What The Experts Are Saying About AI, Longevity, and Consciousness

Andrew comes by and he's working with the ex founder of Skype, I believe, who's funded him to build a unified longevity platform where he could connect into any database that has like a medical record like Sutter Health or Kaiser or whatever. You log in with whatever login they give you. Not a doctor, AI. Jonathan and I just spent the last like five or six days or something last week just going to conferences. Jonathan had a VIP pass to get into a speaker's dinner.

You're just tripping over really smart people. It was just this feeling of constant FOMO that there was just like somebody right next to you that you could have this amazing conversation with, share ideas, you know, generate activity.

These conferences are cutting edge, the latest and greatest with the best people in these spaces.

I want to build consciousness into a user experience. That's the role in life that I want to play.

Host tools group cohorts by click our tool groups cohorts by belief to help.

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Why do actors make the choices they do? The von Neumann Morgenstern utility, Ethereum or VNM demonstrates that rational choice under uncertainty involves making decisions that take the form of maximizing the expected value of some cardinal utility function. Jonathan, could you give the audience the lowdown of what happened at the speaker dinner?

Yeah, let's see.

Foreign welcome to the ABCs for building the future podcast. We have myself, Robert and my co host Jonathan, co founder on epistemic me. On this podcast we bring on researchers, founders, entrepreneurs, scientists, builders of the future. People doing big things with big stories to tell. Today we have a build in public update for epistemic me. Jonathan and I just spent the last like five or six days or something last week just going to conferences like all day. Went to sidebar conference which is it's called the sidebar community for product technology leaders in tech in general. There's some entrepreneurs there as well. And then the Vitalist Bay Longevity Tech conference that was over the weekend in Berkeley. So Jonathan had a VIP pass to the Longevity Bay one. So he was able to get into a speaker's dinner which is pretty cool and I'd love to get a debrief from him for you on the pod. And we want to cover everything we learned really. These conferences are like cutting edge. You're on the latest and greatest with the best people in these spaces. And in these conferences we had a few chance to test out a few things. One was showing AI Brian from Don't Die, our first use case to people and seeing what they think Two is testing out our marketing positioning. So I'll get into that in a sec. But how do we position epistemic me? What is it? What does it do? Why is it valuable? And then also building more partners and building more of a community of contributors. So those were, those were a few of the goals for the conference. And I guess another one was really like, hey, are we on the right track? Does our market positioning resonate with people? Do people get it? So that we could just maximize our learning rate to keep iterating towards our own market hypotheses. So I think where we'll start is like, maybe we could just go back and forth on initial impressions of sidebar. First, we'll talk about sidebar for like 10 minutes and then we'll spend the majority of the time talking about the Vitalist, because that's more in tune with Episode me and our use cases. So first off, sidebar was held in San Carlos and it was their first ever conference. I went to a dinner the first night, Wednesday night, and I hosted like a musical chair sort of thing to facilitate connection with people. That was fun. The event organizers asked me to do it a good time. Met a bunch of people. That's about the marketing positioning of. So this community is really lots of product and technology leaders. So I thought, okay, well, they're probably a mixed panel all the time, right? Or amplitude. They're probably used to the term cohort. So we came up with this positioning. I should say our GPT intern came up with this positioning and then we're just co opting it. Thank you. GPT Internet. The tagline is most tools group cohorts by click. Our tool groups cohorts by belief to help you, your product do its job better. So when we explained it that way at sidebar, I turned a lot of heads at product leaders just like really interested in that. They're like, wait, oh, that's interesting. Because they also understand time to value. If you could really get into a user's head, like, you could personalize their value, right? And so they, under the ones that I talked to, understood beliefs. And so cohorts by clicks, cohorts by beliefs like Old World, New World, that. That really lacks them. And then the sidebar conference the next day, all day Thursday was at the Aviation Museum in San Carlos. So it was kind of a cute small setting and lots of aviation history. So that was fun. There was a really great keynote that I recall them talking about like human evolution and stuff and thinking that was awesome. I went to a session On AI for pms, that was okay. A couple sessions on influence, those are all right too. Most value that I got from that conference was like talking to other product technology leaders. I met a few coaches who are interested in our concept, one of whom just wrote a book, pretty well connected in neuroscience. Her name is Caroline. And so I got her to agree to an interview on the POD and met a bunch of other people too. That I have endless amounts of follow ups to get through. Overall, I give it like seven and a half out of 10. Like, oh, I guess I should miss another thing. I want an award was pretty cool. So yeah, I didn't expect that at all. Mainly because I've been giving them such like visceral feedback on the product that I feel like maybe you won't be my friend anymore. I've been giving them pretty harsh feedback on their product offering. So anyway, when the wards came up, I think I got called up for the first one. It was the sidebar go givers award. And I always pride myself on leaving every relationship or community a better place. I found it. I'm not perfect, so but I try to try to hit that and yeah, won that award. That was fun. And a lot of people gave me congrats after. Yeah, overall I think I'd give it seven and a half out of 10. It was a pleasant experience, met a lot of good people, got good learnings that are marketing positioning with that new tagline by the intern is a pretty good one. Jonathan, what did you think of sidebar?

Yeah, so it was their first conference, right. And I joined the organization like two and a half years ago and participated in their sidebar circles, which is kind of like a advisory forum. And it started as like founders and execs, advisory form for founders, execs. And over the years the organization has pivoted to career growth network and it's focused more on community. And now there's even like these two different levels you can join at. You can either be in a circle and the community or you can be just in the community, which is pretty interesting. And I had been in an entrepreneur organization, EO in previous life and enjoyed the form format they have there. And sidebar is distinct from that in that it has a paid facilitated form advisor that really kind of helps the meeting flow and it helps you clarify your language and your goals and helps you to get environments where you can get feedback from people. So I think, think about when, when I think of sidebar, I think about a place I go every two weeks to like clarify My act, my what I'm actively nar my active narrative in my head, what my goals are, be able to articulate these and get feedback from smart people. And I, I particularly have love sidebar for the specific people I've met in my circle because it's just like really some really incredible thinkers that and. And professionals that have helped me think and advance, you know, that could kind of co evolve together. And I, I was. So I was expecting to meet sort of a high caliber of people at the event. And I'd say there's. There is less entrepreneurship in the organization than there was before. So this was a little bit of like me feeling like I was on the outside looking in, like, hey, I'm an entrepreneur in this place where like people are product managers and they wanted to advance their career. And then there was even people being invited to the conference who weren't in sidebar at all, who were just like, you know, like invited to come to the conference as a product manager to like check out sidebar, which is also cool. So one note about your award I think is this is an example of if you show up in a formative community that you can shape the values. And I actually think that the values they shaped of helping other people, knowledge sharing and innovation, that's been one of the key theses I've thought about a lot in terms of my company T machine. It's really meant. It was meant to build zero to one organizations that could sort of like scale without hitting the iron wall of oligarchy and, you know, keep individual autonomy and creativity and ideas building on top of one another. So anyway, I enjoyed his, his presentation. I thought it was like perfect for the audience. And he had like a really sort of bright message and thoughtful and he's written a book and he has mathematical models. And I definitely have to follow up with him. He's. He's probably my number one follow up.

Yeah, totally, totally. And that was a talk that started the day. So that was like. That was. I think that was the best talk.

Yeah, it was the best one.

Would you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awesome that. Phil will follow up with you on the mathematical models from their book. That's gonna be sick. Keep. Keep us abreast of that and then we'll also keep the pod audience abreast of that too. I suppose. Another thing I should mention is Ethan Evans was at the conference, who's another him and then Shreyas Doshi were two other like kind of influential people in the tech scene. I got to Talk to Ethan a bunch. So that was cool. And hopefully he wants to be on the pod at some point. But yeah, I got to talk to him a lot and saw a presentation by him which had to do with his, his time coming up at Amazon and his interactions with Jeff Bezos. Key takeaway that I got from that was just like, just stay communicative even if you're fucking up. Be communicative about your fuck up. Talk about how you'll keep, you know, take ownership of your fuck up, how you'll improve things. Just basically growth mindset applied to work, you know, And I really like that. That was, that was cool. I liked those stories that came up.

Yeah.

So overall. Yeah, go ahead.

It provoked a thought in the conversation I've been having, you know, about politics because Ethan was talking about how these two periods in his career, you know, working at Amazon at a high level, the failure itself, and his response to the failure was what he felt got him promoted. Right. It's in the context of like maybe a specific personality in the organization and being Jeff Bezos, and Bezos specifically was the one who rewarded his behaviors. Right. But the conversation I've been having recently is just the, the career paths of Elon Musk and Donald Trump and how there's been multiple points in their careers where they've had like failures or setbacks and their, their like superhero ability seems to be like turning those into like a step function in results. Right. I think we saw it with Trump's like amazing political comeback, you know, here in the last several years. Elon's been on, on the ropes like a number of different times with his businesses. And it's just kind of a reminder that like, you know, it's not like it really defines your path, how you, how you're going to respond to setbacks and failure, whether, whether you're going to, you know, like let it set you back or whether you're going to turn that into something way better. And some, I think some of the people that, that kind of float to the top of at least the current U.S. incentive structure, you know, they can always just, they're like Teflon, you know, they can always just find a way, a stakeholder populist movement, something to like resurrect them from the dead and keep going.

Yeah, yeah. I think the ability to pick yourself up, I think Ethan was talking about, like, he basically said that's the best skill you can have. Basically said is recovery optimization. I think that's what he called it. Ethan, if you're Listening to this, that I got it wrong. I'm sorry man. But maybe not in those words, but in that meaning it's like if you fall, if you fail, if you have a setback, how do you actually recover? What do you choose to do in those moments that could be very defining as Jonathan said. I believe that's very true in life as well. So like one thing that came up as you were saying that is just even the word failure, it's like is it real? Like it, it really is just dependent on your mentality. Right. A setback or a failure point could just be like one step in the journey. Right. And progress is non linear. So you're just going to be like doing this the whole time in life in every domain. I think so. I think that's, that's like a choice to see it. Like I remember watching videos of Michael Jordan and he said he loves failure. I was like what? And it's like it's because it gave him opportunity for improvement. That, that's probably like a goated level perspective where you like, like where you're like so good you typically don't brush up against it and then when it's there you're like oh yeah, like I like that. I want to keep growing. So yeah, good points made Jonathan. Okay, so that was sidebar summit. Let's go over the Vitalist, Vitalist Bay conference. Do you want to give a quick overview of what this is about and what the organization is about, Jonathan? Because I think you're closer to them than I am.

Yeah, so let's see. Vitalist Bay is an eight week pop up in Berkeley, California. They're, they're, they're renting the facility from the Light Cone Institute, which was formerly Less Wrong, which you know, like they, they both organizations have sort of interest in extreme longevity. And that's. If you go to vitalism.org I think it's.org you can see their, you know, their, their core tenets which is really that, that, that death is bad, that we all want to live another day. That like, you know, basically we, we want to work towards the option of immortality. And you know, and the minute I met the founder Adam at a longevity dinner in San Francisco, the minute he told me about it, I was like, yeah, I'm in man. It's like this is the life I've been living. This is how I've been thinking. I've been looking for other people's ideology. And so, so he created this pop up called Vitalist Bay and he attracted some of the like smartest minds in the longevity space. So you can think of people coming in from biotech, a lot of biotech entrepreneurs, a lot of biotech scientists, a lot of health entrepreneurs, health enthusiasts, and just people that really want to see longevity progress. And one of the big questions was whether Brian Johnson was going to join the Vitalist. And he did. So the biggest conference was this weekend was the fourth conference they threw is this weekend they called the Summit. And I was kicked off by Brian Johnson on Friday morning. And yeah, it was just really cool to see all the energy and conversations. I have a lot to say about it. So. But that's, that's a little bit of background.

One quick thing before we get into the weeds. There was a hilarious moment. So now I'm like, you know, me and Jonathan are working with Brian's team on Don't Die Brian AI. And there was a hilarious moment where I came in midway through the Brian talk because Google Maps failed me and I took a lift out into the hills of Berkeley. And then I was like, wait, where the fuck am I? I'm in the residential neighborhood in the suburbs. Like where am I? Like, why? I thought this was a conference. I text Jonathan, he gives me the right address which is like 15 minute walk from my house. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm such an idiot. And so I get to the conference late because I lifted, I trusted the Google overlords, lifted to the wrong place. Could have just walked there if I had the right address. And I walked in midway through Brian's talk and I was just standing and I texted Jonathan. I'm like, hey dude, I'm here. And Jonathan's like, hey, I'm on the bleachers, I see Jonathan. We locked eyes, we're like, oh yeah, got you. Cool, I'll catch up later. And he texts me and he's like, hey, Kate from Blueprint is sitting next to me. Kate is Brian's co founder on Blueprint and Don't die. And so I was like, oh, I've been interacting with her in Slack. Like we've, we've been collaborating online. I should say hi. And so I, during the middle of a talk, I had grabbed a coffee or something, I came by and sat myself right next to Jonathan and who I thought was Kate from Blueprint. And I introduced myself, I was like, hey Kate, it's Robert. I'm from the, you know, Blueprint, Slack. Like we've been interacting, we've been working together. And then she like doesn't say Anything for a sec. Had a confused look and I was like, I mean like, whatever. So I sit down and then 10 seconds later she turns over and she's like, oh, wait, do you think I'm Brian's Kate? And I was like, no, me you're not.

She looked exactly, she looked a lot like her. And her name was Kate. They're both of the names were Kate. I mean, and we're. Yeah, it was just this uncanny pattern matching.

She's that long. EPI looks like her. Her name's Kate. It's just, it totally could have been it. Yeah.

And I just seen Kate on Brian's most recent podcast. Like they're starting a new podcast format and so I was very familiar with what her face looked like and I was like, that's definitely her. Her name's Kate. It can't be anybody else. Like, you know, well, Jonathan was confident.

And then when I saw her I was confident. So it wasn't just like Jonathan screwed me over. It was like I, I looked as well and I was like, yes, I agree. That is Kate.

Yeah. And we met, we met, we met Kate later who's a Berkeley, you know, engineering master's student. And, and she's, she's really cool, but.

Very different person than Very, very different. Yeah. So anyway, funny blooper aside, Jonathan, I, I feel like you're bursting with energy on like, you know, what happened at the conference stuff. So you want to debrief it and just give me your top of mind impressions.

Oh man. I mean, first of all, it was, it was like you're just tripping over really smart people. Like, it was just this, this feeling of constant FOMO that there was just like somebody right next to you that you could have this amazing conversation with, share ideas, generate activity. And I still feel that. So I got a long follow up list. Let me start with two of the themes that I think came out of the conference to me because I think two of the most maybe forward looking conversations. One was Brian Johnson's where he did the Denver conversation. He asks the three questions and he talks about how we have no idea what's going to be happening in the future because of AI. So just hang on, stay alive. And I thought it was interesting in the after with Adam Bries that he said he wouldn't be interested in longevity if not for AI. That was the first time I've heard him say that. That and Tim Urban's sort of projection where Tim is working on a new book where he's writing the history of Mankind since the Big Bang and to the present. And he kind of gave a framework where he's like, you know, if you think of each, each of the chapters of civilization is, you know, like we're in like the 900 as, say, there's like a thousand chapters. Overall, we're 999th one. And like things are changing so much faster now. Like we had like a whole block of chapters where we were just like, you know, we would be hominids, right, and like live the same life as our ancestors. Now everything changes, even within a generation. And now there's AI. And so the common theme between Tim Urban and Brian Johnson was like, that things are moving so fast, there's just no tools that we have to predict the future and it's going to be a wild ride. Really crazy. They're both sort of on the optimist scale. But also I think both of them intimated that like, hey, things could go really wrong in the future. There's no guarantee that they won't. And my theme coming out of that was that these are two people that have access to the smartest people in the world. The most like, you know, thought forward AI scientists, the billionaires of the world. Like these guys are talking them constantly and there's this sort of like.

I.

Guess, protocol that if you're really smart, you just admit that you have no idea what's going to happen. And I think there's something fair about that. But I also think that there are ways we can look at how technology and humanity can co evolve where there are evolutionary pathways, impossible paths and impossible paths, and that we don't know nothing about the future. But it's ambiguous. But I think we really need to take this conversation next is what are the possibilities and what are the evolutionary pathways? And I, interestingly enough, got a chance to talk with Tim about this on the way to the speaker center where we both missed like the shuttle to get there. And I hopped in an Uber with him and we just got to chat about this for a bit. So that was one of my key themes is like, yes, AI plus humanity plus longevity. But like, can we know nothing about the future? I think. I think we can.

Okay, so what did y' all Tim talk about in terms of trying to know something about the future, like charting the evolutionary path?

Well, yeah, if you remember, at the end of Brian's conversation, he called on Patrick House, who he'd worked with at Colonel and he was given a presentation earlier that day, and he talked about the nature of evolution as something that is basically metabolism. Fitness drives evolution. He said something to that extent. He mentioned how it's really expensive for mammals to have a constant body temperature, but it's such a strong evolutionary fitness function that, that it.

Yeah, yeah, they talked about turtles and stuff like that that had, you know, they're operating at like 60 degrees or something like that versus humans, 98 degrees. And so that's where they talked about metabolic fits, right?

Yeah. And I thought like, so after the first day when I saw that, I was, I was thinking that like, okay, if there's one evolutionary pathway where AI augments current biological metabolism, let's just call that one pathway, one set of adaptive fitness functions that could co evolve between AI and humanity or biology. And then another evolutionary fitness pathway is that AI figures out how to metabolize its own energy and it creates energy sources that are way more efficient than civilization or evolution has found so far. And that's one of the realities that we can't possibly see. And so I asked him, which of those do you think is going to happen first? And I think he seemed to think that that was maybe a good way to pose the question. Not that we came up to the answers, but we're kind of like, how do we think about this? Right. But that's the thought framework that I had maybe to follow up. Brian, three questions is like of these different ways that we find metabolic fitness functions between AI and humanity. And there's more possibilities, right? It's not just biology. You can have synthetic biology, you can have ecological adaptations, you can have augmentation of civilizational metabolic functions, like being able to mine, extract oil and other fossil fuels or solar energy. And there's a world where AI co evolves with humanity to create robotic systems that can do that. But if we just lay all these things out, I think there are first principled ways to say that augmenting the current organism level metabolic functions of humans is probably the first way the AI will impact and kind of lay out these landscapes and say, which of these evolutionary pathways, how might they evolve and what might this look like? And I think that gives us more information than just saying we can't possibly know anything about the future.

Got it. Okay. So kind of like finger in the air. I think it's this way they're going to augment us and improve our metabolism. Like that might be the evolution. One evolutionary path like that seems like from what you're saying, that seems like an obvious one. Am I hearing that right?

Yeah, well, being at the conference, right. There were a Lot of biotechnologists there that were working at the cellular level. And so there's ways that AI could augment the ways that cells harness and metabolize energy cells within any other, any living being. You know, this might be our agriculture or farm animals or whatever. This might have to do with metabolic disorders and solving health problems. Or there might be like some way that we can augment like the way that our whole biology works together. We have 100 times as much energy as we ever did before because we're just able to like find all these little nuanced deficiencies with AI and accelerate evolution. And I think it's a little bit more than hand waving. It's like there are first principle ways to look at how evolution has happened. To come up with simulations and put energy into really simulating different potential outcomes and being deliberate about humanity, about creating the kind of outcomes that are most favorable to us.

I want to be in whatever lab is working on this. Just like, can you imagine a cool ass lab where you're like, hey, let's like play it out what can happen? Like, and then your whole job is to do that as well as you can. Are there labs doing this? Maybe the audience could tell us. If you know of a lab trying to simulate the future of humanity co evolving with AI evolutionary paths, let us know. I would, I'd love to look into any work there. I'm actually going to do a search.

There are the Institute for the Future comes to mind. Jane McGonagall's work at Stanford. She's a Ted. Talk about it. Ginny Liang from my sidebar group has done this kind of work too. Like it's just, you know, oh yeah.

The theories of change and three horizons.

Yeah, right.

But like specifically this, which is like, let's think about how humans evolve. Like that's like very niche now, not, not just like, hey, future stuff, right? Like, like specifically this.

How does technology meet humanity? Right, Yeah, I think there's a lot of that. I think a lot of the AI safety work falls in that category. I've been listening to 80,000 Hours. They're really like kind of drilling in to AGI specifically and how it evolves. They had Will MacAskill on recently who works at Oxford and they have a whole like philosophical department. And I would just say like, you know, between all the amazing thinkers working in this space, what is missing are strong computational evolutionary frameworks for making sense of past data and then extrapolating it into future data. And I think you have to look at something as extreme as like the shift into the first from non life to life. Like how did that happen? What's the evolutionary narrative, the data that we have, it's a story we can tell today. The shift from single cell cellular life into multicellularity, like that's what we're witnessing right now, is that profound of a shift where we need an evolutionary narrative that can kind of speak to how humanity and AI evolve. Because I think AI could be as important as the RNA substrate that Patrick House was talking about where he was saying we think we individually want to live together. RNAi substrates have already figured out this longevity escape velocity, like DNA is just doing just fine. And I think now we have something that like, that grew out of our language to find a substrate in silicon which is, which is the AI and LLM version which could grow into like the new form of DNA that like, you know, propagates life going forward. That's the moment that we're in now. So what does that look like?

What does that look like? If we're just putting on our. Is it observation context is everywhere in every software. Is that what that is?

Right?

Yeah, well that's what we want to happen.

Yeah, I think. And this like you pull in some components of other things we saw at the conference. Like how does like the individual human experience, like the individual phenotype, like where I can use synthetic biology and AI to create my own, to change my own, like sort of morphogenesis through my embryonic cycle. Like what if I can start controlling my cells and like growing new sensory organs and evolving and adapting in like new ways? What if I can include other humans into my sense making loop? And collectively we're able to sense make and act in coordination at levels. Whereas before we were single cells, now we're multicellular organisms. So I mean you imagine all these things happening at once. I see AI plus plus synthetic or sort of evolved humans coming together as these collective instruments of sense making that are going to have a superior evolutionary advantage if it's not too weird and it's not too fast. And then I think the key. Go ahead.

No, no, go ahead dudes, go ahead, keep going.

Well, yeah, and then this is. We have a lot to talk about, like with our talk with Andrew, who we met in the Dodai community.

But one of the things that could be a whole pod, honestly one of.

The things we touched on, I think after you left was actually like the forcing functions of this co evolution are going to come from, you know, the capitalistic forces captured by large Corporations and the concentration of resources there and military co evolution, so nation states like China and us, you know, co evolving AI technology. I think those are where like the adaptation hypotheses are going to be generated from and then like, you know, where do they land? Like, you know. So in other words, if you get like, if you get some sort of like hybrid man machine AI tool that can win wars definitively, that's going to exist, right. And there's going to be no stopping it and it's just going to be a required function, you know. And like let's say that that that's the tool that's required to stop nuclear weapons, that we're going to build it and that whatever weirdness that is, whatever sci fi reality you can imagine that like humans plus synthetic biology plus AI in coordinated group decision making abilities like the multicellular equivalent of our human organizations coming to life and being able to replicate and reproduce and solve problems is, it might be on the battlefield, it might be reaping in corporate profits, maybe some post capitalistic sort of way of being that finds fitness functions that we can't imagine quite yet. But there are definitely some evolutionary trajectories here that I think we can, we can both exclude, we can order, we can sort and we can imagine like what, what possibly could come first.

Yeah, yeah. I was going to ask on, on this note, do you have a term you subscribe to for what's beyond Homo sapien?

Oh really?

Like have you adopted, yeah. Have you adopted any terms? Like I know there's terms floating out there for what's next.

I've, I've used the term cultural being meaning like it has the, like an actual language as a cultural substate and a evolved homeostatic, you know, like function that is within a common sensory loop and it has its own like sort of UDA loop. I've used the word cultural being, but I think there's probably going to be better words that you know as it shapes up.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, I think that's such an interesting question. What comes next past Homo sapien, you know, because we've seen what's come this far, slash. We're still discovering, honestly like not everything, not broad strokes, but there's still archaeology being done. We're still discovering parts of our own history. But that is interesting to think about. What comes next. I think I still take a viewpoint of like I don't fucking know, man. I don't really know, but I'm happy to speculate. Like I love speculation. That's Kind of where I've settled in my position. It's just like I'll just speculate happily but like, I don't think I'll subscribe heavily into any of these. Any speculations.

Yeah, I think where I think we need speculation is to create a positive reality of future, you know, like, like, like oh. Black Mirror uses sci fi to warn against possible realities. We really need leaders who are going to like paint a picture of a positive future that people can believe in. And that's where I think like it's, it's not enough to say like we don't know, it's just like we need, we need human leadership at this time to manifest the next generation. Like that's a good point.

That's a good point. Is there anybody doing that?

Well, no man. Like I think my standards for human leaders are pretty low right now, you know. Okay, read the news.

Oh man, that's funny. Yeah, I agree with that. And I've always seen sci fi as a tool for almost back casting. Right. Where it's like, let's paint a picture of the future. Might be dystopian thought of autonomous cars through sci fi before it was ever even on the radar to be a real thing, you know. So futurism is definitely something we need investment in. I think that makes a lot of sense. Maybe as the EM community grows bigger, we could start channeling the community's brain power towards these types of questions. It would be cool one day where we have enough of an audience where we could just pose random questions like that. Like what do you think is a good word for the future of Homo what's past Homo sapien. Hey audience, what do you think the future looks like? I think that'll be so cool. If you're in the audience now and hear that this question will probably still be relevant. So please answer still. Even if this is 20 years later, please still answer. Okay, so just moving along here, could you talk a bit more about the speaker's dinner you went to? So Jonathan paid for like a VIP class ticket. I went to the conference a little bit late just because I've been going a lot. So I had it as a game time decision. Ultimately I went, but I didn't feel like it was worth it to buy the all inclusive pass of like this, this VIP tier. It was like a few thousand dollars or something by the time that I was buying, so I didn't want to do it. Jonathan, could you give the audience the lowdown of what happened at the speaker dinner?

Yeah, let's see. So we were going from Berkeley to Alchemy Springs, which is this sauna club in San Francisco. It's a really cool place. It's like the third time I've been there. And it's, it's a beautifully designed, like sort of finish, finish looking style sauna club. And they have one of the biggest indoor saunas in there. Just like really nice, kind of like multi tiered indoor sauna. It's hot and then they have cold plunges outside and then they host like with, with food, you know, sort of on the outside you can get appetizers and stuff. And so yeah, I just like the Vitalism group and Adam do a great job of organizing this. And so you walk in and then you're met with the speakers from the day. So there were speakers from all three days that were at the conference and not everybody was there. Like, Brian Johnson wasn't there, Matt Oberlin wasn't there, but most of the speakers there. And I'll just speak to my experience because I think it was sort of unworldly. First, getting to meet Tim Urban, who I'm a big fan of his blog and his article on neuralink that he produced was like very formative in terms of the ways that you tell narratives about how things change over time. I just thought he did a brilliant job of that. He's done a lot of work on how the humanities have evolved over time. I've just read so many of his different pieces of work and sitting next to him in the car and talking to him. This is a guy that's just so adept at synthesizing what the smartest scientists and the smartest thinkers are saying and bringing into a distilling narrative. And he walks that walk too. Like he can just talk in these terms. And so we were able to navigate through different scientists that I was interested in. And I think the topic of like, I was just like, you know, okay, cool, we're here. Let's talk about how AI and humanity are going to co evolve. Like, what are the different thought frameworks that we have here? We got into talking about assembly theory and he's like, oh yeah, I know Lee, and I know Sarah Lee Cronin and Sarah Walker who admitted to assembly theory. But I had just seen Sarah Walker talk at the Long now foundation and talk about like, how the notion of assembly theory gives a definition of time. As in, like, it's actually a definition of physics that has a unique definition of time. And when Tim was bringing up the point that like, early biotic Life, like cellular life had like the number of generations that it lives is really how you have to look at, like at how it changed it over time. I was like so resonant with that because that's your key tool if you're going to look at how things change. There's a change in between each iteration. The number of generations tells you the story of what the adaptation space, mutation space kind of looks like. And then I was talking about both how to use assembly theory and then how to use Carl Friston's free energy principle to kind of contextualize this kind of cellular evolution. And how many people can you have a conversation like with? This is wild. And so his latest book, again, it tells us the story of humanity starting with the Big Bang, starting with just the beginning of the universe. And it puts together a narrative. And to me that's just so philosophically ambitious that a lot of people that work in university and academia don't get the opportunity to do that kind of stuff. And I'm just really looking forward to his book coming out. So anyway, that was the way there to the speaker's dinner. So it's like a 30 minute ride. I walk in and then I stumble upon Patrick House, who I mentioned earlier. And Patrick has written he works at the Stanford Study for Consciousness and he had made a presentation that I had missed because it's early and I just had trouble getting up that early. But I watched it later on YouTube because his counterpoint said that he had recorded it and put it on YouTube. I was like, great. Then again, I told him what we were working on with epistemic me and I told him, and I mean that we're building belief systems in the sense of how Carl Friston models them and the free energy principle. And he's like, oh yeah, that's great. If you started reading my book. I have a chapter in there called Secondhand Markov blankets. And Markov blanket is the mathematical instrument that separates the external from internal world and like a cells or any beings reality. And so it's like really nerdy term. I actually have like a literal blanket in, in my house that is called a. It's a Markov blanket and it has like the little graph representation of the mathematics. It's like super nerdy. And so I love it.

Dude, that's great. That's amazing. I love that piece of lore about you, Jonathan.

I saw it, I had to buy it. The minute I saw it I was like, you know that Markov flake is going to be in My home. So, you know, and Patrick's even, like, even nerdier about it. Like, he had created a chapter in his book called Secondhand Markov Blankets, and he meant the second hand of a clock, like seconds on a clock. So he was like.

I was thinking, like, I got this Markov blanket off. Good.

That's right. That's what his editor was thinking, too. So he told me that as far as he knew, that was the only typo in the book. And he was just like, oh, how could you miss this amazing pun? And, you know. But so anyway, it's a great book. It's called the 19 Ways to Look at Consciousness. It's on Spotify or Audible or anywhere books are found. And it's a really interesting read. I'm about halfway through it right now. I'm loving some of the, like, the illustrative language he gives around how consciousness evolved. And. And by the way, he. He also mentioned to me that he was interviewed by Anika Harris in the book Lights On. He was in the chapter about, like, parasites and plants.

Well, that's right, because he did that. I was looking at his stuff. He did that. Yeah, that. That one parasite that, like, lives in something's brain or whatever. Yeah.

So, yeah, it was such a trip. I mean, I told them, like, I just read this book on consciousness and like, we were talking about consciousness and he's like, yeah, I was in that book. And so, you know, just clearly somebody is really thinking about interesting things. And, you know, we were. We were all brought to his attention by Brian Johnson, who had him, like, who had worked with him at Colonel and had an answer or come on stage and answer some questions about consciousness that were coming from the audience, which is really cool. Then right after that, I met a gentleman from Japan who is holding up his iPad and he was showing how he had created a falsifiable experiment to replace half of his brain with kind of like a digital memory. And so his plan is, once he sort of is terminal in his life, if he gets cancer or something like that, or if he knows he's going to die, he's got a plan to, like, replace part of his brain with the circuit and then run a consciousness experiment where he's really kind of relying on the. The observations we have so far in the split brain experiments to see if he can actively integrate. And, you know, so part of this idea is that we can't really test consciousness objectively in the lab because we. You only. All you know about consciousness is what it feels like to Be you. And so. But he can test it himself. And he thought, like, on his way out, he's going to do this and he's going to, like, share with the world. And so. So again, we're getting pretty deep into, like, theories of consciousness. And I'm like, well, you know, how do you define consciousness? And we, we got into like, a pretty involved discussion about it. And joining us in that conversation was a pair, one from the Netherlands and one from the US that were doing brain uploading. So in the three of them together were part of the Synthetic Consciousness panel that was part of the. The Vitalist Bay on. I think it was on Sunday. Um, so like a really interesting group. And, and again, you know, like, I have people understanding who Carl Frischen is, who Michael Levin is, like, to get into, like, very deep details of, like, you know, how these, how these people work. We talked about, you know, it's like, so this.

Wait, didn't. Didn't somebody think you were a neuroscientist?

Yeah, that was, this was the conversation. Right. So I'm just like, you kept up.

At such a good pace that people were like, oh, you obviously are a neuroscientist, Jonathan. Is that.

Yeah, these are like my kind of nerds. And I'm like, there like, are you a speaker? No, I just bought the VIP ticket and I'm in vitalism. Are you a neuroscientist?

No, bro. You could totally be a speaker, man. We're going to kill it with this to the point where people will beg for you to speak there. Yeah, that's the new goal.

Totally. And my path has always been, like, I don't want to be the academic around these ideas. I don't want to be the writer. I want to be the guy that builds this stuff that people use and get value out of. So I want to build consciousness into a user experience. That's the role in life that I want to play. And that's how I present myself too. I'd just be like, yeah, I think about this stuff deeply because I'm implementing it. Quite frankly, when you have to think about the Bayesian models that are implemented in code to implement Carl Frischen's free energy principle, a lot of scientists just make an implementation and throw it onto GitHub or something like that. They don't have to make sure it works in any sort of practical sense. Yeah, I thought through these things from this level. And I'm able to talk about. Because I've thought about implementing Neil Seth's beast machine using Carl Frischen's free energy principle to model a hierarchical model of consciousness. And so when I was talking with these scientists, it was just kind of like I had very specific questions about how they're looking at the problem and how they're building the hardware and how they're uploading brains and all this kind of stuff. And. And I think they're appreciated. And several times during the conference I heard such like, wow, I can't believe you got that out of me, or like, I didn't know how to explain that, or give me a few minutes to figure out how to answer your question. And so that was like the richness of the experience of Vitalist Bay for me. It was just like conversation after conversation where normally I can't even talk about what a Markov blanket is. Now we're like three or four orders of magnitude deep into a conversation, like, you know, exploring the ideas. And it's just like kind of very energizing and very like, sort of motivating.

Yeah, sounds like you really found your tribe over the weekend, man. That's what it sounds like to me. Like just around other people crushing it in this particular area, longevity. And then, you know, under. Under that, I guess underneath all of it is consciousness. Not just longevity, but everything.

Yeah. So I don't know if people this smart really form tribes. It's part of the, you know, mystery of, of, of like, movements of consciousness is that everybody's kind of off in their own world, little world, doing their thing. But I think a group like an event like this brings people together and gives opportunities. And that's like. So I think one of my narratives of like, what brings us together is like imagining this future of AI plus humanities and having a, like, creating a positive vision around it. And another one that I was thinking of that we haven't started talking about yet is like, how do we create demand for the interest of wanting to live longer, of longevity? How do we understand the complexity that it is to be human enough to give people hope that there's something they could actually have agency or control over? And I think those are the two vectors I came out of it that I thought could really bond people together in a sustainable way.

Yeah, I've been thinking about that second one actually a lot, which is like, how do we get more people caring? Like, it's an education problem, it's a demand generation problem. Their functions of each other. The more educated people are on longevity, the more they come up against their own mortality, the more demand there will be for longevity. Right. It's interesting. Like, one thing I always ground on is like, my parents, like, it's so hard to get them to care about their health. Like my brother I was telling you about, like, my brother, he. He literally just got a rediagnosis that, hey, your whole life could just be yours now you no longer have schizophrenia if you just exercise and diet and sleep well. And it, even when it's like here, you could just have a great fucking life and just do these things and versus, like, you could have a life with schizophrenia. Like I'm. I'm seeing with my brother, it's. It's even hard for him to break old habits. Like these, like, very hard coded neurological path neural pathways of his habits, right? They're very hard to break. So I actually was thinking, like, you know, I was interviewing a don't die user and the customer, they were telling me that they buy every blueprint product. They were telling me all how hardcore they go into all their data. And it's just on a different level. Like, if I look at my mom, my brother, my dad, they're like. And then over here is somebody like, you know, like that, like Brian, where it's like, I get testing done every day, right? Like, I'm looking at my wearables all the time. Like I have a team of scientists. Like, I'm looking at every single biomarker. I'm looking at every factor that could cause these to move left or right. And I'm being a scientist about it. If we look at Moore's crossing, the chasm, or the technology lifecycle adoption curve, right? Like, really look at that. The biohacker, like, that is like the innovator right now. Like, not even a 1.1.5. 1.5% is the. I think that's the real number of the innovator. Slice of the pie. If we have 8 billion people in the world right now, 1.5%, there's no way we have 1.5% of 8 billion people that are at that level. So I think what that tells me from a product perspective or just like technology, life cycle adoption permeating our cultural consciousness is just like, we're so fucking early. And then I also, I guess another thought is like, I was talking to somebody about this in the conference. Maybe you were there in the conversation. But just like how Brian parses it through, it's like people are going to care for different reasons. The base level is just like, hey, I want to look hot. I want to feel better about myself. I want to be confident. I maybe don't even care about the dying stuff. I just care about the social status games. And then people that are different, people that are like, I just had a blood test. I have a life scare. Oh, shit, I got to get my act in order. Okay? And then there are people that have just been playing sports their whole life, and maybe they're more curious now on, like, okay, I don't really need to be healthy for athletics anymore, but I just want to be healthy just to live long and see what life is like, right? Maybe see if I could be immortal. That's another class of people, too. So I think what I'm saying is the education problem and the demand problem, I see as. As functions of each other. And right now to create more demand, AKA educate more of the populace. I like what Brian's doing. He's bringing influencers like Kim Kardashian into the conversation who have access, influence, and power over the millions, billions of people on Earth. I think that is a way to go about it, where I imagine in a future where everybody cares about longevity, I think there's like, a few key influencers per city in the world living that lifestyle of trying not to die, trying to maximize their life. And then they're very loud about it on social media. They get interviewed on, like, mainstream media. It's all over the place. And then people could see themselves in it too, especially if it's somebody local or if it looks like them. So, yeah, a few thoughts there. But I think it just. It's like, you gotta get people into the funnel of like, okay, I. I should look hot or I should feel good about myself, or, like, go down the funnel to be like, okay, I. I should probably try to live a better life longer. And then it's like, even further down is like, okay, how do I get immortality? So, yeah, I think it's gonna be a while. I don't know. Based on just those numbers, I think, yeah, it's.

I mean, we just live in such an interesting time that I think that people get this idea of what it means to be human, you know, from their. Their family, from their education, from their religion. You know, there's. There's a lot of institutions that, you know, it's sort of you're born into that give you an idea of why you're alive and, you know, what your purpose on life here is. And one of the things. Watching Patrick's talk at the conference, Patrick House, he mentioned that, like, you know, the thing about the Longevity Conference is that is. Is meaning and Purpose meaning that like a neuroscientist that can only like if, if they could only do neuroscience for like five years it wouldn't be meaningful because they wouldn't feel like they could actually make enough impact to like extend life. But I mean neuroscientists that can work for 20 years or 50 years feels like there's going to be enough evolution in the field to where their work could make an impact, could contribute to the thing that they want to advance, which is maybe like to be able to have neural cognition longer or better in an augmented way. Right. I think everybody's got this idea of what their identity is and what it means to be alive and what their purpose is. So I think about where can we instill a value where like you know, kind of like like the French mantra in Western civilization of the cradle to grave. Right. The, the country is here to take care of you from cradle to grave. But if we're educated from the beginning to know that like technology is rapidly changing and we have to have a notion of self, that we're constantly working to contribute towards survival and towards the evolution of consciousness. And if that was like a model that like a four year old kid got when he entered the education system or a model that a three or four year old kid got through some kind of religion or indoctrination that like this is, this is the world you're born into and your life is incredibly important and everybody's life around you is going to be a result of like how hard we work together to co evolve technology and to create the reality that we want. And by the way, we might not all be here in 50 years if we can hold on to beliefs like that. I think that pockets can form that can be very sort of viral and really pull people into it. So it comes down to this notion of identity, this notion of purpose, this notion of meaning.

I always go back to. I think if we just had a cool personality quiz, this could go back. I had so many. So much money is made in the personality quiz space and like a lot of it is just people want a mirror of themselves. Like people, people take Harry Potter quizzes to figure out what Hogwarts house they're in. You know, like they want to know themselves. Like there's a deep human desire to figure yourself out or at least like what might drive that is trying to find your purpose and in that maybe find other identities like who you are. Like I don't think there's one identity. I think everybody's got many like for example, I would identify as a rock climber and a guy and a Vietnamese person and a product leader and a founder. Right? There's, there's all these things, identities coming together at once to make me me. That's what I mean by my multiple identities.

The personality quiz. So you remember that, that test, that prompt I sent you for ChatGPT, now that has memory, it can like accurately determine your Myers Briggs type. And so, yeah, like, ChatGPT is so deeply used, I think we could make a belief mirror personality quiz on top of it. Just like, you know, like a GPT.

Epistemic me GPT that just. Dude, actually, wait, that's a great idea to just try to get any users to come in. That's a great idea.

I mean so many people have their history there already. And so I think it's like, yeah, here's what we can tell about you. Here's the belief system we can construct. Talk about this kind of stuff more. If you want to like update the belief system.

Oh, dude, I have an idea. When we release the self model bootstrapper on our website and we, you know, once we get to the point where we allow somebody to just create their own digital twin, we were talking about that with the coaches. Give them a GPT, an epistemic me intern GPT that can extract as much meaningful data from ChatGPT about them as possible and take that to bootstrap their.

There you go.

Yeah, that's a great idea. Wait, that's awesome. Yeah, I'm going to write this down.

I've been researching the implementation of that, by the way. It's going to be a must have.

I think that for sure is just like the mirror concept. Like people want to see themselves in it. If they see themselves in it, they're more likely to engage in it.

Yeah.

Like you remember The Immortal Dragons VC fund at the Vitalist conference?

Yeah. With the 3D digital twin. Yeah.

Dude, wasn't that so cool? I'm like, oh man, this is so cool. This is exactly. I would love this. Like, I would love this for myself. Powered by epistemic me, of course. But like, yeah, like some visual of it. Just for the audience to know. We saw this VC fund, they're investing in experimental projects in tech and they had one app where you could create an avatar of yourself, like take pictures of yourself. It creates a literally 3D model of you and your exoskeleton, your physiologically, physiological, like structure and your musculature and stuff. And what they show you is like, hey, if you keep doing the habits you're doing, this will be you in 20 years. And it was like a fat version of you or like a healthy version of you, depending on what your body biomarkers were looking like and what your habits look like. That kind of paints a very visceral reaction to the human. That is like, wait, that could be me. I don't want to be that like. Or, oh, that could be me. I keep doing that, I'll look like this. Heck, yeah. So I think that mirror concept is very powerful. So whenever we're ready to test that, I think that would honestly be an amazing demo like that. Like, we were just talking about the Steve Jobs, like, demo. Like, give me something to demo, dude. You had that for me to demo at, like, one of these developer tooling events. Be like. And then we end it with the tagline of something like, most tools group cohorts by clicks. We group cohorts by beliefs. Boom. Done. Mic drop. People are signing up on.

I love it, man. Script it out. Let's bring to life.

I think. Yeah, let's bring that to life. That I'll. Yeah, for sure. That's. Oh, yeah. Okay, let me just add this action to my list of things to do just so I don't forget. This is a really good one. Okay, so this one is gonna be self model bootstrapper demo plus GPT intern to extract self model data. Cool. Okay. Looking at the time, and I have an obligation I got to get to, so I don't think we can get through the rest of today. What I think we'll do is end it there and just end on a teaser of a great conversation we had with a gentleman named Andrew at the conference where we were really getting into. This was such a cool conversation, Jonathan. I was about to leave because I was conferenced out. I was pretty dead. And me and Jonathan were just debriefing and just talking about who we'd follow up with or whatever. And then this guy Andrew comes over. Who, Jonathan? You had talked to him before that, right?

Yeah, he went to the Don't Die conference in September, and I met him on a Don't Die hike. So, yeah, okay.

Yeah, so we met this guy Andrew. He stopped by the conference, and we were all just sitting down on a couch, and Jonathan had his laptop out. And then Andrew comes by and he's working with the ex founder of Skype, I believe, who's funded him to build a unified longevity platform where he could connect into any database that has, like, a medical record, like Sutter Health or Kaiser or whatever. You log in with whatever login they give you and then it could collect your medical record.

A Dr. AI.

That's right. Not a Dr. AI. So it could collect all your medical records and then act as not a doctor for you. Really cool guy. Very, very engaged, passionate. And we could have intellectual conversations. So we were talking about Friston's free energy principle and he was really questioning us on like, how are you defying beliefs in epistemic me to the point where we have never. We don't. I mean, we love that. Kind of like, you want to go that deep? Like, let's go. And so he. We were having a great conversation and then we realized that we had a difference where he was calling beliefs. I think according to this other theorem, which Jonathan and I had never heard of. Let me pull it up right now. It is the von Neumann Morgenstern Utility theorem. Von Neumann Morgenstern Utility Theorem. I'll throw a link to that in the show notes. It's part of behavioral science and decision theory. I'm reading this from the Wikipedia right now. The von Neumann Morgenstern Utility Theorem, or vnm, demonstrates that rational choice under uncertainty involves making decisions that take the form of maximizing the expected value of some cardinal utility function. AKA why do actors make the choices they do? And with epistemic me, we were kind of coming at it from like, hey, people have these belief systems, they drive perception and into reality, like why people do things. They get new evidence to disrupt their beliefs or further them and then they do more things. Right. So he brought this other theorem to the conversation and Jonathan and I had never heard of it. And so we'll sneak peek it here. Y' all can look into it. And then we're just going to do another POD where we wrap up the rest of the conference and then go into this part of that conversation. With that said, Jonathan, any last minute notes on the conference before we wrap today's pod?

Why? Yeah, can I just make one definitional point about the conversation with Andrew that I think is really relevant to what we're doing, which is that Andrew was asking about values. Right. And traditionally in philosophy, epistemology and axiology are sort of separate things from one another. And so one of the things that we were disambiguating the conversation was this. It's like a strong premise that I have that axiology should actually be constrained to concept of cause and effect that makes them part of epistemology. So I see axiologists like a subset of it. And that's where I use this tool called the Observation Context to kind of like both co inform values from beliefs and beliefs from values. So we'll have to get into that deeper sometimes. Sometimes. And it's actually something I like to like, you know, articulate better. Get your feedback on circle back with Andrew, you know, and like there's just like sort of more, lots of, you know, growth and articulation in that direction.

Yeah. Okay, so next pod, we'll debrief more on that Andrew conversation on belief systems, free energy principle axiology at the epistemology and we'll also talk through the rest of what happened at the conference. There were a few other follow ups to do as well for today though. I think that's enough for the pod. It's getting long and I gotta run, so thank you everybody for listening or watching the podcast. We really appreciate your listenership viewership. If you have questions, comments, throw them into, you know, YouTube. That's where we'll check comments. Also subscribe on Substack or you know, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast listening done at next episode, Jonathan and I will go over in detail some of those items around values, beliefs, axiology, epistemology, and the rest of the Longevity conference. And we'll continue to build in public and we'll continue to take feedback from all of you on what you want to hear from us. So let us know. Thanks everyone and thanks, Jonathan. Have a wonderful day. Bye.

Bye.