20VC: Bryan Johnson on Why Humans Are No Longer Qualified to Manage Our Own Affairs, How Algorithms Will Run our Bodies and How to Process New Ideas and Challenge Conventional Beliefs

0:00I'm fundamentally proposing that the human race is no longer qualified to manage our affairs. We can engineer the source code for life. We have the computational tools that have exceeded our native intelligence and abilities. I made an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself. The game I'm trying to play in life is how it would be respected by the 25th century. This is 20VC with me, Harry Stabrings and Stay is a show unlike any other as we welcome the man who is at war with death. The man who spends millions per year to reverse his own aging. Yes, there's not many options in terms of who this one could be.

0:39I'm thrilled to welcome Brian Johnson. Before mastering life and death, Brian was the founder of Brain Tree, which he sold to PayPal for $800 million, and he's also the founder of OS Fund, a fund where he invested $100 million of his own money into genomics, synthetic biology and complex systems. Now, as I said, this is a show unlike any we've done before if you want to watch the full episode you can on YouTube by searching for 20VC. But before we dive into this incredible discussion, there's no shortage of helpful AI tools out there, but using the mean switching back and forth between yet another digital tool, what was supposed to simplify your workflow just made it way more complicated, unless of course you're in notion.

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3:17You have now arrived at your destination. Brian, I mean, last time we spoke it was 7 years ago, I look withered and old. You look like my 20 year old self when we last spoke. So it's lovely to see you again. It's wonderful to be here. That's a seal. Now, I would love to start. We would just say, beforehand, you've done many interviews, you've been asked many questions. My first one was, what are you not asked about? That you would like to be asked about? Probably how to process new ideas. A lot of what I talk about are new frames. There are new ways of thinking and they challenge the status quo.

3:57And I make a rule for myself that whenever I encounter a new idea, I try to set up an alert in my brain that says alert new idea has landed and when a new idea lands The rule is I can't say anything or think anything to fund conclusions for some duration of time Because the challenges when a new idea lands your knee jerk reaction fills the open space and it cramps down Your existing biases and beliefs and understanding and it crushes the space for a new idea to breathe What I've noticed is it's a human tendency that we all have and it takes a lot of work to develop this habit because the impulse to crush new ideas is so strong.

4:42Can I just kind of dive in there so you have a new idea or alert? What is that post alert look like? Do you then solicit feedback? Do you just ruminate on it? What is that kind of process that like post alerting? I try to watch what happens to my internal processes when the idea lands. So typically we are threat response and usually new ideas are a threat to existing things. And so I watch my own self respond in all the ways where I feel threat. Will this require change from me? Will this require that I do a new habit? Will it require that I have to overcome some existing belief system? What is it going to ask of me?

5:25And those things feel threatening. And in response to the threat, the body is like, we're going to shut this fucker down, so we don't have to deal with the unpleasantness. That's just who we are and what we do. And so I just watched my internal profities and it gives me clues, which version of me is trying to shut this down and why. And so that to me is more interesting. So for me, what's interesting, the new idea itself is interesting. And then the second layer of interestingness is what's provoking inside of me. that gives me clues on who's talking within me. Are they commonalities in the who's talking within you in terms of the mind sets, the personas that you have that it comes up?

6:05I built this off of the idea of the evening Brian concept where he over ate and he couldn't control himself and that I separated myself in a different versions of me and I've really taken that to all areas of life. Let's say a person is dedicated to a life of martyrdom. Like they're going to sacrifice themselves. Let's just say they're a soldier in an army that's willing to give their life for country. And then a new idea comes up and says that this idea of nation -state to countries may be lessening in its status and life. Like maybe it's not worth giving life for this thing because it's changing.

6:45That eliminates the entire game somebody is playing. If you're already get up and say, I'm valuable in society because I'm doing this heroic act. If you remove the underlying layer, it's no longer heroic and valuable. And so it removes all of their identity. And so your knee -jerk response would be to fight back and to justify what you're trying to do. But those are the kinds of things that give WIPLASH to people in the most significant ways that are most important to. When you think back to the alerting system, what was the most recent idea that caused an alert? And can you share it? The most significant one was when I was personally challenged with the religion I was born into may not be the explanation of reality.

7:27And that was so uncomfortable because my entire existence had, I was born into a religion that's all I understood reality to be. And then I started thinking maybe it wasn't true. Like maybe this wasn't the explainer of reality. And that is the most uncomfortable thing I had ever encountered in my life because every single bit of my reality, my family, and my children, and my community, and my identity, and my ambitions, everything was built upon that thing. And to encounter that, you have to basically size up and say, I have to redo myself entirely. And that's so much work. It's you, like, almost one is better your head back into the thing and be like, I'm just going to avoid this because it's so uncomfortable to think about all this change.

8:13You have to get a divorce. Become a divorce dad. You've got to be in different living conditions. It's so unpleasant to contemplate that change. It's just easier to duck your head back in. And that's what most of us do in life. We encounter something that is so unpleasant. We'd rather not deal with it. We just go back into the habit. Can I ask a weird one? Is it worth dealing with? When you think about the divorce that the being a divorced father. For the awareness that it may not be the answers for the realities of life, can you actually just get comfortable with that and recognize it, but not actually deal with the unpleasantness that comes with it?

8:49I mean, change is hard. I mean, I think we all maybe tried to do our best to make change fun and rewarding. To me, it just feels like so much of life is inevitable pain and suffering. It's not a negative. It's just a different experience. I don't I would even try to minimize it. I probably just say it's just part of the journey. What's been the most painful change to go through if you don't mind me asking? I was leaving my religion. Do you worry about being light? Leaving religion, it's leaving social security as well. It's leaving friendship, it's leaving communities. Do you worry about being light?

9:24When I left the religion, I had to go through this process and rethink every aspect of my existence and one of those things was the idea of being light because in the religious setting you're constantly vying for the approval of those in the community. You want to be light, you want to be respected, you want to obey the rules so that you have status and with that status you get certain privileges in the tribe and so I wanted to confront the idea head on and say what if I didn't desire to be liked. What would that do? Now in some scenarios being liked is a necessity of life. If you go into work each day and you're awful human and no one likes you, that's not going to do you any favors.

10:10You need to have some kind of baseline likability to cooperate in society, but there's also a different place to play in where if you play for likability in, for example, the new my day's space, that's a path for conformity. Because likability is conformity, and new ideas oftentimes disrupt that. And deliberation for me was flipping it and saying that I care about being liked by the 25th century. And specifically, do not care about being liked by the people in this time and place. That to me was the most liberating thought experiment of my life, because then I could I'd say I'm no longer limited to the approval of my peers.

10:53I can explore the imagination space of what the 25th century might respect. It feels good to be respected by in time and place. It feels good to have status among peers. And I was willing to forego that. That game to me was so much more exciting than pandering to whatever is the current zeitgeist of people's approval systems. As a VCI constantly panned it to founders and to LPs, so this is a whole new concept for me Brian, but I'm learning, can I go back to the idea process though, because you ruminate on it, you sit with it, and understand the different personas and how they interact with it.

11:31What then determines whether you act upon an idea and really pursue it, versus disregard it and put it to one side? So there's the idea as the information in itself and then there's all the things around the idea that can't be seen. And so when I look at the idea, I don't try to identify what can be seen. I try to identify everything that can't be seen. And those are basically the unknown, unknown, those like the zero principle concepts. And so for me, new ideas are not something to accept or reject. New ideas are something to excavate. and you're trying to fill this thing out as broadly as possible.

12:12Because yeah, no idea, maybe just the tip of the iceberg, it may be something much, much more expansive. And so to me, it's the possibility of finding new primitives to work with. What's the most challenging part of that? Because the challenging part to me is the unknown unknowns are infinite, and so it could be this never -ending quest that actually leads to inactivity. Do you worry about that? And what's the most challenging part of that segment? Yeah, I pressure test with a few questions. If a new idea lands, I can pose a question, what must be true for this to be true? What must remain true for this to be true?

12:49And then what would change which would make this untrue? Removing horizontally and vertically through time and space, pressure testing it. So you could say a given thing that may be true in this moment, but it may be entirely untrue in three years from now. And so for example, I was talking to a friend last night and I was explaining to him the concept of don't die. And he's a smart person and he particularly said, well, I disagree with blank because I think superintelligence is blank and Emma models are blank. And so he basically put forward the argument of the skepticism around whether or not we will achieve superintelligence.

13:27I wanted to reframe, because I understand his arguments, they're legitimate, There were reasons, I understand them, fine. I said, cool, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to reframe the problem and say, if you look at our moment from the 25th century, that's the framework which invites how to think about what to do in this moment. Because if you can say, are we going to develop super intelligence? You're going to have thousands of different opinions about where algorithmic progress is, whether we have enough data, whether the algorithms can do this or that. Is this going to fracture into no one knows?

14:02If you look at it from the 25th century, assuming that we still exist around then, it's reasonable to assume that on some time scale, computational intelligence is going to improve substantially faster than we can imagine. If you say that's okay, that's reasonable, that you give that kind of time scale. So then you come back to the moment you say, okay, given that we can make that general conclusion that it's going to improve at some rate and probably be unfathomable to us in many ways, what then do we do right now? And that framework opened him up to say, ah, I understand why don't die might be relevant to this moment because you're trying to basically nail the philosophical, economic, political, social underpinnings of reality on a multi -hundred year time scale.

14:49But it takes that finesse to get the clarity of thought. Otherwise, you're buried in that moment. Unless you ask those three questions of what must be true, what must remain true, and what would change to make that entirely untrue. You don't pressure test the idea as well enough when your stockings very narrow band of thought. You have to go through those thought processes otherwise, you're rendered in the bubble of this moment, which just makes you up against a wall of fog. How do you retain intellectual purity? And what I mean by that is like, what must be true, what must remain true, you can have biases to what you want to really be true, but maybe not be true.

15:25It could be religion that makes one bias in terms of their perspective. There are many different things that can bias how you feel about what those three answers are. How do you retain that purity to be objective? It begins by being skeptical of all things. And I learned this when I left the religion, I had this authority structure saying, this is how reality is. And then I learned about behavioral psychology and about biases and 188 proven scientific biases of how my brain distorts reality to help me understand a complicated world. Now it's doing me a favor because the world is extraordinarily complex and my biases help me understand the reality at the same time I am hypocritical, I am blinded to certain things, I am a disaster of cognition.

16:09So when I found out that my own mind was just as deceptive and unreliable as other authorities in my life, and then I've had to walk to society and every source of authority or truth I thought might be durable is not including myself. And so I enter all things with this deep skepticism of anything trying to be ultimate truth. And so if you accept that as the opening bid, then you walk into the contemplation in a much more humble way to hold things very light. So then you're trying to say we can probably know immediate things with high certainty, and we can probably know long -term things with reasonable certainty, but in the middle, we just have fog, and everyone plays in the middle of fog.

16:52And so when you're trying to make these big decisions on the future of the species, you've got to figure out some way to navigate those thought processes to come up with some kind of clarity. And so if you say, what could we say about the 25th century that it may be different than what we do now? You could say general things, like we'll have probably figured out how to be more energy efficient. We'll probably have figured out computationally to be much more robustly happen out. It will, you can make these general statements assuming some rule of progress and excluding annihilation type scenarios.

17:28And if you just play those general rules, you can start walking back into, okay, then what might that mean to this moment? but it's really a game of trying to manufacture clarity of thought above all. Do you accept anything today as an enjoyable truth? Given the skepticism you bring naturally to everything to get that purity, is anything an enjoyable truth? This is why I arrive at No Die. It is the only thing in existence that I know. Is there an afterlife? I don't know. When death is inevitable, than you really can maintain any opinion you want. Because you're all gonna die, so it's like, doesn't matter.

18:06If death is not inevitable, then you have to reconsider all of your existential scaffolding. We've used a frame like, live long, live great, be great, explore the stars, like whatever you wanna say, people hear that and they're like, fuck yeah, I'm doing it. If you say don't die, the person has to reconcile with existence from zero. Because if you don't die, you're not going to die, or you're going to live in some unknown time horizon, every game you're playing in existence may be called into question. All of your beliefs, all of your assumptions, all of your inner devours, everything about you may be called into question.

18:41Cass, a weird one, but it's like, and this is as matters I've ever bloody asked a question, Brian. Life isn't about existence, is it? What is the meaning of life to you? Is it about existence or is it about fulfillment or is it about love? That question yields no truth. That question yields a mirror of time and place. So if we had a recording of people being asked that question for the past 500 years every year that that question is asked of, you know, 50 people in society, you would see it evolve over that time period into unrecognizable stories. None of this truth. And this is the thing we don't know what the meaning of life is.

19:21We just run our mouth and we run our mouths to try to fill the space that the question creates. We are discerning, is this a question meant to create social cohesion or is this a question to establish truth? It's not truth. It's to establish social cohesion that people are trying to get along, trying to exchange views, they're trying to be human, understand reality. They're dealing with their own stuff internally. How do you reduce the pain your experiencing in this moment, the meaning of life to me is this, that when intelligence reaches a certain level of capability, which is right now, like after 4 .5 billion years on this earth, in the past few years, we have reached a critical point after 4 .5 billion years, for the first time, where intelligence can say the only thing intelligence cares about is continued existence.

20:14Not through the process of having babies, not through work, you know, the immortality of work or contribution, but through actual existence. And this is why this moment is so critical. And so the meaning of life is continued existence as it's the first moment we've achieved that ability. Given it being the first moment we've achieved that ability, as specific as possible, what is it that we've achieved as specifically as possible that has allowed human intelligence to be at this specific juncture? Do we have the intelligence to eliminate disruption of our existence? And then you say, okay, what would possibly be required to do that?

20:50Well, we are biological systems where each about 35 trillion cells, but you know, like we can swap in and swap out. You can print an organ or get an organ from a pig and put a new organ in your body. There's two things you can do direct replenish your system. We can now reliably engineer atoms and molecules and organs. We have the ability. We have the source code for life. we can engineer the source code for life. We have the computational tools that have exceeded our native intelligence and abilities. So we actually have every primary piece of technology required to continue existence. That we know how to do it yet, we're making progress.

21:28The answer is no, but from a first principles perspective, we have everything necessary to figure it out. How do you think about the core underlying threats to human existence? Climate change being worse than ever? A bad global act is with nuclear weapons threatening in ways that we haven't seen in many years. But those not questioning are a continued existence in a way that makes this challenging. I'm fundamentally proposing that the human race is no longer qualified to manage our affairs. I started with myself. I said that I, Brian Johnson, am not qualified to manage my own well -being. I do things that lessen my life.

22:10I overeat. I eat bad foods. I'll make bad decisions. I do these things that threaten my existence. That is an inferior form of intelligence that would inflict upon itself harm. Now, our minds create these really pretty stories of like, live fast, die young, we're all gonna die, so what does it matter? That is a compensation for what is inherently an inferior form of intelligence doing something to itself that shortens its conscious existence. No matter how we want to say in the story, now as a species, we're doing that to plant our earth, we're doing that to each other. We have these really pretty stories about we're competing for dominance, for ideology, of nation state, we're doing this for capital improvements.

22:52We're doing it for progress for humanity, but we're a species that is self -destructive. And now we're bringing online new tools of computational intelligence. It's this possibility to bridge ourselves to a new form of intelligence that is not self -destructive. And so don't die, don't die individually, don't kill each other, don't kill the earth, align AI with don't die. And so if you stitch this together from the 25th century, what do they see? They say, God, those homo sapiens were self -destructed with their idiots. They did these things that shortened their conscious existence and how insanely precious is conscious existence.

23:31And they told stories about how why they're doing it to live their best life and how all the experiences. They're going to look at us like cavemen. It's going to be so ridiculous that we would do that, that we would take this precious conscious we have and be so flippant with it. If we're no longer capable of managing our own affairs and you said there you took yourself as the first test case. Who do you hand your affairs over to? And I'm a big follower of David Goggins who obviously talk about mental discipline a lot. The ability to do the uncomfortable even when your body screams another thing.

24:02Yeah. You are still human, Brian. There are things that just require intense disson. How do you think about who you hand over to and how to manage discipline in the hardest of times? I made an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself. I measured every organ of my body and I then referenced scientific literature and we made an algorithm that determines what I eat, when I eat, when I go to bed and I can't deviate from that. And so I've agreed. Now this is an analog version. This is not like I've got computational systems inside my body making decisions for me. So I'm saying yes to this algorithm, but I'm explicitly saying no to myself.

24:38How do you know the algorithm isn't based on imperfect data? Scientific literature changes is over time too. If we look at it in 20, the 25th century compared to the 18th century, it will be vastly different. Smoking used to be good for you as soon as 100 years ago. How do you think about imperfectness of literature that guides your algorithm? We reference truth based upon hundreds of biomarkers of using the best science that the human race has generated that contributes to health span and lifespan. And we use those data markers to say is this protocol working or not? Could it be wrong? Yes, is it wrong?

25:16likely? Is it better than me and what I was doing before? Yes. Basically, is it saying is the algorithm saying, you know what? You've had a tough week curl up on the couch, get those two bags of potato chips, and your favorite cookies, and then some ice cream, and watch your favorite show until three in the morning. That's something the algorithm is not yet suggesting that maybe it will, it hasn't yet, but it's definitely steered me away from self -destructive behaviors and tuned to my body where I've become the most measured person in history and the data is pretty interesting. I have so many questions to ask.

25:49My first is I get all of that, submit to the album, but you are a cognitive functioning human, Brian, and you still have feelings. And so when the feelings arise, I am tired, I don't want to fucking do this. what do you say? How do you overcome and computerize your mind? That is an idea that is introduced to me of you are hungry and you should eat. And so I, the same with a new idea, I watched the idea land, I watched who responds, and I just witnessed and observed the whole thing. I'm a disciplined guy, but fuck, I don't. What was the most surprising truth you revealed in this exploration of yourself as the first true algorithmic, any pick respectfully.