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He founded Kernel in 2016. Investing a hundred million dollars of his personal capital to build advanced neural interfaces to treat disease and dysfunction, illuminate the mechanisms of intelligence, and extend cognition. In 2014, Bryan invested $100 million to start OS Fund to support investors and scientists who aim to benefit humanity by rewriting the operating systems of life. His OS fund investments include endeavors to cure age-related diseases and radically extend healthy human life To a hundred plus. Make biology a predictable programming language. Digitize analog businesses. Replicate the human visual cortex. using artificial intelligence, expand humanity’s access to resources, reinvent transportation using autonomous vehicles, and reimagine food using biology, among others. In 2007, Bryan founded Braintree, an online and mobile payments provider. In 2012, Braintree acquired Venmo. Bryan and his team worked tirelessly to build an exceptional company, one that they loved and one that was worthy of frequent love letters from its customers. In 2013, Braintree was acquired by PayPal for $800 million. Bryan is an outdoor adventure enthusiast. He enjoys mountains, volcanoes, arctic dog sledding, is a pilot, and an author of a children’s book, Code Seven. Please join me in welcoming Bryan Johnson.\n\n00:01:58.740 --> 00:02:18.700\nHi, good morning, everyone. Sound okay, Carl? So I’m immensely grateful to be here today. And I first want to say thank you to my friend Carl, who we met 15 years ago as next door neighbors, and my friend Reinhard Gannis. So Lincoln will never know the depth of my gratitude for you.\n\n00:02:20.540 --> 00:02:49.800\nI’m here because I think. I tried very hard to maintain my emotions by saying this, but I lost it. Today I want to speak to my 24-year-old self and my father’s here. There’s a band in my bed. Do you mind coming down, Dad, so I can see you a bit better?\n\n00:02:52.040 --> 00:03:15.420\nThe context of this talk is at the age of 24. I was chronically depressed. I wanted my soul to be extinguished. I didn’t want an afterlife. I didn’t want this life. I didn’t want any existence. And it was at this time that I was neighbors with Lincoln Cannon, and I was stuck.\n\n00:03:16.140 --> 00:03:37.880\nAnd Lincoln, through a series of conversations and questions, allowed me to break free from being stopped And what you’re going to hear today is the evolution that has happened over the last 16 years of how it became unstuck. And so, to Lincoln’s children, you have abundance of reasons to be very proud of your father. He’s very great men.\n\n00:03:38.180 --> 00:03:46.739\nAll right, so with that said, this is to my 24-year-old Bryan. Okay, this is not to everyone else. This is to you, Bryan. Okay?\n\n00:03:47.420 --> 00:04:09.780\nSo, Bryan, first of all, I realize you are super pumped up about Mormonism. It is, I realize you are very, very excited about it because. It is a remarkable story. The deal is: if you obey God’s commandments, you get this amazing afterlife. You become a God, you create worlds without end, and all you have to do is obey the rules. It’s fantastic.\n\n00:04:10.980 --> 00:04:39.340\nIt is a single player sport. It does not matter if you’re dad. Does it not matter if your mom does it? It doesn’t matter if the apostles do it. It doesn’t matter if anybody obeys the rules, only you. Now, if your spouse fell, like you find an element in heaven, you’re good. Okay? Like it is you, and that’s a good deal. You obey the rules, and you’re good. So, I realize this is immensely soothing emotionally and intellectually.\n\n00:04:39.500 --> 00:04:52.000\nOkay, so first of all, I’m going to say to you that you are safe. I’m not here to attack your beliefs. I’m not here to undermine your beliefs. I’m not here to argue you shouldn’t be Mormon. You’re good, okay? We just want to establish that we’re okay with each other.\n\n00:04:52.320 --> 00:05:09.200\nWhat I do want to do is, I want to explain a reality to you that exists outside your current reality, one that you’ve never heard before. I just want to plant the seed to say it’s there. And if you want to walk over there and kind of play around with it, you can do so. But I just want to give you somewhere else to go in your brain.\n\n00:05:09.840 --> 00:05:31.740\nI know, Bryan, you’ve got a lot of secret. You have a lot of doubts about the Mormon Church. You don’t think it’s true, but you don’t dare tell anybody. You think it’s going to affect your status among your friends, it’s going to affect leadership positions, it’s going to affect your family relationships. So, you keep them a secret, and that’s a very heavy burden to bear.\n\n00:05:32.060 --> 00:05:49.340\nAnd I want you to know that as you grow older, You will find out that you are not the minority, you’re in the majority. Most people harbor very deep reservations. That is not a knock on any religion. That is just the truthfulness of being human, of understanding what is true, what is not true, how people arrive at those decisions.\n\n00:05:49.580 --> 00:05:59.300\nBut you will find. It to be soothing to open yourself up and acknowledge that doubt can exist with belief. They don’t need to be one or the other.\n\n00:06:00.140 --> 00:06:23.820\nNow I also understand your pain because sitting underneath all the repression and the The cacophony of faith and doubt experiences in guilt and shame and anguish and fear and warmth and love. It’s a mess. It’s very, very hard to make sense of the world. And so I want to say I feel your pain.\n\n00:06:25.100 --> 00:06:45.520\nAnd also, it’s the worst thing in the world that could happen is that the Mormon That someone demonstrates to you that the Mormon religion is not true. It’s the most catastrophic thing that could happen. Because if the Mormon church is not true, What do we have? Like, what is there? There’s nothing. And so it’s terrifying. And so I understand.\n\n00:06:45.680 --> 00:07:26.540\nSo, what you’ve done in this situation, and you realize this in the future, is this is me speaking to my 25th year old Bryan. This is you, Bryan, and what the brain has done is you’ve built up an army of ninjas that circle you. And any time an incoming thing of information comes to you that suggests that what you believe is not true, your ninja is like kung fu that shit, and they just put it down. Right? Like, make a little suggestion that something the Bible is not true, or the Book of Mormon, or Joseph Smith, or Brigham Young, some craziness of the early Mormon church. Your ninjas take care of it because they soothe you and they keep you. They keep you in this nice, warm cuddle.\n\n00:07:26.620 --> 00:07:41.740\nBut you’ll realize that these ninjas are really, really important, and they help you actually understand the world. I’ll get into that a little bit, but I want you to understand you have an army of ninjas to protect yourself. And they do so without you knowing, okay, to protect it.\n\n00:07:42.380 --> 00:08:07.979\nSo, what I’m going to do is, and this is to say that you have become an impenetrable fortress. There is absolutely nothing I could say, do, argue, nothing that would threaten your belief system. Nuclear annihilation? Meh. Right, the zombie apocalypse? Meh. nothing mattered, right? You’re a single player sport, you get what you want. So let’s just acknowledge we’re good, we have these ninjas.\n\n00:08:08.139 --> 00:08:30.639\nSo what I’m going to explain to you now Now I’ve lived a few more years than you, and now I’m going to tell you how I’m going to accomplish the same objective that you’re after. But I’m going to do it a different way. We can still believe the same thing. We can still have the same hope. We can still have the same grandiose aspirations about the future. And so, this is my plan on how we’re going to do it.\n\n00:08:30.720 --> 00:08:40.640\nI have a lot of information to get through very quickly, so we’re going to go through. But I just want to give folks for 20 minutes. I know you’re here with all these people at MTA. And it’s very rare, so I just want to get through this quickly.\n\n00:08:40.620 --> 00:08:55.660\nSo first of all, while you play a single person sport, I am playing a multi-billion person sport. I cannot get what I want to do with one person. I have to play with a few billion people on planet Earth. We have to all cooperate together to do something together.\n\n00:08:55.980 --> 00:09:11.860\nAnd in doing so, what do I worry about? Everything. Pandemics, nuclear annihilation, global warming, war. Runaway, AI, these are all my primary concerns. I own all these problems, and it’s very distressing. But that’s okay. Like, we understand what the landscape’s going to be like.\n\n00:09:12.460 --> 00:09:33.560\nSo the very first thing that we have to do, if we’re going to do a multi-billion personal orchestra, the very first relevation we have to make Is that we are severely cognitively impaired. And we don’t recognize this. We think we’re irrational, logical. We think we actually just are the masters of our universe. We see everything around us. It’s not true. We are severely cognitive impaired.\n\n00:09:33.640 --> 00:09:42.360\nHere, I’ve got a chart right there of 188 chronicled cognitive biases. Things we do in our brain to make sense of the world, to deal with the world.\n\n00:09:42.320 --> 00:09:58.680\nNow, remember that story of Benjamin Franklin, who he tried to become morally perfect. He listed out his attributes and then he set off to become morally perfect. He paid attention one day to humility, the next day he went to temperance, the next day, etc. And what he found out was when he missed, when he went to day two, he forgot about day one. He couldn’t do it.\n\n00:09:58.839 --> 00:10:31.580\nAnd he was just trying to master seven attributes. Now, let’s imagine you’re trying to perfect your cognition with 188. What I would challenge you to do to put a mirror to yourself, to realize how flawed you are, is try to become cognitively perfect. Get the poster and identify one. We’re going to say, we notice when something has changed. Anchoring is the bias. And I don’t want you to anchor. Okay, I want you to have full view around you and not do that. I want you to do that 188 days until you’ve mastered your cognitive biases. And you can demonstrate to me that you are a third-thinking human. Number two.\n\n00:10:32.840 --> 00:10:54.180\nNumber two is that we have built in society the perfect system for humans to become irrelevant and be put out of business. We don’t realize this, but we we have. And we can reduce it to a single metric. Return on investment of intelligence. We don’t think about this, but it’s economics. This world is run by economics.\n\n00:10:54.420 --> 00:11:19.440\nAnd so if I have a million dollars and I can invest it in a to improve a human, or I can invest a million dollars to improve a group of humans who are building software and hardware. Every single time, I’m going to choose the software and hardware. Why? Because it’s going to produce much better intelligence for this given human. This human is going to die. It takes 33 years to produce a PhD. Humans progress. It takes forever. It’s expensive. They’re like super flawed, right? Like, why would you ever do that?\n\n00:11:19.760 --> 00:11:35.080\nAnd so, right now, the rate of return for digital intelligence is screaming up. The rate of return on human intelligence is basically flatlining. We will soon have no incentive, no economic incentive to improve humans. That’s very problematic for us.\n\n00:11:35.839 --> 00:11:49.680\nNumber three is we have a very big problem identifying what we should work on in the world as a species. In fact, we have so many things we’re talking about, we just can’t do it. So, I want to tell you a story of how we can identify the right problems.\n\n00:11:50.480 --> 00:12:20.640\nThere’s a story of so in the 1900s, so 100,000 horses producing 2. 5 million tons of manure a day, and they thought the world the sky was falling. It was the worst thing ever. Like it’s the stench, it was just everywhere. It was in the food supply, people were getting sick, no no what to do to how to solve it. So actually, what happened is cars came along and solved horse manure. So actually, it turned out to be a horseship problem. So they if they would have focused on solving horse manure, the wrong focus. They had cars solved it.\n\n00:12:20.800 --> 00:12:26.880\nThen cars created their own problems. But in the world, we have many horseship problems.\n\n00:12:27.120 --> 00:12:43.520\nOkay, so there are those kinds of problems, then there are game-over problems. A game-over problem might be like nuclear annihilation, or it could be runaway climate change. When we get to second, third, fourth, and fifth-order consequences of climate change, we may not be able to catch up to a thing. So, we need to identify what problems to focus on.\n\n00:12:44.800 --> 00:13:11.720\nNumber four, so Bryan, so far I’ve told you, just to quickly baseline you, the way we’re going to win and create everything we want, we’re going to fix our brains. radically improve ourselves. Number two, we need to make sure we don’t put humans out of business. Because right now we are, that’s not a good thing. Three, we need to identify the right kinds of problems. Don’t force problems, like for example, antibiotic resistance. So the prioritization of the problems. And next is AI.\n\n00:13:12.040 --> 00:13:25.060\nSo we’ve a few mentions of it this morning. twenty seventeen was kind of the year of we said chicken little on AI. We said like it’s the worst thing ever. It’s coming to get us. It’s more dangerous than nukes. Don’t buy it. AI is the best thing since sliced bread.\n\n00:13:25.140 --> 00:13:32.500\nIt’s the best thing that could have ever happened to us because it’s the key to our survival. It’s the key to our radical improvement. I’ll get into that in a bit.\n\n00:13:32.459 --> 00:13:47.180\nFive, we need to become future literate. Okay, so there we acknowledge that reading and writing is an important thing in society. We all share this ability to share information. We need to become literate in another way, which is future literate, which is understanding how to understand and predict the future.\n\n00:13:47.500 --> 00:14:05.839\nSix, belief systems. They are incredibly the most powerful form of technology in existence in organizing human cooperation. And so examples of belief systems are capitalism, religion, democracy, et cetera. We need they are the gears of society that determine the torque and the speed at which we can move.\n\n00:14:06.160 --> 00:14:47.860\nSeven, and the favorite topic is we need to radically improve human cognition And so when I talk about radically improved human cognition, I’m not talking about increasing RAQ by 20, 50, even 100 or 200 points. I’m talking about if we have human cognition potential on a scale from 1 to 10, we are at 2. We can maybe catch a glimpse of level three, but we need to go to 10. It is so far outside of our ability to imagine that it crushes our brain, but that does not mean it does not exist. It just means that we are trapped in our brain. We can only imagine as far as we’re familiar with something. So, do not be fooled and thinking that we have peaked. Do not be fooled to think there’s not something around the corner. We can do this. All right.\n\n00:14:50.399 --> 00:14:52.480\nSo how do we do this thing? How do we get this thing in action?\n\n00:14:52.560 --> 00:15:12.380\nSo on the cognitive impairment, I held I for the past year, I held 12 dinners and I asked 200 of the smartest people I know. I said, let’s imagine we’re living in 2050 and we’ve built this really amazing, successful world. What do we do in 2017, 2018 to start doing that? And I got all the answers you would expect: like AI, climate science, education, healthcare, security. Not a single person.\n\n00:15:12.720 --> 00:15:36.240\nMention the brain. The brain is a blind spot. We do not acknowledge it in society that it’s something that needs to be improved. It’s like our number one priority. Because if we improve the brain, everything sits on the other side of the brain, everything in existence. Sits on the other side of the brain, but guess what? Nobody knows it lives upstream. So we need to acknowledge the brain is number one priority.\n\n00:15:36.560 --> 00:16:24.240\nNumber two is we need to build systems that do not put humans out of business. Right now, You have basically, let’s take Facebook, they’re in the news. Facebook mines our information, our data, and they do so via social interaction, a WhatsApp and Instagram. They sell that information to make a whole bunch of money. $500 billion market cap. They then hire the very best people in the world, paying them insane salaries. They then create a black hole of distraction for us, and they make us the worst possible versions of ourselves. They only care about psychological manipulation. So you spend more time to make more money. Then they invest the money to create higher return on their digital intelligence. They build better tools to mine our data, and they do it again. And what they’re doing in this case is they are driving the return up for digital intelligence\n\n00:16:23.880 --> 00:16:42.560\nkeeping humans at the base level, and they’re treating humans like oil wells, where value to be extracted versus real estate something to be improved. So, our system is terribly wrong. If we had to design a system, if we actually had to think through how we can make ourselves irrelevant, it’d be perfect. Okay, but we don’t want that.\n\n00:16:42.720 --> 00:17:10.860\nWhat we want is to be hyper-relevant. And the way we do that is we put people at the center. We say that the person owns their data. The digital data that Facebook is claiming is ownerness is your data, it’s your asset, it’s your information. And we need to make you the epicenter of your own improvement. So let’s say they mine your digital operating system. They know your wants, your preferences, your ideas, what you know, what you don’t know, how you talk, how you don’t talk. They know everything. You need to take that information and improve your cognition.\n\n00:17:11.020 --> 00:17:33.880\nStart right here on the biases, which is start making ourselves better. You do that, and then you need to make money with your cognition. We do that today. We sell our brain power to our employers. That’s how we make money with ourselves. We then invest in better tool improvement. We then hit ourselves again with more radical improvement. And we go again and mine more data about ourselves. We need to get ourselves in this virtuous cycle. and start radically improving ourselves.\n\n00:17:34.200 --> 00:17:52.740\nNow if you look at this, this inherently pits technology against humans. People somehow have mistaken, they think they are their phones. They’re not. They think that we are massively progressed. We’re not. We are the same we have always been. Our technology has progressed. So don’t get that confused. Now\n\n00:17:50.820 --> 00:18:19.560\nIn terms of the problems, I’m not going to go over much of that. That speaks for itself. Like, for example, I’ll give you one example of where I think antibiotic resistance is really scary. It’s like this idea that we can’t respond. I think it’s actually a horseshoe problem because I think we’ll actually the natural machinery will solve it. For example, a lot of the things I invest in right now, where people are programming biology, there’s various problems, things going on. I think we can figure out how to do that. Nuclear annihilation is different. And runaway climate change is different. All right.\n\n00:18:20.200 --> 00:18:33.600\nLet’s talk about AI. And what let’s talk about we need to get this story right because we need to embrace it with everything we have. One is It is necessary for us to manage societal complexity. Our brains cannot manage it. We cannot manage all the complexity of the world.\n\n00:18:33.679 --> 00:18:42.240\nNumber two, it is the key to our radical self-improvement. We cannot improve ourselves on our own. We have to use AI, and I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you how.\n\n00:18:42.780 --> 00:19:09.820\nThree is the power of AI is and I use AI broadly as this term of like machine learning, software, et cetera. It is not a task rabbit. It is not something we just say, please go do. It is our co evolutionary partner. It is a form of intelligence that amplifies our abilities. It is, again, our best friend, and we need to embrace it. Yes, we need to be mindful of safety. Like, yes, those are all true, but we need to understand that that is key to our success.\n\n00:19:09.740 --> 00:19:30.000\nIn terms of future literacy, there’s a story I’ll share quickly to explain this. So I was with a Saudi Arabian prince in the desert last summer, and we’re talking about his 2030 country plans. And he said, Yeah, like I’m really excited. We’ve got these plans for 2030. We’re going to increase employment. I said, How could you possibly be planning for 2030? It’s like 2017. That’s 13 years. That’s like eternity. To go that long.\n\n00:19:30.320 --> 00:20:04.420\nAnd I said, let’s play a game. Let’s imagine that we are here in the sand. There’s sand dunes before us. I said, let’s imagine that we’ve got a robot right here, and we’re trying to get this robot to that sand dune right over there, the big one. How do we do it? If we could do a topographical map, we could map the whole thing out and we could then program the robot to crawl through the sand dunes and get to that place. But the problem with that plan is the moment the robot begins, the sands shift. And then what happens? The robot gets stuck in the sand. So what do you do? You program the robot so it makes a decision every second, and it finds its way to the endpoint.\n\n00:20:04.200 --> 00:20:22.740\nThat’s future literacy. We need to understand that we don’t know the endpoint. We can’t see it. All we need is this rough approximation. But we have to be able to move that fast in our society. And I’ll get to that. That feeds into belief systems of how we need to roll through society. Okay, so we want to be a robot that changes instantaneously.\n\n00:20:22.919 --> 00:20:36.360\nNow, belief systems are the rate limiters of our societal progress. We move as fast as we change our beliefs, which is really terrible news for humans because we’re terrible at updating our belief systems.\n\n00:20:37.600 --> 00:20:56.559\nSo, the most powerful way that people update their belief systems is through economic incentives. So, imagine you’re a software engineer and you go to work and you’re like, Yeah, this is the only way to program software. It can’t be done any other way. Your dad is a software developer. You’re not going to stay competitive. You have to learn continuing your job. That’s true across the world in capitalism.\n\n00:20:56.880 --> 00:21:35.039\nSo, what happens, for example, when I was 24, Bryan, when I was your age. I basically had that mindset in everything I did in my life. I would innovate and change and learn and be dynamic and everything. But then I carved out this little teeny tiny niche in my momentism state and said, That’s fixed. I can’t move that. I can’t change that. That’s just known. Not touchable. That’s the problem. When something becomes not you can’t iterate on top of it, or you can’t iterate fast enough, that’s problematic. So you need to become super aware of your own belief systems, all of them, even the most sacred ones you have. And so oftentimes, we can’t even talk about certain belief systems because they’re too scary.\n\n00:21:34.560 --> 00:22:20.960\nOkay, so like for example, imagine the most scary belief system we have right now that keeps things in check. Let’s just do some non-scary ones. Let’s just say we currently believe that every person deserves to vote. Is that right? Is that really how we succeed as a species? We believe that our digital data scattered around the world is ownerless, that any company can just Vacuum it up and use it. We believe that a person may believe whatever they want so long as it doesn’t negatively affect others. We believe that a person may exhibit cognitive biases of this scale and not be penalized by law. So what can you think of, Bryan? How many sacred belief systems we have in society today that drive our system that are blind to us? It’s a worthy exercise.\n\n00:22:20.919 --> 00:22:42.720\nSo even when people have economic incentives to change their belief systems, how good are they? Well, in the Fortune 500 was founded in 1955, and today only 60 of the original, that’s 12%, exist. That’s an 88% extinction rate of businesses that have an economic incentive and a full awareness, they need to change their belief systems.\n\n00:22:42.580 --> 00:22:59.780\nNow imagine we’re in a scenario where people do not have an economic incentive to change their belief system, and it’s much more related to their salvation. That’s problematic. So, how do we solve this? How do we make belief systems a horseship problem? We get into cognitive expansion.\n\n00:22:59.860 --> 00:23:27.980\nAnd here’s how I think we do this with the species. One is this fundamental question of why do we not obsess about our own cognitive improvement on the same scale that we obsess about AI? When you think about AI, everyone’s like so excited about how fast technology is progressing. We all think AI can become anything, right? We just imagine everything. But when we think about ourselves, we are unimaginative and unambitious. We think we’re just good. Why?\n\n00:23:29.220 --> 00:23:38.660\nI have a couple of thoughts on this. I’m not going to share them now for limited time, but it’s something to consider. The human race has missed the boat on ambition.\n\n00:23:38.320 --> 00:23:52.660\nAnd this is true as a Mormon. When I was a Mormon, I thought that my cognitive expanse would be given to me in the afterlife. It was going to be done for someone else. I just had to obey the rules. It’s actually your responsibility to cognitively expand yourself.\n\n00:23:52.980 --> 00:24:02.980\nAnd for you, I think it’s totally appropriate. There are no proven limits. There’s no physics-based theories on why your cognition should be limited. So, there’s no reason why you can’t.\n\n00:24:03.060 --> 00:24:38.600\nSo, for example, why can’t I ask these questions? Why couldn’t I say, why can’t I extend my senses past sight, taste, smell, touch, and sound? Why can’t I love and think in 10 dimensions? Why do I have to speak in two dimensions? It’s atrociously slow. Why is there one person talking in this room? Why are we not all talking at the same time? Why do we not form a new communication system? Why could I feel what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes? What if instead of destroying my enemies, I destroyed the concept of enemies? Why are these questions not real? Why don’t we contemplate them more?\n\n00:24:39.440 --> 00:25:04.060\nSo, how might we kickstart this thing? Like, if we’re blind to the brain, if we don’t realize it exists, if we can’t solve our cognitive biases, how would we actually do this? This is an imagination. I’m building a company, kernel, on neural interfaces, and my question is: if I were to build a device, To improve human cognition, to get us on the other side of on this path to creating this amazing world we want. Well, what I do, and here’s an imagination exercise that exceeds the technology today, but still is an imagination exercise to showcase you.\n\n00:25:03.760 --> 00:25:14.160\nImagine I gave you, Bryan, a pie chart of your last 24 hours of mental activity. Okay, so here’s what’s going to happen. Here’s what you see after your 24 hours of pie chart pie or your brain activity.\n\n00:25:14.520 --> 00:25:28.960\nIn the morning, when you were mentally rehearsing your 10 a. presentation, you used 8,303 adabytes. So just like we have computers with kilobytes, gigabytes. Brain measurement is in adabytes. That is, directing one’s brain towards intention.\n\n00:25:29.280 --> 00:25:56.540\nI remember that you wanted to change the title on slide two. 567 attabytes, anticipating how you’re going to emotionally respond when your co-worker Miriam likely rejects your idea even before hearing it out: 15,301 adtabytes. You’re feeling angry that Miriam always seems to purposefully want to undermine and sabotage you. 24,316 Ababytes.\n\n00:25:56.860 --> 00:26:22.640\nNow you’re realizing that your shoes look terribly worn. 409 attabytes. You remember that you have $767 in your bank account. But you need to pay $2,100 in rent next Tuesday to avoid the $75 late fee, 5,302 Etabytes. So you get the new shoes, so getting new shoes is now out of the question, 418 attabytes.\n\n00:26:22.740 --> 00:26:29.700\nYou then begin wondering if the dilapidated state of your clothing reflects poorly on you. 7207 attabytes.\n\n00:26:29.940 --> 00:26:38.820\nMeanwhile, other parts of your brain were larger than autopilot combing your hair, brushing your teeth. and rushing out the door 9,504 edibytes.\n\n00:26:39.140 --> 00:27:10.720\nIf we could measure our brain activity, we would do for our brain activity what we do for food. We would quantify it in calories and nutrition. We would categorize it like fruits and vegetables. We would proactively manage it with diet and bioanalysis. And then we’d innovate. We’d do synthetic biology. Give humans something that they can measure and improve, and they’ll go crazy. We need to unleash the human machine of innovation in cognitive expanse, and we are technology limited.\n\n00:27:10.440 --> 00:27:15.960\nWe can’t imagine it. We can’t see there and let’s go there. It is invisible to us. We have to actually give people these tools.\n\n00:27:16.279 --> 00:27:51.960\nSo, if we did that, if we had these Adabyte tools I wonder things like, could we make studying quantum theory activate the reward systems that are similar to watching the Kardashians? Could we or would we be horrified that we only allocate seven percent of our brain power to the most important things in our life? Would gyms, retreats and businesses of all types spring up for the brain? Would they be obsessed about our improvement? Would we go to this kind of economy? Would we become obsessed with human improvement?\n\n00:27:52.780 --> 00:28:20.800\nAnd finally, what if we could offload 47% of our current cognition? to artificial intelligence. So imagine you have a world that’s automated around you, and everything’s working for you. And you stop having all those silly thoughts of how to buy it assignment to Miriam and your shoes and your bank account, and you focus on expanse. And you start focusing on level three and level four and level five. That’s pretty exciting.\n\n00:28:21.120 --> 00:28:48.420\nSo, Bryan, in summary. I’m going to, in summary, you have three things you can do with this. One, you can disregard everything I’m saying, and you can stay Mormon. That’s cool. It’s a great path. The Mormon community is fantastic. You do good things. I don’t think you’re going to get what you want, but that’s fine. Okay. You can disregard what I’m saying. That’s option number one.\n\n00:28:48.580 --> 00:28:58.780\nOption number two. Is you can leave Mormonism and you can come work with me. We have a multi-billion person symphony to orchestrate. We have an enormous amount of work to do.\n\n00:28:59.160 --> 00:29:08.440\nOr three, you can do both. Now, if you do both, you probably have a lot of friends here in this room with the MTA. So you’re in good company. Okay?\n\n00:29:09.860 --> 00:29:26.840\nSo, in summary, I’m going to tell you the seven things I told you. One, we need to recognize that we are severely cognitively impaired and we are blind to it. And on either side of the brain is everything else we want.\n\n00:29:27.160 --> 00:29:48.380\nNumber two, we need to build commercial systems that Focus on radical human improvement. And I’m not just saying intelligence, I’m saying in 360 degrees and in 10 dimensions. We need to believe. We need to have the same level of ambition we have about AI, about ourselves.\n\n00:29:49.340 --> 00:29:59.460\nNumber three, we need to discern and focus on game over problems. Not horseship problems. We need to be focused and we need to have a good discernment on what to actually focus on.\n\n00:29:59.780 --> 00:30:07.940\nFour, we need to embrace AI and celebrate it, that it is our partner in crime and the best thing that could have ever happened to us.\n\n00:30:08.240 --> 00:30:27.040\nFive, we need to become future literate. We cannot fly by the seat of our pants. We’re going to get run over by the future, and the game’s over. And we both know our incentive is to play infinite games. That’s the whole objective. Not a finite game where there’s a start and a stop. We want to play forever.\n\n00:30:28.540 --> 00:30:47.100\nSix, we need to become extremely good at updating our belief systems. That’s a hard one. So half the world is operating on ancient operating systems. And they believe it’s carved out and fixed and it’s not going to happen. That’s very problem when we’re building a multi-billion person orchestra. So we need to figure out how to do that.\n\n00:30:47.260 --> 00:31:03.520\nAnd the key thing on that is if we make cognitive expansion associated with economic incentives People will adjust their belief systems. Humans will respond to the economic incentive of status and respect and wealth. You need to create that.\n\n00:31:04.080 --> 00:31:10.240\nNumber seven. We need to make radical human improvement the number one priority for the human race.\n\n00:31:10.559 --> 00:31:45.560\nSo if we do these things, Bryan, in our minds right now that we share, I think there’s a shot at getting what we want. So I love you, Bryan, very much. I deeply feel your pain. I know how you feel, and I know what you’re going through. In a year from now, when you move and you have a neighbor of Lincoln Cannon, if people are right and they think he’s Satan, he’s going to be the best Satan you could ever imagine. So talk to that guy. And if we join together, we can do this. Thank you.","views","thumbnail",{"_9":55,"_11":56,"_13":57,"_58":-5,"_59":-5,"_60":61,"_62":63,"_64":65,"_71":109,"_68":69,"_73":74,"_77":110,"_40":111,"_112":-5,"_113":114,"_115":-5,"_17":116,"_19":116,"_20":116},52,"as0orb9v87j1kuf8ld5pkj8h","bryan-thumbnail.jpg","alternativeText","caption","width",3840,"height",2160,"formats",{"_66":67,"_83":84,"_92":93,"_53":101},"large",{"_68":69,"_40":70,"_71":72,"_73":74,"_13":75,"_76":-5,"_77":78,"_60":79,"_62":80,"_81":82},"ext",".jpg","https://media.transfigurism.org/large_bryan_thumbnail_6af5382629.jpg","hash","large_bryan_thumbnail_6af5382629","mime","image/jpeg","large_bryan-thumbnail.jpg","path","size",60.06,1000,563,"sizeInBytes",60063,"small",{"_68":69,"_40":85,"_71":86,"_73":74,"_13":87,"_76":-5,"_77":88,"_60":89,"_62":90,"_81":91},"https://media.transfigurism.org/small_bryan_thumbnail_6af5382629.jpg","small_bryan_thumbnail_6af5382629","small_bryan-thumbnail.jpg",20.99,500,281,20987,"medium",{"_68":69,"_40":94,"_71":95,"_73":74,"_13":96,"_76":-5,"_77":97,"_60":98,"_62":99,"_81":100},"https://media.transfigurism.org/medium_bryan_thumbnail_6af5382629.jpg","medium_bryan_thumbnail_6af5382629","medium_bryan-thumbnail.jpg",38.48,750,422,38475,{"_68":69,"_40":102,"_71":103,"_73":74,"_13":104,"_76":-5,"_77":105,"_60":106,"_62":107,"_81":108},"https://media.transfigurism.org/thumbnail_bryan_thumbnail_6af5382629.jpg","thumbnail_bryan_thumbnail_6af5382629","thumbnail_bryan-thumbnail.jpg",7.35,245,138,7351,"bryan_thumbnail_6af5382629",440.13,"https://media.transfigurism.org/5/bryan_thumbnail_6af5382629.jpg","previewUrl","provider","strapi-provider-cloudflare-r2","provider_metadata","2025-09-14T03:57:16.695Z","authors",[119],{"_9":10,"_11":120,"_121":122,"_17":143,"_19":144,"_20":145,"_47":16,"_146":147,"_52":-5,"_148":149,"_150":-5,"_151":152},"ax4xx8wian2iddgst517s2qw","bio",[123,131,135,139],{"_124":125,"_126":127},"type","paragraph","children",[128],{"_129":130,"_124":129},"text","Bryan Johnson (born 22 August 1977) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and longevity researcher whose work explores the technological transformation of human biology. Born in Provo, Utah, and raised in nearby Springville, he served a Latter-day Saint mission in Ecuador before earning a degree from Brigham Young University and an MBA from the University of Chicago.",{"_124":125,"_126":132},[133],{"_129":134,"_124":129},"In 2007, Johnson founded Braintree, a mobile and web payment platform that powered services like Uber and Airbnb. In 2012, Braintree acquired Venmo for $26.2 million, and in 2013, PayPal acquired Braintree for $800 million, earning Johnson over $300 million. He subsequently invested $100 million of his personal capital in the OS Fund, supporting transformative science startups in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and space exploration.",{"_124":125,"_126":136},[137],{"_129":138,"_124":129},"In 2016, Johnson founded Kernel, investing another $100 million to develop non-invasive neural interface technologies for measuring brain activity. In 2021, he launched Project Blueprint—a comprehensive anti-aging protocol involving strict nutrition, supplements, fitness regimens, and medical monitoring by a team of 30 specialists. His self-funded longevity initiative involves over 100 daily protocols, with Johnson claiming to age at a rate 46% slower than average.",{"_124":125,"_126":140},[141],{"_129":142,"_124":129},"Johnson’s work represents a contemporary expression of transhumanist ambitions—the application of technology and rigorous methodology to extend healthy human lifespan. While his methods have attracted skepticism from some medical experts, his willingness to invest in and personally test radical approaches to human enhancement has made him one of the most visible figures in the longevity movement.","2025-09-17T21:25:03.949Z","2026-01-13T21:36:34.736Z","2026-01-13T21:36:34.724Z","displayName","Bryan Johnson","birthYear",1977,"deathYear","portrait",{"_9":153,"_11":154,"_13":155,"_58":156,"_59":147,"_60":157,"_62":157,"_64":158,"_71":185,"_68":160,"_73":163,"_77":186,"_40":187,"_112":-5,"_113":114,"_115":-5,"_17":188,"_19":189,"_20":190},156,"azoscf1pv3790kem59x9rqc0","bryan-johnson.webp","Portrait of Bryan Johnson",1601,{"_66":159,"_83":167,"_92":173,"_53":179},{"_68":160,"_40":161,"_71":162,"_73":163,"_13":164,"_76":-5,"_77":165,"_60":79,"_62":79,"_81":166},".webp","https://media.transfigurism.org/large_bryan_johnson_3fe16db3dd.webp","large_bryan_johnson_3fe16db3dd","image/webp","large_bryan-johnson.webp",247.4,247398,{"_68":160,"_40":168,"_71":169,"_73":163,"_13":170,"_76":-5,"_77":171,"_60":89,"_62":89,"_81":172},"https://media.transfigurism.org/small_bryan_johnson_3fe16db3dd.webp","small_bryan_johnson_3fe16db3dd","small_bryan-johnson.webp",99.26,99256,{"_68":160,"_40":174,"_71":175,"_73":163,"_13":176,"_76":-5,"_77":177,"_60":98,"_62":98,"_81":178},"https://media.transfigurism.org/medium_bryan_johnson_3fe16db3dd.webp","medium_bryan_johnson_3fe16db3dd","medium_bryan-johnson.webp",172.79,172792,{"_68":160,"_40":180,"_71":181,"_73":163,"_13":182,"_76":-5,"_77":183,"_60":153,"_62":153,"_81":184},"https://media.transfigurism.org/thumbnail_bryan_johnson_3fe16db3dd.webp","thumbnail_bryan_johnson_3fe16db3dd","thumbnail_bryan-johnson.webp",15.45,15454,"bryan_johnson_3fe16db3dd",89.94,"https://media.transfigurism.org/1/bryan_johnson_3fe16db3dd.webp","2025-12-30T06:25:58.513Z","2025-12-30T06:27:01.158Z","2025-12-30T06:25:58.514Z","seo",{"_9":193,"_194":195,"_196":197,"_198":-5,"_199":-5,"_200":-5,"_201":-5,"_202":203},525,"metaTitle","Letter to My Younger Self by Bryan Johnson","metaDescription","A guest keynote from Bryan Johnson given at MTAConf 2018 ","keywords","metaRobots","metaViewport","canonicalURL","structuredData",{"_204":205,"_272":273},"@graph",[206,235],{"_207":208,"_13":39,"_209":210,"_211":212,"_215":216,"_217":218,"_228":41,"_229":16,"_230":231,"_232":233,"_234":111},"@id","#video-bryan-johnson-radical-human-improvement-and-ai","@type","VideoObject","author",{"_207":213,"_13":147,"_209":214},"#person-bryan-johnson","Person","duration","PT30M","publisher",{"_207":219,"_40":220,"_221":222,"_13":226,"_209":227},"#organization-mormon-transhumanist-association","https://www.transfigurism.org/","logo",{"_207":223,"_209":224,"_59":225},"#image-mta-logo","ImageObject","Mormon Transhumanist Association Logo","Mormon Transhumanist Association","Organization","contentUrl","inLanguage","uploadDate","2018-04-10T09:00:00Z","description","Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel, OS Fund, and Braintree, speaks at the Mormon Transhumanist Association conference about overcoming religious doubt, embracing artificial intelligence, radically improving human cognition, updating belief systems, and orchestrating a multi-billion-person symphony to address existential risks and build a better future.","thumbnailUrl",{"_207":236,"_209":237,"_238":111,"_239":240,"_211":241,"_242":39,"_243":244,"_198":247,"_217":263,"_229":16,"_265":266,"_232":267,"_268":231,"_269":231,"_270":271},"#article-bryan-johnson-radical-human-improvement-and-ai","Article","image","video",{"_207":208},{"_207":213,"_13":147,"_209":214},"headline","isPartOf",{"_207":245,"_40":220,"_13":226,"_209":246},"#website-mormon-transhumanist-association","WebSite",[248,249,250,251,252,253,254,255,256,257,258,259,260,261,262],"Transhumanism","Mormonism","Religion","Spirituality","Faith and doubt","Belief systems","Human cognition","Neuroscience","Artificial intelligence","Future studies","Technological progress","Human enhancement","Ethics of technology","Existential risk","Mental health and depression",{"_207":219,"_40":220,"_221":264,"_13":226,"_209":227},{"_207":223,"_209":224,"_59":225},"articleBody","I’m happy to introduce a special guest speaker at the conference, Bryan Johnson is the founder of Kernel OS Fund and Braintree. He founded Kernel in 2016. Investing a hundred million dollars of his personal capital to build advanced neural interfaces to treat disease and dysfunction, illuminate the mechanisms of intelligence, and extend cognition. In 2014, Bryan invested 100 million dollars to start OS Fund to support investors and scientists who aim to benefit humanity by rewriting the operating systems of life. His OS Fund investments include endeavors to cure age-related diseases and radically extend healthy human life to a hundred plus, make biology a predictable programming language, digitize analog businesses, replicate the human visual cortex using artificial intelligence, expand humanity’s access to resources, reinvent transportation using autonomous vehicles, and reimagine food using biology, among others. In 2007, Bryan founded Braintree, an online and mobile payments provider. In 2012, Braintree acquired Venmo. Bryan and his team worked tirelessly to build an exceptional company, one that they loved and one that was worthy of frequent love letters from its customers. In 2013, Braintree was acquired by PayPal for 800 million dollars. Bryan is an outdoor adventure enthusiast. He enjoys mountains, volcanoes, arctic dog sledding, is a pilot, and an author of a children’s book, Code Seven. Please join me in welcoming Bryan Johnson.\n\nHi, good morning, everyone. Sound okay, Carl? So I’m immensely grateful to be here today. And I first want to say thank you to my friend Carl, who we met 15 years ago as next door neighbors, and my friend Reinhard Gannis. So Lincoln will never know the depth of my gratitude for you.\n\nI’m here because I think. I tried very hard to maintain my emotions by saying this, but I lost it. Today I want to speak to my 24-year-old self and my father’s here. There’s a band in my bed. Do you mind coming down, Dad, so I can see you a bit better?\n\nThe context of this talk is at the age of 24. I was chronically depressed. I wanted my soul to be extinguished. I didn’t want an afterlife. I didn’t want this life. I didn’t want any existence. And it was at this time that I was neighbors with Lincoln Cannon, and I was stuck.\n\nAnd Lincoln, through a series of conversations and questions, allowed me to break free from being stopped and what you’re going to hear today is the evolution that has happened over the last 16 years of how it became unstuck. And so, to Lincoln’s children, you have abundance of reasons to be very proud of your father. He’s very great men.\n\nAll right, so with that said, this is to my 24-year-old Bryan. Okay, this is not to everyone else. This is to you, Bryan. Okay?\n\nSo, Bryan, first of all, I realize you are super pumped up about Mormonism. It is, I realize you are very, very excited about it because it is a remarkable story. The deal is: if you obey God’s commandments, you get this amazing afterlife. You become a God, you create worlds without end, and all you have to do is obey the rules. It’s fantastic.\n\nIt is a single player sport. It does not matter if your dad does it, does it not matter if your mom does it? It doesn’t matter if the apostles do it. It doesn’t matter if anybody obeys the rules, only you. Now, if your spouse fell, like you find an element in heaven, you’re good. Okay? Like it is you, and that’s a good deal. You obey the rules, and you’re good. So, I realize this is immensely soothing emotionally and intellectually.\n\nOkay, so first of all, I’m going to say to you that you are safe. I’m not here to attack your beliefs. I’m not here to undermine your beliefs. I’m not here to argue you shouldn’t be Mormon. You’re good, okay? We just want to establish that we’re okay with each other.\n\nWhat I do want to do is, I want to explain a reality to you that exists outside your current reality, one that you’ve never heard before. I just want to plant the seed to say it’s there. And if you want to walk over there and kind of play around with it, you can do so. But I just want to give you somewhere else to go in your brain.\n\nI know, Bryan, you’ve got a lot of secret. You have a lot of doubts about the Mormon Church. You don’t think it’s true, but you don’t dare tell anybody. You think it’s going to affect your status among your friends, it’s going to affect leadership positions, it’s going to affect your family relationships. So, you keep them a secret, and that’s a very heavy burden to bear.\n\nAnd I want you to know that as you grow older, you will find out that you are not the minority, you’re in the majority. Most people harbor very deep reservations. That is not a knock on any religion. That is just the truthfulness of being human, of understanding what is true, what is not true, how people arrive at those decisions.\n\nBut you will find it to be soothing to open yourself up and acknowledge that doubt can exist with belief. They don’t need to be one or the other.\n\nNow I also understand your pain because sitting underneath all the repression and the cacophony of faith and doubt experiences in guilt and shame and anguish and fear and warmth and love. It’s a mess. It’s very, very hard to make sense of the world. And so I want to say I feel your pain.\n\nAnd also, it’s the worst thing in the world that could happen is that the Mormon, that someone demonstrates to you that the Mormon religion is not true. It’s the most catastrophic thing that could happen. Because if the Mormon church is not true, what do we have? Like, what is there? There’s nothing. And so it’s terrifying. And so I understand.\n\nSo, what you’ve done in this situation, and you realize this in the future, is this is me speaking to my 25th year old Bryan. This is you, Bryan, and what the brain has done is you’ve built up an army of ninjas that circle you. And any time an incoming thing of information comes to you that suggests that what you believe is not true, your ninja is like kung fu that shit, and they just put it down. Right? Like, make a little suggestion that something the Bible is not true, or the Book of Mormon, or Joseph Smith, or Brigham Young, some craziness of the early Mormon church. Your ninjas take care of it because they soothe you and they keep you. They keep you in this nice, warm cuddle.\n\nBut you’ll realize that these ninjas are really, really important, and they help you actually understand the world. I’ll get into that a little bit, but I want you to understand you have an army of ninjas to protect yourself. And they do so without you knowing, okay, to protect it.\n\nSo, what I’m going to do is, and this is to say that you have become an impenetrable fortress. There is absolutely nothing I could say, do, argue, nothing that would threaten your belief system. Nuclear annihilation? Meh. Right, the zombie apocalypse? Meh. Nothing mattered, right? You’re a single player sport, you get what you want. So let’s just acknowledge we’re good, we have these ninjas.\n\nSo what I’m going to explain to you now, now I’ve lived a few more years than you, and now I’m going to tell you how I’m going to accomplish the same objective that you’re after. But I’m going to do it a different way. We can still believe the same thing. We can still have the same hope. We can still have the same grandiose aspirations about the future. And so, this is my plan on how we’re going to do it.\n\nI have a lot of information to get through very quickly, so we’re going to go through. But I just want to give folks for 20 minutes. I know you’re here with all these people at MTA. And it’s very rare, so I just want to get through this quickly.\n\nSo first of all, while you play a single person sport, I am playing a multi-billion person sport. I cannot get what I want to do with one person. I have to play with a few billion people on planet Earth. We have to all cooperate together to do something together.\n\nAnd in doing so, what do I worry about? Everything. Pandemics, nuclear annihilation, global warming, war, runaway AI, these are all my primary concerns. I own all these problems, and it’s very distressing. But that’s okay. Like, we understand what the landscape’s going to be like.\n\nSo the very first thing that we have to do, if we’re going to do a multi-billion personal orchestra, the very first revelation we have to make is that we are severely cognitively impaired. And we don’t recognize this. We think we’re irrational, logical. We think we actually just are the masters of our universe. We see everything around us. It’s not true. We are severely cognitively impaired.\n\nHere, I’ve got a chart right there of 188 chronicled cognitive biases. Things we do in our brain to make sense of the world, to deal with the world.\n\nNow, remember that story of Benjamin Franklin, who he tried to become morally perfect. He listed out his attributes and then he set off to become morally perfect. He paid attention one day to humility, the next day he went to temperance, the next day, etc. And what he found out was when he missed, when he went to day two, he forgot about day one. He couldn’t do it.\n\nAnd he was just trying to master seven attributes. Now, let’s imagine you’re trying to perfect your cognition with 188. What I would challenge you to do to put a mirror to yourself, to realize how flawed you are, is try to become cognitively perfect. Get the poster and identify one. We’re going to say, we notice when something has changed. Anchoring is the bias. And I don’t want you to anchor. Okay, I want you to have full view around you and not do that. I want you to do that 188 days until you’ve mastered your cognitive biases. And you can demonstrate to me that you are a third-thinking human.\n\nNumber two is that we have built in society the perfect system for humans to become irrelevant and be put out of business. We don’t realize this, but we have. And we can reduce it to a single metric: return on investment of intelligence. We don’t think about this, but it’s economics. This world is run by economics.\n\nAnd so if I have a million dollars and I can invest it to improve a human, or I can invest a million dollars to improve a group of humans who are building software and hardware, every single time, I’m going to choose the software and hardware. Why? Because it’s going to produce much better intelligence for this given human. This human is going to die. It takes 33 years to produce a PhD. Humans progress. It takes forever. It’s expensive. They’re like super flawed, right? Like, why would you ever do that?\n\nAnd so, right now, the rate of return for digital intelligence is screaming up. The rate of return on human intelligence is basically flatlining. We will soon have no incentive, no economic incentive to improve humans. That’s very problematic for us.\n\nNumber three is we have a very big problem identifying what we should work on in the world as a species. In fact, we have so many things we’re talking about, we just can’t do it. So, I want to tell you a story of how we can identify the right problems.\n\nThere’s a story of so in the 1900s, so 100,000 horses producing 2.5 million tons of manure a day, and they thought the world, the sky was falling. It was the worst thing ever. Like it’s the stench, it was just everywhere. It was in the food supply, people were getting sick, no one knew what to do to how to solve it. So actually, what happened is cars came along and solved horse manure. So actually, it turned out to be a horseshit problem. So if they would have focused on solving horse manure, the wrong focus. They had cars solved it.\n\nThen cars created their own problems. But in the world, we have many horseshit problems.\n\nOkay, so there are those kinds of problems, then there are game-over problems. A game-over problem might be like nuclear annihilation, or it could be runaway climate change. When we get to second, third, fourth, and fifth-order consequences of climate change, we may not be able to catch up to a thing. So, we need to identify what problems to focus on.\n\nNumber four, so Bryan, so far I’ve told you, just to quickly baseline you, the way we’re going to win and create everything we want, we’re going to fix our brains, radically improve ourselves. Number two, we need to make sure we don’t put humans out of business. Because right now we are, that’s not a good thing. Three, we need to identify the right kinds of problems. Don’t horseshit problems, like for example, antibiotic resistance. So the prioritization of the problems. And next is AI.\n\nSo we’ve a few mentions of it this morning. 2017 was kind of the year of we said chicken little on AI. We said like it’s the worst thing ever. It’s coming to get us. It’s more dangerous than nukes. Don’t buy it. AI is the best thing since sliced bread.\n\nIt’s the best thing that could have ever happened to us because it’s the key to our survival. It’s the key to our radical improvement. I’ll get into that in a bit.\n\nFive, we need to become future literate. Okay, so there we acknowledge that reading and writing is an important thing in society. We all share this ability to share information. We need to become literate in another way, which is future literate, which is understanding how to understand and predict the future.\n\nSix, belief systems. They are incredibly the most powerful form of technology in existence in organizing human cooperation. And so examples of belief systems are capitalism, religion, democracy, etc. We need they are the gears of society that determine the torque and the speed at which we can move.\n\nSeven, and the favorite topic is we need to radically improve human cognition. And so when I talk about radically improved human cognition, I’m not talking about increasing our IQ by 20, 50, even 100 or 200 points. I’m talking about if we have human cognition potential on a scale from 1 to 10, we are at 2. We can maybe catch a glimpse of level three, but we need to go to 10. It is so far outside of our ability to imagine that it crushes our brain, but that does not mean it does not exist. It just means that we are trapped in our brain. We can only imagine as far as we’re familiar with something. So, do not be fooled in thinking that we have peaked. Do not be fooled to think there’s not something around the corner. We can do this.\n\nSo how do we do this thing? How do we get this thing in action?\n\nSo on the cognitive impairment, for the past year, I held 12 dinners and I asked 200 of the smartest people I know. I said, let’s imagine we’re living in 2050 and we’ve built this really amazing, successful world. What did we do in 2017, 2018 to start doing that? And I got all the answers you would expect: like AI, climate science, education, healthcare, security. Not a single person mentioned the brain. The brain is a blind spot. We do not acknowledge it in society that it’s something that needs to be improved. It’s like our number one priority. Because if we improve the brain, everything sits on the other side of the brain, everything in existence sits on the other side of the brain, but guess what? Nobody knows it lives upstream. So we need to acknowledge the brain is number one priority.\n\nNumber two is we need to build systems that do not put humans out of business. Right now, you have basically, let’s take Facebook, they’re in the news. Facebook mines our information, our data, and they do so via social interaction, WhatsApp and Instagram. They sell that information to make a whole bunch of money. 500 billion dollar market cap. They then hire the very best people in the world, paying them insane salaries. They then create a black hole of distraction for us, and they make us the worst possible versions of ourselves. They only care about psychological manipulation. So you spend more time to make more money. Then they invest the money to create higher return on their digital intelligence. They build better tools to mine our data, and they do it again. And what they’re doing in this case is they are driving the return up for digital intelligence, keeping humans at the base level, and they’re treating humans like oil wells, where value is to be extracted versus real estate, something to be improved. So, our system is terribly wrong. If we had to design a system, if we actually had to think through how we can make ourselves irrelevant, it’d be perfect. Okay, but we don’t want that.\n\nWhat we want is to be hyper-relevant. And the way we do that is we put people at the center. We say that the person owns their data. The digital data that Facebook is claiming is ownerless is your data, it’s your asset, it’s your information. And we need to make you the epicenter of your own improvement. So let’s say they mine your digital operating system. They know your wants, your preferences, your ideas, what you know, what you don’t know, how you talk, how you don’t talk. They know everything. You need to take that information and improve your cognition.\n\nStart right here on the biases, which is start making ourselves better. You do that, and then you need to make money with your cognition. We do that today. We sell our brain power to our employers. That’s how we make money with ourselves. We then invest in better tool improvement. We then hit ourselves again with more radical improvement. And we go again and mine more data about ourselves. We need to get ourselves in this virtuous cycle and start radically improving ourselves.\n\nNow if you look at this, this inherently pits technology against humans. People somehow have mistaken, they think they are their phones. They’re not. They think that we are massively progressed. We’re not. We are the same we have always been. Our technology has progressed. So don’t get that confused.\n\nIn terms of the problems, I’m not going to go over much of that. That speaks for itself. Like, for example, I’ll give you one example of where I think antibiotic resistance is really scary. It’s like this idea that we can’t respond. I think it’s actually a horseshit problem because I think we’ll actually, the natural machinery will solve it. For example, a lot of the things I invest in right now, where people are programming biology, there’s various problems, things going on. I think we can figure out how to do that. Nuclear annihilation is different. And runaway climate change is different.\n\nLet’s talk about AI. And let’s talk about, we need to get this story right because we need to embrace it with everything we have. One is it is necessary for us to manage societal complexity. Our brains cannot manage it. We cannot manage all the complexity of the world.\n\nNumber two, it is the key to our radical self-improvement. We cannot improve ourselves on our own. We have to use AI, and I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you how.\n\nThree is the power of AI is, and I use AI broadly as this term of like machine learning, software, etc. It is not a task rabbit. It is not something we just say, please go do. It is our co-evolutionary partner. It is a form of intelligence that amplifies our abilities. It is, again, our best friend, and we need to embrace it. Yes, we need to be mindful of safety. Like, yes, those are all true, but we need to understand that that is key to our success.\n\nIn terms of future literacy, there’s a story I’ll share quickly to explain this. So I was with a Saudi Arabian prince in the desert last summer, and we’re talking about his 2030 country plans. And he said, yeah, like I’m really excited. We’ve got these plans for 2030. We’re going to increase employment. I said, how could you possibly be planning for 2030? It’s like 2017. That’s 13 years. That’s like eternity to go that long.\n\nAnd I said, let’s play a game. Let’s imagine that we are here in the sand. There’s sand dunes before us. I said, let’s imagine that we’ve got a robot right here, and we’re trying to get this robot to that sand dune right over there, the big one. How do we do it? If we could do a topographical map, we could map the whole thing out and we could then program the robot to crawl through the sand dunes and get to that place. But the problem with that plan is the moment the robot begins, the sands shift. And then what happens? The robot gets stuck in the sand. So what do you do? You program the robot so it makes a decision every second, and it finds its way to the endpoint.\n\nThat’s future literacy. We need to understand that we don’t know the endpoint. We can’t see it. All we need is this rough approximation. But we have to be able to move that fast in our society. And I’ll get to that. That feeds into belief systems of how we need to roll through society. Okay, so we want to be a robot that changes instantaneously.\n\nNow, belief systems are the rate limiters of our societal progress. We move as fast as we change our beliefs, which is really terrible news for humans because we’re terrible at updating our belief systems.\n\nSo, the most powerful way that people update their belief systems is through economic incentives. So, imagine you’re a software engineer and you go to work and you’re like, yeah, this is the only way to program software. It can’t be done any other way. Your dad is a software developer. You’re not going to stay competitive. You have to learn continuing your job. That’s true across the world in capitalism.\n\nSo, what happens, for example, when I was 24, Bryan, when I was your age. I basically had that mindset in everything I did in my life. I would innovate and change and learn and be dynamic and everything. But then I carved out this little teeny tiny niche in my Mormonism state and said, that’s fixed. I can’t move that. I can’t change that. That’s just known. Not touchable. That’s the problem. When something becomes not, you can’t iterate on top of it, or you can’t iterate fast enough, that’s problematic. So you need to become super aware of your own belief systems, all of them, even the most sacred ones you have. And so oftentimes, we can’t even talk about certain belief systems because they’re too scary.\n\nOkay, so like for example, imagine the most scary belief system we have right now that keeps things in check. Let’s just do some non-scary ones. Let’s just say we currently believe that every person deserves to vote. Is that right? Is that really how we succeed as a species? We believe that our digital data scattered around the world is ownerless, that any company can just vacuum it up and use it. We believe that a person may believe whatever they want so long as it doesn’t negatively affect others. We believe that a person may exhibit cognitive biases of this scale and not be penalized by law. So what can you think of, Bryan? How many sacred belief systems we have in society today that drive our system that are blind to us? It’s a worthy exercise.\n\nSo even when people have economic incentives to change their belief systems, how good are they? Well, when the Fortune 500 was founded in 1955, and today only 60 of the original, that’s 12%, exist. That’s an 88% extinction rate of businesses that have an economic incentive and a full awareness, they need to change their belief systems.\n\nNow imagine we’re in a scenario where people do not have an economic incentive to change their belief system, and it’s much more related to their salvation. That’s problematic. So, how do we solve this? How do we make belief systems a horseshit problem? We get into cognitive expansion.\n\nAnd here’s how I think we do this with the species. One is this fundamental question of why do we not obsess about our own cognitive improvement on the same scale that we obsess about AI? When you think about AI, everyone’s like so excited about how fast technology is progressing. We all think AI can become anything, right? We just imagine everything. But when we think about ourselves, we are unimaginative and unambitious. We think we’re just good. Why?\n\nI have a couple of thoughts on this. I’m not going to share them now for limited time, but it’s something to consider. The human race has missed the boat on ambition.\n\nAnd this is true as a Mormon. When I was a Mormon, I thought that my cognitive expanse would be given to me in the afterlife. It was going to be done for someone else. I just had to obey the rules. It’s actually your responsibility to cognitively expand yourself.\n\nAnd for you, I think it’s totally appropriate. There are no proven limits. There’s no physics-based theories on why your cognition should be limited. So, there’s no reason why you can’t.\n\nSo, for example, why can’t I ask these questions? Why couldn’t I say, why can’t I extend my senses past sight, taste, smell, touch, and sound? Why can’t I love and think in 10 dimensions? Why do I have to speak in two dimensions? It’s atrociously slow. Why is there one person talking in this room? Why are we not all talking at the same time? Why do we not form a new communication system? Why couldn’t I feel what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes? What if instead of destroying my enemies, I destroyed the concept of enemies? Why are these questions not real? Why don’t we contemplate them more?\n\nSo, how might we kickstart this thing? Like, if we’re blind to the brain, if we don’t realize it exists, if we can’t solve our cognitive biases, how would we actually do this? This is an imagination. I’m building a company, Kernel, on neural interfaces, and my question is: if I were to build a device to improve human cognition, to get us on the other side of on this path to creating this amazing world we want, what would I do? And here’s an imagination exercise that exceeds the technology today, but still is an imagination exercise to showcase you.\n\nImagine I gave you, Bryan, a pie chart of your last 24 hours of mental activity. Okay, so here’s what’s going to happen. Here’s what you see after your 24 hours of pie chart of your brain activity.\n\nIn the morning, when you were mentally rehearsing your 10 a.m. presentation, you used 8,303 attabytes. So just like we have computers with kilobytes, gigabytes, brain measurement is in attabytes. That is, directing one’s brain towards intention.\n\nYou remember that you wanted to change the title on slide two. 567 attabytes. Anticipating how you’re going to emotionally respond when your co-worker Miriam likely rejects your idea even before hearing it out: 15,301 attabytes. You’re feeling angry that Miriam always seems to purposefully want to undermine and sabotage you. 24,316 attabytes.\n\nNow you’re realizing that your shoes look terribly worn. 409 attabytes. You remember that you have 767 dollars in your bank account. But you need to pay 2,100 dollars in rent next Tuesday to avoid the 75 dollar late fee, 5,302 attabytes. So getting new shoes is now out of the question, 418 attabytes.\n\nYou then begin wondering if the dilapidated state of your clothing reflects poorly on you. 7,207 attabytes.\n\nMeanwhile, other parts of your brain were largely on autopilot combing your hair, brushing your teeth, and rushing out the door, 9,504 attabytes.\n\nIf we could measure our brain activity, we would do for our brain activity what we do for food. We would quantify it in calories and nutrition. We would categorize it like fruits and vegetables. We would proactively manage it with diet and bioanalysis. And then we’d innovate. We’d do synthetic biology. Give humans something that they can measure and improve, and they’ll go crazy. We need to unleash the human machine of innovation in cognitive expanse, and we are technology limited.\n\nWe can’t imagine it. We can’t see there and let’s go there. It is invisible to us. We have to actually give people these tools.\n\nSo, if we did that, if we had these attabyte tools I wonder things like, could we make studying quantum theory activate the reward systems that are similar to watching the Kardashians? Could we or would we be horrified that we only allocate seven percent of our brain power to the most important things in our life? Would gyms, retreats and businesses of all types spring up for the brain? Would they be obsessed about our improvement? Would we go to this kind of economy? Would we become obsessed with human improvement?\n\nAnd finally, what if we could offload 47% of our current cognition to artificial intelligence? So imagine you have a world that’s automated around you, and everything’s working for you. And you stop having all those silly thoughts of how to bite an assignment to Miriam and your shoes and your bank account, and you focus on expanse. And you start focusing on level three and level four and level five. That’s pretty exciting.\n\nSo, Bryan, in summary. I’m going to, in summary, you have three things you can do with this. One, you can disregard everything I’m saying, and you can stay Mormon. That’s cool. It’s a great path. The Mormon community is fantastic. You do good things. I don’t think you’re going to get what you want, but that’s fine. Okay. You can disregard what I’m saying. That’s option number one.\n\nOption number two is you can leave Mormonism and you can come work with me. We have a multi-billion person symphony to orchestrate. We have an enormous amount of work to do.\n\nOr three, you can do both. Now, if you do both, you probably have a lot of friends here in this room with the MTA. So you’re in good company. Okay?\n\nSo, in summary, I’m going to tell you the seven things I told you. One, we need to recognize that we are severely cognitively impaired and we are blind to it. And on either side of the brain is everything else we want.\n\nNumber two, we need to build commercial systems that focus on radical human improvement. And I’m not just saying intelligence, I’m saying in 360 degrees and in 10 dimensions. We need to believe. We need to have the same level of ambition we have about AI, about ourselves.\n\nNumber three, we need to discern and focus on game over problems. Not horseshit problems. We need to be focused and we need to have a good discernment on what to actually focus on.\n\nFour, we need to embrace AI and celebrate it, that it is our partner in crime and the best thing that could have ever happened to us.\n\nFive, we need to become future literate. We cannot fly by the seat of our pants. We’re going to get run over by the future, and the game’s over. And we both know our incentive is to play infinite games. That’s the whole objective. Not a finite game where there’s a start and a stop. We want to play forever.\n\nSix, we need to become extremely good at updating our belief systems. That’s a hard one. So half the world is operating on ancient operating systems. And they believe it’s carved out and fixed and it’s not going to happen. That’s very problematic when we’re building a multi-billion person orchestra. So we need to figure out how to do that.\n\nAnd the key thing on that is if we make cognitive expansion associated with economic incentives people will adjust their belief systems. Humans will respond to the economic incentive of status and respect and wealth. You need to create that.\n\nNumber seven. We need to make radical human improvement the number one priority for the human race.\n\nSo if we do these things, Bryan, in our minds right now that we share, I think there’s a shot at getting what we want. So I love you, Bryan, very much. I deeply feel your pain. I know how you feel, and I know what you’re going through. In a year from now, when you move and you have a neighbor of Lincoln Cannon, if people are right and they think he’s Satan, he’s going to be the best Satan you could ever imagine. So talk to that guy. And if we join together, we can do this. Thank you.","Full transcript of Bryan Johnson’s talk at the Mormon Transhumanist Association conference, in which he addresses his younger Mormon self, explores doubt and belief, argues for radical human cognitive enhancement, and advocates embracing artificial intelligence and updated belief systems to secure humanity’s 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