Yeah. So I think. I think it'll tell me bit later is the right answer to that. So if you guys are around, see all the way through there'll be some good talks at the end of the ad. I'm going to share with you guys a few sleep tips. My credentials here. I. I achieved the best sleep score in human history. Eight months of perfect sleep. I'm like World Olympia, I'm a gold medalist. I'm the only person competing still low. So yeah, I'm going to talk about. I'm going to try to go through a commitment pattern with you that you are going to agree to adopt a new psychology about sleep. Because as a society we've been taught really bad lessons about sleep and our culture reinforces it and it almost makes any sleep a source of shame or pride. And so we're going to go over those things up here around work on this and I hope you all can point today believing that sleep is the single highest value thing you can do as a human. What we could do is we could have some sort of sleep tracker competition. I think that's a great idea. We should all have a competition. Yes. You have an app which that's all. It's all about the app. Yeah, we have an app. Don't die. All you guys are cheering. Currency. So you can actually numerically assigned activities in life and diaspora. So if you sit outside and drink and I'm going to stomach sleep then you actually can numerically define what does that cost you in life. Of course there's following effects such experimental clarity, how you fill that state in the form. There's only long code effects but just the concept. You can assign a numerical framework to these activities, change the capital reference and use this. They now come and they see the world in this lens. They can do something with algorithms around the calculation brain will and they want to do this. So you're kind of chain ones and give plot systems competent early competitions as well. Of course one of the things I actually want to do on this is more personal genomics. So we were Talking about the P1 is exercise, sleep, diet, all these things. Right. And the V2 which was also I Built a clinical lab at our first startup. And you actually built one yourself. The mechanic one. And one of my views, I don't know if it's true, is that you said there's caffeine, non metabolizers or people who lack alcohol dehydrogenase or not lack but lexer variants of people who metabolize lactose poorly. I have sick allergic off the stage the other day at Google. I'm sure that there's continued people who are poor sleepers, deep sleepers and everything in between. Right. So it'd be interesting to look at that and then look at the genetic privilege or lack thereof on the sleep score as progression. Right. And then you'd see if someone start punching above their weight or below their weight or whatever age. You know it's funny by the way, on this topic, you know the reason why people don't have billion personal genomes, why the FDA? It's literally that right. In 2010 we were actually on the verge of getting consumer genomics and it was about to go vertical and then so called DTC directly the tumor cells was kind of off. So you couldn't just get it through a website. They choke pointed the entire thing through the medical system instead of saying you can't look in the mirror unless you talk to a doctor. It's literally like that. You can't look in the genetic mirror, you can't germinate your own a CGT's. And that's just done such an enormous canvas to health because it's like you don't know your own operating system. It's amazing that we don't have that because it's actually quite cheap. Right. So it's one of the things I want to routineize one of the ways of doing it by the way, I have to look at the very latest regulatory hacks or whatever on this. But you can have a company sell you the raw sequence they have, but they can also sell you the packaged interpretation. You have to assemble it at home where you get the raw data and then you run open source interpretation software on it and you put the two together and you get something right. So that's what it was thinking but now with open source we can do that. You can have a community of people that do that. And I think. Why do I think that's helpful? I think it's helpful to have a sense of all of one strengths and handicaps and so on and so forth and then try to accommodate your environment to those strengths and you okay, we're over.