Fireside Chat: A Plan for Humanity with Bryan Johnson

Good morning, everyone. My name is Star Marcelo. I'm the Executive Director of the Polsky center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago and adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Chicago. Booth and I have the honor of introducing our next speaker, Brian Johnson. I often tell people I have the privilege of having the best job at the University of Chicago. And. And that's because routinely, every day, I get to see the world not as it is, but as it could be. A normal day at the Polsky center involves working with scientists, MBAs, undergrads, community members, all of whom are tackling some of the world's biggest problems and biggest opportunities. This past week, for example, I was in Hong Kong opening up our new building and working with a bioengineer who's using robotics to help stroke victims. I was also working with a group of young programmers using virtual reality to help children with special needs. And this is a typical week for me. Eleven years ago, this privileged job connected me to an incredibly talented and special person, Brian Johnson, Then an MBA student at Booth. Brian was working on Braintree, a company he later sold to PayPal for $800 million. If you want to get to know Brian, you should read his 5,000 word plan for humanity. While the rest of us may be thinking about what's coming next in our day, piles of laundry at home, what we're going to make for dinner, that stressful meeting we have coming up next week, Brian is thinking about something more existential. The future of the collective human race, perhaps. That sounds grandiose if you consider, however, the cognitive biases we have, our behaviors towards one another, everything you read in the news, the advancement of AI and robotics. I think we're all happy that someone like Brian is challenging and encouraging us to think bigger about our future in a way that will impact our kids, our grandkids and future generations. So how is Brian doing all this? In 2016, he announced he was investing $100 million into his new company, Kernel, to build advanced neural interfaces to treat disease and dysfunction, illuminate the mechanisms of intelligence, and extend cognition. Kernel is on a mission to dramatically increase our quality of life as healthy lifespan extends. He believes the future of humanity will be defined by the combination of human and artificial intelligence. In. In 2014, Brian invested $100 million to launch OS Fund, a VC fund that invests in entrepreneurs and companies developing breakthrough discoveries in deep tech, the intersection of science and technology to address our most pressing global issues. After a very successful OS Fund 1 in August, Brian actually launched OS Fund 2 and is raising $250 million for that fund. According to PitchBook, OS Fund's investments are among the top 10 in the US in fund performance. OS Fund is the next generation of impact investing, supporting and delivering on revolutionary innovations that profoundly impact the operating system of life. OS Fund invests in entrepreneurs using applied intelligence to commercialize breakthrough discoveries in genomics, synthetic biology, diagnostics, new materials, data and energy and creates market ready solutions to the growing threats we face in public health, natural resources and global infrastructure. Of course, prior to Colonel Nos Fund, Brian founded braintree, which I got to know through a program. Hopefully some of you have been through the new Venture Challenge run by the Polsky center. That was back in 2007. In 2013, as I mentioned, it was sold to PayPal for $800 million. Brian's an incredible person. I'm very, very happy that you all have the opportunity to hear from him today. I think you will enjoy hearing some of his ideas and seeing his vision for the future as much as I have. In addition to all of this, Brian does have some free time where he does some fun things. He's a pilot actually, and also the author of a best selling children's book, which my own children can attest to. So Brian will do a brief Q and A after his talk. I don't know how much time we'll have for that, so think of your questions along the way. As I think some of you know you can text questions to Chicago booth at 22333 so please write that down because it will not be up here afterwards. 22333. Text your questions for Brian's talk and with that I would like to welcome Brian up to the stage. Thank you very much.

Good morning everyone. Starr, thank you so much. Starr is one of my favorite people in the whole world, was with me when this journey started today I guess. Thank you Booth for having me. I'm really grateful to be here today. I want to share the journey I've been through over the past five years and in doing so I'm going to present a lot of information and a lot of concepts that may be foreign to you and to me. They've been non obvious conclusions in what I started. And really where this started was when I came back from Ecuador. I served a two year mission for the Mormon Church in Ecuador and lived among extreme poverty for two years and I came back to the United States at the age of 21 with basically looking forward, looking at life, wondering what am I going to do with myself. And fresh off this experience after living among Extreme poverty of these people. The only thing that mattered to me was trying to do something that would benefit people's lives. I saw them in this situation where they had the smallest of things would derail their lives. The things they couldn't address a medical problem would make it life just so miserable. And so at the age of 21, I asked the question, what one thing could I do that would maximally help the most number of people? And I looked around the options I had and I couldn't really find anything that was interesting. And so I thought, okay, then I'll just become an entrepreneur, I'll make a whole bunch of money by the age of 30 and then, well, with that money I'll go out and do something useful for the world. And on my 21 year old mind, that made sense that I could just do that. So over the next 14 years, fortunately that happened when I sold Braintree, but not without going through a level of hell that is indescribable. I became chronically depressed for 10 years and just literally wanted to cease to exist. It was an absolute, un, unbearable existence. And on the heels of that, I sold Braintree. I ended a 13 year marriage, had to rearcheck myself as identity with three children. I left my church that I was born into and reconstructed myself from scratch and basically answered questions like, why do I exist? Is there anything out there? What's this whole thing about? And so today's talk is basically this re architecture process. What I've concluded would be useful and I guess the relevant thing walking into this would be the question at 21 was how I could be useful. And the question at 35 posed this thing was what can I do that maximally increases the probability the human race thrives? Because it is not clear to me that we are on a path to thriving as a species. So with that said, we'll start with deep tech platforms. One of the biggest things going on in the world right now is climate change. And wherever you're at on the spectrum of thinking this is real or not real or kind of real, it's a thing that if we get wrong, the consequences could be extremely severe. The second, third, fourth and fifth order runaway consequences of the situation could put us in a very, very bad spot as a species. And so typically when we see headlines like this, we all, I guess everyone has a different reaction to what they can do. And a lot of people's brains typically go to, well, politicians are the answer. They're the ones that manage societal problems and they're the ones that need to make policy, to make things greener and to allocate resources of property. I think politicians are not the answer in this country or globally. I do not think we can rely upon our political system to solve this problem. The second thing we each do is we think of the things that are most familiar to us. Like we contemplate wind and solar and electric cars. Those in themselves are helpful things, but totally inadequate to address the solution on the scale and time frame we need. So they are not the answer. And then we're left to contemplate, what else can we do? How could we possibly create a solution that would be scalable on the time frames that we need? That's what I want to talk about. So in this picture, I'd like to get some responses. What do you think the most advanced technology in this picture is? Anyone? The plant. That's right. So a lot of people of course are biased in thinking the MacBook Pro or the camera is the most advanced thing. But the plant is a biodegradable, carbon capturing, self replicating, solar powered work of art. Our technology does not even stand, not even close to that. But yet most of our thinking goes to these things because they're familiar and we can see it. But the beauty of this plant sits beyond the resolution of our eyes. We can't see the inner workings of the cellular structures, therefore we don't place a value on it like we do our technology. That's a big problem. So we as a species, the first idea is if we're going to go big, we need to go small, which means we need to pay attention to things that we cannot see. That is a very big problem for us because we prioritize that which we can see. The second problem I'm going to talk about in addition to deep tech today is the brain. And this to me was a non obvious observation. After selling Braintree and having the resources to do anything I want, well, most anything I wanted, I talked to hundreds of people and read voraciously and I asked people like, what are you working on and why are you working on that given thing? And I was doing so to back into their assumption stack. If I choose X, Y or Z, the following is going to happen. And the blind spot that I perceived that existed was that everybody was working on problems downstream from the brain. We don't have a climate change problem, we have a human brain problem. It is our brains, individually and collectively, which creates this problem and creates the problem we have in the world. How we build AI is an output of Our minds, how we create economic systems is an output of our minds. Our political system is an output of our minds. But no one thinks about the mind as the core operating system that runs everything else. And so my down on that was, what if we could build tools that enable us to go to this core system that drives everything else? So currently there are no tools to do it. You can get into an FMRI machine and get a scan of your brain, that's great, but it's big and costly and inaccessible. You can do eeg, which is not really useful in understanding what's in your brain. So the brain is a black box. It is inaccessible. So we can count our steps, we can measure our calories, we can quantify our sleep, but we have no clue what's going on inside of our brains. We cannot quantify it. And so the distance between this right now or right now and the next breakthroughs in the brain are very big. And So I invested $100 million to try to make the technological breakthroughs that would make this possible. And so the point of these two things is, had I not sold Braintree and made money myself, neither one of these endeavors would be possible. There's no way an investor would have given me money for either one of the endeavors. Yet I would put forward today that these are the solutions we need at the right level. Politics is not the answer, changing human behavior is not the answer, and focusing on downstream problems is not the answer. So I'll walk you through today. The rest of this talk is going to be about what these companies are actually doing. So when I first started OS Fund and I started talking about this problem of basically our ability to systematically engineer atoms, molecules, organisms and complex systems, basically everything that determine what we have in existence. This reporter who wrote this article in Fortune called it crazy and insane. But in reality, when most people think about science investments, that's the bias they have. They think of a decade long endeavor, billions of dollars of investment. It's probably riding a hype cycle and it's probably a binary outcome, but the reality is much different. So over the past five years, we've made 28 investments, 27 of which received follow on funding. Four valued over a billion, another one on its way. And three have been acquired, four have been acquired. And while these are still paper returns, the companies, the point is the companies are doing well, they're making money, they're in market with technology that actually works. So this is not a pipe dream. So what is deep tech? And how can we explain it more in a Granular fashion. First of all, to give some focus on this, that first category is software Internet. You can see how much venture capital is allocated towards this as let's just say that is a graph that represents attention on what people want to invest in. If you look at the second category, scooters and bikes 3.7 billion last year, grocery mills and kits, 3.5 billion. Synthetic biology 1.9 and then E cigarettes 1 billion. Synthetic biology is the ability to engineer the substrate that makes us. So you're biology, I'm biology. We live in a big ball of biology floating in space and we have no ability to actually work with this stuff. And that's how much attention we're allocating towards that right now. Our UOS fund was the single largest investor in synthetic bio last year. In terms of number of companies. That's a problem. So why, why is there we have that problem. One is that if you look, for example, the 400 top people on the Forbes list, 5% of those people have formal scientific training. So it makes sense that this group of people, or people with wealth, or manage wealth, would invest in things they're familiar with. Finance, education, transportation, real estate, the things where they made their money and they would not go to things they're not familiar with, which is like deep tech. So we have a big problem. There are of course people in the world who do have a lot of money and are trying to save the world or some small subset in it. For example, Bezos is trying to get people in space through tourism and also trying to build low earth orbit manufacturing to make Earth a light industrial zone. Elon Musk is trying to get people to Mars so we can get off this planet. The problem with those solutions is it doesn't really address the problems we have on Earth for the rest of us on the timescales that matter. So there's two quiet revolutions going on in the world that are very significant. The ability to read and write DNA. Everyone knows Moore's Law, which has been driving transistors in computation. Biology, the ability to read DNA has far exceeded Moore's Law. Gone from a billion dollars down to $1,000 in 16, going lower now. So, so our ability to read it and then to write biology, to actually create something. You can see the cross curve is not as dramatic, but it's starting to come down. Those are the read and write tools we need to engineer at this level. And so the key what's been going on, and this is why it's so unique when people think of science and they have their biases, billion dollars, decade long cycle, binary outcome. They come with that bias because that's what it's kind of been in the past. What's changed is the tools that scientists, entrepreneurs have to work with computation. So I'll give you some examples of what this does and how this could solve planetary health. First, Arzita. So the protein in a plant that's responsible for photosynthesis is 50% efficient because it evolved 2 billion years ago when we were in an oxygen starved environment. But the protein, these nanomachines that basically run all the functions of living cells are the workhorses of existence. We basically up to date have only been able to work with existing proteins in nature. We find proteins, we see what the structure is, what it can do, but we haven't been able to design a protein to spec. If we say we want a protein in a plant but is 100% efficient, we haven't been able to do it. We haven't had the computational power to include all the complexity of the amino acids and the folding structures. They're very complex. Arzita is the world leader in designing proteins. They're here in Seattle. We led their series A last year. The ability to choose a protein and design it changes everything for everything because everything runs on proteins. You could apply it to, to. They're currently working with BP in designing self fertilizing plants. So you'd eliminate. Normally in the crop process, you plant the crops, you have to apply the nitrogen fertilizer which runs off, creates environmental damage. It's very expensive. So you could eliminate that. So the plant can do this operation itself. They're doing things like they're building a sweetener like Tagatose so you can redesign foods. But the idea is if you go back to this previous slide, you if Arzita could get the cost of a protein down to a dollar, which is what they're focused on, it changes everything. In terms of our ability to redesign anything in existence, we have to crush that cost curve. And that's what Arzita is trying to do computationally. Another example we have of company we invested in five years ago, Ginkgo Bioworks is the ability to engineer organisms. So for example, In a Chanel no. 5 bottle of perfume, there are a thousand rose petals as an input of raw material. So you have to grow the roses in the field, they have to output, they have to take the rose petals, press it, get the rose oil out and put it in. That's expensive environmentally. To do that they designed, they Took the DNA from the rose plant, put it in an engineer organism, yeast, and designed that yeast to manufacture rose oil. So now you eliminate the process of having to plant the plants, fertilize it, harvest it, use the agriculture that land for doing that. They can do this with jet fuel, they can do this with flavors, they can do this with anything. You can design these microorganisms to do what you want. And the more sophisticated we get, the more predictably we can do it. So now you can imagine in a scenario where we have this major problem of climate change and no one's going to change their behavior, we want to buy our cell phones, we want to drive cars and all that kind of stuff, you can now look to the designing of these organisms to do things that we otherwise can't. It's very expensive. Another example, new mat. So we invested in Ginkgo Bioworks five years ago. They've been a breakout success. They've raised over $400 million now and are the leader in synthetic biology right now. Numat, they are the first company in the world to commercialize what's called a metal organic framework, which is basically playing Legos with atoms. So you take atoms atom by atom and you assemble these molecular structures to do things that you otherwise couldn't do. So, for example, they can design a molecular structure to store gas at 80 times the density that you can today using the same form factor, same canister, same trucks, same systems. They just got a $9 million award from the army yesterday to design new filtration systems for people who are in combat zones that have chemical warfare exposure. Currently, the filtration systems to collect oncoming molecules limit what you can collect, and therefore, people are at risk of this chemical warfare. Basically, it's like a big sponge. They can collect different forms of chemicals that just have not been able to because of this technology. And lastly, one of the offshoots of the technology they created is they now have this filtration system that can collect the most toxic carbon emissions that come off. And they're so small, we've never been able to develop a filtration system that small to collect them. Now we do, but by doing this, they actually been able to accelerate the commercialization because computationally, they can simulate what molecular structures will do and then take those to market. And so if you go back and think back to the original graph I showed you on funding last year, we led, we invested seven, almost $8 million in their series A and B. 10 million, I'm sorry, in their A and B they are the only company in the world doing this and put that in comparison to what we're putting into software, e cigarettes and scooters. You can see the problem, right? Like we need to be able to systematically program molecules. Like we live in a world made of molecules. And so that's an example of something coming online that could be hugely revolutionary for us and change everything. Lygos, which is trying to use everything, of course, you know, most everything we have is an input, requires an input of petrochemicals. They are trying to eliminate petrochemicals as an input by using corn. So let's eliminate oil from our ecosystem. Let's go to other things that are greener and more helpful. A couple other solutions. Ohms ubiome 5 years ago, nobody knew what the microbiome was. We didn't know that basically we are made of 60 trillion cells, 30 trillion human cells, 30 trillion bacterial cells. So we literally half not us, and we had no idea what the other half was. And so to be able to take a sample of our microbiome and realize what is going on in the gut and how that's connected to brain health, body health, everything around us, they basically invented the category of the microbiome. They now have the largest data set in the world where you can take a sample, you can see what's going on in your microbiome and you can take immediate action in the diet or whatever else you have. They also have a test, the vaginal swab, where they can detect 19 strains of HPV and a new form of STD which you currently can't detect through other mechanisms. The idea that we could do this rapid detection system so soon you can imagine outside the skills where at home in the toilet is rapid sequence of your microbiome every day, so you're alerted instantaneously to pathogens and other problems or adjustments to your diet. But they're bringing the operating system of detecting what is going on in the body in real time that's necessary for global health and understanding what's going on at dialysis. They're trying to do rapid real time DNA testing of disease and sickness. So you can do the test, you can discover if you have the flu and if you do what type of. And so basically allows us to create the infrastructure to be responsive to flu season, to pandemics. It's a real time getting closer to a real time global immune system where we can immediately diagnose what's going on with ourselves. Kernel, I'll come back to this in a minute. This is the brain company actually. And then emulate. One of the bigger problems in terms of understanding what is going on in the human body is doing clinical work on humans is really expensive. We're throttled by ethics and morals and just doing things appropriately with people's sickness. Emulate gets around that in that they can basically replicate the human system organs on a chip. So if you want to test out a new drug, you can do so much faster than you otherwise could working with actually a human catalog. So it takes 70 billion kilowatts to run the Internet. It's extremely expensive. And to store all that data is one of the biggest burdens we have. I think it's projected something like in 2040, 15% of our CO2 output would be basically managing, storing the data and outputting the stuff catalog can store. I was working on a technology to store information in DNA so they in a cube of sugar size block could store all the information output of 2018 into that sugar cube in DNA. It is fantastically dense. It can be a good durable way to do it. You can basically keep this in place for a million years versus our hard drives which are good for a year or two or three before something's replacing. And so with the amount of data we're producing and at the rate we're doing it and the amount of energy it consumes, we have to go to a medium that is DNA like and of course that's nature's storage system, which has been phenomenally useful. So back on kernels. So I guess the idea behind this deep tech, as you can see, is the observation is we are not looking in the right places to solve the problems we have. Climate change is not something that politicians are going to solve. It's not something that we're going to change our behavior to solve. The answer is in deep tech, it's the ability to engineer atoms, molecules, organisms and complex systems that is the only way we can succeed on kernel. The thought process back to what I was saying is that the fact that everything is downstream from our mind and we don't have the tools. Let me give you some examples of where I think this could actually be applicable. So this is A chart of 188 chronicled human biases. And to me this is like one of the most beautiful things in existence. So we have this supercomputer in our school that weighs three pounds and runs on 20 watts and it can run on a teaspoon of sugar. It's unbelievable. But in order to have that supercomputer in our brain, it has all these Design constraints, these 188 biases, they're tricks our brains play in order for us to operate in a complex world. So let's take one we're familiar with, like confirmation bias. We are all predisposed to to gravitate towards information which confirms what we think. Already it is uncomfortable for us to encounter information that we disagree with and therefore that constrains how wise we are. Now multiply that by 188 different things. Our memory is distorted, we have all these problems. So basically our cognition is a little bit of a disaster. And the meta awareness to know that our cognition is a disaster is a level of enlightenment that I think very few in society have. And even those who have this meta awareness, the cognition disaster, can't control it. Daniel Kanahan, who wrote that book thinking fast and Slow, spending a life on this, still could not correct for his biases after spending his entire life doing it. And so if we had technology to read out your neural output initially at kernel, we started with an implantable chip. We have shifted now to doing non invasive technologies. So imagine you had something on your head that was reading out your neural data that could allow you to correct for these biases. That's what I think would create the cognitive gold rush that you would be so much better at life if you didn't have these cognitive dysfunctions. The judgment you could exercise would make you so much better. You could see things counterintuitively, you could understand where you're trapped in your own thinking. You could be more open minded, but it creates this closed loop recursive improvement in humans. I think as soon as the tools get to that threshold, a new frontier of human cognition is going to open up. One more thought on this, which is a bit out there, and I'll just briefly touch on it. If we basically say that there's been a few revolutions throughout history that have changed our fundamental reality. The Copernican revolution was an example where the Earth was not the center of the universe. The sun was that changed reality. The Earth is round and not flat. That changed reality. Time and space is relative, not absolute, changed reality. We have these microscopes where this invisible world beyond our resolution of the eyes exists. That's a change in reality. If you say, is there a Copernican revolution on the horizon? Could it be possible that our reality is just going to be fundamentally rewritten? I think a candidate for that is our actual cognition. And the theory is AI is going to get increasingly better at the things we are good at. AI is going to make better decisions than we can ourselves because it has access to large data algorithmically, she's going to do a better job. It also is going to be better knowledge accumulation and knowledge mastery. So AI is going to creep into the worlds where we are really great. That's going to force people for the future of work, the future of media making, the future of purpose to go somewhere else. We need to find a place that we're good at something that we really excel. It's possible we find our future in the exact opposite of what we do today, in nonlinear non rational, non knowledge accumulation. And there's hints of this thing. People who have psychedelic like experiences with entheogens like ayahuasca or 5 MeO or DMT or psilocybin experience something where the identity diffuses and they have these kind of experiences. We know this has happened before with Homo erectus. Homo erectus was 2 million years ago, had no ability for language, no abstract concepts. Imagine trying to explain to Homo erectus the stock market. It would be impossible. You'd have to explain money, the market, technology, it wouldn't be possible. But yet Homo erectus, we evolved from it. So the hypothesis is our future of cognition. This Copernican like revolution could change our reality in ways that would make this version unrecognizable. And it could happen in a matter of decades if we have the tools to actually take control of our cognition. So in summary, If these ideas are approximately right, then what can each of us do to advance it forward? When I did this, I didn't put a set of requirements on myself to say what am I actually good at? Because that answer is actually pretty small. I don't really. I'm not a trained engineer, I'm not a scientist. The decision criteria was what maximally increases our probability of thriving. And I don't think that we are in a situation right now where we have the luxury to choose what we're doing. I think it is an absolute necessity that we focus on things that solve our problems. So the invitation for all of us is what can we do that truly aligns with our long term thriving? For what does any of this matter if we're not around to experience it, or if we are and we're in the world of chaos? Thank you.