S5 EP3: Bryan Johnson discusses life-changing psychedelics, superintelligence, and night-time erections

31:19But I just wonder, can we quickly deal with that? Yeah. Where do we start? I mean, I think the first thing was a Bloomberg Businessweek article that set out your routine and we sort of covered that. But the big one that followed on from that was when it was alleged that you were kind of siphoning off the blood of your 17-year-old son. In fact, it was a little more complicated. You were taking a plasma infusion from your 17-year-old son and in turn offering some of your plasma to your father, correct? That's right. What you characterised as a family bonding thing that you hoped would be helpful for your father's health.

31:58And then it was said that, and along the way the term blood boy came up. Was that your coinage or something that the internet came up with? I think it was there before, but I embraced it. What does that come from? It was parodied in a HBO series, Silicon Valley, where one of the eccentric executives had a blood boy. So during a meeting, they came in and they hooked him up. And he was there giving him a plasma transfusion during the meeting. And it was his private blood boy. But then this article in Bloomberg also said that, oh, for at least a month or two previously, you'd been receiving plasma donations from an anonymous donor.

32:41Is that correct? That's correct. How many infusions did you get? Six total. Five from the previous daughter, one from my son. And then another one was the erections of an 18-year-old. What was the story behind that? I know this is a bit low road, but just let's get it out there. Let's go. I think the allegation, the contention was that you had incredible nighttime erections and that this was a great marker for health. If you're not having nighttime boners, you're 70 % more likely to die. Just sitting with that. How do you know if you're having nighttime boners? You need a measurement because they happen during sleep cycles, and so you're oblivious to a lot of it.

33:23You can catch it on the tail end, but it's just like when you image the brain. You can't really see your brain. You need that technology, and so you need a little cube. You put it on the penis. It sits at the base, and then as your penis engorges throughout the night, it measures the duration and the strength of the erection. A cube with a hole? It has a band. So the cube and then there's a band that wraps around the shaft. Your research has kind of met with a positive response in some quarters. Others have been more sceptical. One of the articles I read described how actually the most important thing for longevity was close relationships.

34:03According to Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, the people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. Yeah, there are power laws to longevity and community and relationships is definitely one. Agreed. I mean, you've been open about the fact that actually if you abide by these rules as stringently as you do, it is kind of cock-blocks you a bit. What's the term? It can get in the way of having a relationship. So I would say if you were to compare my sex life and my relationship well-being and my levels of happiness and my overall energy for life, I bet I score higher than almost anyone that I'd be compared to.

35:03there's this idea that lifestyles of debauchery and late nights with alcohol and these ideas that somehow that's the vector for community and this goes back to the question of the 124 year old says it's tequila and cigarettes i'm like see i told you so they all kind of it weaves together but um the idea that i'm a vampire in my home that's true also um i have a robust community of friends. I'm very happy. My sex life was wonderful. We're achieving all the health metrics that have been shown to be the longest living. I got it. How old are you, Brian? That's such a complicated question. I'm a few hundred different ages.

35:48My brain is a certain age. My lungs are a different age. My pancreas is a different age. My heart's a different age. Different parts of my heart are different ages. My cardiovascular capacity. What's your chronological age? 47. 47. And your ear is 60-something? 64. My left ear is 64. According to a kind of rounding-off metric, like if you collected all the other bits of you, does it arrive at a rough biological age? Are you saying if I averaged out? Yeah. I would guess the average would be somewhere in my 30s. Really?

36:31You could cut that ear off, the 64-year-old ear, and it would take another... That must be dragging you up. That's right. It's a big one, and we have been unsuccessful in lowering it. Your solution's a good one. You mentioned the idea of superintelligence. One of the ideas that's come up a lot, obviously, is that AI is going to dominate us and actually presents a huge risk. Another idea is that we're going to, in some way, merge with AI. And there's some people who are experts in this field who call themselves transhumanists who believe we're going to more or less discard our meat bodies, our kind of substrate of biology and upload our consciousnesses into the cloud.

37:26So is that anywhere? I mean, in certain respects, it feels to me kind of more, in some ways, a more plausible scenario, like because information, digital information is eternal, right? Yeah. So, but is that something you subscribe to or would that cease to be you? My assessment of the situation is that no human can say anything intelligent about the future. Literally nothing. come on that's a total cop-out we can say all kinds of things about the future like what tell me well maybe not with not with absolute well that you will in all likelihood live another year i mean it may not happen but we're going to operate under that assumption that the sun will come up tomorrow it was david hume the philosopher who said we can't prove that no we can't prove it nevertheless every day i've lived it's happened and i'm confident it will So the Earth rotating around the sun, that's got some good data behind it.

38:30Tell me something else that is intelligent about the future. Tell me something that someone can say. That technology and our technological power will progress, that the processing power of computers will continue to accelerate, and that we will, unless current trends change, live ever more under the yoke of technological intelligence. okay so uh technology will improve so yeah pending any unexpected shock you know like catastrophes whatever human in human induced catastrophe or other otherwise catastrophic situations um reasonable um outside of technology progressing there's nothing you can say about yokeness or anything else like there's no way you're the one who said that super intelligence was around the corner.

39:23I'm saying that absent an accident, progress is likely to happen. But what that means, whether bondage or yokeness or empowerment or whatever, no one knows. So people jump very quickly from what you can make for a probability statement to a value assessment, and they don't catch themselves making that jump. Okay, I get that. It seems to be a bit of an obsession in big tech at the moment, that longevity, like it's been alleged that this is the big new thing. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google got some people working on it. Jeffrey Bezos put some money into some research, I believe. Peter Thiel, who I think, did he buy your company?

40:10Or certainly he was involved in PayPal, which bought Braintree and Venmo, correct? Anyway, Peter Thiel, who always seems to come up in these conversations about techno-futurism and kind of visionary, slightly crazy-sounding ideas, he's on record as saying, well, aging is just another thing. It's just another technological challenge that we can solve. I mean, one of the contentions is the idea that, oh, well, this is the ultimate sort of techno, almost oligarchic idea that it's fine for these super rich people to get together and they're working on how they can live forever. But meanwhile, people in West Africa are dying at 54, and it would make more sense to uplift the whole of humanity in a realistic, scalable way than creating regimens that are only really realistic or achievable by a very select community of privileged people.

41:03I get the ethical argument. So what are people asking for? Like, what are you asking for? Oh, you're trying to put me on the spot now. I don't think like that. I don't, I just poke holes in things. I don't come up with like positive ideas. Well, I know that's what I'm saying. That everyone uses this vector to poke, right? They identify basically this, what are referred to as wicked problems. Like take your wicked problem, which is like inequality or whatever the issue is. And they take this thing and they point it at the person. and they're like, well, what about this? Checkmate, motherfucker.

41:43What do you want the person to do that they're not doing? I think it's just the idea. It would be the idea that actually you could do more with your money by – but, you know, I'm not dying on this hill, by the way. Because I think you get the idea, right? I think – I don't know quite what it looks like, but I think it just means let's not obsessively improve the lifestyle style of a single person but but actually think about the broader swath of humanity because clearly i think it's not realistic for everyone in the world to lead your life that to observe the protocols that you've created yeah it's not it's vastly unrealistic for most people okay so let's just take um me for example so someone sees what i'm doing and they say okay here's a narcissistic tech bro billionaire asshole yes who's taking thank you someone needed to say that he's taking all of his wealth and he's that was a joke by the way yeah i know he's obsessed with himself he's holed up in his home he's drinking his son's blood right this motherfucker is a bad deal for society he's got a cube on his boner exactly like this is privilege gone to the moon This is insanity.

42:59It has to stop. Someone has to stop him. Well, I don't know if they have to stop him, but they have to explain to him that there might be more important things in the world than his nighttime erections and spending two million a year. It was claimed that you spent two million a year, I think, on various technologies to improve your life expectancy. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Initially, it's less now. So let's just take that. Now, what's really happening outside of that person's knee-jerk reaction is my team and I have potentially built the best health protocol in human history. We've shared the entire thing with the world for free, the entire process, all the data.

43:50We've educated people. We've shared the whole thing. is it the best humanitarian project ever done? But instead, it's framed as the negative. And so what I'm suggesting is I hear you. There's inequalities in the world. It's upsetting. And then people make these statements, and sometimes they don't fully capture the situation. Sometimes they're really misrepresentations. and in the case with me, entirely misses the point of the entire endeavor that I've done this for the sake of humanity. This is not a narcissistic endeavor but it's just, it's lost in the masses and the headlines, the tabloids do their thing.

44:40So I'm fine with all that. I'm not complaining. I think it's great. I appreciate the attention to the project. But yeah, I want to level set that it's definitely not a correct assessment of what has been happening. I got it. And I appreciate you rolling with, you know, framing that is maybe not positive or that feels, I mean, your phrase was, what was the phrase? Narcissistic arsehole or something? Yeah. Anyway, that was your, those were your words. Yeah, that was my word.

45:33You mentioned earlier that you'd been through a lot. You said you had depression. You said, I'm not afraid of death. I sat on its doorstep for 10 years. Are you OK to talk about that for a second? OK, yes. I mean, when I think of depression for 10 years, in all honesty, what I think is, well, it couldn't have been 10 years of depression solidly. And I imagine, and I might be wrong, that there was a lot about your life probably at the time that it had highs and lows, right? It wasn't a single flat line of kind of grief or inertia, right? Yeah. I think you probably, I think you were married at the time and you had three children, correct?

46:15That's right. At what point did the depression hit? What did it look like? What were its features? How much can you say about it? I remember the day it landed. I was in a hospital parking lot. My brother and I, we were building a company together. We just got back from the meeting and I was in his car. And I said, Jason, I think my brain just broke. I don't know what's going on, but I just feel like it broke. And he said, just snap out of it. you know just bounce back we were going through some pretty tough times as a startup company and i had a little baby and um yeah that day on then it just progressively got worse and i became obsessed with wanting to commit suicide how old were you and do you have any sense of what what triggered it i was 26 26 26 i i'm guessing it was the lack of sleep um with the new baby uh the stress of a startup and uh probably not good health habits some some combination of those things when you said your brain just broke like what did that feel like i i remember distinctly feeling it my brother remembers me having that conversation with him it was just a feeling i hadn't felt before and it felt sad and hopeless and foreign and then over time of course i became in that state where it was impossible for me to imagine happiness.

47:48My brain could not even imagine not being depressed. It was in that state. And so, yeah, I was just trapped in that for 10 years. You were managing to function most of the time. You were still able to do your work, turn up at home, like be present for your family. I mean, because obviously depression can mean different things to different people. For some, it's absolute catatonia. It's being in bed with no reason or no ability to get out or even speak, right? But obviously, you weren't subsisting in that state for 10 years. I mean, on Sundays, I would be in a catatonic state. But yeah, I built and sold a billion-dollar company while in this state, and I raised three kids.

48:39Did you make attempts to pull yourself out of it? How were you attempting to deal with it? I really tried to be as resourceful as I could. I tried multiple therapies, TDCS, TMS. What are those? I tried stimulation on the brain using various technologies. I tried talk therapy, SSRIs, cognitive behavioral therapy. SSRIs are drugs like Prozac, things like that. Yeah, exactly, antidepressants, Borbutrin. I basically tried everything I could identify to alleviate the symptoms, and nothing worked. You put it down to what, overwork, the relationship? Ultimately, I don't know, right? I mean, I'm basically trying to make sense of an event that happens.

49:31I don't have the full, I don't have the data set. So I'm just speculating and observing that my life was stressful in every capacity and also not getting good sleep. Were you drinking a lot? No alcohol or drugs. There's the problem. No alcohol, no smoking. So it's interesting. It's really striking because I do interview people who've been through extraordinary things and depression is usually paired with some sort of substance abuse. But in this case, it sounds like it wasn't. Yeah, no. Food was a problem, but not alcohol or cigarettes or other some other form of drugs. And so how did you come out of that?

50:22in 2014 i i sold my company i got a divorce i left my religion and tried to rebuild myself as much as i could from scratch you were lds latter-day saints aka mormon um had you been pretty observant and had you believed in the tenets of the religion i i had been born into the religion. I was born in a small Utah town. And so it was the only reality I ever knew for the first 20 years of my life. And it's hard to explain to somebody how deeply indoctrinated you become when you're in that circumstance. In my early 20s, I began learning about the Mormon church and realized that what I had been told was not the entire story.

51:17And intellectually, I left the church. However, I was also married to someone who was a member of that religion, and then my children were born. And leaving the religion wouldn't have fractured my entire life, my immediate family, my spouse, my child, and my community. And so I hung in there for a while, hoping to try to sort things out. But basically, I was in the religion, not believing in the religion for several years before formally leaving it. Do you observe any religion now? Do you have any spiritual beliefs? So Mormonism is similar to Christianity in that it says here there, we have an answer to all of reality.

52:10And you may imagine. And now I'm on the other side of things where I don't think there really is an answer to most things. it's been said that you have a tattoo that's right what's it of it's five meo dmt it's here on my arm it's a psychedelic from the cunarian toad it's sometimes called the god molecule that's right why do they call it that it uh like other psychedelics like mushrooms or psilocybin or MDA or MDMA, it induces a different state of mind that can be achieved in normal consciousness. And did you try it? I did. It was the most extraordinary experience of my life, without question. If you try to poke around at this idea of consciousness and say, what is our conscious mind capable of?

53:20Psychedelics offer an answer to that that is unimaginable to our non-psychedelic minds. It's unfathomable. You can't get there with words. You can't explain to somebody what they're going to experience. And so what I found to be remarkable is it is so far removed from my ability to imagine. it to me presents the most exciting possibility of our existence that we may be able to experience consciousness in ways that are just absolutely unquestionably unfathomable to our current minds. That we may be in such a primitive state right now and the best may be yet to come. And so when I look forward in the future, that is genuinely what gets me excited, is that we may be in the earliest possible days of discovering what consciousness is.

54:16At what point in your life did you do that? It sounds like it was a huge thing. I'm just curious, had you been dabbling before or was that something that you just, what took you to that? It was after making those big life changes, selling the company, getting divorced, leaving the religion, and trying to figure out what the next steps of life would be. When you're on the trip or you're having the experience, is there anything you can say to put it into words and how that translates into something that you can hold on to afterwards? Yeah, there were a few things that happened. One is I'll explain what I felt subjectively, which again, this is not brain data.

55:05This is just my subjective experience trying to explain an inexplicable experience. it felt like I existed in 10 dimensions the dimensionality of the world is much higher it felt like and I was almost in fractals number two is it felt like the universe is one big record of all things that have happened that there's electromagnetic signatures of all events that have ever transpired it's just it's just a uh omnipresent state of information and i remember during the experience i was so energized by what i was experiencing i wanted to communicate with those that i was with and it felt like i could almost feel like my motor neurons fire in my head which then activated my muscles in my throat to enable me to initiate speech.

56:08And when I did that, it compressed my experience from 10 dimensions to two or three. It just swallowed it up. And so I immediately stopped it because I didn't want to lessen or ruin the experience. And it just felt how limiting speech is that when we have to compress our thoughts through a series of words, we eliminate so much richness to our reality. I also felt that there was, I could hear some sounds around me of like of a car and a few things. And it felt like society, we're just like a dirty, noisy environment that we're primitive and how we've constructed our systems and sounds and processes.

56:57And it felt like the future was going to be gorgeous and natural and biological and it left me with this wonder that if we make it into the future as a species we may look back at this time and place for us right now and we just may feel the deepest level of empathy and pity for those of us that existed before we gave birth to super intelligence. And that when we did that, life became magical in ways that our minds can't even begin to comprehend. And so it really was the most transformative experience of my life that was real and tangible. Is it part of a routine or a regimen now? Or was that something you put behind you?

57:52It was really in that time period, but not part of my routine now. But it sounds like it did inform your outlook on life and maybe dovetails with aspects of what we've been talking about, but that in a more mystical way, that it suggested the possibility of some other way of existing. That is accurate. I think when humanity has been trying to solve the riddle of existence since we came into existence, Buddha made observations and he said, life is suffering and there's this eightfold path. and then Christianity said, hey, follow me. There's this plan because we've got this afterlife. And Islam said something similar.

58:47And Adam Smith said, actually, there's this invisible hand, this thing capitalism. And Marx said, there's this class warfare. And American founding fathers said, actually, we the people. So people have endeavored since the dawn of time to construct frameworks that solves the riddle of existence. And what I'm suggesting with what I'm doing is that don't die solves the riddle of existence in this moment. It is more accurate and appropriate to this moment than any philosophy in existence. I believe this is the most powerful solve for the riddle of existence today for all of humanity. I know I've taken up a lot of your time.

59:47Just to share a couple of things. You're active on social media. You've tangled with Elon Musk a little bit. One of the things he said is, I don't think we should try to have people live for a really long time. It would cause an asphyxiation of society because the truth is, most people don't change their mind. They just die. So if they don't die, we'll be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn't advance. He's arguing that there is an unsolvable problem in front of us of people changing their minds. That's the core of his argument. And of all the problems we have as a species, figuring out ways for humans to change their minds is like number 1 ,000 for me.

1:00:40There's so many ways to solve that problem today and in the future. So I don't think it's a valid, an accurate criticism or accurate conclusion on basically romanticizing or justifying death. I don't want to sound morbid and certainly don't want to coast out of this interview on a morbid note, but as I get older, my memories, I notice, pile up and the earlier ones become a little more indistinct. And each year feels a little less full, a little less revelatory than the ones before. You know, that 10 years in your 50s feels a lot shorter than 10 years between 10 and 20, let's say. And that as you add year on year, a little bit of repetition, a little bit of malaise or ennui sets in.

1:01:34I know it sounded like an old fart, right? But I just think it's in the nature of humanity that as you accrete more years and then when those turn into centuries, it feels slightly grotesque the idea of adding another year you know so now i'm going to be 998 and and that you know was how's that going to be different from your 997th year while you have you see you've got children you see children growing up each year in a child's life is like an eternity because there's so many new experiences so i don't know if that means anything to you but it feels for me like um well i guess this is me saying it doesn't feel massively appealing it's not like i want to die tomorrow and i know we talked about that at the beginning but i sort of think there's some kind of natural um there's some sense of natural justice in in kind of making way making space for the younger people and so i guess this is me signing off no you know what i mean does Is any of that landing with you?

1:02:31Yeah, here's a way you can think about this. So imagine you and I travel back in time one million years ago and we're there with Homo erectus. They have an ax in their hand and we want to pose three questions to see if they can help us out. We want to say, where's food and where's water and where's shelter? we're going to trust that they know things we don't. We're unfamiliar with that environment. Now we say, thanks Homo erectus. Now can you please explain to us or please just opine what is the future of intelligent existence on this planet? It is going to be an impossibility for Homo erectus to have the language or ideas to explain even approximate concepts of our scientific and technological knowledge and abilities, we would just laugh.

1:03:34It would be comical. And so what I would propose to you is that we, in this moment, are homo-rectus. Our opinions of the future on the eve of giving birth to superintelligence are so primitive and so naive and so ridiculous, they're laughable. We have nothing intelligent to say about the future. And so therefore, given that, our strength is to lean in to the fact that we don't know and that any preconceived notion we have is actually our enemy. For the first time, our own knowledge is our Achilles heel.

1:04:23I mean, I hear what you're saying. It feels a bit all or nothing. You know, the idea of an educated guess or different trajectories, and it's certainly been the case that people have made predictions that have proved surprisingly accurate. People like, whether it's Jules Verne or more recent people, Arthur C. Clarke or science fiction writers, even Ray Kurzweil and others have made surprisingly accurate predictions about things like the internet. I don't say that that means we know what will happen with AI and superintelligence because a lot of experts have different views, but I'm not sure where that's going to get us.

1:05:04I will say, though, that I read one thing that was one expert on AI who said that there's been no episode in the whole history of humanity in which a vastly superior civilization in countering a vastly inferior one in which the outcome has not been genocide. So the idea of superintelligence and AI, the idea that that will not lead to the decimation of humanity feels naive. I don't know if that lands with you at all. This is my primary argument. If you think about ourselves on a galactic scale, And let's just take two polar sides of the argument. Let's just say there's the dark forest theory that once a civilization achieves some super intelligence level, they hide themselves from other civilizations because they don't want to be attacked.

1:06:03And on the flip side, there's the great filter argument, which means that once a civilization reaches a certain ability of 10 ultra advance, it kills itself. It self-destructs. So let's just say for a moment, let's imagine that we are like many intelligent civilizations before us. We're at a certain point, and we are now at this jumping off point to superintelligence, the point at which civilizations self-destruct. It could be the case that we are the first civilization to make it through. And what I'm proposing is that Don't Die is the transition philosophy, economic, political, moral, ethical, and social, that allows us as a species to transition from where we have been to a new era of superintelligence, which we cannot define.

1:06:56And that other civilizations may have self-destructed because they didn't make the philosophical changes at the right moment to basically say when a species reaches a certain level of technological advance, existence is the highest virtue. Don't die. Don't die individually. Don't kill each other. Don't kill the planet. And align AI with don't die. that the only objective of the species is to not die for all intelligence. That's the proposal. That's the riddle of existence in this moment. No existing form of human organization, not democracy, not capitalism, not Islam, not Christianity, not wokeism, no existing form of human thought is equal to this moment.

1:07:51Don't Die is the only proposal in existence that is practically applicable for everyone on this planet. Giving that a resonant pause that it deserves. I know I've taken up a lot of your time and I think we said we'd wrap it up around now. Let me just throw a couple of quick ones at you. You said, where's the phrase? I maintain zero naughtiness because I don't trust myself. Someone once said to me, like, she doesn't trust anyone who doesn't have a vice. And I was like, you know, there's something in that. But I think you have no vices, or at least you, or maybe you do. Do you? I don't. Maybe you have vices that you consider virtues and other people would consider them vices, but you don't have a vice in the sense of something that's a guilty pleasure, something that you're not supposed to do.

1:08:39I totally agree with that. Vices are subjective and subject to a personal definition, but in the traditional frame of mind that advice is some form of self-indulgence, you know, food or drugs or alcohol or something of the sort. No, I have none. When was the last time you slipped up? Years. For real? Mm-hmm. Is this a religion? It is, yes. And it is a political philosophy. It is an economic plan. It is an ethical framework. It is a social norm. It is all those things at the same time. What makes it a religion, though? Because all those others, that's not controversial. But why do you endorse the idea of it being a religion with its suggestion of sort of irrationality and revelation?

1:09:38I mean, intelligence is knowing what to do next. And so when you're posed questions about philosophy, do you believe in death? You need to know what to answer and how to fill and how to act and what to structure. So we create these models of reality that enable us to understand reality and act with some degree of certainty. And Don't Die satisfies the requirements. It helps people make decisions on a daily basis. and it helps people understand existential reality. It helps people understand spirituality. It helps people understand community. It helps people understand sacrifice and contribution.

1:10:25It plays the same role as every other ideological framework. You can be a Christian or a Muslim and still be part of the Don't Die movement? Yes, it is entirely yes and. Don't Die is not about living forever. don't die is we agree in this very moment neither you nor i want to die it is the one thing that every single human on this planet has in common don't die is played more than capitalism is played more than religion is played more than any game in anywhere in the world it is the most played game by every human on this planet every second of every day so it is the one thing in all of existence that all of us humans agree upon.

1:11:11Nothing else do we agree upon. Well, I question whether we do all agree. And animals? Same thing. If you just say, what is the most metabolically active game by all of biology on the face of this planet? Humans and animals and plants. Don't die is the most played game by all of biology. Is there a scenario, and I don't mean to make this a kind of reductio sort of argument, but is there a scenario in which all of biology becomes, what's the word? Like, in other words, this life extension principle is rolled out to every living creature? I mean, this thing is, we're on a jump off point where we just don't know.

1:11:58We're homo erectus. we're dealing with new emergence on intelligence that exceeds our abilities to know and do things. Because I can imagine like this great apes, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas that have consciousness and intelligence and not vastly inferior to humans in some cases. And so it makes sense to include them in the equation. But then we're not talking about flies and beetles and wasps living forever, that feels silly. Let me just give you one example. When I went to college, I could say, I'm going to study the following topic to become the following in my profession. I'm going to do this for a number of years, then I'm going to retire.

1:12:47I could plan out my entire life. I could see until I was 80 years old. My son is 19. He just finished his first year of school. He has no clue what to study in school or even if he should go to school. School is a good idea to know what to do two years from now. That's how fast the world is changing. That is how impaired our ability as a species to plan. Now, my son can't get advice from anyone. No one on earth can give him advice on what to do. Nobody. It used to be the case that adults could give children advice on the future. That's no longer the case. Our ability to see the future is up against a wall of fog.

1:13:31And we are pretending when we speculate on these things. We have no idea. Is that because of the singularity? It's because we are in this major transition as a species where AI will know more than any one of us and all of us. And AI would be better at discovery than any one of us and all of us. We are transitioning as a species from knowing to not knowing. And when we're in that situation, it strips us of our superpower of planning. When you don't know, you can't plan. When you can't plan, we're robbed of our core, our primary abilities. This is the primary contemplation. If you weave together everything we've talked about here, I'm trying to construct the most sober possible assessment of this moment.

1:14:25Looking back at this moment from the vantage point of the 25th century and trying to – let me say it this way. Talent is the ability to hit the target no one else can. Genius is the ability to hit the target no one can see. I think that's Schopenhauer. It is. Exactly right. Exactly right. So we live in a moment that demands genius, not talent. Yeah. A paradigm shift, if you like. There's one species that lives forever, I believe, as I understand it. The jellyfish? Yeah. I think biology has found a way to continue existence. It's not an unsolved problem. No, we are not jellyfish, but we are biology.

1:15:17They look like they're pretty happy, floating around, right? I mean, I don't think they're conscious. But then, what do you think?

1:15:28You know, like, the most surprising things may happen where, you know, in the future, the state of our consciousness is something akin to a jellyfish. and we say, can you believe ourselves how arrogant we were to think that human consciousness was the apex of all consciousness and how we disregarded every other form as so meaningless that we would never be. Those are the kinds of surprises which we know are going to happen. The future has been nothing but a surprise along those lines. I wouldn't expect anything different than the majority of our ideas of this time and place to be exactly wrong.

1:16:12That's exciting. We'll be living forever as jellyfish. What a lovely thought to end on. Thanks so much, Brian. I'm sorry about the glitches at the beginning, but we came out of those and had a great conversation. So I appreciate you taking the time. Yeah, thanks for having me.

1:16:40Hello again. Hope you enjoyed that. So, Brian Johnson, something different from the usual here on the Louis Theroux podcast. Not exactly a celebrity, a kind of celebrity of the Internet, certainly a meme, but also a philosopher, longevity guru, obviously, and kind of a religious leader. That was the journey we went on, wasn't it? It was revealed that at the heart of this philosophy, this concept is a religious outlook that requires a whole new way of thinking about reality. And that thing that he says along the lines of just because something's always been true doesn't any longer mean that it will be true in the future.

1:17:25Like we're at the cusp of a kind of singularity that will mean everything that was previously true is no longer true, which is kind of an amazing get out because therefore you can't ever – it's sort of this ironclad disproof of anything that you can say against his philosophy. He's like, well, that's always been true, but now everything's changed. Because of why? Because of living forever, that there'll be this whole revelation. and it's kind of a revelation, a consciousness-changing religious event that means that we are going to be living in ten dimensions. It's a few months since the taping.

1:18:03I've continued to use my whoop, or whoop, however you say that. They're not giving me any money. I don't need to plug it. It's kind of weird. It turns up in shot in a recent documentary I did when I'm on the steering wheel. I always think like, man, they should be paying me for that kind of exposure. Not really, but kind of. Anyway, I use it probably more than my wife would like. She finds it slightly annoying. It's a fun game. You gamify your routine. You kind of wake up in the morning and you're like, what was my score on sleep? Right? And you get a mark and it's like, oh, yes, I got 85 % sleep.

1:18:45Lately, I haven't been doing so well. I'm on 26 % recovery today I had a few whiskeys in Aberdeen last night and you get punished for that, I didn't do very well I'm on a low score but I'm going to try and bounce back and maybe that's good, maybe that's a good way of incentivising good behaviour, healthy behaviour so why did I have the whiskies? I don't know so partly as a result, well actually wholly as a result of doing this interview, we, slash I, decided to get me tested, get an in-depth biological survey and audit of my functionality. Yes, we're running diagnostics on my hardware. Hardware?

1:19:34Okay, so I'm now looking at my DNA results. You've got an increased risk of vitamin B12 deficiency. This is fascinating. Bitter taste. You have increased genetic variance linked to bitter taste acceptance. That means bitter foods such as cabbage and broccoli may taste too strong for you. How much did we pay for this? Therefore, you will be less likely to enjoy these types of foods. Have I missed the interesting part? Normal O2 usage, muscle mass. you are okay hang on you are gifted in quotes their words when it comes to your anaerobic threshold this is the point at which lactate that's milk isn't it begins to accumulate within the bloodstream during exercise you have a naturally high at compared to others this indicates exercise and training can be performed at a higher intensity and for a prolonged period before lactate starts to build up.

1:20:35I'm gifted. I'm kind of an Olympic athlete. That's interesting. Well, you know, I had a workout yesterday and my heartbeat got up to like 178 beats per second, which is quite high, I think. Or not. Or very high. Like it's amazing. It's kind of amazing. Cool. Anything else? so since we recorded Brian's documentaries dropped on Netflix I think I mentioned that at the beginning he's still out there selling his products Nutty Pudding and so forth and it was like you know I'd love to do more chats like that with kind of people who are in the you know that are more part of a kind of intellectual or what is it philosophical persuasion It's not about show business, to mix it up a bit.

1:21:33So Elon Musk, the ball is in your court. I have already tweeted at you. I'd like to get someone on to talk about AI before it destroys us all. Know what I mean? Okay, that's good enough. If you've been affected by the topics discussed in this episode, Spotify do have a website for information and resources. Visit spotify.com slash resources. That's it for today, apart from the credits. The producer was Millie Chu. The assistant producer was Man Al-Yazri. The production manager was Francesca Bassett. And the executive producer was Aaron Fellows. The music in this series was by Miguel de Oliveira.

1:22:18This is a Mindhouse production for Spotify.

1:22:27We'll be right back.