The following is a conversation with Brian Johnson, founder of Kernel, a company that
has developed devices that can monitor and record brain activity.
And previously, he was the founder of Braintree, a mobile payment company that acquired Venmo
and then was acquired by PayPal and eBay.
Quick mention of our sponsors, FourSigmatic, NetSuite, Grammarly, and ExpressVPN.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that this was a fun and memorable experience, wearing the
Kernel flow brain interface in the beginning of this conversation, as you can see if you
watched the video version of this episode.
And there's a Ubuntu Linux machine sitting next to me collecting the data from my brain.
The whole thing gave me hope that the mystery of the human mind will be unlocked in the
coming decades, as we begin to measure signals from the brain in a high bandwidth way.
To understand the mind, we either have to build it or to measure it.
Both are worth a try.
Thanks to Brian and the rest of the Kernel team for making this little demo happen.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Brian Johnson.
You ready, Lex?
Yes, I'm ready.
Do you guys want to come in and put the interfaces on our heads?
And then I will proceed to tell you a few jokes.
So we have two incredible pieces of technology and a machine running Ubuntu 20.04 in front
of us.
What are we doing?
All right.
Are these going on our heads?
They're going on our heads, yeah.
And they will place it on our heads for proper alignment.
Does this support giant heads?
Because I kind of have a giant head.
Is this a giant head?
As like an ego, or are you saying physically, both?
I'm going to drop it on me.
It's a nice massage.
Yes.
Okay.
How does this feel?
If you move your arm, it's okay to move around.
It feels...
Oh, yeah.
Hey, hey.
I'm not going to tell you at all, because it's a pretty good fit.
Thank you.
That feels good.
All right.
This is big head-friendly.
It suits you well, Lex.
Thank you.
I feel like I need to...
I feel like when I wear this, I need to sound like Sam Harris, calm, collected, eloquent.
I feel smarter, actually.
I don't think I've ever felt quite as much like I'm part of the future as now.
Have you ever worn a brain interface or had your brain imaged?
Oh, never had my brain imaged.
The only way I've analyzed my brain is by talking to myself and thinking.
No direct data.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is definitely a brain interface that has a lot of blind spots.
It has some blind spots.
Yeah.
Psychotherapy.
That's right.
All right.
Are we recording?
Yeah.
We're good.
All right.
So, Lex, the objective of this, I'm going to tell you some jokes, and your objective
is to not smile, which as a Russian, you should have an edge.
Make the motherland proud.
I got you.
Okay.
Let's hear the jokes.
Lex, and this is from the Colonel crew.
We've been working on a device that can read your mind, and we would love to see your
thoughts.
Is that the joke?
That's the opening.
Okay.
If I'm seeing the muscle activation correctly on your lips, you're not going to do well
on this.
Let's see.
All right.
Here comes the first one.
I'm screwed.
Here comes the first one.
Is this going to break the device?
Is it resilient to laughter?
Lex, what goes through a potato's brain?
I got already failed.
That's the hilarious opener.
Okay.
What?
Tater thoughts.
What kind of fish performs brain surgery?
I don't know.
A neural surgeon.
Okay.
And so we're getting data of everything that's happening in my brain right now?
Lifetime.
Yeah.
We're getting activation patterns of your entire cortex.
I'm going to try to do better.
I'll edit out all the parts where I left in Photoshop.
You have a serious face over me.
You can recover.
Yeah.
All right.
Lex, what do scholars eat when they're hungry?
I don't know what.
Yeah, nuts, that's a pretty good one.
So what we'll do is, so you're wearing kernel flow, which is an interface built using technology
called spectroscopy.
So it's similar to what we wear wearables on the wrist using light.
So using light are, as you know, and we're using that to image the functional imaging
of brain activity.
And so as your neurons fire, electrically and chemically, it creates blood oxygenation
levels.
We're measuring that.
And so when you'll see in the reconstructions we do for you, you'll see your activation
patterns on your brain as throughout this entire time we are wearing it.
So in the reaction to the jokes and as we were sitting here talking, and so it's a,
we're moving towards a real time feed of your cortical brain activity.
So there's a bunch of things that are in contact with my skull right now.
How many of them are there?
And so how many of them are, what are they?
What are the actual sensors?
There's 52 modules, and each module has one laser and six sensors.
And they're, the sensors fire in about 100 picoseconds.
And then the photons scatter and absorb in your brain, and then a few go in, a few come
back out.
And we sense those photons, and then we do the reconstruction for the activity.
Overall, there's about a thousand plus channels that are sampling your activity.
How difficult is it to make it as comfortable as it is?
Because it's surprisingly comfortable.
I would not think it would be comfortable.
Something that's measuring brain activity, I would not think it would be comfortable,
but it is.
I agree.
In fact, I want to take this home.
Yeah.
Right.
So people are accustomed to being in big systems like fMRI, where there's 120 decibels sounds
and you're in a claustrophobic encasement, or EEG, which is just painful, or surgery.
And so, yes, I agree that this is a convenient option to be able to just put on your head
and measure your brain activity in the contextual environment you choose.
So if we want to have it during a podcast or if we want to be at home in a business
setting, it's freedom to be aware, to record your brain activity in the setting that you
choose.
Yeah, but sort of from an engineering perspective, are these, what is it, there's a bunch of
different modular parts and there's like a rubber band thing where they mold to the
shape of your head.
That's right.
So we built this version of the mechanical design to accommodate most adult heads.
But I have a giant head and it fits fine, it fits well actually.
So I don't think I have an average head.
Okay, maybe I feel much better about my head now.
Maybe I'm more average than I thought.
Okay, so what else is there, interesting, you could say while it's on our heads.
I can keep this on the whole time, this is kind of awesome.
And it's amazing for me as a fan of Ubuntu, I use Ubuntu Mate, you guys should use that
too, but it's amazing to have code running to the side, measuring stuff and collecting
data.
I mean, I just, I feel like much more important now that my data is being recorded, like somebody
care, like, you know, when you have a good friend that listens to you, that actually like
listens, like actually is listening to you, this is what I feel like, like a much better
friend because it's like accurately listening to me, Ubuntu.
Not a cool perspective, I hadn't thought about that, of feeling understood, heard, deeply
by the mechanical system that is recording your brain activity versus the human that
you're engaging with, that your mind immediately goes to that there's this dimensionality and
depth of understanding of this software system, which you're intimately familiar with.
And now you're able to communicate with this system in ways that you couldn't before.
Yeah, I feel heard.
Yeah, I mean, I guess what's interesting about this is your intuitions are spot on.
Most people have intuitions about brainer faces that they've grown up with this idea
of people moving cursors on the screen or typing or changing the channel or skipping
a song.
It's primarily been anchored on control.
And I think the more relevant understanding of brain interfaces or neural imaging is that
it's a measurement system.
And once you have numbers for a given thing, a seemingly endless number of possibilities
emerge around that of what to do with those numbers.
So before you tell me about the possibilities, this was an incredible experience.
I can keep this on for another two hours, but I'm being told that for a bunch of reasons,
just because we probably want to keep the data small and visualize it nicely for the
final product, we want to cut this off and take this amazing helmet away from me.
So Brian, thank you so much for this experience.
And let's continue without helmetless.
All right.
So that was an incredible experience.
Can you maybe speak to what kind of opportunities that opens up that stream of data, that rich
stream of data from the brain?
First, I'm curious, what is your reaction?
What comes to mind when you put that on your head?
What does it mean to you and what possibilities emerge and what significance might it have?
I'm curious where your orientation is at.
Well, for me, I'm really excited by the possibility of various information about my body, about
my mind being converted into data such that data can be used to create products that make
my life better.
So that to me is really exciting possibility.
Even just like a Fitbit that measures, I don't know, some very basic measurements about your
body is really cool, but it's the bandwidth of information, the resolution of that information
is very crude, so it's not very interesting.
The possibility of recording, of just building a data set coming in a clean way and a high
bandwidth way from my brain opens up all kinds of, you know, at the very, I was kind of joking
when we're talking, but it's not really is like I feel heard in the sense that it feels
like the full richness of the information coming from my mind is actually being recorded
by the machine.
I mean, there's a, I can't quite put it into words, but there is genuinely for me, there's
not some kind of joke about me being a robot, it just genuinely feels like I'm being heard
in a way that's going to improve my life as long as the thing that's on the other end
can do something useful with that data.
But even the recording itself is like once you record, it's like taking a picture.
That moment is forever saved in time.
Now picture cannot allow you to step back into that world, but perhaps recording your
brain is a much higher resolution thing, much more personal recording of that information
than a picture that would allow you to step back into that where you were in that particular
moment in history and then map out a certain trajectory to tell you certain things about
yourself that could open up all kinds of applications.
Of course there's health that I consider, but honestly, to me, the exciting thing is
just being heard.
My state of mind, the level of focus, all those kinds of things being heard.
What I heard you say is you have an entirety of lived experience, some of which you can
communicate in words and in body language, some of which you feel internally which cannot
be captured in those communication modalities and that this measurement system captures
both the things you can try to articulate in words, maybe in a lower dimensional space
using one word, for example, to communicate focus when it really may be represented in
a 20-dimensional space of this particular kind of focus and that this information is
being captured, so it's a closer representation to the entirety of your experience captured
in a dynamic fashion that is not just a static image of your conscious experience.
Yeah, that's the promise, that's the hope, that was the feeling and it felt like the
future, so it's a pretty cool experience.
From the sort of mechanical perspective, it was cool to have an actual device that feels
pretty good, that doesn't require me to go into the lab.
And also the other thing I was feeling, there's a guy named Andrew Huberman, he's a friend
of mine, amazing podcast, people should listen to it, Huberman Lab Podcast.
We're working on a paper together about eye movement and so on and we're kind of, he's
a neuroscientist and I'm a data person, I'm a machine learning person and we're both
excited by how much the data measurements of the human mind, the brain and all the different
metrics that come from that can be used to understand human beings and in a rigorous
scientific way.
So the other thing I was thinking about is how this could be turned into a tool for science,
sort of not just personal science, not just like Fitbit style, like how am I doing my
personal metrics of health, but doing larger scale studies of human behavior and so on.
So like data, not at the scale of an individual, but data at the scale of many individuals
or a large number of individuals.
So it's personal being heard was exciting and also just for science is exciting.
It's very easy, like there's a very powerful thing to it being so easy to just put on that
but you can scale much easier.
If you think about that second thing you said about the science of the brain, we've done
a pretty good job, like we, the human race, have done a pretty good job figuring out how
to quantify the things around us from distant stars to calories and steps and our genome.
So we can measure and quantify pretty much everything in the known universe except for
our minds.
And we can do these one-offs if we're going to get an fMRI scan or do something with the
low res EEG system, but we haven't done this at population scale.
And so if you think about human thought or human cognition is probably the single law
largest raw input material into society at any given moment.
It's our conversations with ourselves and with other people.
And we have this raw input that we haven't been able to measure yet.
And if you, when I think about it through that frame, it's remarkable because it's almost
like we live in this wild, wild West of unquantified communications within ourselves and between
each other.
When everything else has been grounded, for example, I know if I buy an appliance at the
store or on a website, I don't need to look at the measurements on the appliance to make
sure it can fit through my door.
That's an engineered system of appliance manufacturing and construction.
Everyone's agreed upon engineering standards.
And we don't have engineering standards around cognition.
It has not entered as a formal engineering discipline that enables us to scaffold in
society with everything else we're doing, including consuming news, our relationships,
politics, economics, education, all the above.
And so to me, the most significant contribution that kernel technology has to offer would
be the introduction of the formal engineering of cognition as it relates to everything else
in society.
I love that idea that you kind of think that there is just this ocean of data that's coming
from people's brains as being in a crude way reduced down to like tweets and texts and
so on.
So it's a very hardcore, many scale compression of actual raw data, but maybe you can comment
because you're using the word cognition.
I think the first step is to get the brain data.
But is there a leap to be taken to sort of interpreting that data in terms of cognition?
So is your idea is basically you need to start collecting data at scale from the brain and
then we start to really be able to take little steps along the path to actually measuring
some deep sense of cognition because as I'm sure you know, we understand a few things,
but we don't understand most of what makes up cognition.
This has been one of the most significant challenges of building kernel.
And kernel wouldn't exist if I wasn't able to fund it initially by myself because when
I engage in conversations with investors, the immediate thought is what is the killer
app?
And of course, I understand that heuristic.
That's what they're looking at is they're looking to de-risk.
Is the product solved?
Is there a customer base?
Are people willing to pay for it?
How does it compare to competing options?
And in the case with brain interfaces, when I started the company, there was no known
path to even build a technology that could potentially become mainstream.
And then once we figured out the technology, we could even, we could commence having conversations
with investors and it became what is the killer app?
And so what has been, so I funded the first $53 million of the company.
And to raise the round of funding, the first one we did, I spoke to 228 investors.
One said yes.
It was remarkable and it was mostly around this concept around what is the killer app?
And so internally, the way we think about it is we think of the go-to-market strategy
much more like the Drake equation, where if we can build technology that has the characteristics
of, it has the data quality is high enough, it meets some certain threshold, cost, accessibility,
comfort, it can be worn in contextual environments, it meets the criteria of being a mass market
device, then the responsibility that we have is to figure out how to create the algorithm
that enables the human, to enable humans to then find value with it.
So the analogy is like brain interfaces are like early 90s of the internet is you want
to populate an ecosystem with a certain number of devices.
You want a certain number of people who play around with them, who do experiments of certain
data collection parameters, you want to encourage certain mistakes from experts and non-experts.
These are all critical elements that ignite discovery and so we believe we've accomplished
the first objective of building technology that reaches those thresholds.
And now it's the Drake equation component of how do we try to generate 20 years of value
discovery in a two or three year time period, how do we compress that?
So just to clarify, so when you mean the Drake equation, which for people who don't
know, if you listen to this, I bring up aliens every single conversation, so I don't know
how you wouldn't know what the Drake equation is, but you mean like the killer app, it would
be one alien civilization in that equation, so meaning like this is in search of an application
that's impactful.
That's right.
So it should be, we need to come up with a better term than killer app as a, as a, it's
also violent, right?
Very violent.
You can go like viral app, that's horrible too, right?
It's some very inspiringly impactful application.
How about that?
No.
Yeah.
Okay.
So a bullet stick with killer app, that's fine.
Nobody's, but I concur with you.
I dislike the chosen words in, in capturing the concept.
You know, it's, it's one of those sticky things that is as effective to use in the tech world,
but when you're now become a communicator outside of the tech world, especially when
you're talking about software and hardware and artificial intelligence applications,
it sounds horrible.
Yeah.
No, it's interesting.
I, I actually regret now having called attention to, I regret having used that word in this
conversation because it's something I would not normally do.
I, I used it, you know, in order to create a bridge of shared understanding of how others
would, what terminology others would use.
Yeah.
But yeah, I concur.
Let's go with impactful application or just value creation.
Value creation, something people love using.
There we go.
That's it.
Love app.
Okay.
So what, do you have any ideas?
So you're basically creating a framework where there's the possibility of a discovery of
an application that people love using.
Mm hmm.
Is do you have ideas?
We've, we've began to play a fun game internally where when we have these discussions and we,
we begin circling around this concept of does anybody have an idea?
Does anyone have intuitions?
And if we see the conversation starting to, to veer in that direction, we flag it and
say human intuition alert.
Stop it.
And so we, we really want to focus on the algorithm of there's a natural process of
human discovery that, that when you populate a system with devices and you give people
the opportunity to play around with it in expected and unexpected ways, we are thinking
that is a much better system of discovery than us exercising intuitions.
And it's interesting.
We're also seeing a few neural scientists who have been, have been talking to us where
I was speaking to just one young associate professor and I approached the conversation
and said, Hey, we have these five data streams that we're pulling off.
When you hear that, what weighted value do you add to each data source?
Like which one do you think is going to be valuable for your objectives and, and which
one's not?
Yeah.
And he said, I don't care.
Just give me the data.
All I care about is my machine learning model.
Yeah.
But importantly, he did not have a theory of mind.
He did not come to the table and say, I think the brain operates, you know, within this
way and these reasons are how these, these functions, he didn't care.
He just wanted the data and we're seeing that more and more that certain people are devaluing
human intuitions for good reasons as we've seen in machine learning over, over the past
couple of years.
And we're doing the same in, in our value creation, uh, market strategy.
So more collect more data, clean data, make, uh, the products such that the collection
of data is, uh, easy and, and, and fun and then the rest will just spring to life through
humans playing around with it.
Our objective is to create the most valuable data collection system of the brain ever.
And with that, then apply all the best tools of machine learning and other techniques to
extract out, you know, to try to find insight.
But yes, our objective is really to systematize the discovery process because we, we can't
put definite timeframes on discovery.
The brain is complicated and, and science is not a business strategy.
And so we really need to figure out how to, this is the difficulty of bringing, bringing
you know, technology like this to market.
That's why most of the time it just ling, it languishes in academia, academia for quite
some time, but we hope that, uh, we will over, you know, crossover and, and make this mainstream
in the coming years.
The thing was cool to wear, but what's, are you chasing a good reason for millions of
people to put it this on their head and keep on their head regularly?
Is there, uh, like who's going to discover that reason?
Is it going to be people just kind of organically or is there going to be, uh, angry bird style
application that's just, uh, too exciting to, to not use?
If I think through the things that have changed my life most significantly over the past few
years, when I started wearing a wearable on my wrist, that would give me data about my
heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, uh, metabolic approximations, et cetera.
For the first time in my life, I had access to information, uh, sleep patterns that were
highly impactful.
They, they told me, for example, if I eat close to bedtime, I'm not going to get deep
sleep and not getting deep sleep means you have all these follow on consequences in life.
And so it opened up this window of understanding of myself that I cannot self-introspect and
deduce these things.
This is information that was available to be acquired, but it just wasn't.
I would have to get an expensive sleep study, then it's an one night and that's not good
enough to look at, to run all my trials.
And so if you look just at the information that one can acquire on their wrist and now
you're planted to the entire cortex on the brain and you say, what kind of information
could we acquire?
It opens up a whole new universe of possibilities.
For example, we did this internal study at Kernel where I wore a prototype device and
we were measuring the cognitive effects of sleep.
So I had a device measuring my sleep.
I performed with 13 of my, my coworkers.
We performed four cognitive tasks over 13 sessions and we focused on reaction time, impulse
control, uh, short-term memory and then arresting state task.
And we, with mine, we found, for example, that my impulse control was independently correlated
with my sleep outside of behavioral measures of my ability to play the game.
The point of the study was I had, the brain study I did at Kernel confirmed my life experience
that if I, my deep sleep determined whether or not I would be able to resist temptation
the following day and my brain didn't show that.
As one example, and so if you start thinking, if you actually have, uh, data on yourself
on your, on your entire cortex and you can control the, the settings, I think there's
probably an, uh, a large number of things that we could discover about ourselves, very,
very small and very, very big.
I just, for example, like when you read news, what's going on?
Like when you use social media, when you use news, what, what, like, uh, all the ways we
allocate attention with the computer.
I mean, that seems like a compelling place to where you would want to put on, uh, Kernel,
by the way, what does it call it, Kernel Flux, Kernel, like what?
Flow.
Flow.
We have two technologies.
You or flow.
Flow.
Okay.
So when you, when you put on the, the Kernel Flow, it, it is, seems like to be, uh, a comp,
a compelling time and place to do it is when you're behind a desk, behind a computer.
Cause you could probably wear it for prolonged periods of time as you're, as you're taking
in content and there could be a lot of, because some of our, so much of our lives happens
in the digital world now, that kind of coupling the information about the human mind with
the consumption and the behaviors in the digital world might give us a lot of information
about the effects of the way we behave and navigate the digital world to the actual physical
meat space, uh, effects on our body.
It's interesting to think these certain terms of both like for work, I, I'm a big, uh, fan
of, uh, so Cal Newport, his ideas of deep work that, uh, I spend, uh, with, with few
exceptions, I try to spend the first two hours of every day.
Usually if I'm like at home and have nothing on my schedule is going to be up to eight hours
of deep work of focus, zero distraction.
And for me to analyze the, I mean, I'm very aware of the, uh, the waning of that the ups
and downs of that.
And it's almost like you, you're surfing the ups and downs of that as you're doing programming,
as you're doing thinking about particular problems, you're trying to visualize things
in your mind.
You start trying to stitch them together.
You're trying to, uh, when there's a dead end about an idea, you have to kind of calmly
like walk back and start again, all those kinds of processes.
It'd be interesting to get data on what my mind is actually doing.
And also recently started doing, um, I just talked to Sam Harris a few days ago and been
a building up to that.
I started using, I started meditating using his app, uh, waking up at very much, uh, recommend
it.
And we should get data on that because it's, you're very, it's like, you're removing all
the noise from your head and you very much, it's an active process of active noise removal,
active noise canceling like the headphones.
And it'd be interesting to see what is going on in the mind, uh, before the meditation,
during it and after all those kinds of things.
And in all of your examples, it's interesting that everyone who's designed an experience
for you.
It could be the meditation app or the deep work or the, all the things you mentioned,
they constructed this product with a certain number of knowns.
Yeah.
Now, what if we expanded the number of knowns by 10x or 20x or 30x, they would reconstruct
their product, incorporate those knowns.
So it'd be, and so this is the dimensionality that I think is the promising aspect is that
people will be able to use this quantification, use this information to build more effective
products.
And this is, I'm not talking about better products to advertise to you or manipulate
you.
I'm talking about, uh, our focus is helping people, individuals have this contextual
awareness and this quantification and then to engage with others who are seeking to improve
people's lives, that the objective is, is betterment across ourselves individually and
also with each other.
Yeah.
So it's a nice data stream to have if you're building an app, like if you're building a
podcast listening app, it would be nice to know data about the listener so that like
if you're bored or you fell asleep, maybe pause the podcast.
Yeah.
It's like really dumb, just very simple applications that could just improve the quality of the
experience of the using the app.
Kind of imagining if you have, you have your neurom, this is Lex and you, there's a statistical
representation of you and you engage with the app and it says Lex, your best to engage
with this meditation exercise in the following settings at this time of day after eating
this kind of food or not eating fasting with this level of blood glucose and this kind
of night sleep but all these data combined to give you this contextually relevant experience
just like we do with our sleep.
You've optimized your entire life based upon what information you can acquire and know
about yourself.
And so the question is how much do we really know of the things going around us?
And I would venture to guess in my own, my life life experience, I capture my self-awareness
captures an extremely small percent of the things that actually influence my conscious
and unconscious experience.
Well, in some sense, the data would help encourage you to be more self-aware and not just because
you trust everything the data is saying but is, it'll give you a prod to start investigating.
Like I'd love to get like a rating, like a ranking of all the things I do and what are
the things, it's probably important to do without the data, but the data will certainly
help is like rank all the things you do in life and which ones make you feel shitty,
which ones make you feel good.
Like you're talking about evening, Brian, like this is a good example, somebody like,
I do pig out at night as well and it never makes you feel good.
Like you're in a safe space, it's a safe space, let's hear it.
You know, I definitely have much less self-control at night and it's interesting.
And the same, you know, people might criticize this, but I know my own body.
I know when I eat carnivore, just eat meat, I feel much better than if I eat more carbs.
The more carbs I eat, the worse I feel.
I don't know why that is.
There is science supporting, but I'm not leading on science, I'm leading on personal experience
and that's really important.
I don't need to read, I'm not going to go in a whole rant about nutrition science,
but many of those studies are very flawed.
They're doing their best, but nutrition science is a very difficult field of study because
humans are so different and the mind has so much impact on the way your body behaves and
it's so difficult from a scientific perspective to conduct really strong studies that you
have to be almost like a scientist of one, you have to do these studies on yourself.
That's the best way to understand what works for you and not.
And I don't understand why because it sounds unhealthy, but eating only meat always makes
me feel good.
Just eat meat, that's it.
And I don't have any allergies, any of that kind of stuff.
I'm not full like Jordan Peterson where like, if he like deviates a little bit that he goes
off, like deviates a little bit from the carnivore diet, he goes off like the cliff.
No, I can have like chocolate, I can go off the diet, I feel fine.
It's a gradual, it's a gradual worsening of how I feel.
But when I eat only meat, I feel great.
And it'd be nice to be reminded of that.
Like it's a very simple fact that I feel good when I eat carnivore.
And I think that repeats itself in all kinds of experiences, like I feel really good when
I exercise.
I hate exercise, but in the rest of the day, the impact it has on my mind, on the clarity
of mind, on the experiences and the happiness and all those kinds of things, I feel really
good.
And to be able to concretely express that through data would be nice.
It would be a nice reminder, almost like a statement, like remember what feels good
and whatnot.
It could be things like that I'm not many things, like you're suggesting that I could
not be aware of, that might be sitting right in front of me, that make me feel really good
and make me feel not good, and the data would show that.
I agree with you.
I've actually employed the same strategy.
I fired my mind entirely from being responsible for constructing my diet.
And so I started doing a program where I now track over 200 biomarkers every 90 days.
And it captures, of course, the things you would expect like cholesterol, but also DNA
methylation, and all kinds of things about my body, all the processes that make up me.
And then I let that data generate the shopping list.
And so I never actually ask my mind what it wants.
It's entirely what my body is reporting that it wants.
And so I call this goal alignment within Brian, and there's 200-plus actors that I'm currently
asking their opinion of.
And so I'm asking my liver, how are you doing?
And it's expressing via the biomarkers.
And so then I construct that diet, and I only eat those foods until my next testing round.
And that has changed my life more than I think anything else, because in the demotion of
my conscious mind that I gave primacy to my entire life, it led me astray, because like
you're saying, the mind then goes out into the world and it navigates the dozens of different
dietary regimens people put together in books, and it all has their supporting science in
certain contextual settings.
But it's not end of one.
And like you're saying, this dietary really is an end of one.
Some people have published scientifically, of course, can be used for nice groundings,
but it changes when you get to the end of one level.
And so that's what gets me excited about brainer faces is if I could do the same thing for
my brain where I can stop asking my conscious mind for its advice or for its decision making,
which is flawed, and I'd rather just look at this data.
And I've never had better health markers in my life than when I stopped actually asking
myself to be in charge of it.
The idea of demotion of the conscious mind is such a sort of engineering way of phrasing
like meditation.
I mean, that's what we're doing, right?
That's beautiful.
That means really beautifully.
By the way, testing round, what does that look like?
What's that?
Well, you mentioned...
Yeah, the test I do?
Yes.
It includes a complete blood panel, I do a microbiome test, I do a diet-induced inflammation,
so I look for like, sadokine expressions, so foods that produce inflammatory reactions.
I look at my neuroendocrine systems, I look at all my neurotransmitters.
I do...
Yeah, there's several micronutrient tests to see how I'm looking at the various nutrients.
What about self-report of how you feel, almost like...
You can't demote your...
You still exist within your conscious mind, right?
So that lived experience is of a lot of value, so how do you measure that?
I do a temporal sampling over some duration of time, so I'll think through how I feel
over a week, over a month, over three months.
I don't do a temporal sampling of if I'm at the grocery store in front of a cereal box
and be like, you know what, Captain Crunch is probably the right thing for me today because
I'm feeling like I need a little fun in my life.
Yeah.
And so it's a temporal sampling.
If the data set's large enough, then I smooth out the function of my natural oscillations
of how I feel about life, where some days I may feel upset or depressed or down or whatever,
and I don't want those moments to then rule my decision-making.
That's why the demotion happens.
And it says really, if you're looking at health over a 90-day period of time, all my 200 voices
speak up on the interval, and they're all a given voice to say, this is how I'm doing
and this is what I want.
And so it really is an accounting system for everybody.
So that's why I think that if you think about the future of being human, there's two things
I think that are really going on.
One is the design, manufacturing, and distribution of intelligence is heading towards zero, caught
in a cost curve.
Over a certain design, over a certain timeframe, that our ability to, you know, evolution produced
us an intelligent form of intelligence.
We are now designing our own intelligent systems.
And the design, manufacturing, and distribution of that intelligence over a certain timeframe
is going to go to a cost of zero.
Design, manufacturing, distribution of intelligent cost is going to zero.
Again, just give me a second.
That's brilliant.
And evolution is doing the design, manufacturing, and distribution of intelligence.
And now we are doing the design, manufacturing, and distribution of intelligence.
And the cost of that is going to zero.
That's a very nice way of looking at life on earth.
So if that's going on, and then now in parallel to that, then you say, okay, what, what then
happens if when that cost curve is heading to zero?
Our existence becomes a goal alignment problem, a goal alignment function.
And so the same thing I'm doing, where I'm doing goal alignment within myself of these
200 biomarkers where I'm saying when, when Brian exists on a databases and this entity
is deciding what to eat and what to do and et cetera, it's not just my conscious mind
which is opining.
It's 200 biological processes and there's a whole bunch of more voices involved.
So in that equation, we're going to increasingly automate the things that we spend high energy
on today because it's easier.
And now we're going to then negotiate the terms and conditions of intelligent life.
Now we say conscious existence because we're biased because that's what we have.
But it will be the largest computational exercise in history because you're now doing
goal alignment with planet earth, within yourself, with each other, within all the intelligent
agents we're building, bots and other voice assistants.
We basically had to have a trillions and trillions of agents working on the negotiation of goal
alignment.
Yeah.
This, this is in fact true.
And what was the second thing?
That was it.
So the cost, the design manufacturing distribution of intelligence going to zero, which then
means what's really going on?
What are we really doing?
We're negotiating the terms and conditions of existence.
Do you worry about the survival of this process, that life as we know what on earth comes to
an end or at least intelligent life, that as the cost goes to zero, something happens
where all of that intelligence is thrown in the trash by something like nuclear war or
development of AGI systems that are very dumb, not AGI I guess, but AI, it's the paperclip
thing on mass is dumb, but has unintended consequences to where it destroys human civilization.
Do you worry about those kinds of things?
I mean, it's unsurprising that a new thing comes into the sphere of human consciousness.
Humans identify the foreign object in this case, artificial intelligence.
Our amygdala fires up and says, scary, foreign, we should be apprehensive about this.
And so it makes sense from a biological perspective that humans, the knee-jerk reaction is fear.
What I don't think has been properly weighted with that is that we are the first generation
of intelligent beings on this earth that has been able to look out over their expected
lifetime and see there is a real possibility of evolving into entirely novel forms of consciousness.
So different that it would be totally unrecognizable to us today.
We don't have words for it.
We can't hint at it.
We can't point at it.
You can't look in the sky and see that thing that is shining, we're going to go up there.
You cannot even create an aspirational statement about it, and instead, we've had this knee-jerk
reaction of fear about everything that could go wrong, but in my estimation, this should
be the defining aspiration of all intelligent life on earth that we would aspire that basically
every generation surveys the landscape of possibilities that are afforded given the
technological, cultural, and other contextual situation that they're in, we're in this context.
We haven't yet identified this and said, this is unbelievable.
We should carefully think this thing through, not just of mitigating the things that wipe
us out.
We have this potential, and so we just haven't given voice to it, even though it's within
this realm of possibilities.
So you're excited about the possibility of superintelligence systems and what the opportunities
that bring.
There's parallels to this.
You think about people before the internet, as the internet was coming to life, there's
kind of a fog through which you can't see.
What does the future look like?
Predicting collective intelligence, which I don't think we understand that we're living
through that now, is that there's now, we've in some sense stopped being individual intelligences
and become much more like collective intelligences, because ideas travel much, much faster now,
and they can in a viral way sweep across the population.
It almost feels like a thought is had by many people now, thousands or millions of people
as opposed to an individual person, and that's changed everything, but to me, I think we're
realizing how much that actually changed people or societies, but to predict that before the
internet would have been very difficult.
In that same way, we're sitting here with the fog before us thinking, what is superintelligence
systems?
How is that going to change the world?
What is increasing the bandwidth like plugging our brains into this whole thing?
How is that going to change the world?
It seems like it's a fog, you don't know, and whatever comes to be could destroy the
world.
We could be the last generation, but it also could transform in ways that creates an incredibly
fulfilling life experience that's unlike anything we've ever experienced.
It might involve the solution of ego and consciousness and so on, you're no longer one individual.
That might be a certain kind of death and ego death, but the experience might be really
exciting and enriching.
Maybe we'll live in a virtual... It's funny to think about a bunch of hypothetical questions
of would it be more fulfilling to live in a virtual world?
If you were able to plug your brain in in a very dense way into a video game, which
world would you want to live in?
In the video game or in the physical world?
For most of us, we're kind of touring it with the idea of the video game, but we still want
to live in the physical world, have friendships and relationships in the physical world, but
we don't know that.
Again, it's a fog, and maybe in 100 years we're all living inside a video game, hopefully
not Call of Duty, hopefully more like Sims 5, which version is it on?
For you individually though, does it make you sad that your brain ends?
That you die one day very soon?
That the whole thing, that data source just goes offline sooner than you would like?
That's a complicated question.
I would have answered it differently in different times of my life.
I had chronic depression for 10 years, and so in that 10-year time period, I desperately
wanted lights to be off.
The thing that made it even worse is I was born into a religion.
It was the only reality I ever understood, and it's difficult to articulate to people
when you're born into that kind of reality, and it's the only reality you're exposed to.
You are literally blinded to the existence of other realities, because it's so much the
in-group-out-group thing.
In that situation, it was not only that I desperately wanted lights out forever, it was that I couldn't
have lights out forever.
It was that there was an afterlife, and this afterlife had this system that would either
penalize or reward you for your behaviors.
It's almost like this indescribable hopelessness of not only being in a hopeless despair of
not wanting to exist, but then also being forced to exist.
There was a duration of my time of a duration of life where I'd say, yes, I have no remorse
for lights being out and actually want it more than anything in the entire world.
There are other times where I'm looking out at the future, and I say, this is an opportunity
for evolving human-conscious experience that is beyond my ability to understand, and I
jump out of bed, and I race to work, and I can't think about anything else.
I think the reality for me is, I don't know what it's like to be in your head, but in
my head, when I wake up in the morning, I don't say, good morning, Brian, I'm so happy
to see you.
I'm sure you're just going to be beautiful to me today.
You're not going to make a huge long list of everything you should be anxious about.
You're not going to repeat that list to me 400 times.
You're not going to have me relive all the regrets I've made in life.
I'm sure you're not going to do any of that.
You're just going to just help me along all day long.
It's a brutal environment in my brain, and we've just become normalized to this environment
that we just accept that this is what it means to be human.
But if we look at it, if we try to muster as much soberness as we can about the realities
of being human, it's brutal, if it is for me.
So, am I sad that the brain may be off one day?
It depends on the contextual setting.
How am I feeling?
At what moment are you asking me that?
My mind is so fickle, and this is why, again, I don't trust my conscious mind.
I have been given realities.
I was given a religious reality that was a video game, and then I figured out it was
not a real reality, and then I lived in a depressive reality which delivered this terrible
hopelessness.
That wasn't a real reality.
Then I discovered behavioral psychology, and I figured out how 188 chronicle biases and
how my brain is distorting reality at the time, I have gone from one reality to another.
I don't trust reality.
I don't trust realities that are given to me, and so to try to make a decision on what
I value or not value that future state, I don't trust my response.
Also not fully listening to the conscious mind at any one moment as the ultimate truth,
but allowing you to go up and down as it does, and just kind of being observing it.
Yes.
I assume that whatever my conscious mind delivers up to my awareness is wrong on pond landing,
and I just need to figure out where it's wrong, how it's wrong, how wrong it is, and then try
to correct for it as best I can.
But I assume that on impact, it's mistaken in some critical ways.
Is there something you can say by way of advice when the mind is depressive, when the conscious
mind serves up something that dark thoughts, how you deal with that, like how in your own
life you've overcome that and others who are experienced in that can overcome it?
Two things, one, that those depressive states are biochemical states.
It's not you, and the suggestions that these things that this state delivers to you about
suggestion of the hopelessness of lies or the meaninglessness of it or that you should
hit the eject button, that's a false reality.
And that it's when I completely understand the rational decision to commit suicide.
It is not lost to me at all, but that is an irrational situation.
But the key is when you're in that situation and those thoughts are landing, to be able
to say thank you, you're not real.
I know you're not real.
And so I'm in a situation where for whatever reason I'm having this neurochemical state,
but that state can be altered.
And so it again, it goes back to the realities of the difficulties of being human.
And like when I was trying to solve my depression, I tried literally, if you name it, I tried
it systematically and nothing would fix it.
And so this is what gives me hope with brain interfaces, for example, like, could I have
numbers on my brain?
Can I see what's going on?
I go to the doctor and it's like, how do you feel?
I don't know.
Terrible.
Like on a skeleton of 10, how bad do you want to commit suicide?
10.
Okay.
At this moment.
Here's his bottle.
How much should I take?
Well, I don't know.
Like just...
Yeah.
It's very, very crude.
And this data opens up the possibility of really helping in those dark moments to first
understand the ways, the ups and downs of those dark moments.
On the complete flip side of that, I am very conscious in my own brain and deeply, deeply
grateful that it's almost like a chemistry thing, a biochemistry thing, that I go many
times throughout the day, I'll look at like this cup and I'll be overcome with joy how
amazing it is to be alive.
I actually think I'm, my biochemistry is such that it's not as common, like I've talked
to people and I don't think that's that common.
Like it's a, and it's not a rational thing at all.
It's like, I feel like I'm on drugs and I'll just be like, whoa, and a lot of people talk
about like the meditative experience will allow you to sort of, you know, look at some
basic things like the movement of your hand as deeply joyful because that's like, that's
life.
But I get that from just looking at a cup, like I'm waiting for the coffee to brew.
I'll just be like, fuck, life is awesome.
And I'll sometimes tweet that, but then I'll like regret it later, like, God damn it,
you're so ridiculous.
But yeah, so, but that is purely chemistry, like there's no rational, it doesn't fit with
the rest of my life.
I'm like, holy shit, I'm always late to stuff.
I'm always like, there's all this stuff, you know, I'm super self critical, like really
self critical about everything I do.
To the point, I almost hate everything I do, but there's this engine of joy for life outside
of all that.
And that has to be chemistry and the flip side of that is what depression probably is, is
the opposite of that feeling of like, because I bet you that feeling of the cup being amazing
would save anybody in a state of depression, like that would be like fresh, you're in a
desert and it's a drink of water, shit, man, the brain is, it would be nice to understand
where that's coming from, to be able to understand how you hit those lows and those highs that
have nothing to do with the actual reality, it has to do with some very specific aspects
of how you maybe see the world, maybe it could be just like basic habits that you engage
in and then it's hard to walk along the line to find those experiences of joy.
And this goes back to the discussion we're having of human cognition is in volume the
largest input of raw material into society.
And it's not quantified.
We have no bearings on it.
And so we just, you wonder, we both articulated some of the challenges we have on our own
mind.
And it's likely that others would say, I have something similar.
And you wonder when you look at society, what, how does that contribute to all the other
compounder problems that we're experiencing?
How does that blind us to the opportunities we could be looking at?
And so it really, it has this potential distortion effect on reality that just makes everything
worse.
And I hope if we can put some, if we can assign some numbers to these things and just to get
our bearings so we're aware of what's going on, if we could find greater stabilization
in how we conduct our lives and how we build society, it might be the thing that enables
us to scaffold because we've really, again, we've done, humans have done a fantastic job
systematically scaffolding technology and science and institutions.
It's human.
It's our own selves, which we have not been able to scaffold.
It's we are the, we are the one part of this intelligence infrastructure that remains unchanged.
Is there something you could say about coupling this brain data with not just the basic human
experience, but say an experience, you mentioned sleep, but the wildest experience, which is
psychedelics.
Is there, and there's been quite a few studies now that are being approved and run, which
is exciting from a scientific perspective on psychedelics.
Do you think, what do you think happens to the brain on psychedelics?
And how can data about this help us understand it?
And when you're on DMT, do you see elves and can we guess, can we convert that into data?
Can you add aliens in there?
Yeah, aliens, definitely.
Do you actually meet aliens and elves are, elves are the aliens.
I'm asking for, for a few Austin friends yet that are convinced that they've actually
met the elves.
What are elves like?
Are they friendly?
Are they helpful?
I haven't met them personally.
Are they like the smurfs of like, they're, like they're industrious and they have different
skill sets and they, yeah, I think they're very, they're very critical as friends.
They're trolls, the elves are trolls, no, but they care about you.
So there's a bunch of different version of trolls, there's a loving trolls that are harsh
on you, but they want you to be better and they're trolls that just enjoy the, your destruction.
And I think they're the ones that care for you.
Like I think they're criticism for my, see, I'm talking, I haven't met them directly.
So I'm talking, it's like a friend of a friend.
Yeah.
They were, they were getting my telephone.
Yeah.
A bit of an end, end the whole point is then psychedelics and certainly a DMT word, this
is where the, the, the brain data versus word data, uh, fails, which is, you know, words
can convey the experience of most people that you can be poetic and so on, but it really
does not convey the experience of what, what it actually means to meet the, uh, to meet
the elves.
I mean, to me, what baselines this conversation is, imagine if you, if we were interested
in the health of your heart and we started and said, okay, Lex, self-interest back, tell
me how's the health of your heart?
You sit there and you close your eyes and you think, feels all right.
Like things, things feel okay.
And then you went to the cardiologist and the cardiologist like, Hey Lex, you know,
tell me how you feel.
You know, actually what I really like you to do is do an EKG and a blood panel and look
at arterial plaques and let's look at my cholesterol and there's like five to 10 studies
you would do.
They would then give you this report and say, here's the quantified health of your heart.
Now with this data, I'm going to prescribe the following regime of exercise and maybe
I'll put you on a statin, like, uh, et cetera, but the protocol is based upon this data.
You would think the cardiologist is out of their mind.
If they just gave you a bottle of statins based upon, you're like, well, I think something's
kind of wrong and they're just, just kind of experiment and see what happens.
But that's what we do with our mental health today.
So you're, it's, it's kind of absurd.
And so if you look at psychedelics, uh, to have, again, to be able to measure the brain
and get a baseline state and then to measure during a psychedelic experience and post a
psychedelic experience and then do it longitudinally, you now have a quantification of what's going
on.
And so you could then pose questions.
What molecule is appropriate at what dosages at what frequency in what contextual environment,
what happens when I have this diet with this molecule, this experience, all the experimentation
you do when you have good sleep data or HRV.
And so that's what I think happens.
What we could potentially do with psychedelics is we could add this level of sophistication
that is not in the industry currently, and it may improve the outcomes people experience.
It may improve the safety and efficacy.
And so that's what I hope we are able to achieve.
And it would transform mental health because we would finally have numbers to work with
the baseline ourselves.
And then if you think about it, we, when we talk about things related to the mind, we
talk about the modality.
We use words like meditation or psychedelics or something else because we can't talk about
a marker in the brain.
We can't use a word to say, we can't talk about cholesterol.
We don't talk about plaque in the arteries.
We don't talk about HRV.
And so if we have numbers, then the solutions get mapped to numbers instead of the modalities
being the thing we talk about, of meditation just does good things in a crude fashion.
So in your blog post, Zeroeth Principle Thinking, good title, you ponder how do people come
up with truly original ideas?
What's your thoughts on this as a human and as a person who's measuring brain data?
Zeroeth principles are building blocks.
First principles are understanding of system laws.
So if you take, for example, I can Sherlock Holmes, he's a first principles thinker.
So he says, once you've eliminated the impossible, anything that remains, however improbable
is true, whereas Dirk Gently, the holistic detective by Douglas Adams says, I don't
like eliminating the impossible.
So when someone says, from a first principles perspective, and they, they're trying to assume
the fewest number of things within a given timeframe.
And so when I, after Braintree Venmo, I set my mind to the question of what single thing
can I do that would maximally increase the probability that the human race thrives beyond
what we can even imagine?
And I found that in my conversations with others in the books I read, in my own deliberations,
I had a missing piece of the puzzle because I didn't feel like over, yeah, I didn't feel
like the future could be deduced from first principles thinking.
And that's when I read the book Zero, a biography of a dangerous idea.
And I,
I think it's my favorite book I've ever read.
It's also a really interesting number, Zero.
And I, I wasn't aware that the number Zero had to be discovered.
I didn't realize that it caused a revolution in philosophy and then just tore up math and
it tore up.
I mean, it builds modern society, but it, it wrecked everything in its way.
It was an unbelievable disruptor and it was so difficult for society to get their heads
around it.
And so Zero is of course the, a representation of a Zero's principle thinking, which is,
it's the caliber and consequential nature of an idea.
And so when you talk about what kind of ideas have civilization transforming properties,
oftentimes they fall into the Zero's category.
And so in thinking this through, I, I was wanting to find a quantitative structure on
how to think about these Zero's principles.
And that's, so I came up with that to be a coupler with first principles thinking.
And so now it's a staples part of how I think about the world and the future.
So it emphasizes trying to identify the lens on that word impossible, like what is impossible,
essentially trying to identify what is impossible and what is possible.
And being as, how do you, I mean, this, this is the thing is most of society tells you
the range of things they say is impossible is very wide.
So you need to be shrinking that.
I mean, that's the whole process of, of this kind of thinking is you need to be very rigorous
in, in trying to be, trying to draw the lines of what is actually impossible because very
few things are actually impossible.
I don't know what is actually impossible.
Like it's the Joe Rogan is entirely possible.
I like that approach to, to science, to engineering, to entrepreneurship.
It's entirely possible, basically shrink the impossible to zero to a very small set.
Yeah, life constraints favor first principles thinking because it, it enables faster action
with higher probability of success.
Pursuing zero with principle optionality is expensive and uncertain.
And so in a society constrained by resources, time and money and a desire for social status
accounts and et cetera, it minimizes zero with principle thinking, but the reason why
I think zero with principle thinking should be a staple of our shared cognitive infrastructure
is if you look through the history of the past couple of thousand years and let's just
say we arbitrarily, we subjectively try to assess what is a zero level, zero level idea.
And we say how many have occurred on what time scales and what were the contextual settings
for it?
I would argue that if you look at AlphaGo, when it played go from another dimension with
the human go players, when it saw AlphaGo's moves, it attributed it to like playing with
an alien, playing go with AlphaGo being from another dimension.
And so if you say computational intelligence has an attribute of introducing zero like
insights, then if you say what is going to be the occurrence of zeros in society going
forward?
And you could recently say probably a lot more than have occurred and probably more
at a faster pace.
So then if you say what happens if you have this computational intelligence throughout
society that manufacturing, design and distribution of intelligence is now going to heading toward
zero?
Or an increased number of zeros being produced with a tight connection between humans' computers?
That's when I got to a point and said we cannot predict the future with first principles thinking.
That cannot be our imagination set, it can't be our sole anchor in the situation that basically
the future of our conscious existence 20, 30, 40, 50 years is probably a zero.
So just to clarify, when you say zero, you're referring to basically a truly revolutionary
idea.
Yeah, something that is currently not a building block of our shared conscious existence, either
in the form of knowledge, it's currently not manifest in what we acknowledge.
So zero's principle thinking is playing with ideas that are so revolutionary that we can't
even clearly reason about the consequences once those ideas come to be.
Or for example, like Einstein, that was a zero, I would categorize it as a zero's principle
insight.
You mean general relativity, space time?
Yeah, space time.
Yep.
So basically, building upon what Newton had done and said, yes, also, and it just changed
the fabric of our understanding of reality.
And so that was unexpected, it existed, it became part of our awareness.
And the moves AlphaGo made existed, it just came into our awareness.
And so to your point, there's this question of what do we know and what don't we know?
Do we think we know 99% of all things or do we think we know 0.001% of all things?
And that goes back to no known, no knowns and unknowns.
And first principles and zero's principle thinking gives us a quantitative framework
to say there's no way for us to mathematically try to create probabilities for these things.
Or it would be helpful if they were just part of our standard thought processes.
Because it may encourage different behaviors in what we do individually, collectively
as a society, what we aspire to, what we talk about, the possibility sets we imagine.
Yeah, I've been engaged in that kind of thinking quite a bit.
And thinking about engineering of consciousness, I think it's feasible.
I think it's possible in the language that we're using here.
And it's very difficult to reason about a world when inklings of consciousness can be
engineered into artificial systems.
Not from a philosophical perspective, but from an engineering perspective, I believe
a good step towards engineering consciousness is creating, engineering the illusion of consciousness.
I'm captivated by our natural predisposition to anthropomorphize things.
And I don't want to hear from the philosophers, but I think that's what we do to each other.
That consciousness is created socially, that much of the power of consciousness is in the
social interaction.
I create your consciousness, no, I create my consciousness by having interacted with you.
And that's the display of consciousness.
It's the same as the display of emotion.
Consciousness is created through communication, language is created through its use.
And then we somehow, humans, especially philosophers, the heart problem of consciousness, really
want to believe that we possess this thing that's like, there's an elf sitting there
with a hat or a name tag says consciousness, and they're feeding this subjective experience
to us, as opposed to it actually being an illusion that would construct to make social
communication more effective.
And so I think if you focus on creating the illusion of consciousness, you can create
some very fulfilling experiences in software.
And so that to me is the compelling space of ideas to explore.
I agree with you.
And I think going back to our experience together with our interfaces on, you could imagine
if we get to a certain level of maturity.
So first let's take the inverse of this.
So you and I text back and forth, and we're sending each other emojis.
That has a certain amount of information transfer rate as we're communicating with each other.
And so in our communication with people via email and text and whatnot, we've taken the
bandwidth of human interaction, the information transfer rate, and we've reduced it.
We have less social cues.
We have less information to work with.
There's a lot more opportunity for misunderstanding.
So that is altering the conscious experience between two individuals.
And if we add brain interfaces to the equation, let's imagine now we amplify the dimensionality
of our communications.
That to me is what you're talking about, which is consciousness engineering.
Perhaps I understand you with dimensions.
So maybe I understand your hat when you look at the cup and you experience that happiness,
you can tell me you're happy.
And I then do theory of mind and say, I can imagine what it might be like to be Lex and
feel happy about seeing this cup.
But if the interface could then quantify and give me a 50-vector space model and say, this
is the version of happiness that Lex is experiencing as he looks at this cup, then it would allow
me potentially to have much greater empathy for you and understand you as a human of this
is how you experience joy, which is entirely unique from how I experience joy, even though
we assumed ahead of time that we were having some kind of similar experience.
But I agree with you that we do consciousness engineering today in everything we do when
we talk to each other, when we're building products and that we're entering into a stage
where it will be much more methodical and quantitative based and computational in how
we go about doing it, which to me, I find encouraging because I think it creates better
guardrails for to create ethical systems on versus right now, I feel like it's really
a wild, wild west on how these interactions are happening.
Yeah.
And it's funny you focus on human to human, but that this kind of data enables human to
machine interaction, which is what we're kind of talking about when we say engineering
consciousness.
And that will happen, of course, let's flip that on its head.
Right now, we're putting humans as the central node.
What if we gave GPT-3 a bunch of human brains?
I said, hey, GPT-3, learn some manners when you speak and run your algorithms on humans'
brains and see how they respond so you can be polite and so that you can be friendly
and so that you can be conversationally appropriate, but to inverse it to give our machines a training
set in real time with closed loop feedback so that our machines were better equipped
to find their way through our society in polite and kind and appropriate ways.
I love that.
Yeah.
Or better yet, teach it some, have it read the finding documents and have it visit Austin
and Texas.
And so that when you ask, when you tell it, why don't you learn some manners, GPT-3 learns
to say no.
And learns what it means to be free and a sovereign individual.
So that depends.
So it depends what kind of a version of GPT-3 you want, one that's free, one that behaves
well with the whole social.
You want a socialist GPT-3, you want an anarchist GPT-3, you want a polite, like you take it
home to visit mom and dad, GPT-3, and you want party and Vegas to a strip club, GPT-3.
You want all flavors.
And then you've got to have goal alignment between all those.
Yeah.
They don't want to manipulate each other for sure.
So that's, I mean, you kind of spoke to ethics.
One of the concerns that people have in this modern world, the digital data is that of
privacy and security, but privacy, you know, they're concerned that when they share data,
it's the same thing with you when we trust other human beings in being fragile and revealing
something that we're vulnerable about.
There's a leap of faith.
There's a leap of trust that's going to be just between us as a privacy to it.
And then the challenge is when you're in the digital space, then sharing your data with
companies that use that data for advertisement and all those kinds of things, there's a hesitancy
to share that much data, to share a lot of deep personal data.
And if you look at brain data, that feels a whole lot like it's richly deeply personal
data.
So how do you think about privacy with this kind of ocean of data?
I think we got off to a wrong start with the internet where the basic rules of play for
the company that be was if you're a company, you can go out and get as much information
on a person as you can find without their approval, and you can also do things to induce
them to give you as much information.
And you don't need to tell them what you're doing with it.
You can do anything on the backside.
You can make money on it.
But the game is who can acquire the most information and devise the most clever schemes to do it.
That was a bad starting place.
And so we are in this period where we need to correct for that.
And we need to say, first of all, the individual always has control over their data.
It's not a free for all.
It's not like a game of hungry hippo, but they can just go at it and grab as much as
they want.
So for example, when your brain data was recorded today, the first thing we did in the kernel
app was you have control over your data.
And so it's individual consent, it's individual control, and then you can build up on top
of that.
But it has to be based upon some clear rules of play of everyone knows what's being collected,
they know what's being done with it, and the person has control over it.
So transparency and control.
So everybody knows what does control look like, my ability to delete the data if I want.
Yeah, delete it and to know who is being shared with under what terms and conditions.
We haven't reached that level of sophistication with our products of if you say, for example,
hey Spotify, please give me a customized playlist according to my neurome.
You could say you can have access to this vector space model, but only for this duration
of time and then you've got to delete it.
We haven't gotten there to that level of sophistication, but these are ideas we need to start talking
about of how would you actually structure permissions?
And I think it creates a much more stable set for society to build where we understand
the rules of play and people aren't vulnerable to being taken advantage.
It's not fair for an individual to be taken advantage of without their awareness with
some other practice that some companies doing for their sole benefit.
And so hopefully we are going through a process now where we're correcting for these things
and that it can be an economy wide shift that because really these are fundamentals we need
to have in place.
It's kind of fun to think about like in Chrome when you install an extension or like install
an app, it's ask you like what permissions you're willing to give and be cool for in
the future.
It's just like you can have access to my brain data.
I mean, it's not unimaginable in the future that the big technology companies have built
a business based upon acquiring data about you that they can then create a view to model
of you and sell that predictability.
And so it's not unimaginable that you will create with a kernel device, for example,
a more reliable predictor of you than they could.
And that they're asking you for permission to complete their objectives and you're the
one that gets to negotiate that with them and say, sure, but so it's not unimaginable
that might be the case.
So there's a guy named Elon Musk and he has a company in one of the many companies called
Neuralink that has that's also excited about the brain.
So it'd be interesting to hear your kind of opinions about a very different approach
that's invasive that require surgery that implants a data collection device in the brain.
How do you think about the difference between kernel and Neuralink in the approaches of
creating that stream of brain data?
Elon and I spoke about this a lot early on.
We met up.
I had started kernel and he had an interest in brain interfaces as well and we explored
doing something together, him joining kernel and ultimately it wasn't the right move.
And so he started Neuralink and I continued building kernel.
But it was interesting because we were both at this very early time where it wasn't certain
if there was a path to pursue, if now was the right time to do something and then the
technological choice of doing that.
And so we were both, our starting point was looking at invasive technologies.
And I was building invasive technology at the time, that's ultimately where he's gone.
A little less than a year after Elon and I were engaged, I shifted kernel to do noninvasive.
And we had this Neuroscientist come to kernel we were talking about.
He had been doing Neurosurgery for 30 years, one of the most respected Neuroscientists in
the US.
And we brought him to kernel to figure out the ins and outs of his profession.
And at the very end of our three hour conversation, he said, you know, every 15 or so years,
a new technology comes along that changes everything.
He said, it's probably already here.
You just can't see it yet.
And my jaw dropped.
I thought, because I had spoken to Bob Greenberg, who had built second site first on the optical
nerve and then he did an array on the optical cortex.
And then I also became friendly with NeuroPace, who does the implants for seizure detection
and remediation.
And I saw in their eyes what it was like to take something through an implantable device
through for a 15 year run.
They initially thought it's seven years and it ended up being 15 years and they thought
it'd be 100 million as you know, 300 or 400 million.
And I really didn't want to build invasive technology.
It was the only thing that appeared to be possible.
But then once I spun up an internal effort to start looking at noninvasive options, we
said, is there something here?
Is there anything here that again has the characteristics of it has the high quality
data?
It could be low cost.
It could be accessible.
Could it make brain interfaces mainstream?
And so I did a bet the company move.
We shifted from noninvasive to invasive to noninvasive.
So the answer is yes to that.
There is something there that's possible.
The answers we'll see.
We've now built both technologies and they're now you experienced one of them today.
We were applying, we're now deploying it.
So we're trying to figure out what values are really there.
But I'd say it's really too early to express confidence whether it's too, I think it's
too early to assess which technological choice is the right one on what time scales.
Yeah.
Time scales are really important here.
Very important.
Because if you look at the like on the invasive side, there's so much activity going on right
now of less invasive techniques to get at the neuron firings, which what what Neuralink
is building, it's possible that in 10, 15 years when they're scaling that technology,
other things have come along and you'd much rather do that.
That thing starts the clock again.
It may not be the case.
It may be the case that Neuralink has properly chosen the right technology and that that's
exactly what they want to be totally possible.
And it's also possible that the path we chose are non-invasive, fall short for a variety
of reasons.
It's just it's unknown.
And so right now, the two technologies we chose, the analogy I'd give you to create
a baseline of understanding is if you think of it like the internet in the 90s, the internet
became useful when people could do a dial-up connection and then the paid and then as bandwidth
increased, so did the utility of that connection and so did the ecosystem approve.
And so if you say what kernel flow is going to give you a full screen on the picture of
information, so you're going to be watching a movie, but the image is going to be blurred
and the audio is going to be muffled.
So it has a lower resolution of coverage.
Kernel Flux, our MEG technology is going to give you the full movie and 1080p.
And Neuralink is going to give you a circle on the screen of 4K.
And so each one has their pros and cons and it's give and take.
And so the decision I made with Kernel was that these two technologies, Flux and Flow,
were basically the answer for the next seven years.
And they would give rise to the ecosystem, which would become much more valuable than
the hardware itself, and that we would just continue to improve on the hardware over time.
And it's early days.
It's kind of fascinating to think about that.
It's very true that you don't know both paths are very promising.
And it's like 50 years from now, we will look back and maybe not even remember one of them.
And the other one might change the world.
It's so cool how technology is.
I mean, that's what entrepreneurship is like.
It's the Earth principle is like you're marching ahead into the darkness, into the fog.
Not knowing.
It's wonderful to have someone else out there with us doing this.
Because if you look at brainer faces, anything that's off the shelf right now is inadequate.
It's had its run for a couple of decades.
It's still in hacker communities, it hasn't gone to the mainstream.
The room size machines are on their own path.
But there is no answer right now bringing brainer faces mainstream.
And so it both, you know, both they and us, we've both spent over $100 million.
And that's kind of what it takes to have a go at this because you need to build full
stack.
So we are from the photon and the atom through the machine learning.
We have just under 100 people.
I think it's something like 36, 37 PhDs in these specialties, these areas that there's
only a few people in the world who have these abilities.
And that's what it takes to build next generation, to make an attempt at breaking into brainer
faces.
And so we'll see over the next couple of years, whether it's the right time or whether we
were both too early or whether something else comes along in seven to 10 years, which
is the right thing that brings it mainstream.
So you see Elon as a kind of competitor or a fellow traveler along the path of uncertainty
or both.
It's a fellow traveler.
It's like at the beginning of the internet is how many companies are going to be invited
to this new ecosystem.
Like an endless number because if you think that the hardware just starts the process.
And so back to your initial example, if you take the Fitbit, for example, you say, okay,
now I can get measurements on the body.
And what do we think the ultimate value of this device is going to be?
What is the information transfer rate?
And they were in the market for a certain duration of time and Google bought them for
two and a half billion dollars.
They didn't have ancillary value add.
There weren't people building on top of the Fitbit device.
They also didn't have increased insight with additional data streams.
So it's really just the device.
If you look, for example, at Apple and the device they sell, you have value in the device
that someone buys.
But also, you have everyone who's building on top of it, so you have this additional
ecosystem value.
And then you have additional data streams that come in which increase the value of the product.
And so if you say, if you look at the hardware as the instigator of value creation, over time,
what we've built may constitute 5% or 10% of the value of the overall ecosystem.
And that's what we really care about.
What we're trying to do is kickstart the mainstream adoption of quantifying the brain.
And the hardware just opens the door to say what kind of ecosystem could exist.
And that's why the examples are so relevant of the things you've outlined in your life.
I hope those things, the books people write, the experiences people build, the conversations
you have, your relationship with your AI systems, I hope those all are feeding on the insights
built upon this ecosystem we've created to better your life.
And so that's the thinking behind it, again, with the Drake equation being the underlying
driver of value.
And the people at Kernel have joined not because we have certainty of success, but because
we find it to be the most exhilarating opportunity we could ever pursue in this time to be alive.
You founded the payment system Braintree in 2007 that acquired Venmo in 2012 in that
same year was acquired by PayPal, which is now eBay.
Can you tell me the story of the vision and the challenge of building an online payment
system and just building a large successful business in general?
I discovered payments by accident as I was, when I was 21, I just returned from Ecuador
living among extreme poverty for two years.
And I came back to the US and I was shocked by the opulence of the United States.
And I just thought this is, I couldn't believe it.
And I decided I wanted to try to spend my life helping others.
That was the life objective that I thought was worthwhile to pursue versus making money
and whatever the case may be for its own right.
And so I decided in that moment that I was going to try to make enough money by the age
of 30 to never have to work again.
And then with some abundance of money, I could then choose to do things that might be beneficial
to others, but may not meet the criteria of being a standalone business.
And so in that process, I started a few companies, had some small successes, had some failures.
In one of the endeavors, I was up to my eyeballs in debt, things were not going well and I needed
a part-time job to pay my bills.
And so one day I saw in the paper in Utah where I was living, the 50 richest people
in Utah and I emailed each one of their assistants and said, I'm young, I'm resourceful, I'll
do anything, I'll just want to, I'm entrepreneurial, I try to get a job that would be flexible
and no one responded.
And then I interviewed at a few dozen places, nobody would even give me the time of day.
It wouldn't want to take me seriously.
And so finally it was on monster.com that I saw this job posting for credit card sales
door to door.
Commission.
I did not know the story.
This is great.
I love the head drop.
That's exactly right.
So it was the low points to which we're going.
So I responded and the person made an attempt at suggesting that they had some kind of standards
that they would consider hiring, but it's kind of like, if you could fog a mirror, come
and do this because it's 100% commission.
And so I started walking up and down the street in my community selling credit card processing.
And so what you learn immediately in doing that is if you walk into a business, first
of all, the business owner is typically there and you walk in the door and they can tell
by how you're addressed or how you walk, whatever their pattern recognition is, and they just
hate you immediately.
It's like, stop wasting my time.
I really am trying to get stuff done.
I don't want us to do a sales pitch.
And so you have to overcome the initial get out.
And then once you engage, when you say the word credit card processing, the person's
like, I already hate you because I have been taken advantage of dozens of times because
you all are weasels, and so I had to figure out an algorithm to get past all those different
conditions because I was still working on my other startup for the majority of my time.
I was doing this part of time.
And so I figured out that the industry really was built on people, on deceit, basically people
promise you things that were not reality.
And so I'd walk into a business and I'd say, look, I would give you $100.
I'd put a $100 bill and say, I'll give you $100 for three minutes of your time.
If you don't say yes to what I'm saying, I'll give you $100.
And then you'd usually crack a smile and say, OK, what do you got for me, son?
And so I'd sit down, I'd just open my book and I'd say, here's the credit card industry.
Here's how it works.
Here are the players.
Here's what they do.
Here's how they deceive you.
Here's what I am.
I'm no different than anyone else.
It's like, you're going to process your credit card, you're going to get the money in the
account.
You're just going to get a clean statement.
You're going to have someone who answers the call and someone asks, and you know, just
like the basic, like you're OK.
And people started saying yes.
And then of course, I went to the next business and be like, you know, Joe and Susie and whoever
said yes too.
And so I built a social proof structure.
And I became the number one salesperson out of 400 people nationwide doing this.
And I worked half time still doing this other startup.
And that's a brilliant strategy, by the way.
It's very well, very well strategized and executed.
So I did it for nine months and at the time my customer base was making, was generating
around, I think it was, if I remember correctly, $62,504 a month where the overall revenues,
I thought, wow, that's amazing.
If I built that as my own company, I would just make $62,000 a month of income passively
with these merchants processing credit cards.
So I thought, hmm.
And so that's when I thought I'm going to create a company.
And so then I started Braintree.
And the idea was the online world was broken because PayPal had been acquired by eBay around
I think 2009 or 2000.
And eBay had not innovated much with PayPal.
So it basically sat still for seven years as the software world moved along.
And then Authorize.net was also a company that was relatively stagnant.
So you basically had software engineers who wanted modern payment tools, but there were
none available for them.
So they just dealt with software they didn't like.
And so with Braintree, I thought the entry point is to build software that engineers
will love.
And if we can find the entry point via software, make it easy and beautiful and just a magical
experience and then provide customer service on top of that, it would be easy.
That would be great.
What I was really going after though was it was PayPal.
They were the only company in payments making money because they, because they had a relationship
with eBay early on, people created a PayPal account, they had fund their account with
their checking account versus their credit cards.
And then when they'd use PayPal to pay a merchant, PayPal had a cost of payment of zero versus
if you have coming from a credit card, you have to pay the bank the fees.
So PayPal's margins were 3% on a transaction versus a typical payments company, which may
be a nickel or a penny or a dime or something like that.
And so I knew a new PayPal really was the model to replicate, but a bunch of companies had
tried to do that.
They tried to come in and build a two-sided marketplace.
So get consumers to fund the checking account and the merchants to accept it, but they'd
all failed because building a two-sided marketplace is very hard at the same time.
So my plan was I'm going to build a company and get the best merchants in the whole world
to use our service.
Then in year five, I'm going to acquire a consumer payments company and I'm going to
bring the two together.
So focus on the merchant side and then get the payments company that does the customer,
whatever.
So the other side of it.
This is the plan I presented when I was at the University of Chicago.
And weirdly, it happened exactly like that.
So four years in, our customer base included Uber, Airbnb, GitHub, 37 Signals, not Basecamp.
We had a fantastic collection of companies that represented some of the fastest growing
tech companies in the world and then we met up with Venmo and they had done a remarkable
job in building product.
It was then something very counterintuitive, which is make public your private financial
transactions with people previously thought were something that should be hidden from
others.
And we acquired Venmo and at that point, we now had, we replicated the model because now
people could fund their Venmo account with their checking account, keep money in the
account and then you could just plug Venmo as a form of payment.
And so I think PayPal saw that, that we were getting the best merchants in the world.
We had people using Venmo, they were both the up and coming millennials at the time
who had so much influence online.
And so they came in and offered us an attractive number.
And my goal was not to build the biggest payments company in the world.
It wasn't to try to climb the Forbes billionaire list.
It was, the objective was I want to earn enough money so that I can basically dedicate my
attention to doing something that could potentially be useful on a society-wide scale and more
importantly that could be considered to be valuable from the vantage point of 2050, 2100
and 2500.
So thinking about it on a few hundred year timescale.
And there was a certain amount of money I needed to do that, so I didn't require the
permission of anybody to do that.
And so that, what PayPal offered was sufficient for me to get that amount of money to basically
have a go.
And that's when I set off to survey everything I could identify in existence to say of anything
in the entire world I could do, what one thing could I do that would actually have
the highest value potential for the species.
And so it took me a little while to arrive at brainer faces, but you know, payments in
themselves are revolutionary technologies that can change the world.
Like let's not, let's not sort of, let's not forget that too easily.
I mean, obviously you know this, but there's quite a few lovely folks who are now fascinated
with the space of cryptocurrency.
And where payments are very much connected to this, but in general just money.
And many of the folks I've spoken with, they also kind of connect that to not just purely
financial discussions, but philosophical and political discussions.
And they see Bitcoin as a way, almost as activism, almost as a way to resist the corruption
of centralized centers of power and sort of basically in the 21st century, decentralized
in control, whether that's Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, they see that's one possible
way to give power to those that live in regimes that are corrupt or are not respectful human
rights and all those kinds of things.
What's your sense, just all your expertise with, with payments and seeing how that changed
the world.
What's your sense about the lay of the land for the future of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies
in the positive impact they may have on the world?
Yeah.
And to be clear, my communication wasn't suggest, wasn't meant to minimize payments
or to denigrate it in any way.
It was an attempted communication that when I was surveying the world, it was an algorithm
of what could I individually do.
So there are things that exist that have a lot of potential that can be done.
And then there's a filtering of how many people are qualified to do this given thing.
And then there's a further characterization that can be done of, okay, given the number
of qualified people, will somebody be a unique outperformer of that group to make something
truly impossible to be something done that otherwise couldn't get done.
So there's a process of assessing where can you add unique value in the world.
And some of that has to do with, you're being very, very formal and calculative here, but
some of that is just like what do you sense, like part of that equation is how much passion
you sense within yourself to be able to drive that through, to discover the possibilities
and make them possible.
That's right.
And so we were a brain tree.
I think we were the first company to integrate Coinbase into our, I think we were the first
payments company to formally incorporate crypto, if I'm not mistaken.
For people who are not familiar, Coinbase is a place we can trade cryptocurrencies.
Yeah, which was one of the only places you could.
So we were early in doing that.
And of course, this was in the year 2013.
So an attorney to go and in cryptocurrency land, I concur with the, the statements you
made of the potential of the principles underlying cryptocurrencies and that many of the things
that they're building in the name of money and of, of moving value is equally applicable
to the brain and equally applicable to how the brain interacts with the rest of the world
and how we would imagine doing goal alignment with people.
So it's, to me, it's a continuous spectrum of possibility.
And we're taught your question is isolated on the money.
And I think it just is basically a scaffolding layer for all of society.
So you don't see the, this money is particularly distinct from the money?
I don't.
It's, I think we, we at Kernel, we will benefit greatly from the progress being made in cryptocurrency
because it will be a similar technology stack we will want to use for many things we want
to accomplish.
And so I'm bullish on what's going on and think it could greatly enhance brain interfaces
and the value of the brain interface ecosystem.
Is there something you could say about, first of all bullish on cryptocurrency versus fiat
money?
So do you, do you have a sense that in 21st century cryptocurrency will be embraced by
governments and changed of the, the face of governments, the structure of government?
It's the, it's the same way I think about my diet where previously it was conscious
Brian looking at foods in certain biochemical states on my hungry, on my irritated, on my
depressed and then I choose based upon those momentary windows.
Do I eat at night when I'm fatigued and I have low willpower?
Am I going to pig out on something?
And the current monetary system is based upon human conscious decision making and politics
and power and this whole mess of things.
And what I like about the building blocks of cryptocurrencies, it's methodical, it's
structured, it is accountable, it's transparent.
And so it introduces this scaffolding, which I think again is the right starting point for
how we think about building next generation institutions for society.
And that's why I think it's much broader than much broader than money.
So I guess what you're saying is Bitcoin is the demotion of the conscious mind as well.
In the same way you were talking about diet, it's like giving less priority to the ups
and downs of any one particular human mind, in this case your own, and giving more power
to the sort of data driven.
Yes.
Yeah, I think that is accurate that cryptocurrency is a version of what I would call my autonomous
self that I'm trying to build.
It is an introduction of an autonomous system of value exchange and the process of value
creation in society.
Yes.
So there's similarities.
So I guess what you're saying is Bitcoin will somehow help me not pig out at night or the
equivalent of speaking of diet.
If we could just linger on that topic a little bit, we already talked about your blog post
of I fired myself, I fired Brian, the evening Brian who's too willing to not making good
decisions for the long-term well-being and happiness of the entirety of the organism.
Basically you were like pigging out at night, but it's interesting because I do the same.
In fact, I often eat one meal a day and I have been this week actually, especially when
I travel and it's funny that it never occurred to me to just basically look at the fact that
I'm able to be much smarter about my eating decisions in the morning and the afternoon
than I am at night.
So if I eat one meal a day, why not eat that one meal a day in the morning?
I'm not, it never occurred to me this revolutionary until you've outlined that.
So maybe can you give some details and what, this is just you, this is one person, Brian
arrived at a particular thing that they do, but it's fascinating to kind of look at this
one particular case study.
So what works for you diet wise?
What's your actual diet?
What do you eat?
How often do you eat?
My current protocol is basically the result of thousands of experiments and decision making.
So I do this every 90 days, I do the tests, I do the cycle throughs that I measure again
and then I measure it all the time.
And so what I, I of course, I'm optimizing for my biomarkers.
I want perfect cholesterol and I brought perfect bio blood glucose levels and perfect
DNA methylation, you know, processes.
I also want perfect sleep.
And so for example, recently in the past two weeks, my resting heart rate has been at 42
when I sleep.
And when my resting heart rate is at 42, my HRV is at its highest and I wake up in the
morning feeling more energized than any other configuration.
And so I know from all these processes that eating at roughly 830 in the morning right
after I work out on an empty stomach creates enough distance between that completed eating
and bedtime where I have no almost no digestion processes going on in my body.
Therefore my resting heart rate goes very low.
And when my resting heart rate is very low, I sleep with high quality.
And so basically I've been trying to optimize the entirety of what I eat to my sleep quality.
My sleep quality then of course feeds into my willpower, so it creates this virtuous
cycle.
And so at 830, what I do is I eat what I call super veggie, which is, it's a pudding
of 250 grams of broccoli, 150 grams of cauliflower and a whole bunch of other vegetables that
I eat, what I call nutty pudding, which is-
You make the pudding yourself like a veggie mix, whatever thing.
Is that like a blender?
Yeah, high speed blender.
You can be made in a high speed blender.
But basically I eat the same thing every day.
Veggie bowl as in a form of pudding and then a bowl in the form of nuts.
And then I have-
It's a vegan.
Vegan, yes.
So that's fat and that's like, that's fat and carbs and that's the protein and so on.
Then I have a third dish.
Does it taste good?
I love it.
I love it so much.
I dream about it.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
This is-
And then I have a third dish, which is, it changes every day.
It was kale and spinach and sweet potato.
And then I take about 20 supplements that hopefully make, constitute a perfect nutritional
profile.
So what I'm trying to do is create the perfect diet for my body every single day.
We're sleep is part of the optimization.
That's right.
You're like one of the things you're really tracking at me.
Can you-
Well, I have a million questions, but 20 supplements, like what kind are like, would you say are
essential?
Cause I only take, I only take athleticgreens.com slash what else.
That's like the multivitamin essentially.
That's like the lazy man.
You know, like if you don't actually want to think about shit, that's what you take.
And then fish oil and that's it.
That's all I take.
Yeah.
You know, Alfred North Whitehead said civilization advances as it extends the number of important
operations it can do without thinking about them.
And so my objective on this is I want an algorithm for perfect health that I never have to think
about.
And then I want that system to be scalable to anybody so that they don't have to think
about it.
And right now it's expensive for me to do it.
It's time consuming for me to do it and I have infrastructure to do it, but the future
of being human is not going to the grocery store and deciding what to eat.
It's also not reading scientific papers, trying to decide this thing or that thing.
It's all N of one.
So it's devices on the outside and inside your body assessing real time what your body
needs and then creating closed loop systems for that to happen.
Yeah.
So right now you're doing the data collection and you're being the scientist, it'd be much
better if you're doing just it.
If you just did the data collect or it was being essentially done for you and you can
outsource that to another scientist that's doing the N of one study of you.
That's right.
Because every time I spend time thinking about this or executing spending time on I'm spending
less time thinking about building Kernel or the future of being human.
And so we just all have the budget of our capacity on an everyday basis and we will
scaffold our way up out of this.
And so yeah, hopefully what I'm doing is really it serves as a model that others can
also build.
That's why I wrote about it is hopefully people can then take an improve upon it.
I hold nothing sacred.
I change my diet almost every day based upon some new test results or science or something
like that.
But can you maybe elaborate on the sleep thing?
Why is sleep so important?
And why presumably of like what does good sleep mean to you?
I think sleep is a contender for being the most powerful health intervention in existence.
It's a contender.
I mean, it's magical what it does if you're well rested and what your body can do.
And I mean, for example, I know when I eat close to my bedtime and I've done a systematic
study for years looking at like 15 minute increments on time of day and where I eat
my last meal, my willpower is directly correlated to the amount of deep sleep I get.
So my ability to not binge eat at night when Rascal Bryan is out and about is based upon
how much deep sleep I got the night before.
And so there's a lot to that.
And so I've seen it manifest itself and so I think the way I summarize this is in society
we've had this myth of we tell stories, for example, of entrepreneurship where this person
was so amazing, they stayed at the office for three days and slept under their desk.
And we say, wow, that's amazing, that's amazing.
And now I think we're headed towards a state where we'd say that's primitive and really
not a good idea on every level.
And so the new mythology is going to be the exact opposite.
Yeah.
By the way, just to sort of maybe push back a little bit on that idea.
Did you sleep under your desk, Lex?
Well, yeah, a lot.
I'm a big believer in that actually.
I'm a big believer in chaos and not giving it like giving it to your passion and sometimes
doing things that are out of the ordinary that are not trying to optimize health for
certain periods of time in lieu of your passions is a signal to yourself that you're throwing
everything away.
So I think what you're referring to is how to have good performance for prolonged periods
of time.
I think there's moments in life when you need to throw all of that away.
All the plans away, all the structure away.
So I'm not sure I have an eloquent way of describing exactly what I'm talking about,
but it all depends on different people, people are different.
But there's a danger of over optimization to where you don't just give in to the madness
of the way your brain flows.
I mean, to push back on my pushback is nice to have where the foundations of your brain
are not messed with.
So you have a fixed foundation where the diet is fixed, where the sleep is fixed, and all
that is optimal.
And the chaos happens in the space of ideas as opposed to the space of biology.
But I'm not sure if that requires real discipline in forming habits.
There's some aspect to which some of the best days and weeks of my life have been sleeping
under a desk kind of thing.
And I'm not too willing to let go of things that empirically worked for things that work
in theory.
So again, I'm absolutely with you on sleep.
Also I'm with you on sleep conceptually, but I'm also very humbled to understand that
for different people, good sleep means different things.
I'm very hesitant to trust science on sleep.
I think you should also be a scholar of your body, again, the experiment of N of 1.
I'm not so sure that a full night's sleep is great for me.
There is something about that power nap that I just have not fully studied yet.
But that nap is something special that I'm not sure I found the optimal thing.
So there's a lot to be explored to what is exactly optimal amount of sleep, optimal kind
of sleep, combined with diet and all those kinds of things.
I mean, that all maps the data, at least the truth, everything you're referring to.
Here's a data point for your consideration.
The progress in biology over the past, say decade, has been stunning.
And it now appears as if we will be able to replace our organs, zero externa transplantation.
And so we probably have a path to replace and regenerate every organ of your body, except
for your brain.
You can lose your hand and your arm and a leg, you can have an artificial heart.
You can't operate without your brain.
And so when you make that trade-off decision of whether you're going to sleep under the
desk or not and go all out for a four-day marathon, there's a cost-benefit trade-off
of what's going on, what's happening to your brain in that situation.
We don't know the consequences of modern-day life on our brain.
We don't, it's the most valuable organ in our existence.
And we don't know what's going on in how we're treating it today with stress and with
sleep and with dietary.
And to me, then, if you say that you're trying to, you're trying to optimize life for whatever
things you're trying to do, the game is soon, with the progress in anti-aging and biology,
the game is very soon going to become different than what it is right now with organ rejuvenation
or organ replacement.
And I would conjecture that we will value the health status of our brain above all things.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Everything you're saying is true, but we die.
We die pretty quickly.
Life is short.
And I'm one of those people that I would rather die in battle than stay safe at home.
It's like, yeah, you look at kind of, there's a lot of things that you can reasonably say,
this is the smart thing to do, that can prevent you, that becomes conservative, that can prevent
you from fully embracing life.
I think ultimately, you can be very intelligent and data-driven and also embrace life.
But I err on the side of embracing life.
It takes a very skillful person to not sort of that hovering parent that says, you know
what, there's a 3% chance that if you go out, if you go out by yourself and play, you're
going to die, get run over by a car, come to a slow or a sudden end.
And I am more a supporter of just go out there, if you die, you die.
And that's a balance you have to strike.
I think there's a balance to strike in long-term optimization and short-term freedom.
For me, for a programmer, for a programming mind, I tend to over-optimize and I'm very
cautious and afraid of that, to not over-optimize and thereby be overly cautious, suboptimally
cautious about everything I do.
And then the ultimate thing I'm trying to optimize for is funny you said like sleep
and all those kinds of things.
I tend to think this is, you're being more precise than I am, but I think I tend to want
to minimize stress, which everything comes into that from your sleep and all those kinds
of things.
But I worry that whenever I'm trying to be too strict with myself, then the stress goes
up when I don't follow the strictness.
And so it's a weird, there's so many variables in an objective function, it's hard to get
right.
And sort of not giving a damn about sleep and not giving a damn about diet is a good
thing to inject in there every once in a while for somebody who's trying to optimize everything.
But that's me just trying to, it's exactly like you said, you're just a scientist, I'm
a scientist of myself, you're a scientist of yourself.
It'd be nice if somebody else was doing it and had much better data because I don't
trust my conscious mind and I pigged out last night at some brisket in LA that I regret
deeply.
There's no point to anything I just said.
What is the nature of your regret on the brisket?
Is it, do you wish you hadn't eaten it entirely?
Is it that you wish you hadn't eaten as much as you did?
Is it that?
I think, well, most regret, I mean, if we want to be specific, I drank way too much
like diet soda.
My biggest regret is like having drank so much diet soda, that's the thing that really
was the problem.
I had trouble sleeping because of that because I was like programming and then I was editing.
So I stayed up late at night and then I had to get up to go pee a few times and it was
just a mess.
A mess of a night.
Well, it's not really a mess, but it's like the little things.
I know if I just eat, I drink a little bit of water and that's it.
There's a certain, all of us have perfect days that we know diet-wise and so on that's
good to follow.
You feel good.
I know what it takes for me to do that.
I didn't fully do that and thereby because there's an avalanche effect where the other
sources of stress, all the other to-do items I have pile on my failure to execute on some
basic things that I know make me feel good and all of that combines to create a mess
of a day.
But some of that chaos, you have to be okay with it, but some of it I wish was a little
bit more optimal and your ideas about eating in the morning are quite interesting as an
experiment to try.
Can you elaborate, are you eating once a day?
Yes.
In the morning and that's it.
Can you maybe speak to how that, you spoke, it's funny, spoke about the metrics of sleep,
but you're also, you know, run a business, you're incredibly intelligent.
You have to, most of your happiness and success relies on you thinking clearly.
So how does that affect your mind and your body in terms of performance?
Yes.
Sleep, but actually like mental performance.
As you were explaining your objective function of, for example, in the criteria you are including,
you like certain neurochemical states, like you like feeling like you're living life,
that life has enjoyment, that sometimes you want to disregard certain rules to have a
moment of passion, of focus.
There's this architecture of the way Lex is, which makes you happy as a story you tell,
as something you kind of experience, maybe the experience is a bit more complicated,
but it's in this idea you have, this is a version of you.
And the reason why I maintain the schedule I do is I've chosen a game to say I would
like to live a life where I care more about what intelligent, what people who live in
2000, the year 2500 think of me than I do today.
That's the game I'm trying to play.
And so therefore, the only thing I really care about on this optimization is trying
to see past myself, past my limitations, using zeroes principle thinking, pull myself out
of this contextual mesh we're in right now and say, what will matter 100 years from now
and 200 years from now?
What are the big things really going on that are defining reality?
And I find that if I were to hang out with Diet Soda Lex and Diet Soda Brian were to
play along with that, and my deep sleep were to get crushed as a result, my mind would
not be on what matters in 100 years or 200 years or 300 years, I would be irritable,
I would be, you know, I'd be in a different state.
And so it's just gameplay selection.
It's what you and I have chosen to think about.
It's what we've chosen to work on.
And this is why I'm saying that no generation of humans have ever been afforded the opportunity
to look at their lifespan and contemplate that they will have the possibility of experiencing
an evolved form of consciousness that is undoneifiable, that would fall into the zeroes category
of potential.
That to me is the most exciting thing in existence.
And I would not trade any momentary neurochemical state right now in exchange for that.
I would be willing to deprive myself of all momentary joy in the pursuit of that goal
because that's what makes me happy.
That's brilliant.
But I'm a bit, I just looked it up, I'm with a, I just looked up Braveheart speech in
William Wallace, but I don't know if you've seen it, fight and you may die, run and you'll
live at least a while and dying in your beds many years from now.
Would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just
one chance, picture of Mel Gibson saying this, to come back here and tell our enemies that
they may take our lives with growing excitement, but they'll never take our freedom.
I get excited every time I see that in the movie, but that's kind of how I approach life.
Do you think they were tracking their sleep?
They were not tracking their sleep and they ate way too much brisket and they were fat,
unhealthy, died early and were primitive, but there's something in my eight brain that's
attracted to that, even though most of my life is fully aligned with the way you see
yours.
The word is for comedy, of course, but part of it is like, I'm almost afraid of over-optimization.
Really what you're saying though, if we're looking at this, let's say from a first principles
perspective, when you read those words, they conjure up certain life experiences, but you're
basically saying I experience a certain neurotransmitter state when these things are in action.
That's all you're saying.
So whether it's that or something else, you're just saying you have a selection for how your
state for your body.
So if you as an engineer of consciousness, that should just be engineerable and that's
just triggering certain chemical reactions.
So it doesn't mean they have to be mutually exclusive.
You can have that and experience that and also not sacrifice long-term health.
And I think that's the potential of where we're going is we don't have to assume they
are trade-offs that must be had.
Absolutely.
I guess from my particular brain, it's useful to have the outlier experiences that also
come along with the illusion of free will where I chose those experiences that make me feel
like it's freedom.
Listen, going to Texas made me realize I spent, so it's still am, but I lived at Cambridge
at MIT and I never felt like home there.
I felt like home in the space of ideas with the colleagues, like when I was actually discussing
ideas, but there is something about the constraints, how cautious people are, how much they valued
also kind of material success, career success.
When I showed up to Texas, it felt like I belong.
That was very interesting, but that's my neurochemistry, whatever the hell that is, whatever, maybe
probably is rooted to the fact that I grew up in the Soviet Union, it was such a constrained
system that you really deeply value freedom and you always want to escape the man and
the control of centralized systems.
I don't know what it is, but at the same time, I love strictness.
I love the dogmatic authoritarianism of diet, of the same habit, exactly the habit you have.
I think that's actually when bodies perform optimally, my body performs optimally.
So balancing those two, I think if I have the data, every once in a while, party with
some wild people, but most of the time, eat once a day, perhaps in the morning, I'm going
to try that.
That might be very interesting, but I'd rather not try it.
I'd rather have the data that tells me to do it, but in general, you're able to eating
once a day, think deeply about stuff like this, a concern that people have is like,
does your energy wane, all those kinds of things, do you find that it's, especially
because it's unique, it's vegan as well.
So you find that you're able to have a clear mind, a focus, and just physically and mentally
throughout?
Yeah.
I find my personal experience in thinking about hard things is, often times, I feel like
I'm looking through a telescope and I'm aligning two or three telescopes and you have to close
one eye and move it back and forth a little bit and just find just the right alignment
thing.
You find just a sneak peek at the thing you're trying to find, but it's fleeting.
If you move just one little bit, it's gone.
And oftentimes, what I feel like are the ideas I value the most are like that.
They're so fragile and fleeting and slippery and elusive and it requires a sensitivity
to thinking and a sensitivity to maneuver through these things.
If I concede to a world where I'm on my phone texting, I'm also on social media, I'm also
doing 15 things at the same time because I'm running the company and I'm also feeling
terrible from the last night, it all just comes crashing down and the quality of my
thoughts goes to a zero.
I'm a functional person to respond to basic level things, but I don't feel like I'm
doing anything interesting.
I think that's a good word, sensitivity, because that's what thinking deeply feels like is
you're sensitive to the fragile thoughts and you're right.
All those other distractions kind of dull your ability to be sensitive to the fragile
thoughts.
It's a really good word.
Out of all the things you've done, you've also climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.
Is this true?
It's true.
What do you, why and how and what do you take from that experience?
I guess the backstory is relevant because in that moment, it was the darkest time in
my life.
I was ending a 13-year marriage, I was leaving my religion, I sold brain tree and I was battling
depression where I was just like at the end and I got invited to go to Tanzania as part
of a group that was raising money to build clean water wells and I had made some money
from brain tree and so I was able to donate $25,000 and it was the first time I had ever
had money to donate outside of paying tithing in my religion and it was such a phenomenal
experience to contribute something meaningful to someone else in that form and as part of
this process, we were going to climb the mountain and so we went there and we saw the
clean water wells we were building.
We spoke to the people there and it was very energizing and then we climbed Kilimanjaro
and I came down with a stomach flu on day three and I also had altitude sickness but
I became so sick that on day four, we are somebody on day five, I came into the camp,
base camp at 15,000 feet just going to the bathroom on myself and like falling all over
it.
It was just, I was just a disaster.
I was so sick.
Just stomach flu and altitude sickness.
Yeah, and I just was destroyed from the situation and plus psychologically one of the lowest
points.
Yeah, and I think that was probably a big contributor.
I was just smoked as a human, just absolutely done and I had three young children and so
I was trying to reconcile like this is not a whether I live or not is not my decision
by itself.
I'm now intertwined with these three little people and I have an obligation whether I
like it or not, I need to be there and so it did.
It felt like I was just stuck in a straight jacket and I had to decide whether I was
going to summit the next day with the team and it was a difficult decision because once
you start hiking, there's no way to get off the mountain and a midnight came and our guide
came in and he said, where are you at and I said, I think I'm okay.
I think I can try and so we went and so from midnight to I made it to the summit at 5am.
It was one of the most transformational moments of my existence and the mountain became my
problem.
It became everything that I was struggling with and when I started hiking, it was the
pain got so ferocious that it was kind of like this.
It became so ferocious that I turned my music to Eminem and he was the only person in existence
that spoke to my soul and it was something about his anger and his vibrancy in his multi-dimensional
way, he's the only person who I could turn on and I could say, I feel some relief.
I turned on Eminem and I made it to the summit after five hours but just a hundred yards
from the top.
I was with my guide, Ike and I started getting very dizzy and I felt like I was going to
fall backwards off this cliff area we are on.
I was like, this is dangerous and he said, look Brian, I know where you're at and I can
tell you you've got it in you so I want you to look up, take a step, take a breath and
look up, take a breath and take a step and I did and I made it and so I sat down with
him at the top and I just cried like a baby.
Broke down.
I just lost it and so he let me do my thing and then we pulled out the pulse oximeter
and he measured my blood oxygen levels and it was like 50-something percent and it was
a danger zone.
So he looked at it and I think he was like really alarmed that I was in this situation
and so he said, we can't get a helicopter here and we can't get you an emergency evacuated,
you've got to go down, you've got to hike down to 15,000 feet to get base camp.
And so we went out on the mountain, I got back down to base camp and again that was
pretty difficult and then they put me on a stretcher, this metal stretcher with this
one wheel and a team of six people wheeled me down the mountain and it was pretty tortuous
and I'm very appreciative they did.
Also the trail was very bumpy so they'd go over the big rocks and so my head would just
slam against this metal thing for hours and so I just felt awful plus I'd get my head
slammed every couple seconds.
So the whole experience was really a life changing moment and that was the demarcation
of me basically building your life of basically I said, I'm going to reconstruct Brian, my
understanding of reality, my existential reality is what I want to go after and I try, I mean
as much as that's possible as a human but that's when I set out to rebuild everything.
Was it the struggle of that?
I mean there's also just like the romantic poetic, it's a freaking mountain, there's
a man in pain, psychological and physical struggling up a mountain but it's just struggle
just in the face of, just pushing through in the face of hardship or nature too, something
much bigger than you.
Is that, was that the thing that just clicked?
For me it felt like I was just locked in with reality and it was a death match, it was in
that moment one of us is going to die.
To your pondering death, like not surviving.
And that was the moment and it was, the summit to me was, I'm going to come out on top and
I can do this and giving in was, it's like I'm just done.
So it did, I locked in and that's why mountains are magical to me.
I didn't expect that, I didn't design that, I didn't know that was going to be the case.
It would not have been something I would have anticipated.
But you are not the same man afterwards.
Is there advice you can give to young people today that look at your story that's successful
in many dimensions?
Advice you can give to them about how to be successful in their career, successful in
life, whatever path they choose.
Yes, I would say listen to advice and see it for what it is, a mirror of that person
and then map and know that your future is going to be in a zero principle land.
And so what you're hearing today is a representation of what may have been the right principles
to build upon previously, but they're likely depreciating very fast.
And so I am a strong proponent that people ask for advice, but they don't take advice.
So how do you take advice properly?
It's in the careful examination of the advice.
It's actually, the person makes a statement about a given thing somebody should follow.
The value is not doing that, the value is understanding the assumption stack they built,
the assumption and knowledge stack they built around that body of knowledge.
That's the value.
It's not doing what they say.
Concerning the advice, but digging deeper to understand the assumption stack, like the
full person.
I mean, this is deep empathy, essentially, to understand the journey of the person that
arrived at the advice.
And the advice is just the tip of the iceberg that ultimately is not the thing that gives
you.
That's right.
The right thing to do, it could be the complete wrong thing to do depending on the assumption
stack.
So you need to investigate the whole thing.
Is there some, are there been people in your startup, in your business journey that have
served that role of advice giver that's been helpful?
Or do you feel like your journey felt like a lonely path, or was it one that was, of course,
for all, while they're born and die alone, but do you fundamentally remember the experiences
when you leaned on people at a particular moment or a time that changed everything?
The most significant moments of my memory, for example, like on Kilimanjaro, when Ike,
some person I'd never met in Tanzania, was able to, in that moment, apparently see my
soul when I was in this death match with reality.
And he gave me the instructions, look up, step.
And so there's magical people in my life that have done things like that.
And I suspect they probably don't know.
I probably should be better at identifying those things and, but yeah, hopefully the,
I suppose like a wisdom I would aspire to is to have the awareness and the empathy to
be that for other people and not a retail advertiser of advice, of tricks and for life,
but deeply meaningful and empathetic with a one-on-one context with people that it really
could make a difference.
Yeah, I actually kind of experienced, I think about that sometimes, you know, you have like
an 18-year-old kid come up to you, it's not always obvious, it's not always easy to really
listen to them.
Like not the facts, but like see who that person is.
I think people say that about being a parent is, you know, you want to consider that you
want to be the authority figure in a sense that you really want to consider that there's
a special unique human being there with a unique brain that may be brilliant in ways
that you are not understanding that you'll never be and really try to hear that.
So when giving advice or something to that, it's a both sides should be deeply empathetic
about the assumption stack.
I love that terminology.
What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
Of life, why the hell are we here, Ryan Johnson, we've been talking about brains and studying
brains and you had this very eloquent way of describing life on earth as an optimization
problem of the cost of intelligence going to zero at first through the evolutionary process
and then eventually through building through our technology building more and more intelligent
systems.
Have you ever asked yourself why is doing that?
Yeah, I think the answer to this question, again, the information value is more in the
mirror it provides of that person, which is a representation of the technological, social,
political context of the time.
So if you ask this question 100 years ago, you would get a certain answer that reflects
that time period.
Same thing would be true for 1000 years ago.
It's rare.
It's difficult for a person to pull themselves out of their contextual awareness and offer
truly original response.
And so knowing that I am contextually influenced by the situation that I am a mirror for our
reality, I would say that in this moment, I think the real game going on is that in evolution
built a system of scaffolding intelligence that produced us.
We are now building intelligent systems that are scaffolding higher dimensional intelligence
that's developing more robust systems of intelligence.
In doing in that process with the cost going to zero, then the meaning of life becomes
goal alignment, which is the negotiation of our conscious and unconscious existence.
And then I'd say the third thing is if we're thinking that we want to be explorers is our
technological progress is getting to a point where we could aspirationally say we want
to figure out what is really going on, really going on.
Because does any of this really make sense?
Now we may be 100, 200, 500, 1000 years away from being able to poke our way out of whatever
is going on.
But it's interesting that we could even state an aspiration to say we want to poke at this
question.
But I'd say in this moment of time, the meaning of life is that we can build a future state
of existence that is more fantastic than anything we could ever imagine.
The striving for something more amazing.
And that defies expectations that we would consider bewildering and all the things.
And I guess the last thing, if there's multiple meanings of life, it would be infinite games.
James Kars wrote the book, finite games, infinite games.
The only game to play right now is to keep playing the game.
And so this goes back to the algorithm of the Lex algorithm of diet soda and brisket
and pursuing the passion.
What I'm suggesting is there's a moment here where we can contemplate playing infinite
games.
Therefore it may make sense to err on the side of making sure one is in a situation to
be playing infinite games if that opportunity arises.
So the landscape of possibility is changing very, very fast.
And therefore our old algorithms of how we might assess risk assessment and what things
we might pursue and why those assumptions may fall away very quickly.
Well, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the game you, Mr. Brian Johnson,
have been playing is quite incredible.
Thank you so much for talking to me.
Thanks, Lex.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Johnson.
And thank you to FourSigmatic, Netsuite, Grammarly, and ExpressVPN.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
And now let me leave you with some words from Diane Ackerman.
Our brain is a crowded chemistry lab bustling with nonstop neural conversations.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.