Transhumanism with Bryan Johnson

Hey, Upstream listeners! This week, we're airing an interview with Bryan Johnson, along with Antonio García Martínez. Bryan is well-known as a longevity entrepreneur and avid creator, but in this episode, we try and understand his philosophical underpinnings and the profound implications of AI and technology on humanity's future. Let's dive in!

Bryan, we're really excited to get into some of your ideas and philosophy on A Moment of Zen. That's what we do here.

Thanks so much for joining us today.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So, Bryan, one of your main ideas is that you don't want to be judged by people in this century. You want to be judged by what people in the 25th century will think of you and your actions. Say more about that and say, what will they think about you? of us today and of your actions?

I arrived at that observation from reading a lot of history. When you're looking back in time 300, 400, 500, 600 years, you can gain a clarity about reality that is pretty easy. I mean, of course, you're benefiting from someone else's extensive analysis, but you can see the situation pretty clearly. Whereas In this moment, we're stuck in this fog of war. It's noisy and it's confusing, and you don't get the benefit of seeing the trend lines. And so my endeavor really has been trying to see clearly in the present moment of chaos. And so that thought experiment tries to help me say, of the 999 things that could be consuming my attention right now, what is the one thing that's actually worthy And how did you end up with—

go for it, Anthony.

So just to jump in here, I don't know if you listen to our podcast, but we tend to be a little freewheeling, so I'm just going to jump right into it. And if it's too aggro, tell us to pump the brakes. I find it fascinating that you use that imagine looking in the rearview mirror in the future as a metric, because so do I. So I don't know how much you know about my background, but I did a bunch of tech stuff and then I wrote a memoir about it, like kind of a, not really tell-all, but Back in the day, it was weird to tweet about having worked at a big company like Facebook or Twitter. I wrote a book about it and people ask me like, why did you do this? And I'm like, well, I think we're going through a unique point in history in which we're going from the purely analog to the digital. And 3 centuries from now, I want like at least a fighting chance on being like one of the half dozen books on the shelf that are like when humans, you know, became the internet. Like just give me like a 10% shot at being one of the 6 books that historians refer to. So, I often use the same metric. What's interesting though, and I find interesting about your philosophy, I follow you on Twitter, by the way. My girlfriend bought your snake oil. She says wonders about it, by the way. But what I find fascinating about the philosophy is that on the one hand, you obviously are very long-term focused, right? You're viewing the world through the lens of centuries, and yet you're also viewing it obviously through the world of your own personal longevity. And typically when people stare into the yawning maw of death, as every human does, right? the way they sort of get over that existential despair is imagining the immortality of something bigger than themselves. Or Becker calls these things immortality projects in the, in the, um, what did he call it? The, um, The Encounter with Death or whatever, his magnum opus. And, you know, typically that's family or a country or religion or philosophy or even a company. But it, I, anyhow, I, and I know there is a philosophy behind your, your saying, which I think is what Erik was about to push you into, but like part of what I have trouble squaring is kind of the focus on the long-termism, which I think is great. But then also the focus on the sort of personal immortality aspect rather than the sort of diffuse immortality.

Yeah. I mean, I guess it's also the case that if you look throughout history and you pose the question, what are the ways in which— how far can one think about reality? Now, if you're an artist, you can think about infinite backwards and forwards. If you're an engineer, you're constrained pretty dramatically in terms of the technology that are right in front of you. And that's also true with cultural norms. And so really, the function of ambition or aspiration or imagination is constrained to some degree depending upon your discipline. And my thought process is entirely not in the sci-fi realm. I'm thinking about it from a pure engineering perspective, but also a cultural perspective. And what I'm saying is that we're going to experience likely Decades, if not centuries, of equivalent societal change in a highly compressed timeframe. And so even though I use the 25th century as the thought experiment, that's ridiculous. We're going to basically be the equivalent of the 25th century in 2075. It is upon us in terms of our linear thinking. And that's really what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to say, hey, as a species, everyone, this change is going to be so monumental and so fast Unless we bridge ourselves to some unknown environment, we'll probably have sold ourselves short of the imagination exercise we need to stand up to this moment in time. We'll be inadequate if we've got a more myopic view. So that's really— I'm trying to spend time and pull ourselves into the future, basically getting ourselves emotionally and intellectually ready for what I think is imminent.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably empirically true. Although, of course, I think it's many generations always think that they're on the verge of like the apocalypse happening, that there's this messianic moment. And then typically there's some, this is also kind of a post-Christian thing, right? There's some religious figure that's going to come and introduce a new era of things. But I think it's, I mean, if you look at things like GDP curves or productivity curves, or obviously AI curves, it's clear that we are kind of at an inflection point. The cynical retort to that is, of course, the human comedy never changes. And look at Twitter. If anything, we've reverted to a name-calling oral culture, even though it's empowered by like some of this very sophisticated culture.

Yeah.

But maybe you would call that maladaptive evolution along that technological line. But yeah, I mean, I guess the conversation can go either way. One way I'd like for this to go, Bryan, is understanding a little bit the don't die philosophy. I think you're going to be, just to plug it a little bit, You're going to be in Dubai next week. So am I for other reasons, by the way, at the Token2049 conference, I think talking to Balaji, right? If I'm not mistaken.

Yes.

Yeah, cool. Balaji's a friend of ours. He's an investor in my company. He's been on the podcast. We love Balaji. I actually like his network state concept. I actually wrote a piece for it for a magazine. And the one thing, I think the network state is real. For those who don't realize what it is, I'll define it just in terms of my life right now. So I'm talking to you from a hotel room. in New York. My company's mostly based in San Francisco. I'm flying tonight after this to Paris and then after that to Dubai, right? And each of those cities is like an island in this archipelago called the network state, which is where like-minded techno, crypto, whatever enthusiasts kind of hang out and live, right? If you imagine the network state existing with passports and whatnot, I would never have left it, at least in the past couple of years. So it's a very real thing to be clear, like empirically it exists in the world. One place where I think I disagree with Balaji And it's funny, he tweeted a thing that says the network state is like Zionism, but without Judaism, right? Which is funny because there is no Zionism without Judaism, right? If you don't have the shared story and the shared sense of peoplehood and the shared values, it's very difficult to actually create something like Zionism, which created the state out of nothing in 2000, after 2,000 years of exile. So I'm curious, I know this is putting a lot on your one brain, but we tend to do this with guests. Like the Don't Die Network State, I understand the 4 principles, which maybe you should run through here just so that everyone knows kind of what you're talking about. But I'm curious how that is going to fill in, I think, that, that, that gap in the network state thinking, which is how do we all get aligned in the, on the same page? I mean, often literally the same page or the same set of commandments for this, this network state.

Yeah. Yeah. It's actually true.

Yeah.

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Like in any given moment, I'm trying to compress reality into its most intelligible form because any one of us can say an infinite number of things and string words together and talk about ideas and speculate about what will come, talk about politics and drama. And I'm trying to say, that's fun. We're also in this moment of potentially creating this extraordinary future and also annihilating ourselves. And so therefore, how can we compress reality into something that's actionable, that unites us? And so the network state is kind of the next bridging point where I'm trying to get at. Where I'm saying that technology is going to move forward at a speed that is a faster clock speed than we humans. We humans have a certain clock speed in terms of how we understand a topic, how we adapt to a new idea, how we reorganize society around these new concepts. And so far, we've largely been on the same clock speed as change because we've primarily been the change agents.

Yeah.

But now that AI is the primary change agent in terms of its speed of progress, we need a new clock speed. And what is the galvanizing force that allows us to do it? Right now, most of— well, the majority of governments in the world are not working at clock speeds that are impressive. They're mostly a drag on society. A few governments are, like China, for example. China really takes a very aggressive approach in being a change agent itself, trying to create clock speed for society. But the network state is basically to say it's trying to acknowledge that governments as a mechanism to digest and enable adoption is slower than what we need. It's going to create a very serious bottleneck and very precarious situation for us. And so I want to create a parallel, an alternative to say we can create change, these competing nation-state activities. So it's what Yeah. So what nations do is they compete for resources and power. And I want to provide an example of how we might adapt at a faster speed, given that we're now in a new era.

But let me, so that's, I agree with you, Bryan, by the way. Um, but let me raise to you one objection. We have a, we have a group chat where we debate or discuss, sometimes debate the podcast guests before they happen. And one issue when somebody brought up is like amplifying longevity will make people live longer and be older. Which we're already living in a gerontocracy, right? So some vision, imagine Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell get on Blueprint and the vision of our political future is Pelosi and McConnell debating forever. And I don't think that's the reactive government we need, right? To guide us through these sort of— I mean, the way that society is typically advanced is that simply the older generation dies and the newer generation just fills in for it. And that's science advances one funeral at a time goes the saying, right? In physics. So, I'm curious again, how do you square potential longevity? Are people going to just have to perceive their age differently such that whatever happens— there's another thing that one of our friends likes saying is that technology that I experienced in my 20s is cool and exciting. In my 30s, it's just normal life. And anything I find out in my 40s is evil and satanic and must be done away with.

Yeah.

So, how do you avoid— and maybe the longevity thing stretches that out so that it's like, 2x the windows for each of those. But how do you, how do you work against that factor if you're trying to increase the gain function in like our reactivity?

It reminds me, this is like what I call the Blade Runner fallacy, where Blade Runner takes place in 2049 and you've got flying cars and you've got droids that are indistinguishable from humans. Yet humans are identical. They're basically unenhanced. They have the same proclivities, they have the same thought processes, they have the same biases, same frailties. And so they made that movie because we need to be relatable to those humans. If we don't relate to those humans, we're not going to watch the show. But it's this idea that everything moves forward around us, but humans remain unchanged. And a lot of people take that same fallacy where we imagine a world where we're on the eve of creating superintelligence. Yeah. And so we imagine that everything around us is going to change, but we remain unchanged. And so we imagine McConnell and Pelosi being in there, but I don't think it's true. If you say what is going to change, I would speculate that what's going to change is that, for example, we humans are currently the stewards of all knowledge. We learn it in school, we share among with each other, we have systems. We are the stewards of that knowledge. AI is going to become the steward of knowledge. It will know more and be better at maintaining knowledge than any human will be. And it will discover more and faster than any human. So therefore, we are no longer going to be the stewards of knowledge. We're just going to be able to access knowledge to some degree. And that's going to fundamentally change many things, and education, how we understand ourselves, to intelligence. And so, in short, many of the objections and/or problems that people come up with have these underlying fallacies where they assume certain things are going to remain the same. And certain things are going to change. And my primary argument is that we are moving from a first principle society where we take what we do know and we model things out to a zeroth principle society, which is we don't know, that we're no longer the initiator and the manager of knowledge and discovery, and that we'll never— we'll never— we'll lose that position forever because we'll never be able to move that speed. With that said, I think we're up against a wall of fog and we can say absolutely Nothing about the future, which goes back to my point before. If that's the case, how do I compress reality to make it intelligible in this moment?

I think you're touching on something which is a common sentiment in tech, right? Which is that AI is going to become the steward of knowledge and wisdom, which I tend to I tend to agree with. I'm not an AI alarmist at all, by the way. I like I think it's going to have a lot of impact, but I don't think it's going to end the world. That said, I also think it's equally probable that it just puts a bunch of customer service and. people and taxi drivers out of a job. And that's it. That's, and that's a lot of what it does. But, um, but one thing I think you're hinting at, and I've heard this said before, is that in some sense, AI will, will steward humanity or will bring a message. I hate to use religious language, although it always devolves to that. But, you know, something will come out of the AI that will tell us how to live our lives. I think you've talked about using an algorithm to optimize your personal life, right? And I, I, I guess the impression I'm getting is that the AI will be smarter than us. And in some sense, will be a thought partner or a design collaborator with us. And at some point, again, I, like, I don't want to humanize the AI or make it some Terminator scenario. Like, it's, it's still a tool that we build and tell it to do things. Although I'd really like it to keep my AirPods connected to the right laptop. It never seems to do that. At least so far, we haven't solved that problem. But I'm curious, yeah, can you dig into that a little bit deeper? Like, what do you mean by that? That, that in some, that in some sense, the AI will become the stewards of, of us and society?

And why would humans willingly see, like, what is the process by which humans will cede A silicon-based infrastructure is more robust.

If you put the silicon-based infrastructure next to a biological infrastructure like ours, humans to AI, over some duration of time, it's reasonable to conclude the silicon-based infrastructure is going to be far superior than biological, individually and collectively, over some timeframe. And in the near term, we can debate about a whole bunch of things, but longer term, I think it's a reasonable assumption to say it will be the dominant force and we will no longer be the architects of this thing. But in thinking about this, I personally can't understand how anybody can say anything intelligent about the future at all. Like absolutely nothing. Not even the things like the most basic things, like what do I want? What do I care about? What are my aspirations? What is my identity? I think it's that dramatic of a situation that we're in. We have no idea. And when— if I pull this back to what I do personally, I'm trying to build an algorithm that can take better care of me than I can myself. And so that's doing basic things like sleep and diet and exercise.

Yeah.

But if I've got nanobots in my bloodstream, that are doing much more comprehensive adjustments to my biochemical state and repairing DNA and especially with gene expression, at that point, who am I? I'm a computational infrastructure of some algorithmic purpose. And, I experience free— I mean, I perceive myself to have free will, whether I do or not, whatever, that aside. But, what I'm saying is We're walking into this mesh of a computational fabric that we are just part of this tapestry, that we're not operating anymore like we are right now, where we view ourselves as these individual agents, which we're really interconnected, but it's just going to be much more so. And so I think that all of our attempts at trying to predict the future, model the future, anticipate problems, articulate problems, has come to an end. And with that, and I say, if that's the case, if we really are just running our mouths and it's gibberish, what do we do to make intel— what do we make to— what do we say to make intelligence intelligible? Or to say, to make life intelligible?

Yeah, I mean, I, so I guess it's funny. I think we're more aligned, Brian, than I saw in this podcast. Like, like, I don't actually, like, I agree with you. Like, the thing is, like, I don't find it that shocking. Like, if my doctor told me something that, like, Google and WebMD wouldn't back up, I'd like call bullshit on what the doctor said. Because I assume, and then at some point, like, I think there's anecdotes, but many anecdotes coming out of people diagnosing conditions using AI better than a suite of doctors like that. That future is obviously arriving. I guess I don't find it so terrifying, right? Like the reality is we couldn't go back to a hunter-gatherer diet. Like much of our, much of our diet's been accommodated to assuming we cook food. We couldn't even live basically half naked like we did before in most of the climate. I mean, I'm. I'm staring at Midtown Manhattan right here. This is the most artificial thing in the world. Like if the elevators give out in these buildings, this would all become uninhabitable, but we all just live that way. And we live with this conjoined organism between, you know, what we've created and our natural selves. I guess it reminds me kind of a lot of this AI debate, by the way, reminds me of like, I don't know, you probably remember, right? We're probably roughly, I mean, I guess you're younger than me. Oh, certainly biologically way younger than me, but you probably remember the debate when like IBM Deep Blue happened and like the human lost to the computer for the first time. And it was like this massive crisis.

Yeah.

And it, sorry, it just, at the time, it just seemed so dumb to me because it's like, who cares? It isn't humanity losing. It's humanity the chess player against humanity the tool builder who's actually competing here. And it turns out humanity the tool builder is actually better than humanity the chess player. And guess what? People still play chess. It's still extraordinarily popular, partially because of a Netflix series, but whatever. People still play the game. It wasn't the end of the game, which was, believe it or not, serious people thought chess would be over as soon as a computer beat a human playing it. So like a lot of these concerns about AI, I think are a little fake and that whatever, we already are a hybrid with our technology, I guess. But are you saying we're getting to a point where it's way beyond anything we've ever seen and you can't even extrapolate from stagecoach drivers losing their jobs because cars came around, um, or segregate, you know, secretaries losing their jobs because Excel and Word came around? You're saying that we're actually entering a point that it's actually way beyond anything we could historically model.

Exactly what I'm saying. And this is why I do the 25th century thought experiment is We could raise the question and say, do we think taxi cab drivers are going to have a future or not? We can say, who's going to win the 2024 election? We can say, do we think we're going to hit carbon emission standards by 2030? We can basically, we can say these things and debate what we think about these topics. And what I'm saying is, to me, that's all noise. The only question that's relevant to us as a species is how the 25th century views this moment abstracted out a few hundred years. Now, when you do that exercise, all these minor questions get washed. It just doesn't matter. There's this one gigantic question, is, is there a future for us as humans? Is there a future for intelligence in some other form to continue on this planet and maybe even beyond? To me, that's the only question that matters. I really don't care personally to engage in any other short-term contemplation, because to me, it's absolutely irrelevant. There's so many people that can fill the void with their opinions about these short-term things. The thing that I found to be the most difficult is how do you find signal and clarity of thought amidst this chaos when it's so hard to predict? I've had discussions where people are like, no, no, no. I don't believe what you're saying about AI. By 2030, no way is this going to happen, or by 2040, whatever. But you take the argument and say, okay, let's just say 2100 for the sake of whatever. Most everyone concedes, yeah, AI is definitely on a trajectory, probably going to be the case that it's superior to us in all ways and in all things, and in ways we can't even understand on the timeframe, which then invites the humility and soberness to say, all right, How do we understand this moment? And so I'm trying to get this moment correct. Otherwise, we're all just talking heads running our mouths and we have no idea what we're talking about. We're missing that. We're missing really what this moment is really about.

Yeah, no, I agree with you. Um, just quick question, random— what random thought I had, Brian, because I know you think a lot about extending your own life and you have this cool metric where you think about how many months you age for every actual calendar age, which I think is a really cool— as a former product manager, I think it's a really cool KPI to have as a, as a person. But let me, let me ask you this question. Ridiculous, you know, cocktail party question. Would you sacrifice a year of life now to live 10 minutes in 2500 and answer some of your questions about what does the future actually look like?

To get to see 10 minutes in 2500?

Yes.

Easy. Easy. Yes.

Ah, hold on. Wait. So the guy who's literally bending heaven and earth to literally age as slow as possible will just Whack, a year down the tubes just to spend 10 minutes in 2500 and actually answer some of these questions.

Wow. Unquestionably. My endeavor is not to die. My endeavor is that intelligence gets the answer correct and we don't extinguish the flame of consciousness. And so my personal endeavor is a representation of a larger philosophical revolution I'm trying to say, which is as a species, The only thing we understand right now is don't die individually, collectively, the planet, and AI, that you have to rebuild the foundations and fabric of society around that singular game. And so I'm basically just showing what that game is and what it looks like day to day in practice, but really it's a representation of a philosophy. That's it. I mean, so I would not be stingy with my years of life. My objective is thriving of intelligence beyond what we can comprehend.

So, so let's, let's get into the don't die thing a little bit. And I, I think you're right to take the movement and like meme it down to a phrase. I think our friend Balaji is actually very good at this. Um, but let's think about it for a second because most philosophies and religions, what they actually tell you is not don't die. They tell you what you should actually die for, right? In the case of patriotism, it's often like literally dying in combat. In, in, in other less extreme philosophies, it's more like What do you give your life for such that you look back and look at it with gratitude and pride and, you know, sense of happiness? But that you're saying the opposite of that. You're saying the negation of that. Do you think that's enough, like, to actually answer some of the moral questions, like, practically we face in a network state, for example, the don't die?

Yes. And so the, every game that has been generated to date is a cope for death. So we say, if death is inevitable, let's, let's make up pretty stories about what exists after death. And let's make up pretty stories about what we can do right now to achieve that pretty existence. But we've, we've moved heaven and earth in order to cope with the inevitability of death. And it— these meaning-making games give people biochemical states in the form of meaning-making where it soothes the suffering of our of our wretched existence. And, to imagine that we can't remake those games that give biochemical states that remap our existence, we'd be shortsighted. Yes, just because we've created that, I mean, it actually is evidence we can create brand-new games that don't rely upon death as the trigger. We are a highly adaptive species. So, yeah, I think we absolutely can remap it and do it very quickly.

See, that's interesting. I think that's probably the first time we actually disagree, Brian, because I think what you describe as the meaning-making games, I would describe at least today, and maybe things will change, as much of human civilization, right? Like, you're right that it is a cope for death. It absolutely is. I mean, we agree with Becker in that case, right? That Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel with death, he absolutely is. Parents are looking into their children's faces knowing that they're staring into mortality, right? They're coping with death, no question. But if you take away that cope with death, it doesn't seem like there's that much left. You'd have to reconstruct most of the motives, most of the engines of civilization in that world in which you don't feel, you know, the cold breath of death at your neck. Right. And how do you do that? Because when you've retired that cold breath of death, it's almost like the UBI fantasists who think if everyone didn't have to work for a living, they'd all become wonderful jazz musicians or something. Like it just doesn't happen.

Right. Yeah.

And so I'm just curious, like, what would those games be like? Or what would it look like if That doesn't— if the chase of immortality or the evasion of mortality is no longer the engine of civilization.

Yeah, I mean, the— to me, the most effective way of doing this is having a conversation with our ancestors a few hundred years ago, a few hundred thousand years ago, or a few million years ago. You know, Homo erectus 2 million years ago. You pose that question to them and you say, where's food, water, and where's food, shelter, and danger? We listen. When we say, tell us about the future of the species, we laugh. We're in the same moment. So I don't think that this is a question we should put pressure on ourselves to answer. So people, when I do these dinners at my house, the punchline I tell them is that everything you care about, everything you identify with, everything you do, everything you've built, you invested your entire life in, could be taken away from you in this future. All your identity games, all your status, all your power, all your biochemical states of what you think gives you pleasure, they could be gone. And what you're going to get in return is zeros, unknowns. And so it hits human panic in a double whammy. It hits like, we hate unknowns and we hate giving up stuff that we've invested in. We, with, you know, the loss aversion. And that's why this revolution is so significant because We have not reconciled with what this moment really is. And so out of desperation, we want to speculate on what it will be and what it won't be and what I will like and what I won't like and what I will— what I'm willing to live for and what I'm not willing to live for. I don't think any of that's true. We're— we are biochemical states all the time. And those— that is configurable. That is— that is designable. We now have root-level access to atoms, molecules, organisms. We have a new tool in AI that can build it. So I think we can remake ourselves as a biological being in ways we can't even fathom.

Sure. No question. I mean, from the technology perspective, if you take that asymptotically, yes. The question is in what direction. I mean, I, I do wonder, I mean, I have no idea who attends these dinners of yours, right? But I do wonder if some of those, so one of the, I've watched many of your interviews, uh, which have been interesting. One of the more interesting ones I thought was, I don't know if you agree, was with Tucker Carlson that came out recently. Um, he's, he's always kind of an interesting, and I'm using that in 2 senses, interviewer.

Yeah.

But I think one of the interesting, his reaction, I don't think he would have the existential, I mean, I'm putting words in his mouth, obviously, but I don't think he would have the existential crisis that you're, which I know, I assume it does happen to lots of people. Because I think we run in a lot of the same circles or same types of people. But I think someone like Tucker is outside of that circle, actually. And they, they, he said this in the interview. He believes he has a soul. He, he has, he believes in a metaphysics. That's as real as the bits and atoms that you're talking about. And I actually, I don't think he would be in this existential tizzy if he saw much of the trappings of the world disappear. I don't think he would be actually. And I don't think a lot of religious people would be. And I think they do have props or supports in their life that are outside of this very materialistic. And I mean that in the nonjudgmental, like strictly just being material, like an empirical world that we're living in. I think a lot of people actually would not face that crisis. I could be wrong. Maybe you have had those people come to your dinner. I don't know.

But I mean, what, what if Tucker— what if people no wanted to listen to Tucker? What if he spoke and no one cared? What if he went somewhere and no one wanted to photograph himself with him? You know, like, so if you— I mean, uh, I, I realized what he said to me, you know, like, yeah, yeah, but you take away status and power and access and respect, you know, what happens to a person? I mean, I know as a founder, you sell your company and the next day you're existentially lost in existence. You don't understand why you exist. I mean, your company was your identity and you can't prepare for that.

Well, but just pause right there for a second, right? That's the problem. That's the sort of people we're talking about. The only form of identity they have is the company, right? There's, there's nothing outside of that company. If that company fails or gets sold, gets sold, they're left adrift without anything. But that, not everyone is like that, for better or worse, right?

Sure.

And that's, we live completely enmeshed in this techno-capitalist world in which the only organization that matters is the company. That's the only organizing unit of life. And they all start assuming religious cults, which they have to be to be successful. Like, I've got to start it myself. I'm not judging anybody. Okay. But like, that's a very particular set of people. That's a very particular part of the human experience.

Right.

There's most people live outside of that circle, not, not inside that circle.

Yeah. And just take other, other situations where when parents become empty nesters, you know, like I just became an empty nester and right. And the child leaves and it does. And it invites like, oh, why do I exist? Like now, if I'm not a primary caretaker and investing all my time and effort into this thing, there's many things where, or when people retire, what I'm saying is that, that we all, whether we want to Acknowledge it or not, we're all pretty attached to who we are, what we do, and in different ways. But I know very few people who are legitimately detached from attachment. Like most of us are pretty attached to reality, you know, when whatever our things are, and the whether whether it's a strong attachment or a weak, the the primary observation here is that. We dislike being displaced. We like, we like, we just, I'm sorry, we dislike change that invites new questions about our identity and our existence. And we want to smooth it over as fast as possible to make it go away. We want to find a new thing that helps us bolster our understanding of reality and how we deal with the suffering of day-to-day life.

I agree. But that, again, I, sorry to offer on this point, but I think that's a crisis for people. to be blind, who have placed themselves or humanity on the altar of their church. And if there's something else sitting there, then to them, it's not necessarily such a crisis. I cite a specific example. I'm in New York randomly. I went to a synagogue, Chabad, which is this religious Orthodox religious movement.

Yeah.

It's where the tunnels are. It's not really tunnels, but just to place it in time and space. I went to the building with the tunnels, which is a whole different story. And it's funny, Chabad, Had one of the earliest ways. I think the other thing I think that there's a duality here, maybe implicit, maybe not, that there's a hostility between traditional modes of thought and technology, when in fact, not only can they be aligned, one is often the motor of the other. I mean, a lot of Arab astronomy, for example, was to actually figure out the direction of Mecca and the correct times to pray. That's actually why they were doing celestial math, not for abstract reasons to understand the universe. So anyway, going back to the Sabbat thing, they had a communication room in there where before the internet, it was hard to transmit a real-time message other than shortwave radio, which is super faulty. So they had this whole complicated mechanism of literally chaining together phone calls such that the rabbi's speech could get to Israel in real time. And they had one of the earliest websites. Other than not using technology on Saturdays, their social media guy is the most terminally online guy I've ever met, as much as anybody in the Valley. Right. He does not— fast forward 5 centuries from now. I mean, it's a slight joke, but whatever transformations happen, I suspect there's still going to be Chabad and whatever weird AI thing is happening, they will be there and they will figure out some version of that that aligns with their values and their views. I don't think it's actually going to be an exclusionary thing where everything from the old is jettisoned and there's this new order in place. I suspect a lot of the human universals of passion and jealousy and rage and ambition and all that, as well as the traditional modes of thought of religion and philosophy will survive. And in fact, will be amplified by AI. And I guarantee you there's going to be a rabbinic ruling on whether you can use agentic AI on Shabbat or not, and whether that actually violates the Shabbat according to a 3,000-year-old document called the Torah. I guarantee you that's coming in the next 10 years if it hasn't already. So I don't know. I just, I completely agree with you in terms of the impact of AI. I just, I just don't know that the rest of human culture is going to be jettisoned as As a result of it. I guess that's where we disagree.

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I think our conversation, it really is, I think it sharpens each of our relative positions. You, in response to my observations, you offer up your projections with a certain degree of confidence on what will happen. You're willing to bridge your ideas about expectations 50 or 60 years into the future with high degrees of confidence. You're even predicting the conflict that's going to happen with humans and their institutions, religious ideologies. And what I'm saying is, And what I'm trying to contrast here is we don't know anything. And that we don't know anything is basically like 6 months away, 12 months away, 18, 24, something very, very, very soon. Now, is it 6 or is it 2 years or 5 years or 10 years? To me, that's all one timeframe. And I'm saying if we walk into the future, this future and we are incorrect in thinking more than we do, we're going to be in trouble because we've now prepared ourselves to fall off this cliff. Whereas what I'm saying now is, hey, it's most likely going to be the case that we can't model these things out and predict it. And things are probably going to change unfathomably. Therefore, it's better to start laying the groundwork for a new tapestry of a game we can play to bridge ourselves into a stable foundation, and that's don't die. Otherwise, you bring superintelligence into the world, what do you do with superintelligence? How do you know where to point it? Immediately, the US is going to want to be better at warfare. We're going to want to be better at killing people. People are going to want to be better at social media. We're going to use it for all the games we're playing today. And so I'm trying to be a perspective that is unusual in the world today, where the majority of the people I hear talking are confident they have the answers on what at least the questions are. In my journeys, it is rare to try to find a path on what we practically do in this moment, outside of speculate that things are going to be like they have been, just different.

Well, let me ask you a question, right? Do you feel the amount of change that's about to happen in the next 30 years is even greater than the amount of change that happened between now and 500 BC when the Bible was written? I mean, you think the step function change we're experiencing in the next 30 years is bigger than the change from now to before the birth of Christ, just to pick a milestone?

Unquestionably. And I think you can make that a quantitative answer. You could basically Look at the history of humanity as a computational substrate and just run the numbers and say, what kind of computational infrastructure is in the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years relative to the past? Yes, I think you can actually reduce that to a mathematical function and say, yeah, reasonable that we'll see that kind of change in that kind of timeframe.

And Bryan, one example you talk about is COVID, how within weeks, Our whole, all governments just flipped on a dime, right? And we now had a new paradigm of how we're supposed to live, and that there's something similar could happen here. Talk about what that flip might look like, flush it out, because it still seems abstract to me of how there will be more change in the next 30 years than in the last several thousand. Say more about what this could look like or how this could happen.

Yeah, even the smallest of changes. So for example, when Trump got deplatformed, the state wasn't the source of power. It was a technology company. They were the arbiters of free speech. Trump was no longer the most powerful person in the world or in the USA. Another power superseded him. Now, that was a very, very small example. But if you march that forward and AI is doing things like it's better at identity verification than the government, it's better at keeping money secure, it's better at providing security, it's better at the most basic functions of society that we've settled, AI does that and then society wobbles. Who's in charge? And does the government have the wherewithal, the authority, the confidence to carry on its basic functions as a species? And so we saw governments wobble during COVID right? There was like a lot of questions like, do we trust these people in power? Are they honest with us? Do they look after our best interests? Are we going to devolve to anarchy because we just don't think that there's infrastructure to keep us in place? Society is so fragile. It's so much more fragile than we imagine it to be. And it doesn't take a lot from AI progress to wobble society in meaningful ways. And so you just take the trajectory. Yeah, I think we're going to wobble. I think crisis is going to open up, and that's not going to stop the progress of AI. So we're going to wobble, and then it's going to get worse, and then we're going to wobble even more, it's going to get even worse. And so it's a compounded situation where, as this is what I'm saying on the clock speed, if you match societal clock speed to adapt to change with the speed of technological progress, when you've got millions of groups around the world working on these AI models, it's a mismatch. And so we have to come up with some kind of way to weave ourselves together so we can survive what's coming our way. And I don't think that any of us offering up our perspectives is going to actually improve our chances of survival. I think we're in a different game than we have been before.

Okay. But just to be clear, though, Bryan, I mean, your view that in some sense we have to jettison the old for the sake of welcoming in the new is a viewpoint in a way, right? It's, it's, you are expressing an opinion, right? It's, it's not, it's not a lack of an opinion. I guess, I don't know, it's weird. One thing I also got from the Tucker interview, which was interesting, is that you both seem to agree that we are on the verge of some ominous, we are on the brink of some ominous things that are about to happen, that are about to wreck society as we know it. And it's weird to be the optimist in the room because I'm typically not the optimist in the room. But I don't know, I, I just don't see it. I don't. It's funny, um, there's this author, Rebecca Traister, whose politics I hate, but she wrote this book called The Paradise in Hell, um, about how in fact we have these, you know, these ominous visions of when society breaks down, everything goes to hell and becomes like a zombie movie. But that's actually not true, right? And she cites many examples. I personally lived, I went through Hurricane Andrew in the '90s in Miami and Miami fell apart. We got to know our neighbors. Society didn't fall apart actually.

Yeah.

Um, and so it's like, it is kind of a white pill on humanity that even if certain structures fall apart, The apocalypse never really quite comes short of like total nuclear war, right? So I don't know. I, it's, again, it's odd to me that to be the optimist in the room, but one of the implicit things in your interview with Tucker was like, millions are going to die when this really hits the fan. And maybe, but guess how many are going to be saved by better cancer diagnosis because you're going to have an AI bot that reads the, you know, the X-ray better than the doctor does, right? I don't know. It's hard for me to just see it as a net, as it's all negative.

And I feel like a lot of people have the view that Antonio has, Brian. So What do you say to convince those people if you're trying to convince them of the sort of magnitude of what's happening?

Yeah. I mean, I'm not— I don't foresee negativity. I don't foresee collapse. I am neutral. Like, I'm not saying it's positive or negative. I'm simply saying the speed of change is faster than our ability to manage it. That's the entire premise.

But that's been true for 200 years, right? I mean, yes, but that's been true for 200 years. But you're saying the acceleration now is faster than the Industrial Revolution, or, I mean, okay. Sorry to cut you off. Sorry. Go ahead, Bryan.

Yeah. Yeah. And so if, if that speed of change is faster than we humans, then it invites a question of what do we do? And that's how I've, I've tried to collapse reality into Don't Die. Whether, whether you think these speculations about, um, the degree of change are accurate or inaccurate, what I'm trying to say is that in this moment, the most rational thing for intelligence to do on this planet is to recenter ourselves on don't die. It's not an unadulterated pursuit of money. It's not an unadulterated pursuit of power or of territory. It is remapping to don't die, that we evolve ourselves past this primitive state where we're at now. And so you don't need to speculate beyond. I'm just saying we need to get the fundamental game right so that it's not keeping the world at fingertips away from self-annihilation at any given moment. It's an absolutely— if we're trying to be sober, it's insane. That we would pair giving birth to superintelligence and this primitive thing. Now, when, again, when death is inevitable, you play the games we play. You do conquer territory. You do try to acquire power. You do try to become immortal in your deeds, what you do. When it's not certain how long and how well we can live, different games are invited. And that's the gist. I'm not willing to say with any confidence on anything on the horizon, Just simply trying to make the observation that that's what the 25th century would advise. That's what they'd whisper into our ears if they could try to speak wisdom to us in our current insanity.

See, I, I, I, I disagree with you. I think the person in the 25th century living on the Jupiter moon colony would tell us, no, fuck, don't die. Go explore, become a multiplanetary species, launch those rockets, go out there and roll those dice. And then I think A lot, not to characterize you as this, but a lot of that don't die philosophy reminds me of, I don't know, retirees who are, in fact, yes, that is, I mean, if you're 70 years old and living in Palm Beach, don't die is your goal in life. And when I get to be that age, I think that's going to totally be me. But I think, I don't know that you can roll the dice and strap yourself to one of Elon's rockets and head to Mars with don't die as your ruling philosophy. How does one manage that? Like, how do you, I assume you're pro-tech and—

Brian and Balaji are transhumanists, right? So they want all those things too.

Okay. Help me, help me understand that, that, that, that what seems to me to be a contradiction, maybe it isn't.

So your zeroth order priority right now is don't die. You personally, every second of every day you're playing don't die. Now you're playing specifically don't die now. So you may drink alcohol or you may stay up late or you may eat some junk food. That would diminish your life on some longer-term timescale. But right now, you play Don't Die more than you play podcasts. You play Don't Die more than you play business. You play Don't Die more than you play any religion. You play Don't Die as the number one most played game in your existence today.

But that's not true, Bryan. I literally voluntarily went to a war zone in Gaza one week after the attacks and sat there and listened to Israeli mortar fire. When the Ukraine invasion happened, I went a week after the Russians went in. Listening to Russian missile, you know, air raid sirens. And if my optim— I mean, sorry, not to be combative, but I don't. And you know what? Those were some of the most memorable experiences of my life. An entire week will go by working on like Techno Capital, whatever. And it's whatever. It's like another sprint. But the sound of like literally hearing Israeli artillery going off and driving on a highway, but looking at the Gaza fence, thinking we're about to get hit by an anti-tank missile. Those I will never forget for the rest of my life.

Yeah, it's—

I don't know. I, I, it's, I, yeah, it's hard to reconcile that.

It's a different concept. So driving a car is dangerous. Being in a war zone is dangerous. So this, the don't die is don't experience danger. Don't die is don't die. And in those situations, you didn't die. So surely, right? So surely you were not walking out in the battlefield and like, shoot me, let me see if I'm invincible. You were playing don't die. While you were in danger. So you, you had an experience, but you were primarily, as a zeroth principle, you were playing don't die before acquiring your experience.

But, but hold on. But yes, because, and to be clear, I wasn't like literally getting like shot at, like I wasn't in combat per se. I wasn't in the Gaza envelope, but it, it was kind of risky, right? Like if you were optimizing for longevity, I, I wouldn't even have gotten the plane to Israel. But I don't know. I mean, you're expanding don't die to be so broad that it includes everything, but that I was not going into it, to the extent I understand your philosophy, with a don't die philosophy. If I'd been killed the day after I was in one of the kibbutz, a Hamas mortar round came in and killed somebody, right? It could have been me. And if that had happened, would I have said, damn it, that was a mistake? I would have said, I don't know. I wouldn't have been happy with it. But in the context of the Gaza War, Israel, I'm kind of a Zionist, et cetera, I would have been content with it. I would have been—

Yeah.

You know, a Russian shell I would have been pissed off at because I'm not Ukrainian. But in the case of Israel, I would have been like, I don't know, I wouldn't have regretted it that much, to be honest. Like, I don't think I could have gone to that situation thinking just for the thrill. Like, I'm not really a thrill seeker that way. I just felt like I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. And that was what was thrilling about it. Even if I did die, it didn't matter. There was something bigger than me. If you listen to the accounts of like people who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, the thrill, the rush they had inside of them. Which I'm sure you'll probably discount as a purely biochemical phenomenon that's probably evolutionary, and you're probably right, is the thought that they were part of something bigger than themselves. And that's what— and they remembered that for the rest of their life. Even if they actually watched their buddies get their head blown off and were traumatized by it, which is terrible, nonetheless, in their honest account of it, they will recount that moment, right? And again, I just think that moment is part of the human story. And if you eliminate that from view, I don't know what one does with that. I don't know.

Yeah, the— all the examples you gave to me are stories that Homo sapiens in the early 21st century tell that, that reflects inevitability of death. So we talk about experiences we want to have before we die. We want to talk about the most memorable. These are all catchphrases and frames we use when death is inevitable. When you are in a reality where the Objective society is a don't die. You have to remap your entire existence. It's not that you can't have similar biochemical states and arousal and, and certain memories. There's, there's nothing unique about being in a high arousal state. Like, you can be in a war zone. Yes, it's arousing, it's unique, it's high risk. There's nothing unique about that that couldn't be replicated in a don't— in a don't die environment. It's biochemical states of certain chemicals.

Oh, come on. But it's not the same playing Call of Duty as actually being there. It just isn't, right? It's hard to reproduce that in a— do you actually mean like literally virtually reproducing it, like through computer technology, or how do you mean?

What I'm saying is you had a certain biochemical state, those were encoded as memories in your brain, you recall those experiences and have certain emotional reactions to them as you replay them and through all your sensory mechanisms. There's nothing unique that's happening in your system. They are repeatable. You could actually engineer the same experiences through digital reality, through biochemical reality, We now have the source code to do these things. And so our stories fall apart so fast. There's not like you can't do something when death is inevitable that you can't do on the other side. They're mirror events of each other. And so this is the situation where—

Right.

We are so embedded in our time and place that it's very hard to extract ourselves and contemplate that a reality may emerge that is entirely unintelligible to us. And that's most likely the emergent phenomena. This is what's happened in evolution. Our current modern-day world is unintelligible to previous generations. You go back far enough, they couldn't even fathom what we're doing.

Bryan, one last question.

But I would say, but just one comment on there. I mean, what I would also say, and I hate to harp on Israel is the counterexample, but there's reasons for it. I would also say that the life that Israelis lead right now is unintelligible to people in the West who aren't actually living in what is kind of an existential conflict for them, right? Like, I don't know that we can, I don't quite buy the story that I think technologically we can reproduce all those states of mind. I mean, if that's true, if you're going to handwave, as startup CEOs and PMs are like, I want to do, it's like, oh, imagine this thing existed. Imagine you could actually capture the feelings of love. Or victory in combat, or the feeling of mastery of some art or literature that which you've created. Like if you could chemically reproduce that, it would be drug-like and fentanyl-like reality. And I don't think it would actually still spur the creative impulse and the love that originally motivated those things. But who knows? We might actually invent those drugs. I just—

Brain in the vat, right? The brain in the vat experiment.

Well, yeah.

I mean, this is— yeah.

I mean, I guess like what— There's no physical laws that prevent us from doing exactly that. And, it's not even only that, we have the actual technologies to start solving that problem. You don't have to make any jump at all to imagine that we will be able to synthetically create biochemical states that will mirror what we perceive to be real-life experiences right now in all forms, biochemically, mechanically, digitally, We have, we have the level access to do these things.

Maybe so, like, I'm willing to concede the point, but then imagine what a sterile society it would be, right? You would create the feeling of love with no actual love. I mean, I don't doubt that perhaps you would take a drug, fire up the AI girlfriend, and have the same feelings of connection you'd have with a real human. But I mean, to be blunt, a real kid's not going to come out of that union, right? And so there's, there's the question of birth weight and self-perpetuation. But go back to Israel example, and I'm sorry, it's one of these bingo card things of the podcast. It's, it's interesting to me that Israel is the only Western rich country, Western-ish rich country with a replacement rate birth rate. And I don't think it's accidental actually. And I think it's funny that we're entering a post-scarcity society in which I agree with you. A lot of these inflection point things are starting to happen and it's exciting, but somehow people are less and less able to answer the question of why should I exist or why should I bring more life into the world? Like that's still difficult to answer for many people, just empirically it is the case.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm not saying I have the answers, by the way.

I don't have the answers either. I was just going to say that. I think as a species, we are at the end of our ability to offer answers. And I think it is creating a hyperventilation situation for us as a species because who are we except for people that have answers to everything? And this is why It creates— when I have these dinners, it creates so much existential crisis in people because you walk through these scenarios and people start imagining their most precious things about their— so like your preciousness is your experience doing these things in this war zone and the story you tell, and you're proud that you did it, and it's an important memory to you. And you start taking those things away, and it's so threatening to us as a species, and we just can't— it's hard for us to understand a new reality where that's not going to be true. And I think—

hold on, but just to be clear, Brian, since you're lighting over my comprehension, to be clear, what I think is going to go away is the side that can't answer those questions, not the side that can. Again, to be clear, it's Israel's whose birth rate is positive, not our country's and not our societies that lives in this pixelated goo that we call techno-capitalist life, right? So like what I see being swept away is actually not the experiences I had. It's this other world that—

Yeah.

I think he was going to have a hard time, but I agree with you that it's, I agree with you fundamentally that we're hyperventilating and we have a hard time of answering the fundamental questions. And I, but so what do you think the answer is? I mean, do you think AI is going to provide the answer? Like what, what, I agree with you. Like I, those answers are hard to have. Do we regress into previous modes of answering that? Or I think you're, you would say no, we're reframing, like the questions we're even asking are different, much less forget the answers. Right.

Okay.

Interesting.

Yeah. I think that the benefit to listeners of this conversation is You and I are good representatives of 2 different ways of thinking about the future, where you offer a perspective where we can make reasonable guesses about the future because we can map what has been to what will be to some degree of proximity that gives us some kind of sturdy foundation. And I'm approaching the conversation saying we can't, that we can no longer model the future And if that's the case, then it invites the question of what we do. Because what I think, when you can model the world to a reasonable degree, you can say, we can keep on doing what we're doing, and we can maybe adjust this thing here and there. We don't ask this pressing question. And I'm saying it's actually going to be a rewrite of reality beyond our comprehension. And if that's what we're up against, then how do we understand reality? And I'm trying to offer up a new framework of sturdiness that gives us a new reality to play with. So we as a society can say, yeah, we're okay. We have a game to play. We have meaning-making, uh, understanding. I have an identity. I can be focused. Like, I have stuff to do. I'm not deprived of all things in existence. I understand myself. So I think viewers can make their observations on where they land on that spectrum. I think that's probably the value of the conversation.

Yeah. By the way, to, to, to be clear, I don't, I don't know that we're opposing sides of it. Like, I, I agree with you. Like, it's interesting, for example, getting to the birth— I mean, and birth rates is something you can measure. that in some sense measures society's ability to will itself into the future. You see birth rates going down the world over. It's not just like a Western post-Christian thing. Like the world, anything modernity touches tends to say, oh, look, we're not doing this kid thing anymore. And a lot of it's economic and practical, but I do think that we've gotten to humanity as a whole has gotten to a point where we're just asking questions that the traditional answers don't.

And maybe the last question and then we'll get Bryan out of here. Is birth rates part of your plan, Bryan? Or like, do you see that as a major problem that needs to be fixed? Because you could imagine another version of Bryan Johnson that's like having 100 kids and doing YouTube.

Oh, you have children, right, Bryan? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I do.

Yeah, but not 100.

Yeah. Well, I joke in the book I wrote, Don't Die. I joke in my author bio that I father millions of biological and digital offspring that are throughout the galaxy. Yeah. I mean, so this is If you raise the question of birth rate, I can certainly string words together about what I think about the birth rate, but 8 billion people can string words together of what they think about the birth rate. There's nothing that I can say intelligently that hundreds of millions of other people couldn't say. And so I would rather say, I don't know. The value of me in response is trying to say my intelligence limits my ability to say interesting things or relevant things or smart things about the topic. If we've learned one thing throughout history, people are idiotic when they talk about the future. And that is like the thing that is reliably true. And very few people punch through with wisdom But otherwise, the baseline is idiotic. And so I'd rather not subject myself to be vulnerable, to be an idiot, to say something where I just run my mouth when I don't know. So if we weren't up against the superintelligence, you could string together and say, okay, here's how you understand the landscape. Here's how birth rates have affected blank. You could piece together a nice web of contemplations. But yeah. I will pass on that question.

Last comment, right? Just one last comment. I don't know if you've read a book called the— I don't read a lot of sci-fi, but there's a great book by Drew Mongari called The Postmortal, in which they solve death. And it's this fascinating sci-fi imagining. I like sci-fi that imagines a weird technology existing and like what the hell happens after. And it's— I don't know if you've read it. Have you read it? The Postmortals by— it's a novel, so it's not like science. But anyway, it's cool. It might be worth examining it because it's very much in this vein of like what happens if we actually live either infinitely or forever. And to be clear, it doesn't make them like immortal. It just means you stop aging at a certain age and you can still get like shot in the head or run over or whatever, right? But it starts imagining like what are the implications of like literally people in high-density countries not dying, right? And it, just to be clear, rapidly goes off the rails. The Chinese have to like nuke their own cities. There's terrorism groups. It's like a disaster.

Yeah.

And I think, I don't necessarily agree with it, but there is one view that curing death might actually be the death of society in a sense that like, and I think you actually potentially agree with this, right? In that we're going into a mode in which potentially the danger is being unequipped to actually deal with what's coming and that actually being a social threat, even if we do things like solve death or at least extend life a lot more than we have.

I mean, like the best sci-fi I've ever done Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah.

Right?

So, you take a sci-fi author and they simply take what happens among humans. We play power games, we gossip, we have drama, we assassinate each other, we do all of our things. And so, sci-fi takes all those baseline principles and maps it onto different technological substrates and realities, but most of the core things about human remain the same. And so therefore, you're constrained because otherwise, people, again, people are not going to read the book. But you do a psychedelic, you're transported to a dimension where none of your preconceived notions hold very strongly. You're in a different reality that has new coordinates, bearings. So to me, that's the most interesting thing is like, how can we imagine these spaces that bridge us to these new unfathomable lands in some way that make it somewhat intelligible for us?

Which psychedelic? I've taken mushrooms. I'll cop to having taken psychedelics as well. I'm curious what psychedelic have you taken, Ray?

A few.

A few.

Okay.

We don't have to go into details. We got to get Ryan out of here.

Ryan, you've been super generous with your time.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and cognitive revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Hey everyone, Erik here. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts, To shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors, and influencers, like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week, and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's erik@turpentine.co, and let's partner together.