Zeroism - Full Audiobook

Hello friends. This is Brian Johnson, author of Zeroism. A few times in my life I've read books that have changed the way I understand my life and reality. I hope this is one for you. Enjoy Episode one A People's History of Zeroism hello everyone. My name is Zero. In this video, I'm going to walk you through Zeroism, which is my personal philosophy for the future of being human. It's going to be a tour of the past, the future, and the interior of the human mind as it contemplates an existence so different, so unimaginable that it drives many to an existential crisis. But first, I need to set the record straight. Yes, in 2022 I did receive one liter of my 17 year old son's plasma. However, unlike what was reported in the media, my son is kept in a room that is 8x8, not 10 by 10. Also, I have high expectations of my son. Specifically, he must do the following things. First, do well in school. Second, complete his household chores. Third, give me one liter of his plasma and fourth, clean his room. Now. I'm just kidding about cleaning his room. You might have just heard of me recently. Maybe this year. Maybe you heard about some rich guy doing crazy things and trying to live forever. Or maybe the YouTube algorithm brought you here. Isn't it funny how quickly we gave decision making authority to AI about where our minds should go next? Huh? More on that later. Or maybe you're here because you read Ashley Vance's profile on me in Bloomberg how to be 18 years old again for only $2 million a year. I was born 46 years ago, but my left ear is 64, my heart is 37 and my cardiovascular capacity is in the top 1.5% of 18 year olds. After working on the scientific frontiers of anti aging for three years, I'm not really sure how old I am anymore. My Health Endeavor blueprint has been full of surprises. For example, discovering that my left ear has a biological age of 64. I am basically deaf in my left ear from 4000 Hz to 12,000 Hz. I had no idea. As a kid I shot a lot of guns and I listened to a lot of loud music and we never wore hearing protection. It turns out hearing protection is really important. It was also surprising that after sharing for free everything I was learning about my health and wellness. The global response was a tsunami of hate. I became detested from far reaching corners of the globe. People called me a narcissist, a vampire, an elf. Patrick Bateman, Dorian Gray. Surely I must be An Illuminati lizard person. Shh. That's true. No part of me was off limits to ridicule. I was accused of being too pale, too skinny, too vain, too muscular, too reptilian, too idiotic, too. Too. Whatever that even means. Wild. What is happening? People confidently stated that blueprint must exist because I am miserable and trapped in a cage of my own making. That in its implementation, I am missing the point of life. Why extend life? What's the point? They psychoanalyzed me, diagnosing me with a crippling fear of death and more personality disorders than there are people. They suggested I am a fool on a vain quest for immortality. But for the record, I have never said I am pursuing immortality. I. I have said we no longer know how long and how well we can live. They said I was yet another arbitrary person in yet another arbitrary time, on another arbitrary continent, on a failed quest for the Holy Grail. He'll do anything to avoid therapy. Just live life. We're all going to die, so what does it matter? Were the common refrains. The reactions reminded me of patterns I've seen in the biographies I've read. In every era, 99% of those who lived lived in the past, living by the ideas, norms and traditions of dead people. The future in every era had always arrived. They just hadn't seen it yet. Or they hadn't recognized it as the future. Or they had seen it and then outright rejected it. The same is true for us right now. We are no different. The future is always here. It's just hiding in plain sight. It's a game of who can spot it. My Project Blueprint proposed that a radically different future is here. And true to form, it's hiding in plain sight. And I'm going to tell you right now, here it is. Death might no longer be inevitable. When I said this, armies of Death defenders pulled out their swords and charged me. I live near Hollywood, and no joke, movie studios came to me asking if they could learn the details of my life to inspire their next major villain. I admit, at first the vitriol confused me. But soon I realized that most of it was just group therapy. It is a response from a society addicted to addiction. I believe the animosity was all just a confession of helplessness. Amid the hate storm, no one seemed to understand what I was really proposing. Because if they did, they might have truly lost their minds. Alright, before we get into the details, let's start with some context. Like the whole context. For 13.8 billion years or so, who knows the number is always changing. There has been a universe. Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years or so. We were single cells for most of that. Fast forward a bit and boom. Homo sapiens different. We're so, so different. We're intelligent. We think, we think about thinking. We lived what, maybe a couple decades at most, back then we laughed, we loved, we reproduced, we died, just like all other life. Then after a couple hundred thousand years, our species suddenly levels up and massively we get fire, language, agriculture, cities riding industry, electricity, nuclear, solar, Internet, and then AI. It took almost 13.8 billion years, but finally intelligence made more intelligence. Finally, at long last, intelligence has made a different kind of intelligence that evolution couldn't create on its own. It's different, yes, but is it better? What would that even mean? We are in fact baby steps away from creating super intelligence, which very well might be the most extraordinary event in the history of the universe. Life was special. Life is special. But this, this is different. Superintelligence will rewrite reality. It will pop one after another, the bubbles we live in, revealing to us dimensions and realities far beyond our imagination and comprehension. This is why I started Zeroism. Over the past few years, after hearing me explore and build the tenants and pillars of zeroism in private, my friends and family nicknamed me Zero. And it stuck. Zero sits at the origin, at the 00 coordinate of the biggest revolutions in history. It is from this position that we are stepping into what could surely be the most magnificent existence in this part of the galaxy. But before we get there, I must tell you about this Brian Johnson guy and how he died to make room for Zero, as I think we may have more in common than you think. Episode 2 Firing Evening, Brian. I'm going to get personal here for a minute. In my 20s and 30s, life got pretty dark. I was raising three kids, wrestling a challenging personal relationship, starting and building multiple companies and dealing with chronic depression. I was trying to leave my born into religion and it all started to stack up. It was a bonfire at night after fighting the day's battles and then feeding, bathing, telling stories to and putting the kids to bed. I often thought of one of Mother Nature's best defense mechanisms, perfected by the opossum. I just wanted to fall to the ground and play dead. Maybe I thought when it got really bad, I don't even have to play anymore. Maybe I didn't have to pretend anymore. Despite how I felt. At around 7pm each night, I would have the most comforting optimistic thoughts. The brownies. Just eat the brownies. The Kitchen isn't far. You deserve it. It was a rough day. All that stress burned so many calories. Thousands. You read that somewhere, right? Just one will make it all go away. Now, in case you're wondering, that's Evening Brian talking. He was a pretty big personality in my life. He made all the decisions back then. He wanted everything now without the burden of accountability. For years, Morning Brian promised that today was a new day. He wouldn't fall prey to the old bad habits. Dad Brian swore he'd be the exemplar father figure he'd always aspired to become. Then 7pm would come and Evening Brian would push all other Brians aside and do as he pleased. Evening Brian is not a bad person. In fact, I deeply empathize with him. He's carrying the heavy burdens of all other Brians. He was low on willpower and discipline. And he just wanted the pain to stop. One day, as the brownies called from the kitchen, I took a quick stock of myself. I had gained 50 pounds, about the size of a Siberian husky. I carried that canine sized fat around with me every day. My pants were so tight I had to leave the top unbuttoned. I was disgusted with myself. And I knew my pattern of hopeful thinking. Brian, I know what you're thinking. We said tonight would be the last night. But you know what? One more night and tomorrow everything changes. Tomorrow, the new us emerges. Tomorrow, everything we want is going to come to fruition. Just tonight, one last time. I realized in that moment that I had more neurons than anything else in my life. And when those neurons turned on me, I didn't stand a chance. As I began to slip into submission, I jokingly muttered. Evening Brian. You make my life miserable. You're fired. No. Don't do it. For some reason, acknowledging Evening Brian as a distinct version of me to be reckoned with changed something inside of me. Separating my various selves from their behaviors was empowering. I am not the behavior. I am somewhere else. And I prevailed. I didn't eat the brownies. The this small win ushered in a wave of relief. Maybe, I thought, I wasn't trapped forever. I began to understand that there were parts of myself that were unique. Each with their own motivations and proclivities. I spent the night thinking about technology that could commune with my various selves hidden throughout the kingdom of my conscious and unconscious mind. There's Morning Brian after exercise Brian, work Brian, dad Brian, Storytelling Brian, Playful Brian and Evening Brian, among many others. Each version of myself had a distinct biochemical configuration, states of sad and playful, stressed and angry. They created predictable patterns of thought, emotions and behaviors. For example, stressed out Brian was approximately 100 times more likely to down a whole bag of potato chips than morning Brian. Nobody eats ice cream when they wake up. Okay, maybe some of you do. Why then, right before bed, who's really in charge here? I've learned a few lessons building multiple technology and science companies that I think map to this situation. In technology, version one gives way to version two, which then launches version three. The valuable moves forward. The rest disappears. The key to building any advanced technology is trusting in the process, where systematic and methodical improvements create compounded gains. This is the fastest way to advance anything. Why couldn't I apply this to my mind, my body, my health? All day I labored to make abstract technology better. But while at home, I got worse. I got too little sleep, ate too much unhealthy food and didn't exercise nearly enough. I had completely abandoned my personal rate of improvement for the sake of technological progress. I was a martyr for technological advance. But what if I could improve myself at the speed that technology improves? What if we all could? What if decay and decline were not inevitable? In the 1990s, this would have been ridiculous to suggest. Not anymore. With AI, it is now impossible to predict how well and how long we may live. The night I fired Evening Brian, my sleep didn't feel traumatic. For the first time in years, it was rejuvenating. The next day I was flying to a meeting. I had just gotten my pilot's license. As I journeyed to my destination, my gaze was fixed on the airplane's attitude indicator. My hands gripped the controls as my co pilot and I steadied the plane at 10,000ft. Flying is a never ending activity of keeping the airplane in optimal position. I noticed a directional drift, so I corrected ever so slightly left, then down, then a tiny bit right. At the same time, I became lost in thought about work, all the fires that needed putting out. My mind wandered. I wondered how much better could I perform if I wasn't weighed down by poor sleep and declining health. I knew my life was not only stalled, but in a tailspin. If I didn't do something soon, I would free fall straight to the ground. After a few more minutes at the airplane's manual controls, I I ceded authority to the engineering automation of autopilot. I ceded authority to an intelligent system of software and hardware that ingested information from a suite of airplane sensors to make real time flight decisions. Autopilot freed me to tend to other important Flight tasks the airplane sat up straight with perfect posture. It pegged the altitude with steadiness with greater precision through than I could with my own abilities. The airplane's instant alignment triggered memories from my flight training. In conditions of total blackout, when you learn to fly, you're tested by flying blind to any outside visual reference. In these moments, your instruments are your only source of truth. Relying solely on intuition in these crucial moments can be dangerous. Fatal, in fact. Without visual reference points, our body's internal sense of orientation often misleads us. The conscious mind tricks you into believing and seeing things that are not accurate. To simulate blackout conditions during pilot training, you're asked to wear a hood. It's terrifying at first. You can only see the instrument panels. While you're flying. You have no outside reference. So, using your instruments only, you have to safely get the airplane a few hundred feet above the Runway and ready to land. You must master relying upon instruments and trust them with your life. That day, my pilot training collided with my ideas around health and wellness. I wondered, could I build an autopilot for myself? One that would augment my natural abilities? But what should I call it? My autonomous self? I wondered if an automated system for health, body and mind could produce compounded gains in me as fast as we see in technological progress. After thinking this through, I was exhilarated when I landed. Blueprint. I would call it Blueprint. Episode 3 what is Blueprint? What single thing can any individual do to maximally increase the probability that humans throw? Thrive beyond what we can imagine? Blueprint's singular objective is to try and hitch a ride into the future. By answering this question today, there are three main ideas. Number one, Blueprint. Blueprint is an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can care for myself. We humans struggle to act in our best interests. We reliably do unhealthy things that accelerate decay, delay disability, disease and death, both to ourselves and to our planet. We will look both ways before crossing the street to avoid getting hit by a car. But we will do so while smoking a cigarette. Every day, we do things that accelerate aging. And while we may think we can stop those things anytime we want, we are powerless to stop them all. Don't believe me? Try stopping all of your self destructive behaviors. These include eating too much food or junk food, not exercising, smoking, excessive drinking, drugs, staying up past our bedtimes, pornography, excessive social media, and dozens more. All of these things shorten our lives. All of them make life less enjoyable in the long run. They are payday loans and the Interest is taken from the well being, happiness and health of future you. It's not that we want to do bad things. Okay? Yes we do. Bad things are easy and good things are hard. To protect ourselves from the raw reality that we are powerless to stop these behaviors, we create pretty stories to justify them. Live a little. We're all going to die anyway. We are masters at hiding the truth. We don't want to see Blueprint plays a new game called Don't Die. We in fact play it every day right now. We wear seatbelts. We change the batteries in our smoke alarms and throw out moldy food. Blueprint is Don't Die Expert mode. This is how I personally play the game. Don't Die. My team and I gather hundreds of biomarkers from my body. This allows my heart, lungs, liver, and 70 other organs to speak for themselves. No more rumors, no more guesswork. After evaluating hundreds of scientific papers, we then create a health protocol. This algorithm determines what and when I eat, when I go to bed, and so forth. My mind does not have the authority to order from a menu, eat a gallon of ice cream because it's nighttime, or or peruse the pantry because I'm bored. My body's organs and biological processes oversee the whole thing, not my mind. Sounds dystopic, right? This isn't the future you imagined. Just wait. It gets worse. The Autonomous Self the goal of Blueprint is the autonomous self where each of us improves at the speed of science and technology. We are accustomed to our technology getting reliably better every year. We get new versions of almost everything. Meanwhile, every day, we humans reliably get one day closer to death. Your autonomous self reverses this trend by building upon the foundation of Blueprint to interconnect your well being and personal growth with the progress of science and technology. Number three Zeroism. Zeroism is the underlying philosophy of Blueprint and the autonomous self. You can think of zeroism as a version of future literacy, a mindset and toolkit to navigate a rapidly changing and completely unknown future. Let's put future literacy in context. In 1820, only 12% of the world's population could read and write. Imagine what our daily lives would look like right now if we hadn't achieved an 86% basic literacy over the past two centuries. We'd probably be significantly less prosperous, healthy, and interesting. Historically, future literacy was not imminently needed. Things changed slowly over the course of generations. Knowing seasonal weather patterns was good enough for most people today. There are tectonic technological and cultural shifts that happen on the timescales of weeks, months and years, the pace of change will continue to accelerate. We are accustomed to thinking about human evolution on the timescale of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, not in single lifetimes. But that's where we are now. We need to be alert to the changes in store for individuals and humanity to triage the right path forward. Ultimately, this is a question of survival. Personally, after observing my own thoughts and behavior for 46 years, I do not trust my conscious mind. Not in a pantry full of junk food, not with my best long term interests, not in explaining away my irrational behaviors. I do not think that humanity, as we are configured today as a society, can cooperate well enough and fast enough to avoid catastrophic outcomes. I think we need to hand over the reins of power. Humanity has reached its cognitive and attentional limits in managing a complex, ultra interconnected world. Zeroism is a way to understand, think and behave in a rapidly changing future. A way to anticipate and prepare for the unknown. Intelligence has been what we know. Zeroism is the intelligence of not knowing, embracing what we do not know, what we cannot see, and acting courageously nonetheless. Throughout history, the number and concept of zero representation revolutionized math and physics, art, philosophy and religion. Our modern society depends on the power of zero enabling computers, gaming, social media, gps and medical technology. Some of history's most monumental breakthroughs are, as I like to call them, zero discoveries. For example, Einstein's theory of relativity, identifying microscopic germs as the culprit of infections. And the vanishing point in early Renaissance art that bridged the gap between 2D and the perception of 3D space. Each of these discoveries previously existed. They had just remained invisible until someone identified them. Zeroism captures this fundamental shift from status quo preservation and rule following of knowns to not knowing, exploring and adapting. In the past, discoveries of zero happened every few decades or centuries, popping our bubbles and revealing new dimensions that were previously unknown. For example, that the Earth was not the center of the universe. A few decades, or even a century was enough time for society to reconfigure and update its beliefs, technology and culture. Zero discoveries are now happening at a much faster pace. That is because AI is a zero manufacturer. Insights generated by AI will introduce reality, bending zeros and demand that we quicken our adaptation. So there you have it. Three ideas. We humans are going to be run by algorithms because they are superior to us. Some of us will kick and scream the whole way, but this change is inevitable. Once we are through this transition, we we will forget that we ever resisted the upgrade in the first place. In fact, we will pity our former selves autonomous self. We will begin improving ourselves at the speed of science and technology because we can. Zeroism In a rapidly changing future, our best attribute is learning a new form of intelligence, which is not knowing. Also known as future literacy. Zeroism is a response to the fact that humanity is facing at least three imminent and existential risks. Number one, the risk of an unsustainable biosphere two misaligned AI, and three mass destruction via nukes, biowarfare, societal collapse, etc. We need to choose our path forward in evaluating these risks. Do you think humanity, through nation states, corporations, ideologies and individuals can cooperate and problem solve on the necessary timescales to avoid an insufferable existence and or extinction? I'll pose this question another way. Could it be the case that humanity would be better off rethinking how we make decisions going forward in the same way that I did with my health, empowering science, data and an algorithm to care for me better than I can care for myself? A computational system of intelligence to help you build intuitions around computational systems. Imagine empowering Earth's biosphere to manage its own well being. We humans are currently in charge of deciding how much pollution and toxicity we generate, and whether the oceans become more acidic, the planet warms and more life becomes extinct. If our biosphere were in charge, we'd use the same blueprint process to fix its problems. Measuring the biosphere via oceans, atmosphere, land, etc. Via millions of data points, following scientific evidence for sustainable conditions and empowering algorithmic adaptation for Earth's health markers to be achieved. Our biosphere sets the standards for pollution, toxins, wildlife and weather. Humanity deals with it and adapts. Said differently, the former me ate whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it, no matter the damage. Current me opts into and follows what my body's organs are asking for in order to achieve ideal health. Most of humanity treats planet Earth the same way we treat our bodies. Doing pretty much whatever we want, whenever we want, no matter the damage. It's why we're in the tricky predicament of having a rapidly changing and increasingly violent biosphere. In hearing these ideas, many confidently assert that my motivation for blueprint is a fear of death. I do not fear death. I sat at its doorstep for a decade alongside chronic depression, desperately wishing I didn't exist. Had it not been for my three children, I probably would have taken my own life. I know what it's like to be locked into a staring contest with death, I now feel an insatiable love of life, deeper than I've ever experienced. I also know that my future self, perhaps the version that exists when superintelligence has arrived, may understand existence in ways that are inconceivable to me now. Here, right now, wanting life can be hard for so many reasons. The depths of depression taught me a thing or two about this. I dream of an existence where we all want to keep playing the game of life, even in our darkest moments. For thousands of years, it's been the same story. We're born and then we die in predictable fashion. Don't die is the ultimate game to play. Existence is the highest virtue. The concept of God is a zero. An idea to explain what we do not and cannot know. We are all zero and our existence could be that which we cannot imagine. It takes courage to confidently step into into the unknown. Right now, in the early 2000 and twenties, we can't assume that anything that has been true will continue to be true. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't understand what's really going on, baby. Superintelligence is already here and improving faster than our minds can comprehend. Blueprint is not just for me. It is for everyone. Blueprint is a plan to save ourselves. May we have the courage to believe that right now may be the very beginning. Episode 4 Zeroism as a Belief System at the age of 34, I sold my payments company Braintree Venmo for 800 million in cash. The fulfillment of my life dream. Instead of it being this unhinged celebratory moment I'd imagined it would be, it was just one more complication to deal with. At the time, my 13 year marriage was unraveling. Our three kids were aged 10 and under. And it broke my heart and my brain to imagine that we would now be a split family. I was wrestling to leave my born into religion. I'd lost my bearings, not knowing anymore what was up or down, what was left or right. To help you better understand this moment, I'll paint the picture for you. When I was 19 years old, I was a Mormon missionary sent to Ecuador. It was the first time I went outside the rural bubble of Mormon Utah. I had come home only to question the nature of everything I had been taught. It became clear that I'd spent the first 19 years of life comfortably encased within several bubbles, unaware of their limitations and boundaries. I had been inside belief systems, wrapped in belief systems, each shaping my conscious mind. I had grown up in a rural community of 30,000 people. Everyone was Mormon. We all shared a singular understanding of existence. All I could think about now was what other bubbles am I in? And if I'd learned of these bubbles, how would my understanding of existence change? And if that changed, what different decisions would I make? College was beckoning with its life decisions, major selection and career path. I hadn't the faintest idea what I wanted to be or study. The only thing I knew was that my experience in Ecuador had lit a raging fire inside of me. I wanted to spend my life working to improve the lives of others at a societal level. To do this, I determined that I'd make an enormous amount of money by the age of 30 and then figure out a way to up level humanity. I told everyone about my master plan. Nothing quite like the arrogance and wonder of a 21 year old mind. Now, 10 years later, I found myself encased, feeling paralyzed. Severing my relationship with God and a marriage was a psychological conundrum that was perpetually unsolvable. A decade of chronic depression had not only dropped me into a black hole of hopelessness, but it had me questioning whether I could believe anything I thought or felt. When I was born into this world, I was told, follow these life rules and an omnipotent being will crown you with eternal life. Looking back, how beautifully simple. If only it were true. I am not anti religion, I am pro existing and anti death. Growing up, I was asked to bet my existence on a hypothesis that is testable only upon death. In any other time during the past few hundred thousand years, it wouldn't have mattered whether someone accepted the gamble or not. Everyone was guaranteed to die anyways, so why does it matter? But what if? What if? Then I read a biography of a dangerous idea by Charles Seif. Nothing in my mind has been the same since. What a surprise it was to learn that the number 0 was discovered. Of course it was. I just hadn't thought about it. Like the idea behind every great revolution, the concept of zero wasn't birthed into the world easily. It caused a stir in philosophy, math, ideology and society before it revolutionized each. Zeroism is a way of thinking that has helped me in my mental efforts to seek out the undiscovered what lies beyond the fog. Zeroism digs into what is hidden in plain sight, just as the number 0 once was. Zeroism allows me to reach out and fill the intangible and amorphous. The kinds of ideas that have been transformative to civilizations. Heliocentrism, the discovery of germs and Einstein's special and General theories of relativity. These are all zeros. They were not discovered based upon what we knew, but rather what we didn't know. Zeroism is a system of thought one level deeper than so called first principles thinking. If 0th principle thinking is building blocks. First principle thinking is all about understanding the nature of the building blocks. Many people spend their entire lives as first principled thinkers. There's nothing wrong with this. Some professions demand it. Consider the fictional character Sherlock Holmes. He's a first principled thinker. He believes, according to his famed maxim, that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Zeroism invites you to think like Dirk Gently, a different kind of detective. Conceived of by the sci fi humorist Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently is a zero detective. The zero detective rules nothing out. Instead, they begin by wondering if the impossible solution makes more sense. It is a search for the building blocks themselves, not how they work. When someone is thinking from a first principled perspective, they're likely going to start by assuming the fewest number of things within a given time frame. Zeroism, however, doesn't try to identify or rule out the impossible. It wonders if we might not be seeing the structure of reality immediately in front of us. Zeroism leads us to the possible, not the probable, to the previously undiscovered. Zeros are game changers in a world where we are continuously expanding our spheres of understanding. Each zeroth principle insight can potentially unlock a set of more expansive spheres. This is bigger than an exponential effect, a hockey stick curve. With the 0, the graph is not just exponential. The units change. The graph reorganizes its axes. Dimensions are added to accommodate ideas from another dimension. That's what zeros get you. Zeroth principle thinking paves the way to explore boundless terrain. We have entered an era that will be defined by an avalanche of zero like ideas. That is because AI is a zero factory. Understanding our very existence has become a quest for zeros. Already we are seeing 0th principle ideas come to fruition at a faster rate than ever before. Which means we're driving into this future with fog in all directions. Previously, we humans could make reasonable assumptions about what might exist beyond our field of view. Deductive reasoning, and a dash of reverse principle of thinking. Every century or so used to be enough. Not anymore. Evolving, adapting and collaborating with AI will require fluency in zeroism. To that end, I've been working on a system for evolving ourselves so that we humans can roll with the changes that AI brings. No matter how the terrain shifts. The goal is to align ourselves towards harmony and instead of our own demise. So what is the potential payoff? Well, that's a surprise. To begin our journey, as Zeroists, we can seek to identify the building blocks of intelligence. Our bodies and minds are a fruitful place to begin this exploration. Episode 5 the First Supper the ideas around blueprint and zeroism challenge the core of our current identities. Many people, upon hearing these ideas for new models of the future, either boomerang some form of hatred or fall into existential despair, unsure how to climb out of the pit dug by their previous selves. I've seen this happen so many times that I realized I needed to soften the blow, which led me to start hosting blueprint brunches, which I call the First Supper. In a private and comfortable setting, I present the ideas and then create enough space and time for the participants to have multiple existential crises. At the supper's end, the participants rise with a basic level of reconciliation. My favorite follow up notes to receive are those that explain how the conversation broke their brain and in ways they didn't know it could be broken. And then they add they haven't been able to stop ruminating about the ideas since. I suspect that the more time the idea sits in your mind, the more its inevitability creeps in. It's hard to find arguments supporting the idea that we can remain as we are and survive the evolutionary pressure presented by advances in AI, a changing biosphere, and unforeseen and unpredictable future events in invite no demand that we improve our speed of evolutionary adaptation. First Supper guests have included scientists, philosophers, engineers, educators, artists, astronauts, doctors, and entrepreneurs. Each gathering lasts around two to three hours. The meals all have the same arc. To prepare the group for the provocative nature of the conversation, I provide some thought experiments. I start with a simple question we all supposedly know the answer to. How many glasses of water should you drink each day? Eight. Someone always says. How do you know that? I ask. I read it somewhere. Or maybe my parents told me I don't know. This exercise highlights what most of us experience daily across the majority of the decisions we make about health and wellness. Our insides are off limits. We use hunches, folk remedies, and antidotes. We act upon information that we feel we know without truly knowing if the answer is right for us. Is drinking eight glasses of water correct for each of us every day? How would we know the optimal amount at any given time? Perhaps if there were a way to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of our water drinking on our individual health, we could Arrive at an evidence based result. This process is the essence of blueprint to implement with the precision of scientific evidence and data. Soon the food arrives. Everyone has a full blueprint spread in front of them. The result of algorithmic design. Each guest is primed and ready to go on a wild ride of new ideas. Then we begin. I pose my next question. Imagine that you have access to an algorithm capable of generating the best physical and mental health of your life. An algorithm personalized to you that can take better care of you than you can take care of yourself. Opt in and the benefits are yours. The catch what you eat, when you eat, and other health related decisions will will be determined by the algorithm. This algorithm has been built upon the best science available from peak performance health and medicine. This means that pantry grazing, spontaneous pizza parties and junk food binging will no longer be options. Do you opt in or decline? Usually a rare few respond in the affirmative. Yes, please, anything to save me from myself. A third or so wants to make modifications to the deal. Yes, but I'd like to make sure I keep the following things. The rest, more than half, may give a direct and blunt no or something like this is creepy. Is this a cult? The reasons for individual refusal are often tied to personal attachments to existing lifestyles, belief systems and life and death. Or to imagine conflicts that a fully implemented autonomous self would bring to cultural and social relationships. The thought experiment is of course, oversimplified by design. To sincerely answer the question, we'd each need to ask hundreds more questions. My personal experience is that two years after saying yes to the thought experiment, I've never been happier, healthier, more emotionally stable, or as intellectually alive. In fact, I pity my former self, who was continuously tortured by his mind and unable to live his best life. It's understandable if this contemplated exercise invites an existential crisis of sorts. Right now, this is a big idea, as big as the Earth not being the center of the universe. By the end of 2020, I had hired a team of doctors, set up a lab in my home, and become the most measured human in history. No more evening Brian. No more late night binges. No more just this once rationalizations. No more mid flight stalls. Since I began Blueprint, I have come to appreciate the many problems my autonomous self has solved in my daily existence. I no longer spend any amount of time thinking about my next meal or when to go to bed. I no longer grapple with whether to do this naughty thing that will accelerate my speed of aging. My mind is now free to focus on more Enduringly rewarding things such as the future of intelligent existence. This first version of Blueprint and my autonomous self took years and millions of dollars to build. Most of the processes are still manual, clunky and require a large team. It's impractical to imagine the current version being scaled throughout society. That's okay, because this is how innovation works. The first versions are expensive, manual and buggy. The key is looking past the awkward things and finding the gem of inevitability that's been demonstrated. When the first telegraph message was sent, it was clear the pony express was riding into the sunset. When digital navigation via GPS appeared, Paper maps on the laps became a thing of hobby. Blueprint has demonstrated a new approach to managing our self destructive tendencies. A new approach to imagine our future selves. Can you imagine a future where we don't want to inflict the type of self harm that hastens death? You're probably thinking that once your new system is set up, you'll sneak away and insert your favorite vice here. Just kidding. No I'm not. I'm betting that you won't want that vice anymore. Your life and reality will be so fundamentally changed that you'll look back on your former self, as I do now, with pity. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe indulgences of these types we enjoy today will be a new form of entertainment. They'll just be simulations that make the real and perceived index indistinguishable, all while having built in mechanisms to protect us from any biological harm. I'm playing here to make a point. Our minds often foreclose on future possibilities, thinking that something is impossible or undesirable before we've even tried it. So let's think about this. What might be the future of our well being? I have an idea. When building Braintree Venmo, the payments company I founded, we worked with a rideshare company to eliminate all payment friction associated with traveling somewhere. You hailed a car from the app, arrived at your destination and then left. No pulling out your credit card, no janking machines, no awkwardness, no waiting in the car as the transaction took minutes to complete or fail. Payment and tip happened like magic, all behind the scenes. Payment was forgotten. The future of our well being might be similar magic happening behind the scenes. Something that's forgotten and doesn't need to be attended to anymore. AI will be omnipresent. Data from our bodies will be streamed real time systems outside and inside our bodies working in unison, personalized to our needs like the stock market. Micro corrections to our biological Processes will happen on the timescale of milliseconds. We won't even notice. We will be too busy, focused on the next games we've chosen to play with our superior abilities. Blueprint will be applied to the care of Earth too. Millions of measurements taken from around the globe will science and data determining optimal biosphere conditions with protocols and therapies put into action. It seems so basic, so obvious a desire to exist. No qualifiers, no conditionals, no pretending that any of us have the wisdom to see this next chapter of intelligent life and decide ahead of time whether the future is suitable or or desirable for us. We choose life over death unconditionally. But we already do. You might contend that's not what the data shows about our individual or collective behavior. The data demonstrates that we are suicidal, optimizing for temporary pleasure because we have concluded that death is inevitable and we might as well make the most of the time we have. Could a want for life be the most significant revolution to happen in the early 21st century? Sometimes we excitedly race into the future. Other times the future pulls us into her magnificence as we kick and scream. We take credit for seeing the future and forget that we ever opposed it. You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and Change the ending. Gen 0, let's join with Zeroism as our blueprint and lead the charge for this want to exist into what will be perhaps the most marvelous existence to ever occur in this galaxy. Episode 6 Dear Gen Zero, you may or may not be aware that I recently released a book, Don't Die. It's a fictionalized but mostly truthful account of the internal struggles my mind went through as it contemplated blueprint, autonomous selves, Zeroism, AI and the continued survival of our species. I've been trying to write that book and this piece for 10 years. I could always feel the ideas somewhere in the back of my mind. Slowly the concepts have formed and now solidified into a state where they seem understandable, teachable and actionable. Biographies have always been a personal lighthouse for me in trying to understand life. Instead of learning the broad strokes of history, philosophies and technology where this or that thing happened in this or that year. Biographies give a first person account into the thoughts, emotions, context of their time and place. They provide models of thinking, problem solving and persistence to emulate. When I read biographies, I focus on how the person was able to see something so clearly that was invisible to everyone else at the time. Often this is why many of history's most influential characters were written about hundreds of years after their deaths. It takes time for a society to form that clarity of perspective. As I record this, it's 2023. If I challenge myself to learn from the biographies of histories, explorations and muster maximum sobriety trying to discern what is really going on right now, I'd start with three observations. Number one, artificial intelligence is improving faster than we can comprehend and and in ways we cannot predict. Number two, the biosphere of our planet is in question. And three, we humans are dangerously at each other's throats. Obvious, right? So what do we do now? Is humanity's focus correctly and adequately trained on addressing these issues before they create catastrophe and possibly annihilation? I personally don't think so. Certainly not in proportion to the existential risk that each represents. Why? There are many possible answers one might hear to this question. What power does each of us have individually to change anything? Shouldn't governments be addressing problems like these? Other goals, such as professional advancement, family or other personal matters are higher priority. What responsibility do we have to future generations? Why do we care to exist anyways? We're all going to die, so why does it matter? It doesn't matter what happens to humans or Earth. It's the next life that's worth living for. These common perspectives underscore the problem we humans have in aligning our goals. We want and value different things. We understand our lives in unique ways. We are fractured in our opinions and goals about what matters in life and why. We know from studying history that each era lives in their own bubble of norms and beliefs. Change is inevitable, and future humans will consider us primitive relative to their superior ways, just as we do with previous generations. What is primitive about us that future generations will observe? What is potentially inevitable in the future that we may want to pull into our present? To help us with this thought experiment, let's time travel Visualizing people in the 25th century learning about and reflecting upon the early 21st century. That's us. Right now, they're marveling at how we figured out how to keep humanity and maybe ourselves alive amid the greatest existential risks faced by humans up to that point. What do they observe? My best guess is that the biographies available in the 25th century will conclude that up until the early 21st century, the human mind was this superior technology of intelligence. On Earth, the human mind, as long as it played within society's laws, was free to decide what, how, when, and why to do things. Then, in the mid-2020s, there was a swift Societal change. The combination of artificial intelligence and the programmability of biology and chemistry proved that computational abilities were superior to the human mind for managing a wide variety of individual and societal systems, from personal health to biological ecosystems. Most importantly, a seedling of an idea sprouted in the late 2000s, becoming the biggest revolution in human history. Death transitioned from inevitable to don't die. I personally went through this transition from my mind having unquestioned authority and death being inevitable, and to opting into an algorithm to manage my health with the objective of not dying. Before Blueprint, my proclivities seemed hardwired to naturally be self destructive. These self destructive behaviors worsened until I was in the throes of an existential crisis. I had tried to stop my binge eating hundreds of times, but was powerless. It was clear either I stopped my self destructive behaviors or I was going to the grave early. I was choosing death each day and I couldn't stop myself. I was doing something to myself that I knew was bad for me. I knew that it made me feel terrible. So why did I continue to do it? Sound familiar? Why is that so easy to relate to? I was just like humanity at large, fracturing in my own opinions and wants in life, facing existential crisis, daily misaligning. After hundreds of failed attempts, I found a solution that worked for me and stopped my binge eating. The success of this strategy got me wondering if there were other systems that are even more trustworthy than my various selves to look after my best interests. Blueprint has proven trustworthy wherever my mind reliably fails me. Blueprint is an algorithm that takes better care of me than I do. The algorithm has generated, based upon hundreds of biological measurements, near perfect health. It is a revolution of self within self. Blueprint considers that I am a collection of 35 trillion cells and aligns all of them towards a single, objective, continued existence. For more than two years, my commitment to Blueprint has remained constant. I know after living with my mind for 45 years that it is a devious, cunning and ruthless rascal willing to do anything and tell any cheerful story to get what it wants, frequently to my detriment. This makes me wonder who is the enemy? Should we point our fingers outward or look within? For our entire lives, our minds have been our best and only tool to navigate existence. It's nearly unthinkable that we'd willingly opt into a new way of being that gives power to other systems of authority that are superior at looking after our best interests. This is the singular question of our time. Do we humans, with our nation states, corporations, ideologies and individual behaviors, believe that we can solve the existential crisis before catastrophe? Or do we need to opt into superior computational systems that will better manage our interests? Confronting new ideas often hurts. They challenge our identities and make us feel uncomfortable. Most of the time we just want them to go away and will say, think and do anything to hasten their disappearance. When trying to solve difficult problems, sometimes we need to look for the new ideas in the dark, where it's potentially a little scary. If we are to succeed against the formidable existential threats we face, just how far and wide do we need to consider searching? I like starting at the opposite end of Comfort in the Dark, where we haven't dared look. Seeking out and embracing Discomfort Being open minded is hard work. It's a skill of wrestling and negotiating with counterintuition. It might be the single most valuable character trait for any human as we step into this new future. If you're hearing this for the first time, I can imagine what you might be feeling and thinking. If you need to pause this video and go for a walk, I understand. When you return, let's explore this new framework of open mindedness and adaptability. Zeroism the only things on humanity's to do list don't die, don't kill each other, don't destroy our biosphere and align AI with don't die. Crisis has been a near permanent fixture of history. War, plagues, natural disasters, despotism, and more. A crisis free world is out of reach for the foreseeable future. But we can learn from crisis by improving, iterating and aligning. Alfred North Whitehead observed in 1911 Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. We master this process as babies. We learn to crawl, then walk, and then run. Somewhere along that learning process, we no longer need to think about the movements. They just happen as a byproduct of pursuing some other goal. Societal scaffolding works in a similar way. When we buy a washer and dryer, we don't wonder whether it will fit through the front door. We just know they will without thinking about it. They were designed to fit easily through the average US doorway. After all, traffic lights green, yellow and red are are timed to mirror human biological abilities to react. Their timings are not random, but constrained, designed around our physical limits. There are thousands of such building blocks that enable our societal advance from version one to version two to version three. They are the invisible rebar of society's scaffolding and are everywhere. Each generation builds in the context of their time. I love this quote from John Adams as he worked to establish the United I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. The biggest question of our time is how do we marry societal advance, technological improvements, and our own evolutionary advance all in tandem? Early in 2017, I was in the Middle east with the leader of a country. He was telling me about his country's 2030 goals. I marveled at how one could plan 13 years in advance with the speed of technological change. He asked me how I'd think about the task. I replied by asking him to play a game with me. Say we have a robot that we're trying to get to the furthest sand dune on the horizon. We can take one of two approaches. First, we could take a topographical map of the dune and and send the robot off. The problem with this approach is that the sands will shift, causing the terrain to change quickly, making our maps irrelevant. The robot will get stuck in the sand. The alternative is to engineer the robot with the tools it needs to navigate any possible terrain change. I call this future literacy. Of course, Zeroists may even question the premise of a destination. Maybe the horizon isn't the goal. It's a relief that we don't need to know what the future will bring to be prepared, because we'll never know the future with certainty. It's reassuring that we can journey into the unknown with systems and tools that will allow us to respond and adapt quickly to any environment. Adapting, not knowing is our new superpower. There is, however, another option and and it is the easiest we could choose to put our heads in the sand instead of traversing it. Solved. The problem with this, of course, is that 4 billion years of evolution demonstrates that a biological species survives and thrives according to its rate of adaptation, not its rate of looking the other way. How will we adapt to an increasingly complex, ever changing world full of unknowns? We might be inclined to imagine that optimal human adaptation needs to rely on complex systems and that complex problems require complex solutions. However, our journey to adapt may be condensed to just a few simple rules. Flocks of birds and schools of fish self organize into sophisticated emergent patterns using simple rules. Flying insects do the same to find their food under the hood. Some of the most advanced systems of intelligence, including AI, are often just efficient ways of searching through options from simple rules, miraculous robust behaviors and systems can emerge. On the other side of simplicity, said another way, the speed and unpredictability of this early 21st century is the most dynamic, unknowable challenge we've ever faced. Successful navigation will require a systematic and algorithmic approach. The mammalian mind is adaptable. It learns from the past and models the future. It is also full of quirks, biases and tendencies towards self destructive behaviors that stifle our improvement. We can use our own simple set of rules to guide our cognitive scaffolding and up level our cognition to capabilities previously unimagined. Louis Pasteur once remarked, fortune favors the prepared mind. I offer a revision in this context. Fortune will favor the adaptable mind. To adapt, we must align our goals and systems at every level, from the philosophical to the atomic. What will we need to adapt to? Only the most significant event in all of history. AI. No previous generation has been able to contemplate a future of unlimited potential the way we can today. For all of history, death has been inevitable. One day we are born. Another day, hopefully a long time later, we die. That may not be the equation anymore. We simply do not know what the future holds. There are many differing opinions on AI. Some people are convinced that humans are inevitably doomed. Others believe AI will save us from ourselves. No one has been able to reliably predict the rate and contours of AI progress that won't change. What we do know is that AI is improving faster than we can comprehend and in ways that we cannot predict. With the current world order, there is no way to stop or even slow its development. Nation states, corporations, ideological groups, individuals and everyone in between will unabashedly use AI for their self interested objectives. Time traveling again to the 25th century and looking back, what might we observe? In the early 21st century, Gen0, a multi ethnic, multinational, multi generational uprising organized around zeroism, rose to power and built global systems of goal alignment within self between humans and Earth and AI Back in today's world, we can ask when do we need to begin working earnestly on this endeavor to align all of intelligence in a small corner of the galaxy? AI is kind of a time travel. Or as our car mirrors remind us, objects in mirror are closer than they appear. The human mind struggles to understand exponential phenomena as we careen into the future. This can create dangerous blind spots and lack of preparation. Wisdom would have us act now. If we delay, we load ourselves with additional existential risk, putting off for later what needs to be done and can be done now. The major problem is that we tend to be reactionary and not proactive. For the most part, humans only engage in meaningful change after disaster strikes. It's One of the failings of the human mind and a scenario that may be unforgiving and to our survival. What if one day there is a disaster so large we cannot react after it happens because we are no longer around? 25th century wisdom invites us to achieve levels of goal alignment within self, between ourselves and AI and between ourselves and Earth that are unthinkable to us right now. To do this, we need to act on presumed timescales that will certainly make us uncomfortable. Whatever opinion one has about AI, the precarious instability of our biosphere requires that we do act now. Alignment with Earth includes many of the same fundamental processes as aligning with AI and many of the same processes as aligning within self. Today, my daily routine is trialing a version of human AI alignment. The past two years of blueprint required that I goal align my three 35 trillion cells around continued existence. The first thing I did was label any behavior that increased my speed of aging as an act of violence. Extensively measuring my body and capturing thousands of data points allowed me to begin identifying which foods, behaviors and lifestyle choices slowed my speed of aging and those which increased it. The heuristic I applied is simple. Remove all things that increase the speed of aging and implement things that slow my speed of aging. So how did I do? In a group of more than 2,000 anti aging athletes longitudinally measuring their speed of aging using a state of the art DNA methylation algorithm, I ranked number one in the world for greatest reduction in the velocity of aging. I demonstrated that an individual could reconfigure their systems of decision making and authority. I tamed my devious and conniving mind, eliminated all self destructive behaviors and achieved zero violence within self by empowering other systems, in this case my individual organ systems with authority. I did this to try and demonstrate a beta version of a future human. One intelligent being trying to self align. Building AI systems that align with continued human existence is a discipline in itself and deserving of the greatest minds of our generation. For anyone not directly working on AI alignment, you can contribute by knowing that aligning all intelligence is the central opportunity of our time. It can begin with self. Every second of every day my mind is searching for the most important piece of information available. What is the highest value use of my time? What is the most piercing insight at this moment? What can't I see but if I could would change the way I understand reality. A constant search for E MC squared. The task that I've given myself is to write you, dear listener, I a letter that prepares you for the future to provide you the best wisdom that I'm capable of communicating. This is the best I've got right now, which, as you know, will change in one hour's time. This is what I the future is not going to be like the past. Every generation before you had the advantage of being able to learn from the past and model out their lives the way they thought about individuals, countries, currencies and relationships, about ambition, regret, happiness and sadness. The wise would diligently study to identify what they didn't need to relearn, and then, with extra time, set off to discover something new. The unwise perceived their novelty of experience as original when it was in fact predictable, limiting their time and ability to discover for the first time. We cannot look into the past to accurately model the future. Some fundamental underpinnings of history as we know it may carry over. However, the zeroth nature of computational intelligence steals away control from using the past to create any future predictions. We cannot know which historical or present phenomena will persist and what will defy our expectations. Be aware and cautious about what assumptions you make about the future. Try to isolate each assumption and examine it carefully. Simply being aware of the scaffolding you're standing on will enable you to react faster and with improved clear headedness when you see other patterns emerge in the world. If you can make this a staple in how you process information, you'll be able to sift through arguments, trends and norms and and keep your mind in sync with technological advance. You won't live in the past. Here are three simple questions you can ask to enhance your predictions when you're trying to make life decisions. First, what must remain true for this to continue to be true? Second, what new thing would make this untrue? And third, what wildly unexpected surprise would change the question? It used to be that society and science advanced one funeral at a time. Now society advances at the speed at which it rejuvenates. Thank you for listening. If you like this, check out my other books, Don't Die and We the People, wishing each of you all the best.