Bryan Johnson & Kate Tolo On Curing Their Incurable Diseases, Addressing The Disparity In Women's Health & The Don't Die Mission

29:54It is so hard to measure myself. It - like, just being able to separate the noise in measurement on just one person doing the same thing every day versus the signal of my body's actually changing, that's one thing. And then you stack up, okay, you want to do that for hormones so you can correlate it with where you're at in the cycle most people most people think women ovulate on day 14 halfway through a 28 day cycle most women actually don't have a 28 day cycle most women actually ovulate on day 17 but it's incredibly variable like i think i ovulated this year this uh cycle on like day 23 or something like that and so there's like tons of myths around this but what it means is that it's very variable so how to kind of lock down in our existing paradigm of how we consider measurement, that process is incredibly difficult.

30:43And if I was to try and measure 100 women at once, I'm not sure how I would go about it robustly, to the standards by which science has currently set up our system of what we consider justice in terms of good science. So I think we need a paradigm shift entirely. That's actually why, weirdly, the N of 1 may be the perfect entry point. We may discover population-level science on women through many, many N of 1 experiments at home, and then with that, you're able to detach the signal from the noise. Right. And at some point, concoct the best clinical trial that you could run at scale. Yes. And it might look entirely different than what it does for men right now.

31:26Yeah. But in the immediate kind of day-to-day of dealing with this condition and trying to understand it, what else have you discovered that you think would be helpful to a woman who's watching or listening to this who is struggling with that right now? Yeah. So we have a master plan to cure endometriosis. Okay. Right off our alley. so uh first the the the hubris sitting right alongside the uh humility yeah exactly so like first i'm gonna give to the haters so you know kate and i did this documentary on netflix we are bright-eyed but she tells we're like we're gonna you know take on death and then within a year we both have a diagnosis of an incurable disease it's so delicious so there you go haters Like autoimmune disease for you, endometriosis, you know, karma is alive and real.

32:22Exactly. So like, there you go. It's a gift. Now, also the dual diagnosis has been the best thing that could have ever happened to us. Because like, if you think about this from the universe's perspective, irony is always going to show up and play a role. So it's a journey now, right? Like if we are to be don't die, we both have to cure our incurable diseases. There's just no path forward. So either they get us or we get them, but there's just no middle ground. It's clarifying. So like, you know what? We have our tasks laid out for us very clearly. So we have been hustling both and we immediately got to work.

33:00So we have probably on each of our teams, like three or four international groups helping us try to solve this. We've had all these people rally around the intent. So what we find is that in any given area, of course, there's a rich world exploring these things, but oftentimes they don't have the publicity or reach or focal point. And we happen to be that on these two diseases. And so we've just rallied so many incredible people to work on these things. And so we think we could potentially make significant headway on both within 12 months. What is your autoimmune disease specifically? specifically, how is it impacting you and where are you at in terms of like addressing it?

33:47It's I have no symptoms. It's basically, I don't really, I didn't realize I had it. So it is my immune cells mistakenly attack my stomach. So they basically eat my endothelial lining of my stomach. It is a autoimmune condition I had starting about 30 years ago with my thyroid. So it's been cooking in my body for a very long time. It has nothing to do with what I've been doing in the past five years. And in fact, had I not been taking care of myself for the past five years, my diagnosis could be really bad. So just to be clear, because a lot of people, they think this autoimmune condition is from that.

34:23It's not, it's from a thyroid and - Hypothyroidism. Yeah, hypothyroidism and the stomach are very closely linked in the immunology. So that's the pairing, but it's not what I've been doing the past couple of years. So what we're doing now is we did two things. One is I got my immune system sequenced. So we did a blood draw. We got a million of my immune cells. And we looked at each one of these guys individually. Like, who are you? What's your job? And what's your special key? And then I went under again two weeks ago. Kate was there for it. So I went under general anesthesia. We had a scope down my throat and we took 24 biopsies on my stomach.

35:03And so we biopsied the actual autoimmune condition. We took those samples and then we did like an Ocean's 11 style operation to cool them at the proper speed, deeper cool them at the proper speed, then cryopreserve them, transfer them overseas to a special lab. So we now have a mini Brian growing in a dish from these immune cells. And so we'll take these, we'll actually get results in a couple of days. we'll take my biopsy and my immune system and say, now we have a full picture. Who are you guys and what are you doing? And with that, we can then say, okay, we're going to do this therapy or that therapy and we'll carve out the path.

35:41But this has never been done before. We've done all of this in four weeks time. And how receptive is the traditional medical community to this initiative or this ambition? It's purely, it's a scientific endeavor. It is as purely scientific as you can get. Yeah, so it doesn't get caught up in things like, should you eat meat or vegetables? Where people are going to war with each other. This is just a pure biology plan. Got it. You mentioned mini Bryans growing in a Petri dish. Perhaps your greatest accomplishment in terms of attention farming is this idea that you're cloning yourself, right? Like this is just headline bait and internet gold again.

36:28The reality of that is, of course, very different. So walk me through where you're at with that, what's going on. Basically, what you're doing is you're establishing a culture of pluripotent stem cells, right? Which are cells that can express them in any number of ways that can be replacement for cells that are diseased, et cetera, to eventually and hopefully rebuild organs and all kinds of interesting things that are happening at the very sharp edge of these technological advances in medicine. Is that accurate? That's right. Yeah. So the way this works is I did a blood draw, 150 milliliters. You separate out the cells and you take the cells and then you apply Yamanaka factors.

37:18And that will reverse the age of my cells from 48 to zero epigenetically. So now they're in an embryonic light state. Now, what it doesn't do is my cells at age 48 has gone through a number of cell divisions and I have these somatic mutations. Like it has the errors in my DNA and my mitochondria. So it doesn't fix that. It takes the epigenetic age back to zero. So embryonic. So now I have these raw materials. So if I get a disease like an autoimmune condition and I need to rebuild my stomach lining. I have my own cells. I can say, can we rebuild my stomach with my own embryonic-like cells? So now I have the raw material to do that.

37:55Because if you take somebody else's cells, your body might reject it. You have the high risk. And so currently in the world, there's trials going on where people with Parkinson's disease are using their iPSCs, induced pluriprolytic stem cells, to replace the neurons that die in the Parkinson's process, and then also for heart failure. So it's the raw material. So the technology is phenomenal because everybody should have their cells banked. You have this bank and this is available to you if and when you're going to need it at some point in your life. And on a surface level, it's like, okay, this is insane.

38:35This is some sort of Gattaca kind of situation. and an indulgence of a wealthy, privileged person. But it's just like anything else. I mean, when Elon Musk started Tesla, his first offering was that Lotus supercar, which was very expensive, but that's what you have to do to get to the Model 3 that's affordable, et cetera. So by dint of you kind of investing in this and trying to share understanding of it, the idea is that at some point this will catch on, it will incept as an idea. And then with scale, these things become affordable and just second nature. On some level, we've already been doing this.

39:18You take like when you have a baby, you can get the stem cells then and you can bank them, et cetera, for future. So it's not necessarily a new idea. It's just a more kind of like advanced, refined version of that. Yeah. Yeah. We've done the same with my immune cells. So we did, during this immune profile, we take my immune cells. We also bank them because you want to store your immune system as young as you possibly can, right? Because every day you age and the cells have more somatic mutations. So I'm trying to basically take all of my body's raw material in the iPSCs, you take it back to zero epigenetically with the immune systems, you're taking 48-year-old Brian, but still like your immune system is your ultimate weapon to detect disease and cure disease.

39:59And so we're trying to take all these precautions of like, this is the way for everybody eventually, like you're saying to have a shot at, if we say that we are going to be able to extend our lifespans and imagine a future where we're not decrepit, we're healthy and we're vibrant. We can rejuvenate our organs. These will be the raw materials that will help along that path. So we're just like, it's the next stage in our evolution. We are an example of what we're doing. We're an example of that. We're rolling this out to our customers today. So they also have access and we'll just, it'll get cheaper over time and more accessible.

40:33How accurate are these biological age measurements? You know, like now we're all wearing wearables, et cetera. Depending upon the device, you get different analytics. These things vary wildly. Like I have one device that says I'm 44 years old. I've got another one that says I'm like one year younger than I am. The delta is gigantic, right? And I assume that you have a different measurement system that on some level you're going to contend is superior, but it does seem like, how reliable is any of this? Or is this just all nonsense in the interest of this longevity Olympics and the leaderboard of who's the youngest, et cetera?

41:13I'll take one example. EightSleep, they're just about to announce this. They did an age predictor where they had a model, like an AI model, and they showed it data of nights of sleep. And it said, the question to the AI was, here are two separate nights of sleep. Is it from the same person or not? That was the only task that the AI had in determining this data set. So it just went through a bunch of iterations to find out, okay, yes, these two data sets are from the same people. these ones aren't, these ones are, these ones aren't, et cetera, et cetera. And it got checked on that ability. Through that process, essentially mapping what is the same about these data sets to establish the same person versus what's different, what changes.

41:54Maybe you have alcohol the night before one and so your breathing rate is a little bit higher. In that process, it actually ironically found all of the markers that are associated with age. So how good is your heart pumping blood, for example, is a really good age marker. It was able to detect within three and a half years of precision how accurately how old that person is just based on their sleeping patterns. That's an example of scientifically backed or a scientific process of within three years delta accuracy of that. Then you apply, okay, take this person, have them sleep in this bed, what does their body act like?

42:36And it's like, okay, it acts like a 21-year-old with a three-year degree of margin. So some of these algorithms are just pretty much washouts. They just grab three markers, put it together, and they say, oh yeah, this is typical of a 21-year-old. Others are actually genuinely predictive and accurate, and you can actually prove it with science. Yeah, you could probably just do a ranking. So one thing I'm proud of, we gave birth to biological age. Everyone doing biological age markers has come from our initiative of making it as a centerpiece of conversation of bringing people in. And so you can just take a ranking.

43:15If you look at volume of the brain via MRI, that's a very good marker predicting age. The brain shrinks with age. There's of course some variation according to certain things, but that's going to be a more powerful predictor than you're off the shelf wearable. And so you just look at, We basically, in our effort, we are willing to accept hundreds of inputs into biological age. We know some are better than others. And so the one, like the wearables, we kind of discount a little bit because it's like, it's a, the measurement robustness is not as good. You have a lot of variability, et cetera. So yeah, I mean, biological age is a real thing.

43:50We visually know that's true in our lives. And then depends on the measurement modality and the data behind it. Sure. It depends on how, how good these sensors are. I mean, it's like your wearable is never going to be a comp for being in a sleep lab where you've got things all over you or whatever and it's measuring you at a much more accurate level. And then the algorithm making decisions about where all of these metrics fall in the hierarchy of what's important. And this percolates into social media discourse around this. One month it's VO2 max and the next month it's you know, mitochondrial health and mitochondrial density, you know, it's all about like, it's the human mind like wanting to just give me like this one thing and then I have certainty around that.

44:36It's more complicated. It's vastly more complicated than that. But for the average person who's thinking about their longevity, who's living on a budget, who has a busy life, you talk about these principles for how to live an average life and do what you can within the constraints of your busy life on a budget to extend your health span. And those are, they're simple things. They're very simple things. Yeah. I mean, we tell people to not be intimidated by the complexity of the world, the chaos, the disagreement, but just think about and understand their health through one marker, the resting heart rate before bed.

45:16It's an oversimplification, but also that's what makes it beautiful. And so before you go to bed, your heart rate is basically an accounting system that tells you how much food did you consume? Did you drink alcohol? Are you stressed? Did you stay up late? Did you have light in your eyes? It's basically, you can't cheat it. And so the resting heart rate is a representation of you and your entirety, and that will then determine how well you sleep. And sleep is the best longevity drug in the entire world because it determines how you feel in life. When you're poorly rested, you have poor willpower, you're generally more discouraged.

45:55When you sleep well, you feel great, you want to exercise and eat well. So it creates that bifurcation of I do bad stuff or I do good stuff or I have the ability to do so. So yeah, we simplify and we just say, your task is to build your life to lower your heart rate before bed. Most people's current habits drive their heart rate up. So they eat late, they eat close to bed. They have a lot of light exposure. They are stressed. They'll work up until the bedtime. They'll scroll on their phones. So the five rules are no food four hours before bed. So if your bedtime is 10, final food by six, two is screens off 30 minutes before bed.

46:31Three is a wind down routine. So in that last 30 to 60 minutes, read a book, go for a walk, talk to a friend, literally anything other than scrolling your phone or working. Light, be mindful. It's like red and amber, a great white, white and blue is bad. Then last caffeine by noon. And those five simple things dramatically change people's lives because they finally get into a state where they can sleep well. And book in hand before bed and that wind down routine is the best thing you can do. It's on par with a sleep medication. So, but it's really just trying to, you're trying to curb late night bad habits, which come out when you're stressed, you're done.

47:09You just want to do nothing. So those are the things you focus on. The after 10 p.m., Brian. Brian, you've surrendered your will over to these rules and it's removed all of the analysis paralysis and you're relatively robotic in your consistency with this. Like, Kate, where's the sticking point? Like, where's the struggle? For him? For you. For me? Yeah. In what sense? Like which is the hardest thing for you? Oh, God, everything. Yeah, in all of it. This is like the antithesis of Kate. I was meeting Brian somewhere the other day and I arrived at the garage with one kilometer left on my gas tank.

47:48I'm the most measurable female in the world doing 100 tasks a day, this insane morning routine. And I arrive and I'm like, Brian, can you take me to the gas station so I can fill up a canister, take it back to my car, fill up my car so I can get home? so yeah no this whole thing is just like the antithesis i'm a creative chaotic human being and structure is not my default mode what's the hardest it's everything every morning i wake up at 6 30 a.m on the dot i immediately spit into a tube i turn on my my therapy light so i get light my eyes immediately i put on a hrv device and measure my hrv every morning i log my subjective sleep score my subjective feeling i breathe into a mask for 10 minutes and measure my resting metabolic rate at rest.

48:30I take my blood pressure. I measure my face to check for like, is the bacteria growing in my skin as I get later into my cycle? I measure my reaction time, my grip strength. I measure my brain using essentially like a portable MRI device, the neurotech company, the Brian Bill Kernel. I measure my vaginal microbiome, my female hormones through urine, my cortisol through urine i measure my breath size i do my smart scales it just goes on i mean you have to understand that hearing that it comes across like some kind of uh obsessive compulsive like neurotic condition 100 that's what i'm saying so how sustainable Why do you think that?

49:17Sounds bad to me. That's not like a stained person to me. He's like, I love that routine. No, totally. I'm doing this because women need it. Somebody has to do it. There needs to be a Rosetta Stone for women to translate it into the masculine world we live in of numbers and everything's digestible through data. And so I will zip my mouth shut and do my task. Doesn't the constriction of it impinge upon your happiness and your ability to enjoy your life and the ways in which those are very important emotions to be able to channel and experience in terms of your overall well-being? Yes. I am not doing this for my happiness.

49:59I appreciate that. I am not. You're honesty on that. I am not doing it. My second week, I had a panic attack. My cortisol was through the roof. Now, fortunately, I'm in a routine where I've stabilized, so I feel like I can go a little bit on autopilot. in my five-hour morning routine, but absolutely this is not happening. That's why as much as I can hit home, that we would rather be in a cabin, not living this life. What about your girlfriends? What do those texts look like? What do they think about all this? I mean, my sister is an Olympic athlete, and so we grew up in a family where we like hard things.

50:34So everyone knows that I wake up, I'm alive, and I'm like, what do I do that's the most valuable thing for humanity. And that's my, the way I look at things through. So my friends and family are like, you know what, that's just Kate, like she's going to do her thing.

50:50One of the things I love about Rivian is the way they fill their vehicles with so much amazing high performance technology, but always make sure it feels like second nature, that it keeps that human touch. And a great example would be the haptic halo wheels on the new R2. On either side of the steering wheel, there's a dial that you could roll, push, and pull to adjust things like the AC or skipped in the next song. And they have this incredibly satisfying tactile feel because you're really clicking a button and rolling a mechanical wheel. I was recently able to drive an R2 with RJ Scringe, the founder and CEO, and he shared the thinking behind this cool and unique feature.

51:29So walk me through the thinking on that because as technology is sort of informing this screen-only experience, there is something in the human animal that craves that kind of tactile control. Yeah, and that was part of what the logic was here. And that was from the feedback we had in R1, is the desire for some more mechanical touch points and also the ability to not have to use the multi-touch screen for everything. And so being able to do HVAC through this side, your entertainment through that side, you also have drive modes in you as well. There are just so many features packed into this vehicle.

52:06You can learn all about them, watch the rest of our conversation, and even book a demo drive at stories.rivian.com slash richroll.

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53:35You're confronting people with uncertainty in a way that is discomforting, right? Like if we're questioning these things, we're questioning the very nature of reality as we understand it, right? And that's a difficult pill to swallow. I'm curious around how your experience with psilocybin has informed that perspective because I've had my own experience with that. Yeah. I mean, Kate did both live streams with me. I guess my favorite thing - I mean, this was internet gold. You're live streaming this, you've got grimes coming on, there's special guests, you're putting on a show. It's all part of this bizarre rom-com that you guys are living.

54:20This whole thing is like, it's total theater on one level. while also trying to get at something meaningful at the same time. Yeah. I mean, what I'm very proud that this was the most quantified psychedelic experiment ever done, we bridged psilocybin into the world of longevity. Whereas before it's been an ancient medicine, it's been more recently in clinical trials for various indications, and we bridged to longevity. And I'm very proud of that. So it's now people are seeking funding for that. So that That would be cool if psilocybin were understood as a longevity therapy. But then I think our adventure spirit as a species is to look outward, which makes sense.

55:01Our eyes point forward, our brain is right behind us. So in many ways, our brain is kind of hidden from our own perspective. So we see the world and we say, I want to climb that mountain, or I want to go to that star, or I want to go to that moon, or I want to go to this place. We very much think about ourselves moving forward with visual contact moving forward. and psychedelics, you reverse that, right? You're actually going to things you can't see and you're exploring the inner world. And if we map the space of exploration going forward and you say, what is, how big is space and how fast can you get there?

55:33What is the space internally? I think it's possible internal exploration is the new world of exploration. Even though right now, Mars and the moon kind of has the zeitgeist of like, how do we be adventurous as a species? What is cool to do? And I think this is certainly, you know, you find these kind of thought processes in the world of psychedelics, but as we get really good at drug design with AI, we, I mean, if you look at the number of possible psychedelic molecules that have the capacity to be like psilocybin or 5-MeO-DMT, it's very large. And if you can now start designing these and constructing experiments, you may find that like that itself is the deliciousness of the future.

56:18our ability to start changing the ways we process reality in new ways that almost like a GLP-1, but for consciousness. These modifications of how we process the world that just fundamentally change how we understand ourselves and how we go about. So I think that to me is very promising. What was your experience, Kate? I mean, I think it was reflective of our roles where I can't imagine having so much faith in your own mind to be able to do that on a live stream. And then not only do that, but then do 5-MeO-DMT on a live stream too. So my experience was just like, how can I be the container for Brian in this moment, such that there's a safety net here that if he wobbles that there's like some buffering around him?

57:07So yeah, I was just really proud and in awe of his ability to navigate that. So such a complex space publicly. and in lifetime. I mean, for me, it just gave me a humility and a capaciousness. It just rewrote my understanding of reality, how we process time. You're saying tomorrow and the next day, and it's like, this is all an illusion. I went in thinking I'm going to heal this childhood wound and it sort of said, well, that's really cute. Let me just show you the way things actually are. That's right. And not a day goes by that I don't think about it. And it has fundamentally altered my convictions around what's real and I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the real outer space is the nature of consciousness.

57:52I really don't think that this materialist definition of consciousness is correct. It's called the hard problem for a reason, and the materialist definition just always falls apart. I think that there is one vast consciousness and the material world is a projection of that as much as anything else. It seems like that makes more sense in the wake of having that experience. Whether or not that's true is almost irrelevant to my daily experience because it's enriched me in that way and gave me a different lens on how to make decisions and navigate the difficulties of being in a human body. Yeah. I feel like that's part of what you see for yourself having going through these experiences is like that's the prize on the other side of this ginormous transformation we're going through as a species that potentially it's the tools and ability to be able to go and explore that freely like do you know what i'm saying like the 10th dimension type of thinking yeah what is it what i really enjoy about these thought experiments is um and the one the contrast i always use which makes sense to me is contrasting myself with homo erectus a million years a million years ago so So let's just say we are going to experience a million years equivalent of evolutionary advance in the next, what, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.

59:15And then we have access to our root biology, right? We now can, we can design these molecules. We can discover these molecules at speeds that would defy any previous model. And so if you, if that's the stage, then I don't think it's a reasonable basis at all to imagine that what is, will be. That we'll have the same motivation, same aspirations, same characteristics. I mean, we see even now like GLP-1s turn off a hunger response, like a primal need of the body just gets turned off with an injection, right? That is crazy. What other primal things just get turned off? And so, or on, or created. And so I guess like what I like about this is I like that you can basically ask a question with no assumptions about what would be limited is the full suite of possibilities.

1:00:10And so that to me is the most exciting moment. Yeah. I mean, that's a fundamentally optimistic view of what's going on. And it's not that I don't share it, but I think I couch it with recognition that humans are, they're overconfident in their predictive abilities. We kind of think we know how things are going to go. And the history of our species is that we rush forward impulsively and break things and then deal with the unforeseen ramifications in the aftermath. And I don't see any precedent for this being any different. And so in your example of Homo erectus, it's like dropping and giving them an atom bomb and saying, figure out how to use this.

1:00:54We're literally playing with fire and the fire is more potent in ways that we can't possibly imagine. And I think we're arrogant to think that we can control it and put these guardrails on and make it work for us. What are we intentionally bringing in in a way that we're not developed enough to really truly understand? How is that experiment going to go? And I think anybody who says they know how it's going to go is going to be proven incorrect. Yeah, well, I agree with that. This is the struggle for literally anybody on planet Earth to say anything intelligent. Right? It's back to that premise then.

1:01:34And we're just gonna do it. We're gonna barrel forward and we're gonna see what happens. And what will be will be. Yeah. And so the only guardrail I want to have in place, which again, I'm not saying this guardrail is not gonna have also negative consequences because everything always is a double-edged sword. but I'm saying the guard rule I want to have in place is that we as a species prioritize existence. That we say, what we can say might be bad is we don't wanna go to war with each other. We don't wanna put ourselves in that kind of situation. We don't wanna kill each other. We don't wanna be making products and services that kill out of humans or make them degraded in their ability.

1:02:10They give some disease, like some basic rules of the road of like, can we agree? We don't have to be kumbaya. Don't we already agree on that? It's just that our actions belie that sentiment. Yeah, I mean, there is a starting point. Like, you know, if you look over the past couple decades, we've made good progress, right? Marching those basic principles forward. But still, we are a society that says your highest status is given with abstract, you know, accumulation of money, power and status. That's the ultimate trophy we give out to people in society. So I'd say that trophy has side effects and consequences.

1:02:50Now it's a good engine of innovation, but it says we will give you that trophy even if you kill yourself, even if you kill others, and even if you kill the planet, you still get the trophy. And so we just have some misalignment among us humans on what is worth doing and what is worth granting someone a trophy. I'm in total agreement with the power, property, and prestige incentive structure. of our society being misaligned with human flourishing while also acknowledging, yes, it's given us all of this bounty and it incentivizes people to work hard and innovate and all the like. It's also given rise to tremendous economic disparity and suffering and addiction and all the like that you talk about all the time.

1:03:37And so another kind of like substrate underneath all of this is a questioning of these systems, right? from government to healthcare, et cetera, and back to the Jeffersonian dinner that I attended, that was populated with some interesting characters who are questioning our governmental systems. In a way, maybe I don't agree with. I appreciate the curiosity to engage with a difference of opinion about where we should go. But I can't help but think that there is this strain of wealthy tech personality, these people like yourself who are very wealthy and have figured out a way to bend the universe to their will and then in the wake of that enjoy the benefits of that, surround themselves with the trappings of wealth, et cetera, only to discover like, well, this isn't actually fulfilling in a way that I thought it was.

1:04:42And in that history of being able to make shit happen and the hubris that can set in with that, I know better than everybody because I was successful in this regard, the real frustration is that you can't bend time. Time and your mortality are hanging out there. It doesn't matter how powerful or prestigious you are, etc. And so what are we going to do about that? And so hence, we see this movement around very wealthy people trying to extend their healthspan, etc. And with that kind of galaxy brain mentality, there's a sense of like, well, we need to change the government and it needs to be this way and we know better and people shouldn't really have to vote.

1:05:28They shouldn't have the right to vote. What they really need is a strong leader and maybe a techno-autocratic society would be better. where are you on that? I think it would be good to have a little bit of clarity around where you fall and that because it's simpatico with this idea of surrendering your decision-making and your will over to a superpower AI. Similarly, in a government context, let's just have somebody who is in charge, we're going to trust them with our wellbeing and society would be better. Does that make sense? It does. Yeah. Yeah. I've steered clear of any political engagement and any expression of opinion.

1:06:11I think our existence is about a singular thing. We're trying to change the objective function of the human race from power, prestige, and wealth to existence. Now, you can still achieve power wealth and status in the pursuit of existence the same things work but our only objective is that swap and and primarily because i do think that like on some grand scale in the universe there's this question where is life are we the only life is it true that other species get to a point of advance like we are and they destroy themselves like we're playing the biggest of all possible games and politics plays a game in the species we do you know it's like a part of our of our society i don't think my opinions matter in that regard we are as far as i know we are a singular voice of this new philosophy if you look at planet earth who is fighting for existence like who is actually saying like you guys this is very precious this it's unbelievable we're actually conscious all of us on this planet our planet is precious and delicate and we should probably suspend everything that compromises um or or makes us weak in our ability to persist as a species and so i'd rather us be a singular voice a singular focus than i would dabble in all these little side quests which create an acrimony disagreement it was splinter we're trying to be more of a unifying focus.

1:07:54And this is true among all religions, political class, all people. So we're really trying to be extremely narrow in what we say and what we're trying to achieve. Yeah, fair enough. It was also one of the things that was really important to me when we first started dating, because we were private for three years before we announced our relationship. And a big part of that three years was A, what happens when we reach conflict? How do we resolve that? It's also like, I remember having conversations with you really early on being like, I don't know, like, what happens if we become really successful in this path?

1:08:28Like, who are you gonna be on the other side of that? Are you gonna be that person that you're describing that doesn't realize that they're pursuing something and then ultimately changes their mind? And Brian was really clear. He was like, Kate, like, I've already been successful in all these ways and like, and who am I? I've set my life up in a way where he's diverting his body to the bigger picture of humankind. And that really, for me, was like, okay, yeah, actually, I believe that and I see that. And it's held true that the more power we gain, we try to have real integrity that we are devoted to the cause rather than to our own individual self-interests.

1:09:05And of course, we're, you know, faultful human beings. And so I'm sure there's plenty of ways that I'm not able to see that that still holds. But I think out of the people, where we're really trying to, our essence is in devotion of a cause. You have the property box checked and this kind of social media celebrity is sort of checking the prestige box on some level. It's human to enjoy the attention and all of that, so how do you keep that in check so it doesn't become this hypnotic, addictive thing where you're serving a digital audience we don't we don't care about it i mean for for real i think we would we would be happier in a cabin in the woods doing our thing i don't buy that you're loving this dude come on you speak up i mean we have this conversation all the time it's a sacrifice i know that sounds like insane to say but you you become not a human you're a symbol and that's a giant - that's the biggest trade-off you can make in life.

1:10:12You walk somewhere and people relate to you as something that you're not, ultimately. They relate to you as a symbol, they think you are versus who you are. And so we knowingly have walked into that being like, we accept those terms. Sure, it's fun at times, but are we going out to parties on the weekends, having these really insane, lavish lives? No, we're hanging out, playing pickleball, watching a movie. It seems that you've backed away from... There was a moment maybe a year ago where it was like, oh, you're entering Guru terrain, these don't-die get-togethers, which are cool, like these community events, but there was some drapery around cult status stuff and it seems like you've retreated from that.

1:10:58Is that true? Is that a conscious thing? I wouldn't say retreat. I think a truly intelligent being on planet Earth right now would say, okay, let me survey the situation. I am on a habitable planet with resources. I'm going to measure the energy capacity of my distant stars. I have this much capacity to exist. And these are the threats that could undermine my existence. That would be like the most coherent thought process of an intelligent being. And instead we branch off into these groups, like I hate you because of blank, or I want to pursue this because of my own sensory needs of filling status or power.

1:11:37But we are an intelligent species, but we are also an idiotic species. If you're really truly intelligent, you just want to exist and you want to not die. And so we just have never had that opportunity. And as a species, death has always been inevitable. Therefore, we make up these other games like religions and afterlives and these status games or capitalism and accumulation. But I guess to get to your point this is not about fame it's not about attention it's not about what we personally want like we would so much rather be playing another game we're trying to we're trying to pierce this moment with our best intellect and say in the like the most sober way possible how can you say something intelligent without getting distracted and all the primal things that occupy our minds.

1:12:32But that genuinely is our thing. So the Don't Die, back to your question on the gatherings, we were formulating a hypothesis on how you build Don't Die globally. So like build these events, build up local chapters. And we came back because we said, we're not convinced this is the right strategy. What you really wanna do, and so we wrote two essays. Kate wrote one called The Antientropic Systems. I wrote one called Immortalism. And Kate's frame was like, you want to basically build anti-entropic systems. Think of it like a nation state is an anti-entropic system. It propels itself over time. Religion propels itself over time.

1:13:08And individuals, if you look at it through an age perspective, religions are the most enduring institution society has ever created. They're remarkably resilient. Actually, DNA even exceeds religions. And so we're trying to say, how do you build this incredibly resilient structure that rides through the next couple centuries with AI and however it emerges. And so I approached it via math. Kate approached it through this framework. We said, basically, we don't think the move right now is to build a human-based system of organization. It's you have to build like a computational model that works on entropy.

1:13:49Like basically you have to give AI the philosophy and the math to go after this objective. So we wrote this out in the essays, but that's probably a very confusing answer. I'll take a sound about it. We stopped the Don't Die summits because they reached like 1 ,700 people per time, whereas our social media efforts reach millions of people every time. And so it's just a strategy on like communication. An antientropic system is like, why has Christianity been around for 2 ,000 years and there's no CEO in charge? And I'm not saying that there's not some spiritual element to it that propels it. I'm saying, why has it survived that long?

1:14:30Out of all of our institutions, why has that and other religions survived for so long? So, something about the structure of that allows it to defy entropy for that long. And you compare that to the world's most powerful company as of when I wrote this was NVIDIA. And that's been around for, I think, 33 years or something like that. And so the contrast there on how anti-entropic is NVIDIA versus Christianity. Christianity has proven itself so far to be much more anti-entropic. So what structure would allow itself for us to build to be as anti-entropic as possible? People currently point themselves at companies.

1:15:06They say that is the best place for me to spend our time. Our hypothesis is that there are so many other antitropic systems that people don't look at right now that are higher chance success that have been pippooed by society because they're not in the zeitgeist. So religion is one of those things. Incredibly important. Our brains operate through storytelling and it's untapped that we have no zeitgeist storytelling to connect us as a species. On the individual level, yeah, we care about each other and we won't do something horrible for 50 bucks. But on the global level, we create systems for that exact exchange because on the global level, there's something missing in terms of our zeitgeist storytelling.

1:15:49So the guru element is framed in that way, right, because that's the way we relate to it today. But what we're trying to say is science has bulldozed through storytelling. It's made it very hard to believe in bigger picture stuff because science is extremely sound and it's really like entered the zeitgeist. How can you pair storytelling of our species to soothe our conscious minds and science at the same time. That's what immortals don't die is. Humans are storytelling animals. We use story to understand the world. It's how we relate to each other. It's how we form emotional bonds. I think you're correct in saying that we've lost our appreciation for the stories that we rely upon to understand what's important, et cetera.

1:16:40We've supplanted it with the rationalist model, with the enlightenment of science. And we've put that on the pedestal as the ultimate in human understanding at the cost of storytelling. And when you were sharing, Brian, I was thinking about the movie Inception. Have you seen this movie? So the most antropic thing is an idea. How do you incept an idea? It's not about an individual. And once that idea is firmly planted, it has antropic properties, right? It will outlast and have a certain legacy that isn't contingent upon a certain individual. And as much as Jesus Christ is fundamental to Christianity, it exists beyond that individual as an idea, as a story.

1:17:30You look at Alcoholics Anonymous, there's nobody in charge, there's no boss. This is an idea that is about a shared agreement and a story amongst people. And so the idea that you are trying to incept is this challenge to a presupposition around our mortality. Is that essentially what you're trying to say? You said it so well, we are playing inception with life, consciousness. That's entirely what we're doing. We're implanting an idea in humans' minds about what it means to exist as an intelligent being. You start at that base, I wake up and I'm intelligent. What do I care about? What are my priorities?

1:18:10How do I relate to you? What stories do I tell? We're trying to get at the core of like that thing. And around it, of course, is like we've got thousands and thousands of years of stories and architecture and culture and ethics and norms. And this has a friction with what we're doing, which you've pointed out. But that's what we hit at every day. We're basically, we're provoking that and reminding people there's a contrast with the way they understand reality. And there's a different way to understand reality. And that may be scary initially, but if you just can slow walk bit by bit, you can kind of warm people up because they thaw them out.

1:18:49If you look at the, actually, we did this deep analysis on sentiment towards us for the past five years. And you look at the chart, it was deeply negative. when this went viral initially, people were just like, I'm repulsed by this situation. It has steadily climbed where now we just crossed over a majority positive. And so we now have defenders actively out there. So it has been unbelievable that the zeitgeist has changed so fast within a five-year time period to almost be thought of like, we might be open to new ideas about ourselves in the world. And that's why we're willing to make the trade-off of losing our day-to-day existence for it.

1:19:28If you had to distill this definition of reality or this different understanding of it down to a log line, what is that? Yes to existence. So I personally experienced this with 5-miodmT. So it's an entheogen, right? And I did 27 milligrams, which is a gigantic dose. So for those listening, you know it's like 5-MeO psilocybin like they're kind of like in the same like similar worlds that took me to the most challenging experience I've ever had in my entire life it was also the pinnacle it was like peak experience I've had as a conscious being and where I went is to the absolute epicenter of existence and every layer it's almost like Dante's Inferno where like every layer, it was like, I'm going to put this enormity of pain upon you.

1:20:30And you have to say yes to existence when the body is screaming panic. Like I can't control anything. I don't know what's happening. I just want to be out. And you have to just breathe through it and say, yes. And then you get to the next gate and it gets even more punishing and you have to say, yes. And then you get to the center after you finally kind of breathe through it. And you are just absolutely dumbfounded, speechless at the, the exquisite and magnetic, like magnificent nature of existence. Like just our minds cannot understand it. And so I'm sure people who are listening to me speak, they're struggling to connect.

1:21:16Like, what is he talking about and how do I relate to that? You can't, you can't convey through words, but you just leave that. And you're so humbled and so appreciative that we are alive. It's like, you just weep. Like you're just, I was speechless for, I don't know how long, but it's like that. It's like as a species, we just say yes, more fully than anything we've ever done before. And that to me is it, is like, that's the beauty of this moment. The moment is all there is. We live our lives captured, rehashing the past or lost in imagining a future that hasn't happened yet. And we're very rarely actually present for the only thing that is real, which is what's happening right now.

1:22:06That's a form of insanity that has an evolutionary advantage. It allows us to live and thrive and procreate and all the like, but it's fundamentally blind to the true nature of what actually is, which is interesting. And my experiences with a version of what you just shared, like mimic that in that way. It just gives you this profound humility and appreciation. And you're flirting with a sort of understanding of that reality while also appreciating that you can't actually grasp it. We never got to the bottom of Kate's discomfort with being seen and a theory of mind. Well, isn't that a nice reflective of reality?

1:22:55Maybe we'll never get to the bottom of it. Yeah. You're deflecting right now. I know, but like, you know? Yeah. I don't know. I'm really good at being the space between objects rather than the object itself. And I think we live in a world that views things as objects. But I'm someone who says, how can I influence the room such that people might not even notice my involvement or my presence? Obviously, now I'm stepping more into this object-related role, but traditionally, I've been much more of the space. And so I'm much more like in your head, in his head, trying to facilitate a certain vibe within the world.

1:23:36But that does make it hard for me to be seen by others, but also for me to see myself. So you have a sibling who's an Olympic athlete. Did you grow up in Australia? Where in Australia? Do you know where Brisbane is? Like a 10 to 12 hour drive north. So kind of right in between the middle of Australia and the very top. So far north Queensland. But like Olympic athlete sibling. So I imagine, I'm projecting, but like some discipline in the household, some expectations that parents who raised you to be achievement oriented. Yes and no. They immigrated from Bosnia. So more of an immigrant child mindset where we felt we needed to do them justice for everything they gave up to move to Australia and give us such a fortunate life.

1:24:23My sister is also 6 '5". And so from a very young age, both her and my brother were really into basketball. And so our whole lives centered around basketball and getting them to practice and driving. My parents were extremely dedicated and never letting them miss a game. But Brian just went home to Australia to meet my parents. What's your sense on discipline? Or just the impact of her upbringing, like what you noticed and saw that contributes to her character and sense of self or failure of legibility, as you put it. That's what it is. Kate was not legible to her family. Invisible because your sibling was 6 '5 and getting all the attention.

1:25:09She's neurodivergent and her thought patterns are different and she's difficult to understand. She expresses herself in ways that are not obvious. They don't fit into certain boxes or certain patterns. And so unless you really investigate and can kind of get your head around it, but I went through her old bedroom and we went through her art books and school books. She is just a different person, like wildly different. Like even when we go out now, I always joke that, you know, she's like socially, you know, challenged because you'll see a bunch of women, you know, swapping like gossip and in case just like stunned.

1:25:46Like she just can't, she doesn't know what to do. She's like speechless. And so you get her engaged on like a meaningful topic and she'll chime in on the certain thing, but she just doesn't flow within society. And so I think she'll say this, that I was probably the first person to see her. When she showed up in my life, I was like, ah, I got you. Like, I understand this. And we would be in my office at Colonel and I would just say, talk. And she's like, about what? I don't care, just like go. And she was able to explore like her expression of what she is, but no one had ever done that. And so I think that she's had a legibility problem her entire life, that she basically gave up on it.

1:26:27At the age we met at, you were 23, 24. Mm-hmm, 25. She had given up in terms of, you know, like expecting that a person would understand her. I see what you're saying. So she was in this supportive capacity where she could show up and understand you and service you and be present for you and give you all the social signals of like, I understand the rules of the game and I'm gonna be, you know, a good social partner. but if you flipped it, it's very hard to get something out of her. Is this a point of commonality, like a source of your bonding? Because I would imagine there might've been a legibility problem with you, Brian, growing up.

1:27:02I mean, you're a very unique individual. I don't know if you're neurodivergent or not, but you're certainly unique in your wiring and perhaps just a different kind of kid. I do have a better understanding of how you were raised and the impact of that on the person that you've become. But now I'm starting to see like maybe that's something that you share. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the funny thing about Brian, also one is when we met, it was just that like, he just wanted to know more. Like I didn't even feel particularly understood initially because it's very hard to understand, but he just like, he was like, go, like start giving me breadcrumbs.

1:27:48And every time I usually do that with someone, I get blank stares. And I remember my very first memory in life, I was like six years old, I was pacing around the top floor of my family home growing up. It was like a Queenslander, similar to Florida where you have a lot of cyclones and so - Yeah. On stilts. And I was pacing around and I remember just being like, I can see that I'm being taught all these rules subconsciously by everyone. and none of the adults realize that they know that they're being run by all these rules that they learned a long time ago that no one's present to now. We're all just playing out a program that was imprinted upon us.

1:28:27Exactly. And I was like, I want to write all these things down because I know I will forget them too and I will become cemented in these rules that are oblivious to me. And I was noticing that the street signs were the popular kids' last names at school. And I was like, I'm walking into this system that's like pre-established that is greater than me and this frustration of um how much we don't see what's right in front of us the space between the objects rather than the objects themselves and so i just remember wanting to write that down but never quite being able to communicate to the people around me like do you guys see this and feel like they could understand then brian rolls around 25 years later or you know 20 years later and we're interfacing and i'm kind of just like, I'll take a gamble because you gave me the space to say something.

1:29:12Can you see what I see? And we slowly walked into this world of where we're at now where we're saying, hey, we'll give up our anonymity, our individual identity as human beings become symbols because we see the same picture and the world being run by this certain algorithm. Yeah. So the legibility issue being a young person who's seeing things differently is trying to connect with other individuals who aren't really understanding you. And so then there's a withdrawal. I guess I'm on a solo mission here and better to just kind of keep quiet. Yeah. Precisely. That makes sense. That's the entirety.

1:29:50You maybe now see our pattern, right? That experience she had at six is what I've been experiencing the past couple of years. And we were both just like, wait a second, the world is structured a certain way that makes no sense in the context of ai like no sense isn't this obvious like all the rules and we're like we gotta change the situation because these rules don't make any sense and people here say this are like you guys are fucked up what are you talking about right like i'm gonna give you all the reasons why that is a an unacceptable way to view the world. But for Kate and I, we're just like, this is so clear.

1:30:33And specifically, we need to help people create the system so they're going to be able to survive this next thing. We'll be fine, right? Everyone will be fine. But we're not set up in a way where we have support systems, value systems, ideologies, beliefs that will allow us to usher in and not panic as AI upheavals our societal rules and we're left with what ties us together. So we're like, can we build some infrastructure and some ideological thinking to help keep our brains intact as we go through this transition, which we think can anchor on, prioritize the fact that you're alive and hold onto that for dear life.

1:31:12Let go of the politics, let go of the wanting status and fame and capitalism and money in your bank account to go up and just hold on to those close to you and your existence and say, that's our most priority asset and we won't give it up for anything else. So there's an example, I'm going to give an attempt at this explanation. There's a professor from the University of Chicago who has this theory called unicontext, where she says social media has basically flattened context where before this, if you went to church, you behaved in a church setting. If you were home, you're different masks you had different mannerisms and behaviors in those settings and now it's because social media knocks down all those walls and it's just one unit context it has this side effect where we now live in a perpetually comparative world where you're you're never isolated in these small groups but you're compared across the spectrum that creates this intense pressure this intense psychological pressure and then two is that everything turns negative so in a private setting the example she uses i believe is i can say i really enjoy chicken enchiladas and the person's like that's cool but if you post that on social media people are like i don't care you got to tell me who's racist right because they like enchiladas and so it turns into like these really sharp takes which then creates this perception the world is very bad and so she like the point of that i think for me is that if a person in the modern world says i kind of feel bad about life.

1:32:42I kind of feel bad about myself. I don't know why. I just like, I don't feel good, you know? Um, and so the, the tectonic plates are shifting underneath the feet of humans and we don't know what's happening. So we can't quite put our fingers on it. We just know we feel stuff that makes us feel different. And so that's what we're trying to get at is as technology continues to move fast, we kind of slip into the psychosis where we can't quite orient ourselves to say like, who are we? What are we doing? Where's safe? Where's connection? And that's why we think that spirituality is the path is like, there's this open question, what does it mean to be connected and to have a spiritual experience?

1:33:28What does it mean to be spiritual? And it's kind of the first opening in kind of 2000 years since Jesus was here of like, Like, because you've had Buddha, some big figures like Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus, but they kind of set these big structures. But right now is this opening for society of like, what is spirituality? And like, we're trying to poke at this question of like, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to exist? What do you value? Why? How do you behave? How do you relate to others? And so we're really trying to get our minds around this. And that's why we're experimenting with all these approaches is like, we think it's really open.

1:34:03like very open for the first time in a very long time. I actually really love that. And I think that that gets to the very heart of what initiated this journey and this obsession, you know, in the first place. I mean, I have a theory of mind for you, Brian. I have no idea if it's accurate, but I want to share it with you because I think it's relevant to what you just said. My theory is that you were somebody who suffered a tremendous amount of trauma as a young person. You grew up in a chaotic environment of lack and poverty. You didn't have a dad. You were indoctrinated into the Mormon faith, and you dutifully showed up as a good citizen in that community.

1:34:54at some point you questioned the faith and broke ranks with your community. You were othered, right? And this alienated you and exiled you not only from the church, but from the broader community and ultimately your nuclear family. And so there's a tremendous amount of pain that I think you carry and that you're trying to heal and make sense of that is a consequence of a set of circumstances that were extremely difficult.

1:35:32To heal that, your first impulse was, well, let me transcend my environment and in a sort of, I don't know if it was, I'll show them, but I'm going to make my own way in the world. You go out, you become this very successful entrepreneur, you make a lot of money, get a lot of attention for that, and you enjoy the spoils of all of that, only to realize like, oh, this actually didn't heal me and maybe the way I initially thought it might because I'm just following Blueprint 1.0, which is power, property, and prestige, only to discover that it has betrayed its promise, right? you still have this hole in your soul.

1:36:16In the Mormon faith, according to that blueprint, you live your life in a certain way and you are promised this beautiful afterlife. All those questions are answered for yourself, all you have to do is act accordingly. That being stripped away, you fill it first with material things, realizing that's not working, what am I going to do now? There's sort of a bereftness, a depression, perhaps a bit of an existential crisis. And what I've seen you do is attempt to fill it, maybe not initially, with some version of spirituality, a sense of a higher power, a surrender to a humble sense of powerlessness in the vastness of the universe and trying to find comfort in some kind of spiritual tenets to hang onto, but instead to deny the prospect of death altogether because it's so ultimately terrifying.

1:37:13If there is no afterlife, as I was told in the Mormon church, and we don't know what it is, I short-circuit on that. So what I'm going to do is create a life in which I don't have to think about it because I'm going to do all these things that's going to allow me to sidestep it and prevent it. What I think you have now matured into is a recognition on some level, maybe you're not going to admit it, of perhaps mortality is inescapable. But in the midst of that and maybe as a consequence of some of these alternative experiences you've had with psychedelics in appreciation for some version of bespoke faith in something larger than yourself.

1:37:56So how does that land? Am I way off the reservation with that? Kate, what do you think? Is this a reductive explanation to help me make sense of Brian's mind? do you have anything i would love to hear your take i figured that you would um i think he's like 20 times more complicated than that like i spend every single second of my day decoding people from five seconds of information there are still things that just don't add up like brian was also captain of the football team high school captain what do you call it when you're like cedar club president yeah yeah like i don't know some mayor position like didn't have any qualms with mormonism until he went on his mission so what i i agree that a large portion of what propels brian into the position that he's in right now is this historical context i don't even want to call it trauma because it's very hard to actually look back and truly pick up the tangible fingerprints of trauma and you know that's obviously a really complicated word.

1:39:08The video that you made where you visited your father is a very beautiful video, but I think it's pretty revealing. It provided some context for that relationship. Anyway, sorry I interrupted you. It's almost like you know how you can arrive at something from the top down or bottom up? For example, Brian does therapy through his body. He's very somatic and he arrives at the same conclusions as me through physical experience and the moving of his atoms in the world, whereas I do that through being alone, thinking, processing, analyzing, getting data points, contrasting them until I find the overlap.

1:39:46You could say it's entirely context trauma-driven, or you can say it's entirely analysis until he came at the conclusion that he's at right now. Like, I don't think it's one or the other. I've gone so deep with it on him that even now I still put my hands up on like, there's only so much I can understand or structure together into a coherent, pretty story that has a very clear through line. It's like most people like that. I think weirdly Brian escapes that pigeonholing, bucketing, you know, paradigm. Okay. What do you think? I mean, at first, I appreciate the attempt. That's cool. My lived experience of myself is I wake up every day and I try to shed my skin and I say, what do I think is true?

1:40:37And in that contemplation, I'm willing to basically eliminate everything in my life that is not true. and that's my lived experience as i've tried to crawl through because i feel like you know i was born into a system i had to experience that system i had at some point question the system and if you look at the stages of my life i've changed pretty radically pretty quickly over short periods of time and i still have that same kind of velocity and so that's uh and maybe i've said that multiple times in our discussion today i'm just ultimately trying to string together I give myself some kind of constraint, seven words is the budget, and you can say what is true to you.

1:41:17And anything more than that is verbose and garbage. And so you have to distill reality into those seven words. Otherwise, I'm in an intelligible track. But it's very hard for me to see myself outside of that, of course, my own subjective experience. I understand. Can I ask you something, Brian? How does it feel to hear that synopsis? Your facial expression changed. And so I sensed like there's some kind of emotional response there. I don't mean to offend you. Oh, not at all. Yeah, it's not offensive to me at all. Or to presuppose anything either. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it definitely feels, like Kate said, my lived experience feels much more complex.

1:42:04That as I, from your vantage point, I think the pattern matching is good, right? You're trying to piece together these elements. Yes, this is what I see. This is what shows up on the internet. I'm trying to make sense of it. How does this fit into something that I can understand? I can understand how he went from there to here. Yeah, yeah. So I guess intuitively,

1:42:26it doesn't match my internal lives experience of what I have. I understand from your perspective why you would think that. And I think that a lot of people make similar conclusions in looking at me. and I also don't want to say they're wrong because I'm not quite sure how to express confidence of myself, right, of my subjective experience. Others oftentimes have the superpower of seeing you much more clearly than you can yourself. So I try to be very careful to never step on other people's insights, which may be the thing I need to hear or would be helpful to hear. So I try to tread very carefully, but yeah, my lived experience is it's much more complicated than what others perceive.

1:43:07Of course. Well, it always is going to be, you know, because everything is more complicated than our ability to like reduce it to something that we can articulate in a few sentences. I think if I had to like summarize it, you know how when you do LLM creation, you're predicting next token? You know how like, it's like you could have - Theoretically, I understand that, but I'm not like an AI scientist person. Me, me either. Yeah, I understand that much. Yeah, like the cat, you know, the dog jumped over the fence, the fence with being the predictive word. I've gotten much better at predicting what Brian's next word will be, but I still am unable to be extremely good at predicting the next word.

1:43:45And so that's the part that I'm with you. I do this analysis on him all the time. He hears it all the time. I always say the comment section is actually always the most right section, ultimately. It's the consolidation of the humankind into one space, and it says something about the way that we all – it's collective intelligence and consciousness, the comment section in places, but still I'm unable to predict the next word. So all that to say that for some reason, his essence is far more complicated than I think most people. I think it's what he said, the shedding constantly, constantly rebirthing himself.

1:44:26Every couple months it feels like a new Brian arrives and we're all just like who's it going to be? We don't know. You're in this constant process of change, evolution, growth, and transformation. You're engaged with change as a relationship, not as a thing you did or planned to do or in the middle of doing, but just as a way of being in the world. So many people struggle with trying to make a change. All of us want to be better in a certain way. I wish I could do that or I plan to do that. Most people fall short. Not usually because of a lack of information. It's because of systems or because of emotional reasons, et cetera.

1:45:09So from an emotional, psychological perspective, what is it that you think you could share for somebody who has struggled to make a change, but feel strongly about like wanting to make a change that would be helpful to the average person for me the singular thing i care about is being correct from the vantage point of the year 2500 that when they look i'm not going to get a simple answer out of this guy he's going to 50 years into the future so like but the reason why that's helpful to me is because you know with that distance of time, we have sobriety to look back at historical figures and assess their wisdom in the context where they could see something that was extremely unique and hard, like invisible, like zero.

1:46:01And so why I use this as an example is so much of what keeps people locked in to their aversions is they're scared of what other people say. They're scared of their reactions of their immediate family, their coworkers of the comment section. Like so many of my smart friends, you know, we're in similar chat groups and really powerful, smart, capable people are legitimately fearful of the comment section and it keeps them in a certain state. And so the reason why the 21st century frame is useful for me and I think for others is it tells you to not give a fuck what anyone thinks, right? That basically the starting premise is everybody in the 21st century is wrong.

1:46:47And there's probably like, you know, a few hundred of us that maybe get through with a kernel of truth, like some kind of insight that carries over the ages. Otherwise, most things that exist today will be viewed as extremely primitive. They're just like, we're puppeting behaviors that we were given. So to me, that's it is like, you want to unshackle yourself so you can explore concepts and a persona like you know so much of like the the lunacy of us online is we're willing to do things that rain hell upon us right that are that it's so outrageous and anyone else who did it would just be clobbered by hate and dismissal and they would worry about being ostracized by the tribe and we're like you know, we love it.

1:47:39It feeds us. And so, yeah, I'd say that would be my advice to people is try to get yourself in a position where you don't get trapped by the influence of other people, because ultimately it's an illusion that they don't represent the things you necessarily want. And if you can overcome that, then it gives you more space to say, I'm okay to ride through this and experiment with what I want to become. Yeah, sure. I mean, that's sort of an ephemeral idea though. Like I'm imagining the person who's like, just help me get over myself so I can lose those 10 pounds, you know, or like, like drilling it down into something practical.

1:48:16They wake up in the morning, like, what am I going to do differently today to set myself up for success in the wake of, you know, relapses and, and, you know, shortcomings, et cetera. Okay. So here's something very practical. So like I had a, I had a behavioral problem. I ate a lot of food at nighttime, 7.00 PM. The date that would come, I would be dealing from I'm all distressed of building a startup. I had three little kids, a challenging personal relationship and chronic depression. You stack those on top of each other. And at 7 p.m., I'm powerless to stop myself. So like if I have a box of graham crackers, I'm gonna eat the whole goddamn thing, right?

1:48:49Or like there's a pan of brownies, not just one, it's the whole pan, right? It's the way I soothe myself to deal with my pain. So I try to - I share that. Go ahead, keep going. So I couldn't stop this self-destructive behavior. And of course, when I did that, it made me miserable, right? I couldn't sleep. And then I woke up the next day, I felt awful, made my depression worse. I got fat, like everything was awful. And so what I realized was that when I woke up in the morning, even if I was beat down, my willpower and my spirit was as high as it's going to get. Like I am going to change myself.

1:49:19I am going to exercise. I'm going to make good decisions. I'm not going to do that thing tonight again. But then as the day tapers on, different versions of Brian come out, right? And so by the time 7 p.m. comes, it's literally a different Brian. It's a different biochemical Brian. That biochemical Brian does not have the capacity to say no. He's just like, he's too worn down. And so the system I created, as I said, morning Brian is my best Brian, and he gets to have the authority to make decisions in my life. So that means evening Brian, who comes on duty around 5 p.m. and then hits his peak at 7 p.m., he does not have authorization to eat food ever.

1:49:53It's just, it's out. He cannot eat food, period. And that kind of firm rule for me was like really helpful because then I could break myself out to my different Brians. but to give myself space to say, I don't need to feel shameful about eating Brian. I don't need to punish him. He doesn't need to feel guilt. Like he's just doing his best with the situation he has, but then setting that firm rule. And that has led to my ability now where I have absolute perfect control with what I put on my body. Like absolute perfect. I do not eat anything that does not nourish my body. And I'm at the proper weight.

1:50:26I'm the proper biomarkers. I feel great about food. I don't have an eating disorder, but to have this kind of perfection is like one of my life goals. It's like, it's unbelievably empowering to just say, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to eat bad stuff. It's real. So separate yourself into your different versions, make decisions and then follow through on those actions because it is the easiest way to set rules for yourself. You never want to put yourself in a situation where you're making a call in the moment. This is another version of basically acknowledging your negative inner monologue that doesn't have your best interest at heart.

1:50:58First of all, realizing that there's you and there's your inner monologue. These are two different things. Not pretending it doesn't exist, acknowledging it, but disempowering it, I guess, on some level. And then recognizing that discipline is freedom in this sort of way. Exactly right. Do you share that? Do you have a different means for this? You're the chaotic creative person who seems maybe a little more resistant to the notion that your life should be driven by all of these restrictive kind of tenants. How are you wired to navigate through all of this? Yeah, I definitely wouldn't be this disciplined if it wasn't for the thousands of women watching.

1:51:40It's not like I - Oh, so the communal pressure as an accountability partner. Exactly. Yeah. I haven't reached some next level of self-control here. You have to do it because there's an expectation. There's an external layer on top of this that's informing it. Interesting. You said that eradicating death is the most urgent and important issue of our time. But setting aside notions of lifespan extension, immortality, et cetera, I think that we can all agree, and this goes back to systems, that our culture has a very unhealthy relationship with death. I have aging parents right now. I have a mother with dementia who's in a memory care unit.

1:52:22And the whole industrial complex around aging and death is one of the most inhumane things I've ever seen. And the degree of suffering is off the charts, not to mention the economic incentives that are driving all of this. And it was interesting, I recently visited my mother and it was in the midst of having to put down one of our dogs who was very, very old and was suffering that our culture accepts as compassionate, right? And it led me to thinking about why we contextualize it different with human beings when these people really have no quality of life whatsoever. Yeah. Our priority is to nonetheless extend it.

1:53:09And I think that stems from an unhealthy relationship or understanding of death and what this signifies that is kind of a disease in our society. So I'm curious, setting aside like, okay, death is not happening to acknowledging that death is a reality. How do you think about that? How we interface with the notion of death and how we could perhaps have a healthier perspective on it for the people we care about. Yeah. Both my parents are in their mid-70s. They're experiencing aging, and I watch it happen in real time. And it's excruciating to watch. It's so unpleasant. It's so uncomfortable to watch it.

1:54:00And I've had this conversation with my dad as well of raising the topic with him in ways I haven't before of dad. How do you feel about death? And dad, have you reconciled with death? And dad, have we talked about everything you and I want to talk about before death? Do you have things you want to say? And do I have things I want to say? And Kate has been instrumental. I had the sweetest moment with my dad. We were having a conversation. We retraced my childhood and were frank in ways that we had never been before. And we were in a studio and Kate was bridging the conversation.

1:54:49And she said something to my dad of something like, Brian doesn't express himself to you because he's played this role in your life where he's tried to be protective and supportive and always there. And he hasn't taken on the role of being a son. And my dad got into a position where he said, I'm open to, I'm open. I want to hear from you. and for whatever reason, these sounds started happening inside the studio and we weren't quite sure what was happening and the only thing I could do is just be quiet. I had nothing to say to my dad and after I said, when I kind of understood what was happening, I said, dad, I want you to understand what silence feels like.

1:55:48you know and like it's like being in middle school like i'm gonna break down and cry when like i'm waiting for my dad and he's not there and um like so many times where he's just not there and um he said i want you to feel it silence and um to his credit he did he sat in it and i think we were able to um you know broach that because death has kind of been the backdrop now of our conversation and so there's this beauty of reconciliation that happens between humans when you're faced with that you get this sobriety so i i certainly haven't reconciled with it my default disposition is defiance that I'm going to personally save my father from death through all these things we're doing and my mother.

1:56:56And I'm much less accepting of it than maybe one would expect. But also in being open to it, it's allowed me to have experiences and conversations that are healing for both of us. I appreciate the openness of that answer. I think that's worthy of deeper interrogation on your part. I think there's a lot there. Yeah. The intolerability, the unacceptability of it as an animating influence on your daily life now in the present moment. It's beautiful. I think that's a great place to end it for today. I'll end it by saying that I appreciate, again, you opening your home and being so vulnerable and open with me.

1:57:49I have a great fondness for you. I don't know you that well. We've spent some hours together, and I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about who you are as a human being and who you guys are as a couple. Part of that is your fault because of the way you present on the internet. You're inviting that kind of misunderstanding on some level. but i appreciate the service that you're performing and i certainly enjoy watching you perform all these experiments and you know i think from a spirit of trying to better understand things so that we can understand things better there's so much confusion on the internet right now like you know it's just it just everything's flip-flopping every single way and we need ballast And we need stewards of information in this age of skepticism and the denigration of institutions and the distrust of experts, et cetera.

1:58:46Like, where do we find our footing? And behind the kind of PT Barnum entertainment value of what you guys provide, I think that that is the true sensibility of who you guys are. And my hope is that I've helped to underscore that for you. so thank you for sharing this afternoon with me you guys thanks for being here i really enjoyed it cheers yeah thanks for putting a spotlight on female health awesome and keep us posted on the women's health front please i think what you're doing is is vital and important and i'm here to celebrate it yay thank you thanks you guys thanks peace