Bryan Johnson: Kernel Brain-Computer Interfaces | Lex Fridman Podcast #186
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Bryan Johnson is the founder and CEO of Kernel, OS Fund, and previously Braintree. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Bryan's Twitter: https://twitter.com/bryan_johnson
Bryan's Website: https://www.bryanjohnson.co/
Kernel's Twitter: https://twitter.com/KernelCo
Kernel's Website: https://www.kernel.com/

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:13 - Kernel Flow demo
10:25 - The future of brain-computer interfaces
43:54 - Existential risk
49:33 - Overcoming depression
1:04:52 - Zeroth principles thinking
1:13:05 - Engineering consciousness
1:19:19 - Privacy
1:23:48 - Neuralink
1:33:27 - Braintree and Venmo
1:49:10 - Eating one meal a day
1:55:22 - Sleep
2:15:04 - Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro
2:22:02 - Advice for young people
2:26:38 - Meaning of life

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 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, Forsigmatic, 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 FlowBrain interface in the beginning of this conversation, as you can see if you watch the video version of this episode. And there was 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 just 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 2004 in front of us. What are we doing? 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 just giant heads? As like an ego? Or are you saying physically? Both. I'm going to drop it on you. It's a nice massage. Yes. Okay, how does this feel? It's okay to move around? It feels, oh yeah. This feels awesome. It's a pretty good fit. Thank you. That feels good. So 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? Yep, 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. 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. 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 laughed and Photoshop 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. Academia nuts. That was pretty good. 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. It's a functional imaging of brain activity. And so as your neurons fire electrically and chemically, it creates blood oxygenation levels when we're measuring that. And so you'll see in the reconstructions we do for you, you'll see your activation patterns in 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 a hundred picoseconds. And then the photons scatter and absorb in your brain. And then a few go in, a few come back out, a bunch go in, then 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 uncomfortable. 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. Yeah, that's right. I think people are accustomed to being in big systems like fMRI where there's 120 decibel 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. It measures your brain activity in the contextual environment you choose. So if we want to have it during a podcast, if we want to be at home in a business setting, it's freedom to be where to record your brain activity in the setting that you choose. Yeah, but sort of from an engineer 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. 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. It's amazing to have code running to the side measuring stuff and collecting data. I feel like much more important now that my data is being recorded. You know when you have a good friend that listens to you, that actually is listening to you? This is what I feel like a much better friend because it's accurately listening to me, Ubuntu. What a cool perspective. I hadn't thought about that of feeling understood. Yeah, heard. Yeah, 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 brain interfaces 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 while we were 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 a 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 can 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. 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 was the feeling and it felt like the future. So it was a pretty cool experience. And from the sort of mechanical perspective, it was cool to have an actual device that feels pretty good. It 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 a Huberman Lab podcast. We're working on a paper together about eye movement and so on. And he's a neuroscientist and I'm a data person, machine learning person. 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. There's a very powerful thing to it being so easy to just put on that you can scale much easier. If you think about that second thing you said about the science of the brain, most we've done a pretty good job. Like we, the human race has done a pretty good job figuring out how to quantify the things around us from distance 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 a 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 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. 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 formal introduction to 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 the 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 taking 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 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 a 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. If 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 humans to then find value with it. So the analogy is like brain interfaces are like early 90s of the internet. 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, I don't know why you, if you listen to this, I bring up aliens every single conversation. So I don't know how you would know what the Drake equation is, but you mean like the killer app, it would be one alien civilization equation. So meaning like, this is in search of an application that's impactful, transformative. By the way, it should be, we need to come up with a better term than killer app as a, as a, it's also violent, right? It's very violent, you can go like viral app. That's horrible too, right? It's some very, uh, inspiringly impactful application. How about that? No. Okay. So ballistic with killer app. That's fine. Nobody's, but I concur with you. I dislike the chosen words in capturing the concept. You know, it's, it's one of those sticky things that, uh, is as effective to use in the tech world. So 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 cyber regret having used that word in this conversation because it's something I would not normally do. I, I used it 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 a impactful application or value creation, value creation, something people love using. There we go. That's it. Love app. Okay. So what, uh, do you have any ideas? So you're basically creating a framework where there's the possibility of a discovery of, uh, an application that people love using is do you have ideas? We've began to play a fun game internally where when we have these discussions or we begin circ circling around this concept of, does anybody have an idea? Does anyone have intuitions? And if we see the conversation starting to veer in that direction, we flag it and say human intuition alert, stop it. And so 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 neuroscientists who have been, have been talking to us while I was speaking to this one young associate professor and I approached a 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 which one's not? And he said, I don't care. Just give me the data. All I care about is my machine learning model. But importantly, he did not have a theory of mind. He did not come to the table and say, I think the brain operates in this way and these reasons or have 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 the past couple of years. And we're doing the same in our value creation market strategy. So more collect more data, clean data, make the product such that the collection of data is easy and, and, and fun. And then the rest will just spring to life through humans playing around with them. Our objective is to create the most valuable data collection system of the brain ever. And with that, then applying 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 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. It's why most of the time it just ling, it languishes in academia for quite some time, but we hope that we will over, you know, cross over 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 this on their head and keep on their head regularly? Is there, like who is going to discover that reason? Is it going to be people just kind of organically or is there going to be a Angry Birds style application that's just 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, metabolic approximations, et cetera. For the first time in my life, I had access to information, sleep patterns that were highly impactful. And 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-interest back and deduce these things. This is information that was available to be acquired, but it just wasn't. I would have to dig an expensive sleep study. Then it's an end, like one night and that's not good enough to look at, to run all my trials. But if you look just at the information that one can acquire on their wrist, and now you're applying it 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 coworkers. We performed four cognitive tasks over 13 sessions. And we focused on reaction time, impulse control, short-term memory, and then a resting state task. And 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 my deep sleep determined whether or not I would be able to resist temptation the following day. And my brain did show that as one example. And so if you start thinking, if you actually have data on yourself on your entire cortex, you can control the settings, I think there's probably a large number of things that we could discover about ourselves. Very, very small and very, very big. Just for example, when you read news, what's going on? Like when you use social media, when you use news, all the ways we allocate attention with the computer. That seems like a compelling place to where you would want to put on Kernel. By the way, what is it called? Kernel Flux? Kernel? Flow. We have two technologies, you or Flow. Flow. Okay. So when you put on the Kernel Flow, it seems like to be a compelling time and place to do it is when you're behind a desk behind a computer. Because you could probably wear it for prolonged periods of time as you're taking in content. And there could be a lot of, because so much of our lives happens in the digital world now. But kind of coupling the information about the human mind with the consumption and 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 space effects on our body. It's interesting to think in terms of both like for work, I'm a big fan of, so Cal Newport has ideas of deep work that I spend 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 waning of that, the ups and downs of that, and it's almost like 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, 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, I just talked to Sam Harris a few days ago and been building up to that. I started using, started meditating using his app, waking up, very much recommend it. And be interested in getting 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 before the meditation, during it and after all those kinds of things. And you, all of your examples, it's interesting that everyone who's designed an experience for you. So whether it be the meditation app or the deep work or all the things you mentioned, they constructed this product with a certain number of knowns. Now, what if we expanded the number of knowns by 10 X or 20 X or 30 X, they would reconstruct their product, quote, 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. But 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. The objective 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, or like really dumb, just very simple applications that could just improve the quality of the experience of using the app. I'm imagining if you have your neurome, this is Lex and there's a statistical representation of you and you engage with the app and it says, Lex, you're 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's 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 influenced my conscious and unconscious experience. Well, in some sense, the data would help encourage you to be more self-aware, not just because you trust everything the data is saying, but is it'll give you a prod to start investigating. Like I would love to get like a rating, like a ranking of all the things I do and what are the things, this is probably important to do without the data, but the data will certainly help. It's 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. We like, I do pig out at night as well and it never makes you feel good. Like you're in a safe space. This is a safe space. Let's hear it. No, 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 leaning on science. I'm leaning on personal experience and that's really important. I don't need to read. I'm not going to go on 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 or 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 and you know, 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, I can have like chalk. I can, I can go off the diet. I feel fine. It's not, it's a, it's a gradual, uh, uh, it's a gradual worsening of how I feel, but what I eat only meat, I feel great. And it'd be nice to be reminded of that. Like there'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, uh, when I exercise, not, I hate exercise, okay. But in the rest of the day, the, uh, the impact it has on my mind and the clarity of mind and 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, would be nice. It would be a nice reminder, almost like a statement, like remember what feels good and whatnot. And there could be things like, uh, that I'm not many things like you're, you're suggesting that I could not be aware of. There might be sitting right in front of me that makes 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, 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 lists. And so I never actually asked 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's all has their, all has their supporting science in certain contextual settings, but it's not N of one. And like you're saying, this dietary really is an N of one. What people have published scientifically of course can be used for nice groundings, but it changes when you get to an N of one level. And so that's what gets me excited about brain interfaces 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 that, 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 a 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? Yeah. That's beautiful. That means really beautifully put. By the way, testing round, what does that look like? What's that? Well, you mentioned. Yeah, the very, the tests I do. Yes. So that includes a complete blood panel. I do a microbiome test. I do a food inflammation, a diet induced inflammation. So I look for X-satokine 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 very various nutrients. So that's self report of like how you feel, you know, almost like, you can't demote your conscious, you still exist within your conscious mind. Right? So that lived experience is 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 that interval. And they're all 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, on a cost curve over a certain design, over a certain timeframe. But our ability to, you know, evolution produced us an intelligent, a 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 costs is going to zero. For example. Again, just give me a second. That's brilliant. Okay. So, you know, in 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 that's going on and then now in parallel to that, then you say, okay, 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 are these 200 biomarkers where I'm saying when, when Brian exists on a data basis 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. You basically 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. 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 it 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 AIS system, it's the paperclip thing with unmasked is dumb, but has unintended consequences to where it destroys human civilization. Do you worry about those kinds of things? I mean, it's, it's unsurprising that a new thing comes into this fear 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. We can't, 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. So 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, but like we have this potential. And so we just haven't given a 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. I mean, there's parallels to this. You think about people before the internet as the internet was coming to life. I mean, 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're understanding 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, like sweep across the populations. And so it's almost, I mean, 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 don't think we're realizing how much that actually changed people or societies. But like to predict that before the internet would have been very difficult. And 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? And it seems like it's a fog, you don't know. And it could be, it could, whatever comes to be could destroy the world. We could be the last generation, but it also could transform in ways that creates a, you know, 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. It might be more, you know, 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, like it's like, it's, it's, it's funny to think about a bunch of sort of hypothetical questions of would it be more fulfilling to live in a virtual world? Like if you were able to plug your brain in, in a very dense way into a video game, like which world would you want to live in? In the video game or in the physical world? For most of us, we kind of toying 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, maybe in a hundred years we're all living inside a video game. Hopefully not Call of Duty. Hopefully more like, like Sims five, which, 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, that, that, 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 in my life. I, you know, I had chronic depression for 10 years. And so in that 10 year time period, I desperately wanted lights to be off. And the thing that made it even worse is I was in a religious, 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. And so 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, or reward you for your behaviors. And so it was almost like this is indescribable hopelessness of not only being in hopeless despair of not wanting to exist, but then also being forced to be, to exist. And so there was a duration of my time, of a duration of life where I'd say like, yes, I have no remorse for lights being out and actually wanted 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 future 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. But 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 doing 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. And so am I sad that the brain may be off one day? It depends on the contextual setting. 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 biased, 188 chronicle biases and how my brain is distorting reality all the time. I have gone from one reality to another. I don't trust reality. I don't trust realities 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. So 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, you know, 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 life 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 that that is an irrational situation. But the key is when you're in that situation, 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 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 scale from one to 10, how bad do you want to commit suicide? 10. Yeah, at this moment. Here's his bottle. How much should I take? Well, I don't know. Yeah, it's very, very crude. And as data opens up the, yeah, it 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 what there, 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. Like 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 it's like that's life. But I get that from just looking at a cup. Like I'm waiting for the coffee to brew. And 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. But that is purely chemistry. There's no rational, it doesn't fit with the rest of my life. I have all this shit. I'm always late to stuff. I'm always like, there's all stuff, you know, I'm super self critical, like really self critical about everything I do. To the point I will 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 this flip side of that is what depression probably is, is the opposite of that feeling of, like, cause I bet you that feeling of the cup being amazing is, 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 a, 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 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 in 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 compound or 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, 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 enough, 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. 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 else? And can we get, can we convert that into data? Can you add aliens in there? Yeah, aliens, definitely. Do you actually meet aliens and elves are elves, the aliens, I'm asking for a few Austin friends yet that they're convinced that they've actually met the elves. What are elves like? Are they friendly? Are they helping? 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. 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 there's 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. It's like a friend of a friend. Yeah, if you gave them a telephone. Yeah, a bit of a, and the whole point is that in psychedelics and certainly in DMT, this is where the brain data versus word data fails, which is, you know, words can't convey the experience. Most people that you can be poetic and so on, but it really does not convey the experience of what it actually means to meet the elves. 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-interests, tell me how's the health of your heart. And you sit there and you close your eyes and you think, feels all right. Like things seem, things feel okay. And then you went to the cardiologist and the cardiologist like, Hey Lex, you know, tell me how you feel. Like, 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 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, 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, uh, 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 to 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, 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. Meditation just does good things in a crude fashion. So in your blog post, zero principle thinking, good title, you ponder how do people come up with a truly original ideas? What, what's your thoughts on this as a human and as a person who's measuring brain data? Zero 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 brain tree 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 really good book by the way. It's I think it's my favorite book I've ever read. It's also a really interesting number zero. And I wasn't aware that the number zero had to be discovered. I didn't realize that it caused a revolution in philosophy and, and it just tore up math and it tore up. 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. Yeah. And so zero is of course the representation of a zero 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 in the zero category. And so in thinking this through, I, I was wanting to find a quantitative structure on how to think about these zero principles. And that's, so I came up with that to be a coupler with first principles thinking. And so now it's a staple as 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 very small set. 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, accomplishment, et cetera, it minimizes zero principle thinking. But the reason why I think zero principle thinking should be a staple of our shared cognitive infrastructure is if you look through the history of past couple 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, the human go players, when it saw AlphaGo's moves, it attributed it to like playing with an alien, playing go with, 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 reasonably 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 towards zero, you have an increased number of zeros being produced with a tight connection between human and computers. That's when I got to a point and said we cannot predict the future with first principles thinking. We can't, that cannot be our imagination set. It can't be our sole anchor in this situation that basically the future of our conscious existence 20, 30, 40, 50 years is probably a zero. Just to clarify, when you say zero, you're referring to basically a truly revolutionary idea. Yet something that is currently not a building block of our shared conscious existence, either in the form of knowledge. Yeah, it's currently not manifest in what we acknowledge. I suppose zero principles 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 principle insight. You mean general relativity, space time. Basically, building upon what Newton had done and said yes, also, and it just changed the fabric of our understanding of reality. That was unexpected. It existed. It became part of our awareness. The moves AlphaGo made existed. It just came into our awareness. 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? That goes back to known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. First principles and zero principle thinking gives us a quantitative framework to say there's no way for us to mathematically try to create probabilities for these things. Therefore, 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. In thinking about engineering of consciousness, I think it's feasible. I think it's possible in the language that we're using here. 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. I don't want to hear from the philosophers, but I think that's what we kind of do to each other. Okay. 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. That's the display of consciousness. It's the same as the display of emotion. Emotion is created through communication. We're just created through its use. We somehow, humans, especially philosophers, the hard problem of consciousness, really want to believe that we possess this thing. There's an elf sitting there with a hat or nametag that says consciousness, and they're feeding this subjective experience to us, as opposed to it actually being an illusion that we construct to make social communication more effective. I think if you focus on creating the illusion of consciousness, you can create some very fulfilling experiences in software. That to me is a compelling space of ideas to explore. I agree with you. I think going back to our experience together with Brain Interface is on, you could imagine if we get to a certain level of maturity. First let's take the inverse of this. 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. 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. That is altering the conscious experience between two individuals. If we add Brain Interface 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. Maybe I understand when you look at the cup and you experience that happiness, you can tell me you're happy. I then do theory of mine 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. 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 to create ethical systems 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 and 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 idea. Or better yet, teach it some, have it read the founding 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. It learns what it means to be free and a sovereign individual. So it depends what kind of version of GPT-3 you want. One that's free, one that behaves well with the social revolution. You want a socialist GPT-3, you want an anarchist GPT-3, you want to polite, like you take it home to visit mom and dad, GPT-3 and you want like party and like 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. 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, 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 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. They can just go out 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. The 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 it's being shared with under what terms and conditions. We haven't reached that level of sophistication with our products. 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? Yeah. 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 company is 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 if in the future it says 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 model of you and sell that predictability. And so it's not unimaginable that you will create with like 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 D.Lan Musk and he has a company, one of the many companies called Neuralink 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 requires 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 getting 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 what 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. Until less than a year after Elon and I were engaged, I shifted kernel to do non-invasive. And we had this neuroscientist come to kernel we were talking about. He had been doing a neural surgery 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 a 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 was seven years and it ended up being 15 years and they thought it'd be a hundred million, 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 non-invasive 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 non-invasive to invasive to non-invasive. So the answer is yes to that. There's something there that's possible. The answer is 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 value is 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 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 to 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. It's possible that the path we chose are non-invasive fall short for a variety of reasons. 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 as bandwidth increased, so did the utility of that connection and so did the ecosystem improve. And so if you say what kernel flow is going to give you a full screen on the picture of information, but as 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 in 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. So it's kind of fascinating to think about that. It's very true that you don't know both paths are 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. It's the 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 brain interfaces, 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 of bringing brain interfaces mainstream. And so both they and us, we've both spent over a hundred million dollars. And that's kind of what it takes to have a go at this because you need to build full stack. I mean, at Kernel, we are from the photon and the atom through the machine learning. We have just under a hundred 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 brain interfaces. And so we'll see over the next couple of years, whether it's the right time or whether we are 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 the 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, okay, 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 $2.5 billion. 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 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. 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, 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'm entrepreneurial. I tried 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. I did not know this story. This is great. I love the head drop. That's exactly right. So it was the low points to which we go in life. 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 a hundred percent 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 dressed 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 to listen to 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 time. And so I figured out that the industry really was built on people, on deceit, basically people promising things that were not reality. So I'd walk into a business and I'd say, look, I would give you a hundred dollars. I'd put a hundred dollar bill and say, I'll give you a hundred dollars for three minutes of your time. If you don't say yes to what I'm saying, I'll give you a hundred dollars. And then he'd usually crack a smile and say, okay, what do you got for me, son? And so I'd sit down and I just opened 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 when someone asks and you know, just like the basic, like you're okay. 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 to, 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, you know, 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. They did it for nine months. And at the time my customer base was making, was generating around, I think it was six, if I remember correctly, $62,504 a month were 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 1999 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. And 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 and make it easy and beautiful and just a magical experience and then provide customer service on top of that, that would be great. What I was really going after though, it was PayPal. They were the only company in payments making money because they had the 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 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. And so focus on the merchant side and then get the payments company that does the customer, the whatever. So the other side of it. Yeah. 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, 37Signals, 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. Then something very counterintuitive, which is make public your private financial transactions, which people previously thought were something that should be hidden from others. And we acquired Venmo. And at that point, 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 in 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. 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 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 Brain Interfaces. You know, payments in themselves are revolutionary technologies that can change the world. 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 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, decentralizing 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 of human rights and all those kinds of things. What's your sense, just all your expertise 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? To be clear, my communication wasn't meant to minimize payments or to denigrate it in any way. It was an attempt at 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 out performer 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 being very formal and calculative here, but some of that is just like what do you sense? 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 not familiar, Coinbase is a place where you 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 in cryptocurrency land. I concur with the statement 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 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 to me, it's a continuous spectrum of possibility. 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 this money as particularly distinct from... I don't. I think 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? Do you have a sense that in 21st century, cryptocurrency will be embraced by governments and changed the face of governments, the structure of governments? It's the same way I think about my diet, where previously it was conscious Brian looking at foods in certain biochemical states. Am I hungry, am I irritated, am I 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. 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 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. I see there are 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 was too willing to not making good decisions for the long-term wellbeing 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. 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? It never occurred to me, this revolution, until you've outlined that. So maybe can you give some details and this is just you, this is one person, Brian arrives 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, then I measure again and then I'm measuring all the time. So what I, of course, I'm optimizing for my biomarkers. I want perfect cholesterol and I want perfect blood glucose levels and perfect DNA methylation processes. I also want perfect sleep. And so for example, recently, 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. And my sleep quality then of course feeds into my willpower. So it creates this virtuous cycle. 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. Like a blender. Yeah. 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- So vegan. Vegan, yes. Vegan. So that's fat and that's like that's fat and carbs and some protein and so on. Does it taste good? I love it. I love it so much. I dream about it. Yeah. That's awesome. And then I have a third dish, which is, it changes every day. Today it was kale and spinach and sweet potato. And then I take about 20 supplements that hopefully constitute a perfect nutritional profile. So what I'm trying to do is create the perfect diet for my body every single day. Where sleep is part of the optimization. That's right. You're like one of the things you're really tracking. I mean, 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? 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. And then the good North Whitehead said, civilization advances as it extends the number of important operations it can do without thinking about them. Yes. 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 end 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 just did the data collection or it was being essentially done for you and you can outsource that to another scientist that's doing the end of one study of you. That's right. Because every time I spend time thinking about this or executing, spending time on it, 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 it and 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 I presumably 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's 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, Alex? Well, yeah, a lot. I'm a big believer in that actually. I'm a big believer in chaos and not giving like giving into your passion and sometimes doing things that are out of the ordinary, they're like 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 like it's nice to have like 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 that 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 there's a... That requires real discipline and forming habits. There's some aspect to which some of the best days and weeks of my life have been, yeah, 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 own body. Again, the experiment of N of one. 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... That all maps to sort of data, at least the truth, exactly what 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, X-ray 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 happening to your brain in that situation. We don't know the consequences of modern day life on our brain. 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 optimize life for whatever things you're trying to do, 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, 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 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, it'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 a, 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 you have to kind of, it's a weird, there's so many variables in an objective function that 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, like 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 than, 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, the 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. And 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. 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, you spoke about the metrics of sleep, but you're also, you run a business, you're incredibly intelligent. Mostly your happiness and success relies on you thinking clearly. So how does that affect your mind and your body in terms of performance? So not just sleep, but actual mental performance. As you were explaining your objective function of, for example, in the criteria you were including, you like certain neurochemical states. 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, something you kind of experience. Maybe the experience is a bit more complicated, but 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 people who live in 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 a hundred 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 a hundred years or 200 years or 300 years. I would be irritable. I would 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 undeniable, that would fall in a zero 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, I'd 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 just looked up Braveheart's speech and 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 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. And do you think they were tracking their sleep? We're 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. Part of it 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 experienced 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. And so if you as an engineer of consciousness, that should just be engineerable. 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. So 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 I was, I 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, whatever, maybe probably is rooted to the fact that I grew up in the Soviet Union. It was so such a constrained system that you'd really deeply value freedom. You always want to escape the man and the control of centralized systems. I don't know what it is, but that's, but at the same time, I love strictness. I love the dogmatic authoritarianism of diet, of like 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. 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 like my personal experience in thinking about hard things is like, oftentimes I feel like I'm looking through a telescope and I come aligning two or three telescopes and you kind of have to close one eye and move it back and forth a little bit and just find just the right alignment. Then 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 a 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 of my life. I was ending a 13 year marriage. I was leaving my religion. I sold Braintree and I was coming a battling depression where I was just at the end. I got invited to go to Tanzania as part of a group that was raising money to build clean water wells. I had made some money from Braintree and so I was able to donate $25,000. It was the first time I had ever had money to donate outside of paying tithing in my religion. It was such a phenomenal experience to contribute something meaningful to someone else in that form. As part of this process, we were going to climb the mountain. We went there and we saw the clean water wells we were building. We spoke to the people there and it was very energizing. When we climbed Kilimanjaro, 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 were summiting on day five, I came into the camp, base camp at 15,000 feet, just going to the bathroom on myself and falling all over. I was just a disaster. I was so sick. Stomach flu and altitude sickness. Yeah, and I just was destroyed from the situation. Plus psychologically, one of the lowest points you've ever had. Yeah, and I think that was probably a big contributor. I was just smoked as a human, just absolutely done. I had three young children and so I was trying to reconcile. 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 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 5 a.m. 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, the pain got so ferocious that it became so ferocious that I turned my music to Eminem. And Eminem was the only person in existence that spoke to my soul. And it was something about his anger and his vibrancy and his multibentrality. 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 100 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 were on. I was like, this is dangerous. And he said, look, Brian, I know where you're at. 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 got there and I just sat down with him at the top. 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 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 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 down 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 torturous. I'm very appreciative they did. Also the trail is very bumpy. So they'd go over these 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 of seconds. So the whole experience was really a life changing moment. And that was the demarcation of me basically building a new life. 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 fricking mountain. Is 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. 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. In that moment, one of us is going to die. So you were 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. And 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. Considering 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. It could be 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. 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, we're all, we're all born and die alone. But do you fundamentally remember the experiences when you leaned on people at a particular moment in 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. 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. Not a retail advertiser of advice, of tricks for life, but deeply meaningful and empathetic with a one-on-one context with people that it really can make a difference. Yeah, I actually kind of experience, I think about that sometimes. 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 want to consider that you don't 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 given advice, there's something to that. 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, Brian 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. You ever ask yourself why is doing that? Yeah. 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 asked this question a hundred years ago, you would get a certain answer that reflects that time period. Same thing would be true of a thousand years ago. 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 evolution built a system of scaffolding intelligence that produced us. We are now building intelligence 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. Does any of this really make sense? Now we may be a hundred, 200, 500, a thousand 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 that that that's, and I guess the last thing, if there's multiple meanings of life, it would be infinite games. You know, James Carson 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 it's just the landscape of possibilities 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 Four Sigmatic, 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.
 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, Forsigmatic, 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 FlowBrain interface in the beginning of this conversation, as you can see if you
 watch the video version of this episode.
 And there was 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 just 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 2004 in front
 of us.
 What are we doing?
 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 just giant heads?
 As like an ego?
 Or are you saying physically?
 Both.
 I'm going to drop it on you.
 It's a nice massage.
 Yes.
 Okay, how does this feel?
 It's okay to move around?
 It feels, oh yeah.
 This feels awesome.
 It's a pretty good fit.
 Thank you.
 That feels good.
 So 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?
 Yep, 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.
 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.
 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 laughed and Photoshop 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.
 Academia nuts.
 That was pretty good.
 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.
 It's a functional imaging of brain activity.
 And so as your neurons fire electrically and chemically, it creates blood oxygenation levels
 when we're measuring that.
 And so you'll see in the reconstructions we do for you, you'll see your activation patterns
 in 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 a hundred picoseconds.
 And then the photons scatter and absorb in your brain.
 And then a few go in, a few come back out, a bunch go in, then 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 uncomfortable.
 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.
 Yeah, that's right.
 I think people are accustomed to being in big systems like fMRI where there's 120 decibel
 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.
 It measures your brain activity in the contextual environment you choose.
 So if we want to have it during a podcast, if we want to be at home in a business setting,
 it's freedom to be where to record your brain activity in the setting that you choose.
 Yeah, but sort of from an engineer 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.
 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.
 It's amazing to have code running to the side measuring stuff and collecting data.
 I feel like much more important now that my data is being recorded.
 You know when you have a good friend that listens to you, that actually is listening
 to you?
 This is what I feel like a much better friend because it's accurately listening to me, Ubuntu.
 What a cool perspective.
 I hadn't thought about that of feeling understood.
 Yeah, heard.
 Yeah, 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 brain interfaces 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
 while we were 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 a 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 can 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.
 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 was the feeling and it felt like the future.
 So it was a pretty cool experience.
 And from the sort of mechanical perspective, it was cool to have an actual device that
 feels pretty good.
 It 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 a Huberman Lab podcast.
 We're working on a paper together about eye movement and so on.
 And he's a neuroscientist and I'm a data person, machine learning person.
 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.
 There's a very powerful thing to it being so easy to just put on that you can scale
 much easier.
 If you think about that second thing you said about the science of the brain, most we've
 done a pretty good job.
 Like we, the human race has done a pretty good job figuring out how to quantify the
 things around us from distance 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 a
 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 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.
 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 formal introduction to 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 the 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 taking 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 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 a 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.
 If 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 humans to then find value with
 it.
 So the analogy is like brain interfaces are like early 90s of the internet.
 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,
 I don't know why you, if you listen to this, I bring up aliens every single conversation.
 So I don't know how you would know what the Drake equation is, but you mean like the killer
 app, it would be one alien civilization equation.
 So meaning like, this is in search of an application that's impactful, transformative.
 By the way, it should be, we need to come up with a better term than killer app as a,
 as a,
 it's also violent, right?
 It's very violent, you can go like viral app.
 That's horrible too, right?
 It's some very, uh, inspiringly impactful application.
 How about that?
 No.
 Okay.
 So ballistic with killer app.
 That's fine.
 Nobody's,
 but I concur with you.
 I dislike the chosen words in capturing the concept.
 You know, it's, it's one of those sticky things that, uh, is as effective to use in the tech
 world.
 So 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 cyber regret having used that word in this
 conversation because it's something I would not normally do.
 I, I used it 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 a impactful application or value creation, value creation, something people
 love using.
 There we go.
 That's it.
 Love app.
 Okay.
 So what, uh, do you have any ideas?
 So you're basically creating a framework where there's the possibility of a discovery of,
 uh, an application that people love using is do you have ideas?
 We've began to play a fun game internally where when we have these discussions or we
 begin circ circling around this concept of, does anybody have an idea?
 Does anyone have intuitions?
 And if we see the conversation starting to veer in that direction, we flag it and say
 human intuition alert, stop it.
 And so 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 neuroscientists who have been, have been talking to us while I
 was speaking to this one young associate professor and I approached a 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 which one's
 not?
 And he said, I don't care.
 Just give me the data.
 All I care about is my machine learning model.
 But importantly, he did not have a theory of mind.
 He did not come to the table and say, I think the brain operates in this way and these reasons
 or have 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 the past couple of years.
 And we're doing the same in our value creation market strategy.
 So more collect more data, clean data, make the product such that the collection of data
 is easy and, and, and fun.
 And then the rest will just spring to life through humans playing around with them.
 Our objective is to create the most valuable data collection system of the brain ever.
 And with that, then applying 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 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.
 It's why most of the time it just ling, it languishes in academia for quite some time,
 but we hope that we will over, you know, cross over 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 this on their head and keep on their head regularly?
 Is there, like who is going to discover that reason?
 Is it going to be people just kind of organically or is there going to be a Angry Birds style
 application that's just 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, metabolic approximations, et cetera.
 For the first time in my life, I had access to information, sleep patterns that were highly
 impactful.
 And 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-interest back
 and deduce these things.
 This is information that was available to be acquired, but it just wasn't.
 I would have to dig an expensive sleep study.
 Then it's an end, like one night and that's not good enough to look at, to run all my
 trials.
 But if you look just at the information that one can acquire on their wrist, and now you're
 applying it 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 coworkers.
 We performed four cognitive tasks over 13 sessions.
 And we focused on reaction time, impulse control, short-term memory, and then a resting state
 task.
 And 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 my deep sleep determined whether or not I would be able to resist temptation the
 following day.
 And my brain did show that as one example.
 And so if you start thinking, if you actually have data on yourself on your entire cortex,
 you can control the settings, I think there's probably a large number of things that we
 could discover about ourselves.
 Very, very small and very, very big.
 Just for example, when you read news, what's going on?
 Like when you use social media, when you use news, all the ways we allocate attention with
 the computer.
 That seems like a compelling place to where you would want to put on Kernel.
 By the way, what is it called?
 Kernel Flux?
 Kernel?
 Flow.
 We have two technologies, you or Flow.
 Flow.
 Okay.
 So when you put on the Kernel Flow, it seems like to be a compelling time and place to
 do it is when you're behind a desk behind a computer.
 Because you could probably wear it for prolonged periods of time as you're taking in content.
 And there could be a lot of, because so much of our lives happens in the digital world
 now.
 But kind of coupling the information about the human mind with the consumption and 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 space effects on our body.
 It's interesting to think in terms of both like for work, I'm a big fan of, so Cal Newport
 has ideas of deep work that I spend 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 waning of that, the ups and downs
 of that, and it's almost like 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, 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, I just talked to Sam Harris a few days ago and been building
 up to that.
 I started using, started meditating using his app, waking up, very much recommend it.
 And be interested in getting 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 before the meditation, during
 it and after all those kinds of things.
 And you, all of your examples, it's interesting that everyone who's designed an experience
 for you.
 So whether it be the meditation app or the deep work or all the things you mentioned,
 they constructed this product with a certain number of knowns.
 Now, what if we expanded the number of knowns by 10 X or 20 X or 30 X, they would reconstruct
 their product, quote, 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.
 But 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.
 The objective 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, or like really dumb, just very simple applications that could just improve the quality
 of the experience of using the app.
 I'm imagining if you have your neurome, this is Lex and there's a statistical representation
 of you and you engage with the app and it says, Lex, you're 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's 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 influenced my conscious
 and unconscious experience.
 Well, in some sense, the data would help encourage you to be more self-aware, not just because
 you trust everything the data is saying, but is it'll give you a prod to start investigating.
 Like I would love to get like a rating, like a ranking of all the things I do and what
 are the things, this is probably important to do without the data, but the data will
 certainly help.
 It's 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.
 We like, I do pig out at night as well and it never makes you feel good.
 Like you're in a safe space.
 This is a safe space.
 Let's hear it.
 No, 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 leaning on science.
 I'm leaning on personal experience and that's really important.
 I don't need to read.
 I'm not going to go on 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 or 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 and you know, 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, I can have like chalk.
 I can, I can go off the diet.
 I feel fine.
 It's not, it's a, it's a gradual, uh, uh, it's a gradual worsening of how I feel, but
 what I eat only meat, I feel great.
 And it'd be nice to be reminded of that.
 Like there'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, uh, when I exercise, not, I hate exercise, okay.
 But in the rest of the day, the, uh, the impact it has on my mind and the clarity of mind
 and 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, would be nice.
 It would be a nice reminder, almost like a statement, like remember what feels good and
 whatnot.
 And there could be things like, uh, that I'm not many things like you're, you're suggesting
 that I could not be aware of.
 There might be sitting right in front of me that makes 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, 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 lists.
 And so I never actually asked 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's all has their, all has their supporting science in certain contextual settings, but
 it's not N of one.
 And like you're saying, this dietary really is an N of one.
 What people have published scientifically of course can be used for nice groundings,
 but it changes when you get to an N of one level.
 And so that's what gets me excited about brain interfaces 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 that, 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 a 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?
 Yeah.
 That's beautiful.
 That means really beautifully put.
 By the way, testing round, what does that look like?
 What's that?
 Well, you mentioned.
 Yeah, the very, the tests I do.
 Yes.
 So that includes a complete blood panel.
 I do a microbiome test.
 I do a food inflammation, a diet induced inflammation.
 So I look for X-satokine 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 very various
 nutrients.
 So that's self report of like how you feel, you know, almost like, you can't demote your
 conscious, you still exist within your conscious mind.
 Right?
 So that lived experience is 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 that interval.
 And they're all 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, on
 a cost curve over a certain design, over a certain timeframe.
 But our ability to, you know, evolution produced us an intelligent, a 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 costs is going to zero.
 For example.
 Again, just give me a second.
 That's brilliant.
 Okay.
 So, you know, in 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 that's going on and then now in parallel to that, then you say, okay, 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 are these
 200 biomarkers where I'm saying when, when Brian exists on a data basis 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.
 You basically 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.
 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 it 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 AIS system, it's the paperclip thing with unmasked is dumb, but has unintended
 consequences to where it destroys human civilization.
 Do you worry about those kinds of things?
 I mean, it's, it's unsurprising that a new thing comes into this fear 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.
 We can't, 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.
 So 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, but like we have this potential.
 And so we just haven't given a 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.
 I mean, there's parallels to this.
 You think about people before the internet as the internet was coming to life.
 I mean, 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're understanding 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, like sweep across the populations.
 And so it's almost, I mean, 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 don't think we're realizing how much that actually changed people or societies.
 But like to predict that before the internet would have been very difficult.
 And 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?
 And it seems like it's a fog, you don't know.
 And it could be, it could, whatever comes to be could destroy the world.
 We could be the last generation, but it also could transform in ways that creates a, you
 know, 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.
 It might be more, you know, 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, like it's like, it's, it's, it's funny to think about a bunch
 of sort of hypothetical questions of would it be more fulfilling to live in a virtual
 world?
 Like if you were able to plug your brain in, in a very dense way into a video game, like
 which world would you want to live in?
 In the video game or in the physical world?
 For most of us, we kind of toying 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, maybe in a hundred years we're all
 living inside a video game.
 Hopefully not Call of Duty.
 Hopefully more like, like Sims five, which, 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, that, that, 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 in my life.
 I, you know, I had chronic depression for 10 years.
 And so in that 10 year time period, I desperately wanted lights to be off.
 And the thing that made it even worse is I was in a religious, 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.
 And so 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, or reward you for your behaviors.
 And so it was almost like this is indescribable hopelessness of not only being in hopeless
 despair of not wanting to exist, but then also being forced to be, to exist.
 And so there was a duration of my time, of a duration of life where I'd say like, yes,
 I have no remorse for lights being out and actually wanted 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 future 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.
 But 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 doing 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.
 And so am I sad that the brain may be off one day?
 It depends on the contextual setting.
 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 biased, 188 chronicle biases
 and how my brain is distorting reality all the time.
 I have gone from one reality to another.
 I don't trust reality.
 I don't trust realities 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.
 So 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, you know, 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 life 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 that that is an irrational situation.
 But the key is when you're in that situation, 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 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 scale from one to 10, how bad do you want to commit suicide?
 10.
 Yeah, at this moment.
 Here's his bottle.
 How much should I take?
 Well, I don't know.
 Yeah, it's very, very crude.
 And as data opens up the, yeah, it 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 what there, 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.
 Like 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 it's
 like that's life.
 But I get that from just looking at a cup.
 Like I'm waiting for the coffee to brew.
 And 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.
 But that is purely chemistry.
 There's no rational, it doesn't fit with the rest of my life.
 I have all this shit.
 I'm always late to stuff.
 I'm always like, there's all stuff, you know, I'm super self critical, like really self
 critical about everything I do.
 To the point I will 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 this flip side of that is what depression probably is, is the opposite of that feeling
 of, like, cause I bet you that feeling of the cup being amazing is, 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 a, 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 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 in 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
 compound or 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, 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 enough, 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.
 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 else?
 And can we get, can we convert that into data?
 Can you add aliens in there?
 Yeah, aliens, definitely.
 Do you actually meet aliens and elves are elves, the aliens, I'm asking for a few Austin
 friends yet that they're convinced that they've actually met the elves.
 What are elves like?
 Are they friendly?
 Are they helping?
 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.
 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 there's 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.
 It's like a friend of a friend.
 Yeah, if you gave them a telephone.
 Yeah, a bit of a, and the whole point is that in psychedelics and certainly in DMT, this
 is where the brain data versus word data fails, which is, you know, words can't convey the
 experience.
 Most people that you can be poetic and so on, but it really does not convey the experience
 of what it actually means to meet the elves.
 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-interests, tell me how's the
 health of your heart.
 And you sit there and you close your eyes and you think, feels all right.
 Like things seem, things feel okay.
 And then you went to the cardiologist and the cardiologist like, Hey Lex, you know,
 tell me how you feel.
 Like, 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 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, 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, uh, 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
 to 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, 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.
 Meditation just does good things in a crude fashion.
 So in your blog post, zero principle thinking, good title, you ponder how do people come
 up with a truly original ideas?
 What, what's your thoughts on this as a human and as a person who's measuring brain data?
 Zero 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 brain tree 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 really good book by the way.
 It's I think it's my favorite book I've ever read.
 It's also a really interesting number zero.
 And I wasn't aware that the number zero had to be discovered.
 I didn't realize that it caused a revolution in philosophy and, and it just tore up math
 and it tore up.
 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.
 Yeah.
 And so zero is of course the representation of a zero 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 in the zero category.
 And so in thinking this through, I, I was wanting to find a quantitative structure on
 how to think about these zero principles.
 And that's, so I came up with that to be a coupler with first principles thinking.
 And so now it's a staple as 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 very small set.
 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,
 accomplishment, et cetera, it minimizes zero principle thinking.
 But the reason why I think zero principle thinking should be a staple of our shared
 cognitive infrastructure is if you look through the history of past couple 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, the human go players, when it saw AlphaGo's moves, it attributed it to like playing with
 an alien, playing go with, 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 reasonably 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 towards
 zero, you have an increased number of zeros being produced with a tight connection between
 human and computers.
 That's when I got to a point and said we cannot predict the future with first principles thinking.
 We can't, that cannot be our imagination set.
 It can't be our sole anchor in this situation that basically the future of our conscious
 existence 20, 30, 40, 50 years is probably a zero.
 Just to clarify, when you say zero, you're referring to basically a truly revolutionary
 idea.
 Yet something that is currently not a building block of our shared conscious existence, either
 in the form of knowledge.
 Yeah, it's currently not manifest in what we acknowledge.
 I suppose zero principles 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 principle
 insight.
 You mean general relativity, space time.
 Basically, building upon what Newton had done and said yes, also, and it just changed the
 fabric of our understanding of reality.
 That was unexpected.
 It existed.
 It became part of our awareness.
 The moves AlphaGo made existed.
 It just came into our awareness.
 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?
 That goes back to known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.
 First principles and zero principle thinking gives us a quantitative framework to say there's
 no way for us to mathematically try to create probabilities for these things.
 Therefore, 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.
 In thinking about engineering of consciousness, I think it's feasible.
 I think it's possible in the language that we're using here.
 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.
 I don't want to hear from the philosophers, but I think that's what we kind of do to each
 other.
 Okay.
 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.
 That's the display of consciousness.
 It's the same as the display of emotion.
 Emotion is created through communication.
 We're just created through its use.
 We somehow, humans, especially philosophers, the hard problem of consciousness, really
 want to believe that we possess this thing.
 There's an elf sitting there with a hat or nametag that says consciousness, and they're
 feeding this subjective experience to us, as opposed to it actually being an illusion
 that we construct to make social communication more effective.
 I think if you focus on creating the illusion of consciousness, you can create some very
 fulfilling experiences in software.
 That to me is a compelling space of ideas to explore.
 I agree with you.
 I think going back to our experience together with Brain Interface is on, you could imagine
 if we get to a certain level of maturity.
 First let's take the inverse of this.
 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.
 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.
 That is altering the conscious experience between two individuals.
 If we add Brain Interface 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.
 Maybe I understand when you look at the cup and you experience that happiness, you can
 tell me you're happy.
 I then do theory of mine 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.
 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 to create
 ethical systems 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 and 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 idea.
 Or better yet, teach it some, have it read the founding 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.
 It learns what it means to be free and a sovereign individual.
 So it depends what kind of version of GPT-3 you want.
 One that's free, one that behaves well with the social revolution.
 You want a socialist GPT-3, you want an anarchist GPT-3, you want to polite, like you take it
 home to visit mom and dad, GPT-3 and you want like party and like 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.
 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, 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 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.
 They can just go out 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.
 The 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 it's being shared with under what terms and conditions.
 We haven't reached that level of sophistication with our products.
 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?
 Yeah.
 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 company is 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 if in the
 future it says 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 model of you
 and sell that predictability.
 And so it's not unimaginable that you will create with like 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 D.Lan Musk and he has a company, one of the many companies called
 Neuralink 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 requires 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
 getting 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
 what 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.
 Until less than a year after Elon and I were engaged, I shifted kernel to do non-invasive.
 And we had this neuroscientist come to kernel we were talking about.
 He had been doing a neural surgery 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 a 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 was seven years and it ended up being 15 years and they thought
 it'd be a hundred million, 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 non-invasive 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 non-invasive to invasive to non-invasive.
 So the answer is yes to that.
 There's something there that's possible.
 The answer is 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 value is 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 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 to 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.
 It's possible that the path we chose are non-invasive fall short for a variety of reasons.
 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 as bandwidth increased, so did the
 utility of that connection and so did the ecosystem improve.
 And so if you say what kernel flow is going to give you a full screen on the picture of
 information, but as 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 in 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.
 So it's kind of fascinating to think about that.
 It's very true that you don't know both paths are 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.
 It's the 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
 brain interfaces, 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 of bringing
 brain interfaces mainstream.
 And so both they and us, we've both spent over a hundred million dollars.
 And that's kind of what it takes to have a go at this because you need to build full
 stack.
 I mean, at Kernel, we are from the photon and the atom through the machine learning.
 We have just under a hundred 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 brain
 interfaces.
 And so we'll see over the next couple of years, whether it's the right time or whether we
 are 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 the 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, okay, 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
 $2.5 billion.
 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 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.
 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, 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'm entrepreneurial.
 I tried 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.
 I did not know this story.
 This is great.
 I love the head drop.
 That's exactly right.
 So it was the low points to which we go in life.
 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 a hundred
 percent 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 dressed 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 to listen to 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 time.
 And so I figured out that the industry really was built on people, on deceit, basically
 people promising things that were not reality.
 So I'd walk into a business and I'd say, look, I would give you a hundred dollars.
 I'd put a hundred dollar bill and say, I'll give you a hundred dollars for three minutes
 of your time.
 If you don't say yes to what I'm saying, I'll give you a hundred dollars.
 And then he'd usually crack a smile and say, okay, what do you got for me, son?
 And so I'd sit down and I just opened 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 when someone asks and you know, just
 like the basic, like you're okay.
 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 to, 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, you know, 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.
 They did it for nine months.
 And at the time my customer base was making, was generating around, I think it was six,
 if I remember correctly, $62,504 a month were 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 1999 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.
 And 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 and make it easy and beautiful and just a
 magical experience and then provide customer service on top of that, that would be great.
 What I was really going after though, it was PayPal.
 They were the only company in payments making money because they had the 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 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.
 And so focus on the merchant side and then get the payments company that does the customer,
 the whatever.
 So the other side of it.
 Yeah.
 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, 37Signals, 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.
 Then something very counterintuitive, which is make public your private financial transactions,
 which people previously thought were something that should be hidden from others.
 And we acquired Venmo.
 And at that point, 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 in 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.
 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 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 Brain Interfaces.
 You know, payments in themselves are revolutionary technologies that can change the world.
 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 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, decentralizing 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 of human rights and all those kinds
 of things.
 What's your sense, just all your expertise 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?
 To be clear, my communication wasn't meant to minimize payments or to denigrate it in
 any way.
 It was an attempt at 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 out performer 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 being very formal and calculative here, but some
 of that is just like what do you sense?
 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 not familiar, Coinbase is a place where you 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 in cryptocurrency land.
 I concur with the statement 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 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 to me, it's a continuous spectrum of possibility.
 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 this money as particularly distinct from...
 I don't.
 I think 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?
 Do you have a sense that in 21st century, cryptocurrency will be embraced by governments
 and changed the face of governments, the structure of governments?
 It's the same way I think about my diet, where previously it was conscious Brian looking
 at foods in certain biochemical states.
 Am I hungry, am I irritated, am I 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.
 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 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.
 I see there are 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 was too willing to not making good decisions for the long-term wellbeing 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.
 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?
 It never occurred to me, this revolution, until you've outlined that.
 So maybe can you give some details and this is just you, this is one person, Brian arrives
 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, then I measure again
 and then I'm measuring all the time.
 So what I, of course, I'm optimizing for my biomarkers.
 I want perfect cholesterol and I want perfect blood glucose levels and perfect DNA methylation
 processes.
 I also want perfect sleep.
 And so for example, recently, 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.
 And my sleep quality then of course feeds into my willpower.
 So it creates this virtuous cycle.
 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.
 Like a blender.
 Yeah.
 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-
 So vegan.
 Vegan, yes.
 Vegan.
 So that's fat and that's like that's fat and carbs and some protein and so on.
 Does it taste good?
 I love it.
 I love it so much.
 I dream about it.
 Yeah.
 That's awesome.
 And then I have a third dish, which is, it changes every day.
 Today it was kale and spinach and sweet potato.
 And then I take about 20 supplements that hopefully constitute a perfect nutritional
 profile.
 So what I'm trying to do is create the perfect diet for my body every single day.
 Where sleep is part of the optimization.
 That's right.
 You're like one of the things you're really tracking.
 I mean, 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?
 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.
 And then the good North Whitehead said, civilization advances as it extends the number of important
 operations it can do without thinking about them.
 Yes.
 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 end 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 just did the data collection or it was being essentially done
 for you and you can outsource that to another scientist that's doing the end of one study
 of you.
 That's right.
 Because every time I spend time thinking about this or executing, spending time on it, 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 it and 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 I presumably 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's 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, Alex?
 Well, yeah, a lot.
 I'm a big believer in that actually.
 I'm a big believer in chaos and not giving like giving into your passion and sometimes
 doing things that are out of the ordinary, they're like 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 like it's nice to have like 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 that
 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 there's a...
 That requires real discipline and forming habits.
 There's some aspect to which some of the best days and weeks of my life have been, yeah,
 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 own body.
 Again, the experiment of N of one.
 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...
 That all maps to sort of data, at least the truth, exactly what 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, X-ray 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 happening to your brain in that situation.
 We don't know the consequences of modern day life on our brain.
 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 optimize life for whatever things you're
 trying to do, 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, 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 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, it'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 a, 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 you have to kind of, it's a weird, there's so many variables in an objective
 function that 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, like 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 than, 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, the 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.
 And 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.
 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, you spoke about the metrics of
 sleep, but you're also, you run a business, you're incredibly intelligent.
 Mostly your happiness and success relies on you thinking clearly.
 So how does that affect your mind and your body in terms of performance?
 So not just sleep, but actual mental performance.
 As you were explaining your objective function of, for example, in the criteria you were
 including, you like certain neurochemical states.
 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,
 something you kind of experience.
 Maybe the experience is a bit more complicated, but 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 people who live in 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 a hundred 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 a hundred years or 200 years or 300 years.
 I would be irritable.
 I would 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 undeniable, that would fall in a zero 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, I'd 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 just looked up Braveheart's speech and 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 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.
 And do you think they were tracking their sleep?
 We're 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.
 Part of it 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 experienced 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.
 And so if you as an engineer of consciousness, that should just be engineerable.
 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.
 So 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 I was, I 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, whatever,
 maybe probably is rooted to the fact that I grew up in the Soviet Union.
 It was so such a constrained system that you'd really deeply value freedom.
 You always want to escape the man and the control of centralized systems.
 I don't know what it is, but that's, but at the same time, I love strictness.
 I love the dogmatic authoritarianism of diet, of like 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.
 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 like my personal experience in thinking about hard things is like, oftentimes I feel
 like I'm looking through a telescope and I come aligning two or three telescopes and
 you kind of have to close one eye and move it back and forth a little bit and just find
 just the right alignment.
 Then 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 a 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 of
 my life.
 I was ending a 13 year marriage.
 I was leaving my religion.
 I sold Braintree and I was coming a battling depression where I was just at the end.
 I got invited to go to Tanzania as part of a group that was raising money to build clean
 water wells.
 I had made some money from Braintree and so I was able to donate $25,000.
 It was the first time I had ever had money to donate outside of paying tithing in my
 religion.
 It was such a phenomenal experience to contribute something meaningful to someone else in that
 form.
 As part of this process, we were going to climb the mountain.
 We went there and we saw the clean water wells we were building.
 We spoke to the people there and it was very energizing.
 When we climbed Kilimanjaro, 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 were summiting on day five, I came into the
 camp, base camp at 15,000 feet, just going to the bathroom on myself and falling all
 over.
 I was just a disaster.
 I was so sick.
 Stomach flu and altitude sickness.
 Yeah, and I just was destroyed from the situation.
 Plus psychologically, one of the lowest points you've ever had.
 Yeah, and I think that was probably a big contributor.
 I was just smoked as a human, just absolutely done.
 I had three young children and so I was trying to reconcile.
 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 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 5 a.m.
 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, the pain got so ferocious that it became so ferocious that
 I turned my music to Eminem.
 And Eminem was the only person in existence that spoke to my soul.
 And it was something about his anger and his vibrancy and his multibentrality.
 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 100 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 were on.
 I was like, this is dangerous.
 And he said, look, Brian, I know where you're at.
 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 got there and I just sat down with him at the top.
 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 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 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 down 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 torturous.
 I'm very appreciative they did.
 Also the trail is very bumpy.
 So they'd go over these 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 of seconds.
 So the whole experience was really a life changing moment.
 And that was the demarcation of me basically building a new life.
 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 fricking mountain.
 Is 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.
 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.
 In that moment, one of us is going to die.
 So you were 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.
 And 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.
 Considering 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.
 It could be 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.
 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, we're all, we're all born and die alone.
 But do you fundamentally remember the experiences when you leaned on people at a particular
 moment in 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.
 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.
 Not a retail advertiser of advice, of tricks for life, but deeply meaningful and empathetic
 with a one-on-one context with people that it really can make a difference.
 Yeah, I actually kind of experience, I think about that sometimes.
 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 want to consider that you don't 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 given advice, there's something to that.
 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, Brian 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.
 You ever ask yourself why is doing that?
 Yeah.
 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 asked this question a hundred years ago, you would get a certain answer that reflects
 that time period.
 Same thing would be true of a thousand years ago.
 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 evolution
 built a system of scaffolding intelligence that produced us.
 We are now building intelligence 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.
 Does any of this really make sense?
 Now we may be a hundred, 200, 500, a thousand 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 that
 that that's, and I guess the last thing, if there's multiple meanings of life, it would
 be infinite games.
 You know, James Carson 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 it's just the landscape of possibilities 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 Four Sigmatic, 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.