Kind: captions
Language: en
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 for
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netsuite grammarly and expressvpn
check them out in the description to
support this podcast
as a side note let me say that this was
a fun and memorable experience
wearing the kernel flow brain interface
in the beginning of this conversation
as you can see if you watch the video
version of this episode
and there's a ubuntu linux machine
sitting next to me collecting the data
from my brain
the whole thing gave me hope that the
mystery of the human mind
will be unlocked in the coming decades
as we begin to measure signals from the
brain
in a high bandwidth way to understand
the mind we either have to
build it or to measure it both
are worth a try thanks to brian and the
rest of the colonel team for making this
little demo happen
this is the lex friedman podcast and
here
is my conversation with brian johnson
you ready lex yes i'm ready do you guys
want to come in
and put the interfaces on our heads and
then i will proceed to tell you a few
jokes
so we uh we have two incredible pieces
of technology and
a machine running ubuntu 2004 in front
of us
what are we doing all right are these
going on our heads they're going on our
heads yeah
and they will place it on our heads for
proper alignment
does this support giant heads because i
kind of have a giant head
is this is just as like an ego or are
you saying
physically both
it's a nice massage yes
okay how does it feel it moves around
it's okay to move around yeah it feels
oh yeah
[Music]
this feels awesome thank you that feels
good
so this is big head friendly it suits
you well lex
thank you i
feel like i need to uh 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 uh never had my brain imaged
the only way i've analyzed my brain is
by uh
talking to myself and thinking no direct
data
yeah yeah that is it that is definitely
an interface
that has a lot of blind spots it has
some blind spots
yeah psychotherapy that's right
all right are we recording
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 gotcha okay
let's hear the jokes lex and this is
from the kernel 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 if i'm if i'm seeing the muscle
activation correctly on your
on your lips you're not gonna do well on
this let's see all right here here comes
the first unscrewed here comes the first
one
is this gonna break the device is it
resilient
to uh 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 gonna try to do better i'll edit out
all the parts where i left
photoshop you serious face over me you
can recover
all right lex what do scholars eat
when they're hungry i don't know what
academia
nuts
that's a pretty one so what we'll do
is so you're wearing
kernel flow which is
an interface built uh using technology
called spectroscopy so it's similar to
what we wear
wearables on the wrist using light so
using lidar 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 and chemically it
creates
uh blood oxygenation levels we're
measuring that and so in 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
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
uh in about 100 picoseconds and then the
photons scatter and absorb in your brain
and then a few go in if you come back
out they a bunch go in that a fuel come
back out and we
sense those photons and then we do the
reconstruction for the activity
overall there's about a thousand plus
channels
that are sampling your activity how
difficult is it to make it as
comfortable as it is
because it's surprisingly comfortable i
would not think it would be comfortable
something that's measuring brain
activity
i would not think it would be
comfortable but it is i agree in fact i
want to take this home
yeah yeah that's right so 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 the podcast if we
want to be at home in a business setting
so we it's freedom to be where to record
your brain activity in the setting that
you choose
yeah but sort of from an engineering
perspective are these uh
what is it there's a bunch of different
modular parts and they're kind of
there's like a rubber band thing where
they they mold to the shape of your head
that's right so we we built this this
version of the mechanical design
to accommodate most adult heads
but i have a giant head and if it's fine
it feels fits well actually
so i don't think i have an average head
okay maybe i feel i feel much better
about my head now maybe i'm
uh i'm more average than i thought
okay so what else is there interesting
you could say what's up
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 a bunch of mate you guys
should use
that too but it's amazing to have code
running
to the side measuring stuff and
collecting data
i mean that i just i feel like much more
important now
that my data is being recorded like
somebody care
like you know when you you have a good
friend that listens to you
that actually like listens like actually
is listening to you this is what i feel
like
i'm like a much better friend because
it's like accurately listening to me
upon two 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
yeah 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 uh 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
to take this amazing helmet away from me
so
brian thank you so much for this
experience and let's uh
let's continue without helmetless all
right
so that was an incredible experience uh
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
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 mean 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 that means 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 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 in a high
bandwidth way from
my brain opens up uh
all kinds of you know at the very i was
kind of joking when we're talking but
it's not really it's 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
i can't quite put it into words but
there is a genuinely for me
this is not some kind of joke about me
being a robot is this genuinely feels
like i'm being
heard uh in a way that uh
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 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
uh about yourself that could open up all
kinds of applications
of course there's health that i consider
but honestly
to me the exciting thing is just being
heard my state of mind
the level of focus all those kinds of
things being heard
what i heard you say is you have an
entirety of
lived experience some of which you can
communicate in words
and in body language some of which you
feel internally
which cannot be captured in those
communication modalities and that this
measurement system
captures both the things you can try to
articulate in words maybe in a lower
dimensional
space using one word for example to
communicate focus
yeah 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 yeah that that's that's that's the
promise that's the hope that was the
feeling
and it felt like the future so it's a
pretty cool experience and from the sort
of
mechanical perspective it was cool to
have an actual device that
feels pretty good that doesn't uh
doesn't require me to go into the lab
and also the other thing i was i was
feeling there's a guy named andrew
huberman
he's a friend of mine amazing podcast
people should uh uh should listen to a
humor in the lab podcast
we're working on a paper together about
eye movement and so on
and we're kind of he's a neuroscientist
and i'm a data person a machine learning
person and
we're we're both excited by
how much the that
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 uh 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 a scale of many
individuals or a large number of
individuals so
science so it's personal being heard was
exciting and also just
for science is exciting it's very easy
like there's a very powerful thing to it
being so easy to just put on
that you can scale much easier if you
think about the 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 the low-res eeg system
but we haven't done this at
population scale and so if you think
about
human thought or human cognition is
probably
the single law largest raw input
material into society at any given
moment
it's our conversations with our with
ourselves and with other people
and we have this this raw input that we
can't haven't been able to measure yet
yeah
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 me for example i
know if i buy an appliance at this
at the store or on a website i don't
need to
look at the measurements on the
appliance 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's not a for 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 that the most significant
contribution that kernel technology has
to offer
would be the formal sca the
introduction of the formal engineering
of cognition as it relates to everything
else in society
i love that i 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 just a very
hardcore mini scale compression of
actual the raw data but maybe you can
comment
because you use the word cognition
i think the first step is to get the
brain data
but um is there a leap
to be taking to sort of interpreting
that data in terms of cognition
so is your is your ideas 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 it's
you know as i'm sure you know we don't
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 colonel 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 yes and then once we
figured out the technology
we could even we could commence having
conversations with investors and it
became
what is a killer app and so what has
been
so i've funded the first 53 million
dollars 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
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
the human to enable
uh humans to then find value with it
okay so it so the analogy is like
brain interfaces are like early 90s of
the internet is you
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 to non-experts
these are all
critical elements that ignite discovery
and so
we believe we've accomplished the first
objective 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
uh 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
it's 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 in that equation
so meaning like this is in search of an
application that's
impactful transformative by the way it
should be a we need to come up with a
better term
than killer app as a it's also violent
right
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
yeah okay so let's stick with killer app
that's fine
nobody's but i concur with you i dislike
the chosen words in in capturing the
concept
you know it's one of those sticky things
that uh is as
effective to use in the tech world but
when you
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 you know it's
interesting i
i actually regret now having called
attention because i 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 the
impactful application 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 and we
begin circling around this concept of
does anybody have an idea does anyone
have intuitions and
if we see the conversation starting to
to veer in that direction
we flag it and say human intuition alert
stop it and so we 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 tuitions and it's
interesting we're also seeing a few
neural scientists who have been
have been talking to us where i was
speaking just 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 you know in this way
and these regions that have these these
functions
he didn't care he just wanted the data
and we're seeing that more and more
that certain people
are devaluing human intuitions for good
reasons as we've seen in machine
learning over
over the past couple years and we're
doing the same in our value creation
uh market strategy
so more collect more data clean data
make uh the products such that the
collection of data is uh
easy and and and fun and then the the
rest will just
spring to life that's right 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 time frames on
discovery
the brain is complicated and and science
is not a business strategy
and so we really need to figure out how
to
this is the difficulty of bringing
bringing you know technology like this
to market it's why
most of the time it just ling it
languishes
in academia 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 uh
are you chasing a good reason for
millions of people to put it
this on their head and keep on their
head regularly
is there um like who's going to discover
that reason
is it going to be people just kind of
organically
or is there going to be a angry bird
style application
that's just uh too exciting to
to not use if i think through the things
that
have changed my life most significantly
over the past few years
when i started wearing a wearable in my
wrist
that would give me data about my heart
rate heart rate variability respiration
rate
metabolic approximations etc
for the first time in my life i had
access to information
uh sleep patterns that were highly
impactful
they they told me for example if i eat
close to bedtime i'm not going to get
deep sleep
and not getting deep sleep means you
have all these follow-on consequences in
life and so
it opened up this window of
understanding of myself
that i cannot self-introspect and deduce
these things this is information that
was
available to be acquired but it just
wasn't i would have to
get an expensive sleep study then it's
an end like one night and that's not
good enough to look
to run all my trials and so if you look
just at the information
that one can acquire on their wrist and
now you're applying planted to the
entire cortex on the brain
and you say what kind of information
could we acquire
it opens up a whole new universe of
possibilities
for example we did this internal study
at kernel where i wore a prototype
device
and we were measuring the cognitive
effects of sleep
so i had a device measuring my sleep i
performed with 13 of my
my co-workers 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 we
with mine we found for example that
my impulse control was independently
correlated with my sleep
outside of behavioral measures of my
ability to play the game the point
of the study was i had the brain study i
did at colonel
confirmed my life experience that if i
my deep sleep determined whether or not
i would be able to resist
temptation the following day and my
brain didn't show that
as one example and so if you start
thinking if you actually have
uh data on yourself on your on your
entire cortex you can control the
settings i think there's probably an
uh a large number of things that we
could discover about ourselves
very very small and very very big i just
for example like when you read
news what's going on like when you use
social media when you use news what
like uh all the ways we allocate
attention
that's right with the computer i mean
that seems like a compelling place to
where you would
want to put on uh kernel by the way what
is it called kernel flux kernel like
what flow
fluid yeah two technologies uh flow flow
okay so when you when you put on the the
kernel flow
it it is seems like to be um
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 as you're taking in content
and there could a lot of
because some of our so much of our lives
happens in the digital world now
that kind of coupling the information
about the human mind
with the consumption and the behaviors
in the digital world might give us a lot
of information about the effects
of the way we behave and navigate the
digital world
to the actual physical meat space
uh effects on our body it's interesting
to think so in terms of both like
for work i i'm a big fan of uh
cal newport his ideas of deep work
that uh i spend uh
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 or focus zero distraction
and for me to analyze the i mean i'm
very aware of the
uh the waning of that the ups and downs
of that
and it's almost like you you're surfing
the ups and downs of that as you're
doing programming as you're doing
thinking about particular problems
you're trying to visualize things in
your mind you
start trying to stitch them together
you're trying to uh
when there's a dead end about an idea
you have to kind of
calmly like walk back and start again
all those kinds of processes it'd be
interesting to get data on what my mind
is actually doing
and also recently started doing uh i
just talked to
sam harris a few days ago and been uh
building up to that i started using
started meditating using his app waking
up but
very much uh recommend it it'd be
interesting to get data on that
because it's you're very it's like
you're removing all the noise
from your head and you're very much it's
an active process of
active noise removal active noise
cancelling
like the headphones and it'd be
interesting to see what is going on in
the mind
uh before the meditation during it and
after all those kinds of things
and in all of your examples it's
interesting that
everyone who's designed an experience
for you so whether it be the meditation
app
or the deep work or with all the things
you mentioned
they constructed this product with a
certain
number of knowns yeah now what if
we expanded the number of knowns by 10x
or 20x or 30x
they would reconstruct their product
cool incorporate those known so it'd be
yeah and so this is the dimensionality
that i think is
the promising aspect is that people will
be able to
use this quantification use this
information
to build more effective products and
this is i'm not talking about
better products to advertise to you or
manipulate you i'm talking about uh
our focus is helping people individuals
have this contextual awareness and
quantification and then to engage with
others who are
seeking to improve people's lives that
the objective is
is betterment across ourselves
individually and also
uh 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
it's like really dumb just very simple
applications
that could just improve the quality of
the experience of the using the app
and imagining if you have you have your
neuron this is lex
and you there's a statistical
representation of you
and you engage with the app and it says
lex
your best to engage with this meditation
exercise in the following settings at
this time of day
after eating this kind of food or not
eaten 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 we you've optimized your entire
life
based upon what information you can
acquire and know about yourself
and so the question is how much do we
really know
of the things going around us and i
would venture to guess in my own my life
life experience
i capture my self-awareness captures an
extremely small
percent of the things that actually
influence my conscious
and unconscious experience well in some
sense the data would
help encourage you to be more self-aware
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 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
must make you feel good
like uh you're talking about evening
brian like uh
this is a good example somebody like
i do pig out at night as well
and uh and it never makes like you're in
a safe space
this is just a safe space let's hear it
no i i definitely have much less
self-control at night and it's
interesting
and the same you know um people might
criticize this but
i i know my own body i know when i eat
carnivore just eat meat
i feel much better uh
than uh if i eat more
more carbs the more cups i eat the worse
i feel i don't know why that is
i don't i there is science supporting
but i'm not leading 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
in a whole rant about nutrition science
but
many of those studies are very flawed
they're doing their best but nutrition
science is a very difficult
uh 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 an
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 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 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 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 what not
and there could be things like
uh that i'm not many things like just
you're suggesting that i could
not be aware of they might be sitting
right in front of me
that uh make me feel really good and
make me feel not good
and the data would show that i agree
with you i've actually
employed the same strategy i i fired my
mind entirely
from being responsible for constructing
my diet
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 that about my
body all the processes that make up
me and then i let that data generate the
shopping list
and so i never actually ask my mind what
it wants it's entirely what my body
is reporting that it wants and so i call
this goal alignment
within brian and there's 200 plus actors
that i'm currently asking their opinion
of
and so i'm asking my liver how are you
doing and it's expressing
via the biomarkers and so then i
construct that diet
and i only eat those foods until my next
testing round
and that has changed my life more than i
think anything else
because in the emotion of my conscious
mind that i gave primacy to my entire
life it led me astray because like you
were saying
the mind then goes out into the world
and it navigates
the dozens of different dietary regimens
people put together in books and it all
has
al their their supporting science in
certain contextual settings but it's not
n of one
and like you're saying this dietary
really is an end of one
these what people have published
scientifically of course can be used
for nice groundings but it changes when
you get to the end of one level
and so that's what gets me excited about
brainerd faces is if you
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 i've never had better
health markers in my life than when i
stopped
actually asking myself to be in charge
of it and
the idea of uh the motion of the
conscious mind
is uh is such a sort of engineering way
of phrasing like meditation with
what they mean that's what we're doing
right yeah that's beautiful that means
really beautifully put
by the way testing around what does that
look like what's that
well you mentioned uh yeah the very the
test i do
yes so includes a complete
blood panel i do a microbiome test i do
a food inflammation of diet
induced inflammation so i look for
excited kind expressions so foods that
produce inflammatory reactions
i look at my neural endocrine systems i
look at all my neural transmitters
i do yeah there's several micronutrient
tests to see how i'm looking at the very
various nutrients
what about like self report of
like how you feel you know almost like
um
you can't demote your con you still
exist within your conscious mind
right so that lived experience of is of
a lot of value so how do you measure
that i do a temporal sampling
over some duration of time so i'll think
through how i feel
over a week over a month over three
months i don't do a temporal sampling of
if i'm at the grocery store in front of
a cereal box and be like
you know what captain crunch is probably
the right thing for me today because i'm
feeling like
i need a little fun in my life yeah and
so it's a temporal sampling if the data
set's large enough then i 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 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 con a cost curve
over over a certain design over a
certain time frame
but our ability to you know evolution
produced us
an intelligent form of intelligence we
are now designing our own intelligence
systems
and the design manufacturing
distribution of that intelligence over a
certain
uh time frame is going to go to a cost
of zero
design manufacture distribution of
intelligent
cost is going to zero again
just give me a second okay that's
brilliant okay
and evolution is doing the design
manufacturing distribution of
intelligence and now we are doing
the design manufacturing distribution of
intelligence
and the cost of that is going to zero
that's a very
uh 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
what then happens if when that cost
curve is heading
to zero our existence becomes
a goal alignment problem a goal
alignment function
and so the same thing i'm doing where
i'm doing goal alignment within myself
of these 200 biomarkers where i'm saying
when when brian exists on a daily basis
and this entity is deciding what to eat
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 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 go alignment
with planet earth within yourself with
each other
within all the intelligent agents we're
building bots and other you know voice
assistants
you basically i don't have a trillions
and trillions of agents working on
the negotiation of goal alignment yeah
this this is in fact true uh and what
was the second thing
that was it so the cost the design
manufacturing distribution of
intelligence going to zero
which then means what's really going on
what are we really doing
we're negotiating the terms and
conditions
of existence do you worry about
the survival of this process
that uh life as we know it on earth
comes to an end
or at least intelligent life that as the
cost goes to zero
all something happens where uh
all of that intelligence is thrown in
the trash by
something like nuclear war or
development of agi systems that are very
dumb
not agi i guess but ai is just that it's
the paper clip thing
what on mass is dumb but has unintended
consequences to where it destroys human
civilization
do you worry about those kinds of things
i mean it's it's unsurprising
that a new thing comes into
the sphere of human consciousness humans
identify the foreign object in this case
artificial intelligence our amygdala
fires up and says
scary foreign
we should be apprehensive about this and
so it
makes sense from a biological
perspective that humans
for the 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
yeah 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 you cannot even create an
aspirational
statement about it and
instead we've had this knee-jerk
reaction of fear
about everything that could go wrong but
in my estimation
this should be the defining aspiration
of all intelligent life on earth that
that we would aspire
that basically every generation surveys
the landscape of possibilities they're
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 like we have
this potential and so we just haven't
given voice to it
even though it's within this realm of
possibilities so you're excited about
the possibility of
super intelligence 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
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
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 to
me i don't think we're realizing how
much that actually changed in 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
uh super intelligent systems how is that
going to change
the world what is uh increasing the
bandwidth like
uh 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 uh
whatever comes to be could destroy the
world that this we could be the last
generation
but it also could uh transform in in
ways that creates a an incredibly
fulfilling life experience that's
unlike anything we've ever experienced
it might involve dissolution 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're kind of
touring it with the idea of the video
again 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 5 which version is it on
for you individually though does it make
you
sad that your brain ends
that you die one day very soon
that the whole thing that that uh 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 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're 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 there was an afterlife
and this afterlife had this
system that would either penalize or or
reward you for your behaviors and so
it's 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 the observation of life where i'd say
yes i have no remorse
for lights being out and actually want
it more than anything in the entire
world
there are other times where i'm looking
out at the future and i say
this is an opportunity for future
evolving human conscious experience that
is beyond
my ability to understand and and i jump
out of bed and i race to work and i
i can't think about anything else but i
i think the 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 like 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 i mean
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
yeah it depends on the contextual
setting like how am i feeling what
moment are you asking me that and that's
it's 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
uh 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 make try to make a decision on
what i value or not value that future
state
i don't trust my response so not
fully not fully listening to
the conscious mind at any one moment as
the ultimate truth
but allowing it 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 pawn 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 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 uh you know
the dark thoughts how you deal with that
how in your own life you've overcome
that and others who are experiencing
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 lice
or
or the meaninglessness of it or
that you should hit the eject button
that's a false reality
yeah and that it's when
i i completely understand their rational
decision to commit suicide there's it is
not lost to me at all that that is a and
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 yeah and so i'm
in a situation where for whatever reason
i'm having this
this uh neurochemical state but
that state can be altered and so it
again it goes back to the realities of
the difficulties of of being human and
like when i was trying to solve my
depression i
tried literally ev 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 because i go
to the doctor and it's like how do you
feel i don't know
terrible like on a scale of 10 how bad
you want to commit suicide
10. okay at this moment here's
here's his bottle how much i take well i
don't know like just
yeah it's very very crude and this data
opens up the
the yeah it opens up the possibility of
really helping
in those dark moments to first
understand
the the waves the ups and downs of those
dark moments on the complete flip side
of that i
i am uh very conscious in my own brain
and deeply deeply grateful that
what they're it's it's almost like a
chemistry thing a biochemistry thing
that i go many times throughout the day
i'll 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 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 uh 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
uh ridiculous but yeah so but that
is purely chemistry like
there's no rational it doesn't fit with
the rest of my life i 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
i'm to the point i almost hate
everything i do but
there's this engine of joy for life
outside of all that
and that has to be chemistry and the
flip side of that is what depression
probably is