The Jordan Harbinger Show - 223: Bryan Johnson | A Plan for the Future of the Human Race

Episode Date: July 11, 2019

Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson) is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and founder and CEO of Kernel, a company developing advanced neural interfaces, and OS Fund, a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage science and technology companies. What We Discuss with Bryan Johnson: Why humanity needs to co-evolve with artificial intelligence if we are to survive as a species. What future literacy is and why it's crucial for understanding the role humanity will play in the decades to come. The steps being taken to comprehend what makes biological systems fail in order to improve their capabilities. How privacy inequality could create more of a disparity between people than economic disparity ever could. Why Bryan advises us to be skeptical of advice -- and how we can discern between what's applicable to our own situation and what's completely useless. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/223 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Live your best life online with Dashlane -- the safe, simple way to store and fill passwords and personal information. Find out how Dashlane keeps you secure where others fail and get 10 percent off for being one of the first 200 to try it at dashlane.com/jordan! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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In other words, trying to solve the enormously complex problem of connecting our human brains to computers and artificial intelligence. This problem is very, very complex because if our brains are, were simple enough for us to understand, we'd be too dumb to understand it at the first place. That and a whole bunch of other reasons, we can't just plug wires into our head without any sort of negative consequences. And today on the show, we get into the weeds about the future of humanity and why we need to co-evolve with artificial intelligence if we are to survive as a species. Brian is very, very passionate about this, and he's a friggin' genius. So we both get pretty excited here. We'll also discuss how and why being able to interface with our brain,

Brian believes, is the most consequential endeavor of the human race, even more important than getting to Mars or other similarly large endeavors. And by the end of this episode, you'll see that the future of the human race lies in our ability to evolve our cognition, because everything lives downstream from our minds. That includes what we care about, how we resolve differences, the future of work, how our political and economic systems work, how we treat our Earth, and how we build AI in the first place. If you want to know how we get all these great people and our orbit. It's all about that network and we're teaching you how to build one. The course is free. It's called six minute networking. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the

guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us and you'll be in great company. All right. Here's Brian Johnson. So you believe human intelligence and AI will essentially be symbiotic in the future. And that's kind of a weird concept for most people. because I think the people who are afraid of AI, I go, it's going to take over and we're just going to be kind of enslaved to it. Or they just go, human intelligence, we're like ants compared to this God that we're building that would be AI. But you're kind of looking at it differently. Yeah, in both of those frames, you use two frames. One is the frame of AI is going to basically threaten us with our future.

And the other frame is that it's somehow going to take something away from us. And most people have latched on to those narratives. They've accepted those statements and then built upon it with their own ideas about the world. And I would challenge the primary assessment to suggest that we need to view this through our amygdala of fight or fly and be scared of this. The frame I'm interested in is we all want to be our best selves. We do everything in our lives to try to become our best selves. And to put that in context, imagine if our hands are hands. hands behaved like our brains did.

So in this conversation, randomly, I would, my hand would swing across the table and swipe your drink away. It would knock your iPad down. It would slap you in the face because we wouldn't have control. We don't have control of our brains. As much as we want to, we all struggle with various things of how our brain works. So therefore, we do a lot of things to try to control our brains. We meditate.

We do a lot of self-talk. We do therapy. We do educational. But our hand on the other side is a controlled system. It's rare that your hand does something you don't want it to do. I will admit, though, I do sometimes think, what would happen if I just reached across and slapped him in a face right now? Does that happen to everybody, or is that just me?

I've asked my listeners this. A lot of people said it happens to them too. Interesting. Maybe you should try it. Yeah, you know, maybe at the end of the interview. I want to get something good here first before you run out of the room. But the frame, I think, that's interesting, is if we acknowledge that we do want to be our best selves and that we do want greater control over our brain,

as the first assumption, there's other things here too, then machine learning, artificial intelligence, whatever word you want to say, has the most promise out of any tool we have to help us improve ourselves. And so there are the obvious things we can talk about and how we can improve ourselves, but there are the more non-obvious things

we can talk about improving ourselves. And some, I think we have gotten this discussion wrong from the beginning because we haven't had the tools that actually allow us, For people to be experiencing how these new tools of machine learning can help us in ways we care about the very most. Yeah, yeah, I would love an example because I think most people are going, yeah, that all sounds good, but aren't we going to build paperclip making robots that rip all of us to shreds

in the service of making more paper? Exactly. I'll give you a couple simple examples. If you tell a 12-year-old girl prior to her taking a test, a math test, that girls are as good boys at math, she has a higher likelihood of doing better on that math test. Is that like a, is that true? That's true. Oh, wow.

It's priming. And the same thing is true. If you are signing up for your retirement plan when you join a new company, if you are opted into the retirement plan during that signup process, not where you have to opt in, but you're by default opted in instead of you have, and then you have to opt out. If you don't want to be in the retirement plan, signup rates are much higher. So the circumstances around us that prime our brain. brain. And so in this conversation, what you're wearing, in this room setting, what I had for

breakfast, what I heard. Eat protein, by the way, if you're wondering. Everything around us has dramatic influence on what we do. And we don't realize how influential those things are. And so imagine a scenario where I have an interface on my head, and it's reading up my neural activity, it has a baseline. And I can create a closed-loop system with machine learning that is feeding me information that helped me optimize my current state. So take that 12 year old girl, for example, she can do better on that math test. If you just simply say girls are as good as boys into a math, she's going to improve. That's a simple statement,

but there's more sophisticated things that could be done to help her. And so if you start applying these tools to our lives, imagine you preparing for this discussion you and I had. You walk into this meeting, just like both of us, we haphazardly prepared this morning for this conversation. We have no idea how we were primed to have this. And so these new tools of machine learning and brain interfaces will open up this new era of human improvement that we've never had before. Yeah. And so that's the frame I think that is most interesting is that we are limited only by our tools, and it's going to open up this new horizon that's going to be far bigger than we can imagine right now.

Yeah, this makes sense. Just on a small, small scale, things that I would want to know during an interview that I can't get would be like, oh, is this person nervous or they did not like that question or they're bored right now and they want to go, oh, they really like this other question. Let's go down that. I mean, emotional intelligence can do a little bit of it, but I'm really just guessing. Yeah. Because sometimes people, I'll go, oh, this person like really does not like me. They cannot wait to get out of here. And the truth is, Moby had to pee for 45 minutes of our two hour long conversation. That's right. And I should have just like known that and been like, hey, let's take five.

didn't come up with that just assumed, wow, he's maybe he doesn't like me. I totally agree. So as an example, Saturday, I've been hiking a lot lately. I've been having hip pain, and I've been uncertain why I've been having hip pain. So I went in and got a new pair of shoes, and I walked into the store, and they did a series of tests on me. I sat on this machine.

They looked at my arch structure, my weight, my size, my width. I ran on the treadmill. They recorded me that they did an analysis impact of how I ran, the structure of my running. And then they they suggested a shoe structure for me and also created a custom insul for my shoe. They actually measured it and molded it on the spot. Wow.

That's awesome. As I walked away thinking how in the world, I can't imagine ever buying shoes any other way. You walk into a store, you look at shoes on the stand, and you say, I'll take that one. Right, because it's yellow. Because it's yellow. That's right. And you do that. But in this situation, I thought, this is insane that I don't do the same thing for my brain.

that I don't get a full assessment for my brain that customizes my life on the kinds of information sources I have, what impact my friends have on me, what words trigger what memories, what my childhood does to me subconsciously, this whole range of things. We are basically in an era right now.

We have no idea what's going on inside our brain or the inputs that are influencing us. And once we bring this online, all of them say, oh my goodness, can you believe 10 years ago people used to just go about their day and they would consume any new resource that popped up, they'd listen to any podcast, they would have,

they'd wear any clothes that they could find and they didn't take into account this personalized nature of their brain and how they are optimized. And so we'll look back like a blockbuster to Netflix and say, that's insane. Can you believe people used to do that? That's, I think, the most relevant frame

and that will give us the greatest opportunity for all of us to be the kind of people we want, plus more, which we can't even imagine. Yeah, I imagine having something that says, hey, whenever you hang out with these people, you are less happy, you become less intelligent in terms of the way that you solve problems. They make you tired. You shouldn't hang out with them anymore. And you go, oh, I never put that together because you don't have enough data points where I'm going, huh, every time I hang out with them, I'm tired. I mean, how many friends have you had in the past where you go, after like 10 years?

I don't really like that guy. He drives me crazy. Or, like, also the case that these little nests. nudges that you have between the relationship. If you and I are engaging here and we're trying to establish a relationship, if we had interfaces, if we could get neural data, perhaps we could have a machine learning counterpart suggesting things for you and I to talk about, words we can use with each other, things we can avoid going down the path.

Basically, a personalized coach for you and me to connect more deeply. Maybe the things that irritate you about me, I can be aware of in your neural reactions so I can start adjusting and we can create deeper connections. And these are the powers that interfaces plus machine learning create for us. Again, is the most relevant discussion, not this, is AI going to take over the world? And should we be scared of the paperclip poll situation? We've missed the essence of this opportunity. And it's ran away with people's fear discussions, which is a fun topic.

It makes everyone scared. Yeah, it's good sci-fi stuff. But it's not, I think, the practical application and really the opportunity we have with this technology. You'd mention that the ability to co-evolve with AI is important. If humanity were to identify a singular thing to work on, the thing that would demand the greatest minds of our generation, it's human intelligence. That's a big statement.

Like, forget about getting to Mars. It's work on the brain. Or, you know, do both. But, like, work on the brain also. What's the urgency here that you see with this? Or is there urgency at all, and I'm just sort of misreading your quote? Oh, so basically, after I sold Brain Tree for the, very first time in my life, I had resources. I was poor to my childhood. I was broke as an

entrepreneur. At the age of 35, I had money for the very first time. And the question, and this was a goal I made when I was 21 years old, but I was going to make a whole bunch of money and then do something in the world. It was useful. Yeah, I think you said, I want to be a millionaire by 30, and you overshot the millionaire goal by like a lot. Congratulations, by the way. Thank you. I mean, so I certainly worked very hard. I was also in the right place, the right time. I got lucky. things, it happened. And I got, and I'm fortunate. And so at that age of 35, I had this opportunity to ask the question, what one thing can I do in the world that maxim increases the probability that we will thrive as a species? If I can pull one lever and basically how can I do something

now that matters in 500 years from now? Like that kind of time horizon. Yeah, I think about that. And my answer is, I can't so enjoy your life. But you could. You could do that. It's really, it is cool to think about though, right? Like, I tried to, my friend Neil Strauss asked me, what are you doing now that anyone's going to care about in a hundred years? Because I told them if I had 10 days left, I would have to record a lot of podcasts or something. And he's like, no, you're missing the point.

But something like this is such a big, bold, ambitious project, that it's almost something that somebody who's got a tremendous amount of resources and has already achieved something big, like with Braintree, would even think about trying to do. Because for a lot of people, I think they look at it go, there's no way that I can make an impact that's going to last a century or five centuries. Here's the argument of why I chose that and why I said that. In that moment with resources, I knew I could decide on what I wanted to next, but I knew in that moment that I was going to

exercise biases of what things I was aware about in the world and how I thought. And so the first thing I wanted to do was I wanted to understand everything I didn't know and acquire perspectives I didn't have. And so I spent roughly two and a half years for raciously consuming information and people's opinions and people's perspectives, asking everyone, I'd go to people who are working on interesting things to say, why are you working on this thing? Like, what are you trying to solve? What are your assumption stacks for doing this? What other options did you consider? Breaking down as much as I could, their entire intellectual architecture of that path they chose. And then I would frame that within the context of every other person I spoke to and try to piece

together all these bits. The one thing I found in common that they all had was everyone was using their mind to determine the given thing and then using their mind to build that given thing. And everything everyone was talking about that they were worried about, whether it be climate change or AI or health or fitness or politics or whatever were all products of the mind. So the one thing everyone had in common was the mind. So you're trying to draw this big circle around everything or you're trying to find something and they're so disparate. that it's like, well, if I draw a big enough circle, the only thing we have in common is we're all people

and we're using our brains to do to that. Exactly. And climate change is a second order problem of the mind. Should we be scared of AI or should we love AI or should it be more nuanced is a product of the mind? How we build AI is a product of the mind. Everything is a second order consequence of our mind. And so in looking at the mind, there was technology, for example, like FMRI, to scan our brains. There's EEG, which is low resolution, non-invasive stuff,

which is not all that helpful. There's implantable stuff. but basically the world's neuroscience had hit a ceiling on the technological tools they'd had. And the insight was if we had better technology to interface with our brain that allowed us to acquire high fidelity neural signal, I actually get in there and figure out what's going on the brain and then married this up with machine learning, we would have a chance to start co-evolving our minds, and that would affect everything else in existence. And specifically in doing this, there was one conclusion I felt, I want argument, I felt most compelled on. That is that if we want to thrive, if you and I want to say in 50

years from now, humanity is going to be in a better spot than you and I could even imagine in our wildest and almost optimistic anticipations. And that is that Darwin showed that species survive, not by a function of how intelligent they are, but by how fast they adapt. Yeah. To change. So if you basically say as a human now, and then if you say, you, you're you take a spectrum of how fast can we adapt to our circumstances now. And so take the extreme of someone loses eyesight and they have to readapt themselves to the world quickly. That's an extreme version of a human adapting themselves. Or can that person change a habit, which is a bit slower?

And then you take it out to a whole bunch of us and say, how can 8 billion of us change our habits? How long is it take us through that? Human adaptation has a certain speed. And if you say the future is going to change very quickly, here are the forces that are going to change the future. And we think that humans are going to have to change roughly this fast in order to adapt the future plus things we don't know. And I look at those two things and I thought, uh-oh. Yeah, uh-oh. Those are different numbers that I'm seeing because humans like status.

We like status quo. We like the status quo. We like the way things are. The future is demanding us to change very fast. And so that was the single thing that got me most interested in the way we are going to survive ourselves and create a thriving future is we have to increase the rate in which we adapt. we have to improve our evolutionary path. And specifically, the fastest way to do that is our minds. Because if you do a change in your genome,

I'm a big fan of genome. I've invested in a ton of companies doing gene editing and gene sequencing. But the mind, if we had an interface, we could begin evolving ourselves within milliseconds. It is right now. And so that was my conclusion is, and I looked around the world, there was no one, there was good work being done in various areas, but nobody was with a concerted effort building specifically technology to try to break through the ceiling

that enabled this new era of neuroscience to move forward. And that's what I decided to do. Yeah, it's incredible. I know you bootstrapped Brain Tree, which for those of you who don't know what bootstrap means, essentially means not taking a bunch of outside capital. There's probably more to it. So you put $100 million into Kernel to try to do the interface. I'm wondering, $100 million sounds like a whole lot. But when you're talking about technology that doesn't exist, I'm wondering just how fast that money goes and you go, wait a minute. Where is it? Building Kernel is, it has to be one of the most difficult companies in the world, unquestionably. We have, in any given path, we are on the bleeding edge of engineering and physics and machine learning and software. Yeah.

Nothing is easy. Like every component of this is, well, we don't know. It's never been, well, we have to advance this if that's even going to be possible. and then we got to do this other thing. Exactly. There's absolutely nothing easy about it. And it requires expertise from every field of science and engineering. And you need to figure out how these complicated systems work together.

And so, yes, $100 million is a starting point, but it is not adequate. Yeah. And it's the case that brain interfaces really has not entered into the public imagination. There's been robust discussions about gene editing, about AI, about other things. We are nascent as a society and how we, even think about, talk about, because no one thinks that interfaces are a possibility. They think that they're 20, 30, 40, 50 years down the road. Maybe an invasive, likely, no one thinks they're even possible for the near term.

So, therefore, we just haven't wanted to really discuss it. So we haven't established a vocabulary. We don't have stories. We don't have narratives. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Brian Johnson. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing

sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Brian Johnson. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes in your podcast player as they're released so you don't miss a single thing from the show. And now back to our show with Brian Johnson. I was talking to David Eagleman on the show.

I'm sure, you know, David Eagleman, he was on the show before, and he's like, the problem is our brain doesn't want an implant in there, so it's going to push things out. And right now, the implants that we have are kind of like this giant metal straw that I have in my cup here. And you're just going, well, if you jam it in right there, it's going to maybe hit the right part of the brain. And we need something that's going to be like 1,000th of a human hair hitting this very specific point that we're not exactly sure how to find.

Yeah. So you get your work cut out. We started off looking at invasive, but we're actually building non-invasive technology. That makes more sense to my layman brain. Yeah. So we actually were working on that and it will not require surgery. That's incredible because I'm thinking brain interface, okay, so it's like a cochlear implant on steroids. But at some point, you just can't get enough things in the right places without messing up the brain to the point where maybe it doesn't even work anymore, right?

Wow. So this is going to, in the future, what do you think in a X, number of years we'll be wearing an ugly hat that can read our brain and interface with our brain? Or not sure yet? I mean, of course, not sure yet, but... No, we're getting increasingly closer to knowing. And my guess is that the things we will be able to demonstrate in the very near term will change everybody's perspective. Great. That's exciting. Not just interfaces, but in the promise of what we can do with a more tightly woven

integration with our technology. I mean, the past 10 years we've flourished in our progress of creating remarkable technology. The sad thing, we've used that technology to largely become worse, individually and collectively. And the companies that have done it have used it. These companies do not care if my 15-year-old does his homework, finishes it on time, and goes to bed on time. No, they want to just get data and then go, hey, bug your dad to buy this for you. I think this is actually a situation where future generations will look back on us and they will think we are insane. And irresponsible. Because we used our most powerful tools to literally make each other and all of us worse.

And it's, I think it will be a head scratcher that they will just, I'll be unable to comprehend why we were so foolish collectively. And I think, and it's also the case that I'd say that the thing that I don't understand, I guess I'm baffled by is if we were to make a global priority, I would say that priority would be to radically improve ourselves as a species. And that does not mean we need higher IQ. It does not mean on the single metric. That means we to acknowledge that investing in becoming better, and that is a subjective term, would be the number one priority. Right now, however, we are obsessed by making our technology better, not ourselves.

And we have chosen the wrong endpoint. And so we need to correct this so that if we make our technology better and we find that we're glued to making this thing work better, We need to somehow leverage technology to then feed back into a cycle because basically what we've done, we've created the perfect economic system to put humans out of business as fast as possible. We've created this economic cycle. We create better technology that makes us worse. Meanwhile, people make money.

They make the technology better. It makes us worse. And so we basically have made this cycle where we're actively making people, humans, irrelevant in the face of technology. Instead of making ourselves increasingly relevant and adaptive. Right, right. So you want a world where humans not just machines and technology improve over time, which sounds like a pretty good idea. And I would say that we, I don't think we necessarily know what improvement means.

I don't think we even know where we want to go. I don't think it's scoring higher, necessarily on a higher IQ score. I think we have an opportunity to open our minds on what it means to be better. It's this whole new range of exploration where we can challenge our assumptions of what that direction looks like. So we can kind of evolve with machines instead of just. going well, eventually we'll build machines and they'll evolve for us. And not, yeah, so specifically that when you and I talk, what you and I say to each other is highly predictable, algorithmically, extremely predictable.

Because we're very... What are the biggest piece of feedback I get on this part? We're very similar. And we both live in the United States. We're both in Los Angeles. Like, we're roughly the same age. Like, when the state, right, it's like, there's so many similarities between you and me. But if you pair you or me with machine learning, that machine learning is only as similar

to us as we've built it. But it's a new form of intelligence that has the ability to take us out of our reality and expand our reality, our creativity, our assumptions. That's what I'm talking about. The power of this technology is we have built machine learning or AI to conform to our reality. But that does not mean that's the only reality that exists. You can build AI to take you into other realities that are not consumed. And that's the potential to start expanding our cognition beyond what you and I can do with each other. And so when you couple that up, now I've got this reach in my brain that I never had before

because I was limited before to only interacting with humans. Oh, that's, yeah, that's fascinating. So instead of just adapting to talking to your wife and your friends, you're literally adapting to something that's completely unconstrained. Exactly. And doesn't have to worry about the fact that they had too much coffee and, like, is distracted right now. You know, like all of that is gone.

That's right. So what is exactly. So what is the likelihood that you and I in this situation that I could say something genuinely surprising to you that makes you stop in your tracks and realize you've never had that thought before and it broke your understanding of reality. And

that's rare for a human to do another human. It's hard for us to walk outside of our boundaries with machine learning. You can build it specifically for that to start breaking our realities and expand ourselves out. And that's why it's so powerful, but it's hindered in many ways by this closed

loop nature of us and our technology. and right now we can deal with our technology via screens and via voice commands, but not a true closed loop with our brains. What is really going inside of our brains, what is really capping the machine learning and create that closed loop system. Right, because we're also limited right now by our senses, which I'm sure, as you know, again, with David Eagleman, he's like, look, your eyes aren't seeing the thing that is in front of you. They're seeing all this data.

They're getting all these light reflections. Your brain is what makes the picture, which is. why when you lose your eyes, you could learn to see, literally see, just like anything else using, I don't know, what was it, like a tongue electrical grid on the tongue? And I thought, oh, he's just feeling things. And the truth is, the vision that someone like that might have could be just as good as what we are looking at, which is impossible to understand when you first hear it, because you just go, but my eyes, because we don't have any concept that our eyes are a keyboard or whatever.

And it's just a crappy USB keyboard from a 93 Pentium 2. That's right. There's nothing advanced about it. I mean, they're miraculous in their own way. But there are other things that we can do. And even David Eagleman also had like that vest or whatever where deaf people can essentially hear using touch.

This is just leagues and leagues and leagues and leagues beyond that where we don't need that stuff. The brain is talking to the brain or interacting with the machine, not like I'm reading words off a screen, which is essentially going to look Stone Age. That's right. Once your stuff comes out.

That's right. The example that brings this point home to me is our brain tricks us into thinking that the reality we occupy right now is the only reality that exists. We have a hard time imagining other realities could exist. So when we imagine the future, we imagine everything around us changing. Things will get faster. Maybe we'll have flying cars, like, etc. Yeah, still waiting on those.

What we do assume is we will always have the same reality-based construction we do now, that we are rational or logical, that we're a knowledge-acquiring tool-making species. We assume that is fixed in perpetuity. However, I think that could be a false assumption. And we need to look back, like, for example, a homorectus two million years ago, that had very rudimentary language, didn't have abstract concepts like math or other, right, physics. And so imagine speaking... Sounds like I have a lot in common with Homo erectus.

Imagine speaking to Homo erectus. And first, you didn't know the language bearing back. Homer Rectus, imagine what is going to be like to be an evolved form of view in two million years. Homo erectus did not have the imaginative capacity to imagine the stock exchange. And so we need to realize we are in the exact same position. There's no reason to believe we've reached this apex of reality construction. And to imagine that our reality could be entirely unrecognizable to us in 30. 30, 40, 50 years breaks our brains.

But it's that starting point, which I think is the most interesting thing we could be doing right now is opening up this possibilities that we could, and we may want to, head in this evolutionary direction, but it's possible. We've done it before. So it's not a crazy idea. We're on this path. The question is, can we replicate 2 million years of evolutionary advance in 30, 40, 50, 100 years with technology?

And I don't know why we couldn't. Yeah, it seems like things are speeding up everywhere else. Why not in this department? And the brain's plastic. We can evolve very quickly. You and I can change ourselves very fast. And so we know that we have that capacity. So we're in a really good starting point.

I think we're only bottlenecked by our technology. And if we can do that and start playing with ourselves and start opening up avenues, people might become really interested in exploring outside of ourselves. Definitely. Yeah, especially if they don't have to let your buddy crack open their skull and shove some wires in there. I mean, that part, that I thought, whoa, I even had a question in here that you essentially have preempted with the whole non-invasive thing where I thought, like, how are you even going to convince people to let you go in there and try this? I mean, it would have to start with medical application where it's like, you're going to die. Can we open up your head? Yeah.

Yeah, sure. Go for it. Yeah. You mentioned CRISPR and gene editing and wanting to interface with neural code. are we going to be able to go in there and fix errors, or are we only thinking right now about how do we sort of supercharge this thing? How do we add? You're asking about gene editing? Yeah, but also even with our neural code. I guess I'm asking you about gene editing slash editing.

I see what you're saying, yeah. I know, for example, if I had a brain interface, one of the things I'd be most interested in is I did this experiment where Benjamin Franklin, tried to become morally perfect. So I think it was in 1723, 53, I forget. He wanted to become like Socrates and Jesus. And he said, I'm going to master humility, temperance. He wrote down these seven moral attributes.

And he tried to become morally perfect. So day one, he'd focus on humility. And he'd make strides and being humble under that conception of humble. But when he shifted to day two to focus on another attribute, he would forget about humility because the brain couldn't scaffold. Humility is one, right? And he goes. So basically he gave up, and he's like, well, I can't become morally perfect.

So I attempted. Did he own slaves, or is that just one of those myths? Because also I'm like, how are you doing that and he own slaves? I guess, yeah, in the context of the day. That's right. They were blinded to their own reality. And we look back now and we say, we make assessments. But it's very hard when you're in the moment, your reality is not, true reality is not clear to you.

And we think it is. But so I try to become, following Benjamin Franklin's example, I try to become cognitively perfect. And what I did is I took 188 chronically known biases. So tricks our brain plays on us to cope with a complicated world. So, for example, confirmation bias. Confirmation bias. We love those.

I've got to send this to you. I've got to send this to you. playing cards. They're not even playing cards. They just have biases on them. as the true reality that my brain is highly flawed and that I am always making mistakes of distorting reality to help me make sense of a complicated world. And so I'm exercising these biases all the time. So I try to become cognitive perfect and say, today I'm not going to fall as up, pray to confirmation bias. So if you ask me my opinion about something, I'm going to stop my brain tracks and say, hold on, you are telling me you believe in this existently and you

you now are desperate to find information that confirms what you already believe. Now, if I had an interface that could help me become aware of my biases, or could give me nudges to say, just be careful as you think about this thing. You may want to think about it like this and like this and like this, and it helps me expand out my cognition to not fall prey to these things. Right. Yeah. I would probably become much more self-aware, more humble, more open-minded. And right now in society, we struggle with these things.

Our fights are so contankerous. Yeah. And so I guess what would I use that? I guess in my own cognition, that's one area. But you can imagine if we start becoming aware of these things, where that allows us to go. Yeah, of course. Because even when you're thinking of a counter argument for something, you're just availability bias is right there because the first thing you think of, well, you're like, well, I already,

I knew this before or like temporal. There's all kinds of, because these are adaptive, these biocative. biases. It would be almost impossible to go about your day without having these adaptive biases help you unless you had a computer going, don't fret. Here's a bunch of examples that you wouldn't have readily thought of that I'm going to provide for you because otherwise you're going to sit there for 20 minutes trying to think of something that is not subject to availability bias because you're, you're going to spend half an hour thinking of options. I'm imagining a situation where two people are talking and they have an interface and let's just say we can detect. For example,

I say a statement to you and within 100 milliseconds you have made up your mind about what I'm going to say in your opinion and reaction to it. So now all you can think about is your response to me and so I speak for 30 seconds

but you don't care about it because within 100 milliseconds before you're even aware you already know what you're going to say and you... Isn't how we are normally? Exactly, what I'm saying. I was like, wait a minute, this is me already.

Exactly. If we became aware of that and then you say, hold on, Brian, you are not listening to anything he's saying. You've already made up your mind. That imperils you to reentrent yourself in your existing beliefs. So these are the kinds of things I think

it would be humorous. And then we all say like, holy shit, you're right. I am so close-minded. And I thought I was this open-minded person. And that's the funny thing is most all of us believe that others. I found a study. I think it was something like 92% of people

or 82% of people believe that others suffer from cognitive biases, but not themselves. They think they are hyper, rational, logical, have total meta-awareness, and they are so convinced of that situation that others are falling prey to that. Yeah, must be nice to be the only person

that has no cognitive bias affecting any of their decisions. Although, if it were really the case, you'd have to take a nap by 11 a.m. because you wouldn't be able to function. If you take away bias and in everything that you do, you couldn't function. There are hundreds of these things

and there are shortcuts that your brain has, so that you can get by. Your point is a great one. And what you just identified was scaffolding. Our brain is all by itself to handle this complicated world. And it does those things in part out of necessity to survive the complexity. However, if we could create technology to help us scaffold, so we slowly build up better infrastructure all around us in how we think and how we roll,

you basically, that's how you level up the human race, is you slowly scaffold up our cognition by knocking these things down one at a time, but you knelt it. We have limited capacity in our brain. Being human is very, very hard. This world is very complex. That that's the power of this evolutionary path, as we can scaffold up in ways we never could before. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Brian Johnson.

We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Brian Johnson. Some of our biases don't service that well anymore, like negativity bias, for example.

That was great when we were running around hunting and gathering, but we haven't, we don't really need that necessarily anymore. It probably does more harm than good, at least in certain areas. You know, oh, you know, look, your brain interface thing, it's not going to work. Just go on vacation, sitting on beach. You got plenty of money. Why are you worrying about this? Oh, yeah, it might not work. A lot of things I've done in my life haven't worked.

I mean, this one huge thing worked, but, you know, that could be an anomaly. I'm just going to go play Xbox. I mean, this kind of thing could easily have happened. And it would have made sense. And also, nobody would have gone shame on you. Everyone would have gone, yeah, I get it. That makes sense. That might be what I would have done to do.

So if we can knock those things down and be more optimistic but not ridiculously so and get rid of a lot of the straw manning and stuff that we do, even do ourselves, it would be so much more. That's again why I think it's a reasonable conclusion that working on the mind is the highest leverage point in all society. Because if we begin acquiring greater meta-awareness and if we begin slowly nudging ourselves towards these. other areas. Again, everything else downstream changes. Right now, like, look at our political environment. It is predictable to a nature of fighting and arguments and, and the acrimony. To me, it's just, it's a representation of a certain insanity. It's the best we can do right now, but I just don't, I find it difficult to imagine how that system of cooperating intelligence is capable of solving the problems we have. And then I look at that and I think, what else,

what I possibly try to work on that could actually break this log jam of humans. Yeah, budding heads all the time. Or brimming our own head against the wall. Forget about it. There's self-destructive behavior. No one, none of us win.

I don't know, you know, and we all just want to just win over the other group and superimpose our beliefs on either people. But to me, we're definitely in a certain form of insanity in our society. And it would be interesting if we could figure out ways that we could try to break these log jams in ways that we really do care about a lot of similar things.

Yeah, that's a good point. You almost do need to unplug it and plug it back in type of outlook when it comes to, hey, look, this tribalism thing, your tribe is not people who live in rural southwestern Michigan or whatever anymore. You know, you have to expand the way that that looks. It's going to be tricky without serious reprogram. That makes sense. You've said brain science is the new rocket science, so I guess the brain machine interface is the new

man on the moon in a way. It is. And rocket science has a deep history. Going back to the 60s in our country where people saw JFK speech and then going to the moon and then all the projects, people grew up with this visual of rockets going into space, that people would be on the moon. We have never had visual manifestations of a compelling nature around our brain. Our brain is hiding behind our eyes. We can't see it. And we don't really pay attention to what we can't see.

And so it's been hiding in plain sight this whole time. And we haven't had the imagery or the endeavors that basically have allowed a generation of people to grow up and say, I want to do that. But once you get these technologies to a point where it can start doing some of the things you and I spoke about, it will ignite this enthusiasm that will be irresistible to, so many people because it basically affects everything we care about. And that's why I do think that in a matter of years, neuroscience will become the new rocket science because it won't just be rockets going

into space to some rock floating around. It will be this infinite realm of expansion of our minds, which ultimately that's the thing we find most interesting, is exploring experience and relationships. And this is the thing we care about the most. and we basically get this opportunity to you come to explore this new era of our cognitive expanse, and we have no idea where we can go. And I think we're getting there, but I do think this new era will be here,

and it will become the primary interest of the world. Yeah, I think it would be hard not to get fascinated by this once we can actually see what it does, especially when you have a critical mass of people that are doing this, and it's not just one crazy guy who's like, no, my interface is telling me all these things, and it's like, calm down, here's a tablet of medication you need to take. If you have a critical mass of people, and they're all coming to these advanced conclusions

and able to build and do things that other people can, everyone's going to want them. So it'll be like a smartphone, where everyone's like, I don't need email on my phone. Oh, well, that's actually, it's pretty convenient that you can do all these other things. All right, fine. And then, oh, they're addicted to it. I mean, it worked on my parents.

Yeah, that's right. I think your comment on the smartphone is right. The smartphone has been the dominant platform over the past decade. Yeah. That's fueled pretty much everything else. Sure. All of our habits and our behaviors. That platform has begun to taper off in terms of societal adoption and what we've done to it.

I think the next one to emerge will be the brain. Yeah. That will be the new platform we all build upon. And it will create our new rich of environment. But again, I think the world is looking for a new platform to build upon. We've run the course on smartphones to a to a, to a, to a, to a, to a, a great degree, we need a new thing. And I do think that the brain is a good potential. It's the new old thing. The old new thing. That's right. What about privacy when it comes to,

you've mentioned this might be a little bit of a tangent. So if it's a non-sequitur, then so be it, I suppose. But you said that privacy inequality could actually create more of a disparity between people than economic disparity, which is kind of a scary thought, considering that a lot of us feel like we don't have any privacy at all already. What's on here? What is the privacy issue? Is it just that we're giving big companies, big tech, all of our data, or is this problem going to get worse with things like brain interfaces? To me, the central premise around this entire thing, I think privacy is an element of it. The primary interest I have on this question is, how do we deal with each other? And what do I gain if you become worse

and I become better. And that's the game we're playing now, is people are willing to become better at everyone else's expense. Yeah, zero sum or whatever. Is that what that's called? I think that's what that's called. To me, that's a form of insanity.

Again, that's how our brains work now. It's how we optimize in our current system and we're willing to make those tradeoffs. And I'm not saying I'm above that. I'm saying I fault prey to the same things because my brain is flawed. However, to me in building kernel, the central thing I want to accomplish

is people become better. And they become better in the ways they want. And that's hard because there's a careful line of paternalism. I don't know what's better for you, and I can't say what's better for you. You also need the opportunity to explore the things you want. Now, it's also you and I know that even though you and I want to be better, we don't behave in our best interest all the time.

No, for sure that. In fact, you and I are probably our worst enemy in many ways. Definitely. And so it's like this alarm clock problem. You set your alarm clock for six in the morning at midnight. And then when it goes off at midnight or 6 a.m., you're like, ah, like just. Right. So who's, which one of you are you? Are you midnight or are you 6 a.m.?

Yeah. And which person wins in that scenario. And so we all have this complication. Depends how far away the alarm clock is from the bed. Exactly. But yeah. But I'm saying we have these internal conflicts. We have these societal conflicts.

But the point is there's a lot of pressure. A lot of things holding us back from becoming the people we want to become and becoming the society of what we want to become. And acknowledging those limitations, privacy is one component of those larger things. And it goes back to what we discussed before. The highest value priority we could have as a society would be radically improving ourselves. The single highest area of focus. And in all the ways we can imagine.

Now, that is a difficult concept because if you didn't break it down, so what does that mean? Where do you go? There's no clear answer. It's very easy for me to make that as a statement, but then in practice. But still, just that acknowledging we have the debate and then try to start nudging our way in that direction, to me, has a highest shield for all of us. I know that you'd grown up, you said you grew up pretty poor. And I read about this, your mom used to make your clothing. I mean, that's most people's moms don't have to make their clothing.

So that's kind of next-level economic disparity that you must have grown up and seen growing up. And is it Mormon that you grew up? so you went on a mission to Ecuador, what was it about the trip to Ecuador that said, okay, I got to make big changes here because it seems like that was a big moment or big time, not necessarily a moment. I guess you were there for a couple of years. I've had a few of these experiences in my life where I was exposed to circumstances that made me realize I was trapped in a reality. And when I went from growing up in Utah to going to poverty-stricken Ecuador, living among people with mud floors, mud walls, that broke my reality from growing up in a privileged world of the United States.

Clean water, great medicine. Even though my family was poor, living in the United States was magnificent. We have all these great things. And so that broke my reality. And so when I came back to the U.S., the contrast just struck me. And I was confronted with this dilemma of there are these people who are in extreme poverty. There's these people in the United States who are in this opulent world. That is a big disparity.

And the same thing happened when I grew up in Mormonism where it was a hyper-religious environment. It was a singular reality about everything. I literally, like, it was black and white about my reality as a Mormon and then everyone else's reality. And I could not understand anyone else's reality. And when I came out of Mormonism and I was like, oh, my goodness. I was in a all-encompassing reality. And the same thing when I discovered, when I became aware of behavioral economics and biases,

I realized my brain was flawed, incredibly flawed. So I guess the point is several times in my life, there's been these demarcations where I realize I'm trapped in a reality. There's other realities that exist, and it expands my awareness. So that mission was the first moment of my life. And what I happened from that is I basically said, I don't care about anything other than creating a better life for other people, trying to do what I can to improve the life of other people.

Like it didn't make sense for me to get a job, to make money and retire and travel, you know, the U.S. in an RV. I didn't care about anything else other than trying to make the world, improving the world in whatever way I could. And so I guess I'm now, I'm always. always on the hunt to discover new realities that I can't see. It's the most interesting question, I think, for me, that I find. It's funny because it's a lot of people who grow up that way or anyway

aren't necessarily looking to expand. They'll maybe leave the Mormon church and go, okay, I broke that reality. I'm good now. You're just kind of like, well, wait, if that was trapping me, and then I left that, and then I went to this other place, and that was trapped reality. So everything I'm seeing right now is always, always just another reality that I'm sort of trapped in. You're like the guy from Quantum Leap or something, right?

Like you end up at another place, but it's not really home. Exactly. And I think that's the risk we all have is we do. Like you said, we leave a reality, we get into a new reality. I'm like, ah, this is home. This is the true one. This is the true one. I need to convert everyone to my new reality instead of saying, okay, this is a temporary reality.

Where am I being trapped? Where can I go next? I totally agree. because I don't think there's one true reality. I think we're just like popping around from one reality to another, and then we have these tendencies to evangelize our reality. Yeah, we want to seek certainty. And if other people believe it, then it's probably true, right?

Exactly. And this is actually that I think one of the more interesting things about being human is right now we have this general agreement that we want to occupy the same reality. And we do so for practical reasons. We all want to drive cars on the right side of the road. We want to obey a certain set of laws so that we can agree upon society. So we try to scaffold society on a similar reality. if we can scaffold society and structure things in a way where we're operationally competent,

we liberate ourselves to now explore different realities that aren't threatening to each other anymore. So we can coexist in different realities because we don't have the same constraints. And that's what I'm talking about where we can expand as a, as humanity as humans, is scaffold up the functional elements of life and expand our reality diversity so that it no longer is offensive or threatening to me. if you are an entirely different form of consciousness than I am, cool, like great, like how can I explore your reality, you explore mind, and we don't have this friction on now we all have to convert your ideas and beat each other up to coincide on one reality.

Yeah, yeah, that is fascinating. And some of the hypotheticals with communicating telepathically eventually, well, it wouldn't really be telepathically. It would be brain interface to brain interface. It would be, you know, Bluetooth 10.0 or whatever. But still, that's pretty, there's all these different things that we can do, walking a mile on someone else's brain, which theoretically could increase empathy, or we could just see how crazy everyone is,

which might also increase empathy now that I think about it, or maybe, maybe not. Yeah, you must have been raised with pretty good values. You really would have had some moral license growing up with your mom making your clothes to be like, I grew up poor, I'm going to go all out now. I don't have to worry about this anymore. I have more than I can spend in a lifetime. But instead, it's like, nah, I'm going to start up a fund and, like, solve big problems. And I feel like it's a different conversation, but at some level, it must be like what we talked about earlier.

Look, this is my only shot at having some immortal idea last beyond my lifetime. To me, it's very practical. It does not make sense to me at all that we would focus on anything other than our future thriving. Why would we spend our time not caring about? the quality of our life, the quality of our kids' lives, of solving big problems. I don't understand why our orientation is not. To me, it feels like a version of crazy to not care about the future more than anything in existence. And I realize our brains are built to care about now and a minute from now. Yeah. And not the other way around. I realize

I'm saying against that in my thinking, however, in my biased thinking, in my distorted way of reality. So in the situation of, okay, I made money, what do I do, it does not make sense me at all to do anything other than I'm doing. I actually have no interest in buying a yacht and vacationing, and that does not make sense me at all. And I know, again, that's my version of reality. I do hope, however, that we can evolve ourselves so that all of us

become equally interested in, I guess it says James Karsz wrote in his book. There's finite games and infinite games. And a finite game is there's a start and a stop, like a baseball game. And all those two teams care about

is winning the game. So we'll do anything to win that game in that finite period of time. An infinite game, you basically the only incentive of the players in the game is you keep on playing the game. And right now, we all want to live life. We want to experience life to its fullest and relationships and all the things we all care about. And therefore, it makes sense that we only care about doing things that help all of us continue to play the game. Although, to be fair, you could probably get a yacht and do all this.

But you don't have any time for the yacht with all of your... No, I don't. You don't. You don't have time. I don't, no, it's not time. I don't have enough money. Colonel, Colonel and the fund are capital-intensive businesses.

Yeah. I do not have excess capital to do anything else other than these two endeavors. Have you kind of gamed it out and gone, oh, okay, if we, like, you could, have you gamed out basically going broke funding this stuff and then dying or something like that? Unquestionably. Oh, no. Unquestionably. And this is, and this key thing of where I'm out on both is I chose two things.

that did not have social proof, which means that it wasn't already accepted in society as a given. It wasn't accepted as a no-brainer. There wasn't social scaffolding where people could say like, that's a cool thing. Yeah, I agree. That's a cool thing. Yeah, I agree. That's a cool thing. I'm basically doing things where it is unfamiliar to people.

And they don't have the social support of being affirmed that a given path is the right one. And so both are on that prep. And I think they're both now getting to a stage where there's enough legitimacy from what we've done. So others can be like, ah, I get it and I'm in. But I guess I just make that comment of doing things that are not social proof in society are extraordinarily hard. I agree. And it just makes it even more admirable that you would go that route. Because think about this, and I'm sure you have.

I mean, of course you have. If you just took all of the cash out from Braintree and put it into even just moderate index funds, you'd have over a billion dollars in short order. But instead it's like, no, I'm going to basically not take this with me and I'm going to invest it all in this. I mean, talk about putting it all on black in a way. But it's like the other choices make no difference in the future of humanity. Possibly we never solve this problem. Dot, dot, dot, gloom instruction.

So yeah. Before we wrap, I wanted to ask about assumption stacks. You'd mentioned that before. What are those and why are they important? And of course, how do we use these or avoid them or whatever it is we need to do with them? Assumption stacks is all the scaffolding we live on that support our decision-making in life and we just forget about them. And I discovered this, for example, after selling Braintree and then asking people, they're working on epic things and going to them and saying, why are you working on this thing and not that thing and why this particular way from that thing? And my experience was most people walk into a given path because of years of decision making.

And they rarely go back to say, this decision or observation I made 13 years ago is now supporting this thing today. Right. But if they question that thing 13 years ago, the entire scaffolding would crumble. And so the key is to always realize you're standing on top of this structure of all these things you accept as truths, all these things you've been told as truths. and then you're making a decision. Like with my 15-year-old who's in school, I ask him questions. For example, he optimizes for college admissions.

Everything he does is like get good grades, do this extra-curricular activity. And he's basically building his resume for college admissions. And I ask him, why? Like, what is it about this whole college admissions process that you're accepting as an ultimate truth of life that should guide your 15-year-old mind? And when you get into college, then what?

Yeah, then what? And then you get into a job and then what? So basically to make him realize you are in a system that adults created for you. And you're accepting the system by default, by doing all these things. But just stop and say, if you want to do the system, cool. But understand you are in a system, not of your design. What does he think about that? He gets it.

He has this meta-awareness. And now he doesn't know what else. Like, as a 15-year-old, what do you do? Yeah, what other options are there? And so I guess that we all live in these systems. as a society and to pull yourself out and to have the awareness of what you exist in and then to say I accept that system or I reject that system. That's what I did when I came back from Ecuador. The default move for me was go to college, get a job, and get in that system.

And I basically said, I don't think that system is right. I'm going to create a different system. And so it's assumption stacks reveal systems. and then it gives you the option to accept those or to do something different. But just having that meta-awareness that you're opting into those things. And I mean, so much of, I'd say 99% of societal assumption-sac scaffolding is outside of our perception. We all exist. Like, we're sitting in these chairs with this table, with you and I engaging with this light structure.

These are assumptions other people have made that we exist in. And we just accept it because people just do it. It's always been that way. Exactly. But to realize that we are in this system created by others and we are oblivious to it. It opens up so many options when you start to think about these, right? And what are some of the most common, what are some common assumption stacks you see people holding that don't serve us? So the school system is one thing.

It might serve a lot of people, actually, who have no other structure. Sure. But you'd mentioned before in, or at least maybe this isn't wired or something. It was like the monkeys climbing to get bananas kind of example. and I think this is really good. Can you take me through that? I'm going to ruin it if I try. Yeah, that's right.

So I was trying to use this example at Braintree because I was invited the team to tease out what assumption stacks we were accepting in building payments, building a company. And that includes our leadership structure, our customer support, all the above. So the story is there's five monkeys in a room. There's a ladder that goes up to a perch.

There's a box of bananas. And when a monkey tries a climb on the ladder to get the monkey, then that monkey sprayed with cold water and all the other monkeys. So the monkeys soon realized after being sprayed a few times that if you climb the ladder and go to the bananas to get one, everyone gets sprayed by cold water. So in the experiment, you pull out one monkey, you put a new monkey in, the new monkey's like, wow, bananas runs up the trail, the ladder to get the banana and they all get sprayed by cold water soon.

The behavior is, if is known by the monkeys, if a new monkey comes in and doesn't know the rules and tries to run up the ladder, grab the monkey, pull it back down. because we all get sprayed by cold water. So soon you basically replace all the monkeys in the colony, none of which have ever been sprayed by cold water. All they know is there's this accepted and expected behavior. If a monkey goes up the ladder for the bananas, grab it and pull it down.

But if a new monkey comes in and they say, hey, why do you guys grab the monkey when they try to go up the ladder to get the banana? Not a single monkey could tell you because they've never been sprayed by the monkey. cold water, the assumption is buried. And so in society, if you start poking, and even in your personal life, you start poking, why is this the case? Then you basically have the power of playing the game of Jenga, where you find the loose little piece of wood, you pull it out, and the entire

thing crumbles. And this goes back to everything we've talked about in our conversation today, of our realities, of cognitive evolution, of how we compare ourselves with machine intelligence. For me, are thriving in large part depends upon poking at the scaffolding we've created and letting it crumble in certain ways and rebuild in other ways. I think I was better at this when I was younger. Is that normal? Because when I was a kid, I remember looking at gopher, which was like text-only internet, which is essentially, it was just a library connection on a dial-up modem.

And I remember telling my dad, hey, there's this company called Yahoo that is indexing things on the internet. And he's like, no one's going to use this. Every town has a library. I think we know how that shook out. I've told the story on the show a bunch. But then I remember getting a Palm pilot. And they were like, oh, if you buy this really specialty thing that connects to it, it's a card instead of a memory card. It's a Wi-Fi device. And I was like, I have to have that. So I special ordered it. And I remember thinking, why don't they take the same type of thing that satellites or wireless data, because we didn't have data on a smartphone, back then, why don't they make it so that this can sort of wirelessly get data just from anywhere?

And I remember asking people who worked at, I think, Palm at the time, or Compact, it was Compact. And they go, yeah, there's just no demand for that. And I thought, how is there no demand for you to have the internet, which even at that time was pretty basic, in your pocket everywhere you go, especially if you're already going to carry this big-ass Palm Pilot, why would you not want connectivity? And now, of course, everyone has smartphones that are all connected. And if you don't have data, people are trip it, right? Or if you have slow data, people are freaking out.

And so, but now as an adult, I don't think I'm as good at finding, at breaking those assumptions anymore. Maybe I'm just in so many assumptions that I can't see a way out. Like, I'm tangled on a spider web of them. Whereas as a kid, nothing seemed sensical because it was all built by grownups who didn't know anything. And I, as a 14 year old, was a genius. Yeah.

Knew everything at that point in my life, right? So it seemed easier. I relate with you on that in that with my children, my favorite thing to do is listen. I'll ask them a question, what do you think about this? And they just talk. And I love listening to how they think. Because as they architect their arguments and roll through things, I get to see how they piece information together, what they accept is an exemption, not an exemption, but it's fresh.

because I walk into the world like you're saying with some pretty tough conclusions about life and they're still formulating their reality and so I get a mirror in hearing them think of new insights of a new way to understand reality and so I agree with it's entirely fresh and this goes back to why I find interfaces so interesting is imagine you've got an interface on your head

you have a machine learning partner and it is helping you break your assumptions all the time and so it's suggesting hey what about this and what about that? And so a different form of intelligence and reality to start breaking it down, you might find the most liberation you've ever experienced in your life

to unshackle yourself from your own brain. That to me is the most exciting thing. And so then you basically say like, you just pose a question, who can be a guest on your show, what topics can you discuss in what formats? Like, for example, here's a weird idea, is you may find that sitting down in a conversation

constrains the range of your conversation. You can quantify it. And that basically if you get a rotating system that changes the person's physical layout to the person. Like we're now on our sideways, now we're kind of tilted, now we're kind of backwards. And that doing that as you talk through various things, it changes the way our brains work,

the way we relate with each other, the social structure. And that may sound weird to us now, but then if you do it experimentally and we say, wow, that changed entirely my attitude towards you, it changed my responses on certain opinions, I thought of things differently, we may find that sitting across from each other in a stationary fashion is crude relative to changing body positions. Sure. Things like that, that you could start finding this expansive thinking of your own,

that how you could do your podcast in non-traditional ways to expand the range of experience that your listeners could have and you could have. I think about this a lot, because there's a YouTube show called Hot Ones, where this guy basically eats hot wings with famous people and ask some questions. And at first I thought, what a dumb gimmick. But now it's like, well, wait a minute. You can't really have pretense when you're covered in hot sauce. You're crying because it's really spicy.

You get on Tyra Bank, who's a model, she's covered in hot sauce and crying. And she needs to blow her nose, but she's got barbecue sauce over their hands. It's a whole different experience. It's a whole different conversation. And I'm thinking like, okay, it's hard for me to imagine doing this while eating hot wings. But what other ways are there for me that are, just beyond what I thought was a dumb gimmick, even comedians in cars getting coffee with Jerry Seinfeld.

It's like, well, we're driving. When you're driving, you're kind of, there's a little bit more or less autopilot stuff going on. And I'm thinking, like, well, I have some of my best thoughts in the shower. I don't know if I could shower and do a show. It might be a little awkward. There's something there, right? Yeah. There's something there.

This goes back to the very first thing we talked about today, which is priming. You tell the 12-year-old girl that she's as good as math as boys. and that single statement changes how she approaches that math test. And so what we're talking about now is you're priming either with wings or in a car. But yes, you then open up that awareness, right? So now we have five different scents, five different drinks, and a vaping device. And before every question, we choose a scent to prime ourselves or a drink to prime ourselves or a vape, like nicotine. And we watch how our mind evolves with each other.

Maybe we change a color of the room, but you basically change the priming inputs in real time. And we acknowledge that we are very susceptible to incoming influence. And now we acknowledge it and we play with it. And we see where we can go. That's the richness of our future that exists. Is if we can become aware of the power of our cognition to expand out, the excitement we have in the future, I think, is orders of magnitude larger than today. because our brains constrain our reality experience.

And we want to be in the status quo, we want to be in a safe place, we want things to be consistent. But if we make it fun, where we're now exploring this outer range, we seek it out. And now change becomes desirable. Changing your opinion becomes something you're interested in.

Right now, to change your opinion seems a bad thing. Yeah. It is the least productive thing we'd be doing as a species. That is contrary to evolution. And so we just all these things, And again, I think that the way, one of the most powerful ways to break this whole thing is to get data from the brain, bring it out, pair it with machine learning, and create a closed-loop system.

That will create the ecosystem that breaks all these other barriers of our imaginative capacity and our ability to get along, evolve, et cetera. Yeah, this is fascinating. We could go on for hours, but I really appreciate it. This has been really, really fascinating. Great big thank you to Brian Johnson. He is such an interesting guy. Extremely smart.

I'm glad that somebody is deciding to tackle these problems and putting their money where their mouth is. That's always nice, right? Because often people will go, hey, someone should do something about this. I'm going to write a blog post about it. Or I'm going to go give a talk about it, then go back to my sky layer that I bought with all my money. But he's really, I asked him at the end, Jason, I don't know if you caught this, where I said, $100 million isn't going to go very far. and I asked him if he was going to sort of die wealthy,

and he's like, no, this endeavor is going to take all my money. I'm basically going to spend all of my money doing this. Well, that's good. Yeah. He's like, no, it's just he's not going. I mean, I'm sure he's going to, he gave his kids some stock in Braintree, which is worth something. I'm sure he's going to take care of his future wife and kids,

but he's not going to have, you know, $400 million. He's going to have whatever is needed to take care of them, and the rest of it's going to get spent on solving this problem. I wish more tech entrepreneurs would take that stance. Yeah, I mean, you have the giving pledge from Warren Buffett and those guys, and it's like, hey, donate at least half your wealth. And it's like, that's great. But when you have $14 billion, donating half of your wealth, yes, it's extremely generous.

And yes, it's your money you can do whatever you want with it. But it's also like, are you even going to notice that? No. If you have 14.8 billion, donate 14 billion. You know, like you can do a lot with that, man. You know, figure it. And I know that's easy for me to say, because if I had 14.8 billion, I don't know if I'd be like, hey, I don't need all this. Here's a bunch of it.

But on the other hand, I really do think that I would want to solve some problems because who cares how rich your great, great grandchildren are. It's just so unexciting to even think about versus being the person who figured out how to do X. And then you're in every textbook forever. Like, you want to be immortal. Who cares what your great grandkids think of you? How about the whole world is like? And then Jordan Harbinger solved this crazy problem with all of his money and his foundation. He didn't do squat.

He sat around and, you know, entertain people. But the money, that solved this huge problem. And now we don't have XYZ anymore because it's been eradicated. Cool. Exactly. Do you want to leave the world a better place or do you want to leave it with like, you know, a lineage of spoiled grandchildren? It's like, come on, fix the problem.

Take that money and use it for good. So kudos to them. Precisely, yes. The other trick that I've heard, and this is a little off topic, is if you're going to give your kid a trust fund, make sure they don't see a penny of it until they're, I think, 30. Ooh, that's good.

Even better, 40. Because imagine having to live your whole life and then work your way up, work your way up, work your way up, and do stuff and develop out. Like, yes, you could cut around being a dipshit until you're 40, but it's actually probably harder than making something of yourself, even if that something is not anything

sort of textbook-worthy. It's like you still have to, if you're smart and you're raised decently, you still, and knowing you're not going to see a penny of whatever's in there till you're 40, you might as well develop some kind of career. Yeah, and here's a better one. Don't even tell them the trusts exist. And then like when he turns 40, then they get the money.

And they're like, sweet, that was a nice surprise. I thought about that too. Yeah, like how awesome would it be if on your 40th birthday, the family attorney calls you and goes, hey, I need you to come in for a meeting. You're like, oh, my God, what's up? Yeah. Oh, yeah, you have $30 million. Oh, okay, that's cool.

I'm going to buy a bigger house and send my kids. Well, no, I don't want to take them out of school. I'll just tear down my house and rebuild another one. I have a car. I don't need to buy another one. I'm good. Like, I don't even know what I would do if that happened to me. I think I'd finally go on vacation maybe.

Maybe. But probably not. Let's be real. We'd build that studio that we always wanted that Howie Mendel has. That's pretty much it. I'd be like, hey, Howie, you want to come to my studio? It's two floors. One way to do it.

Anyway, enough daydreaming. You wanted to how we managed to book all these great, amazing, folks well it's all about that network we're teaching you how to develop that network for free six minute networking jordan harbinger.com slash course don't wait you got to do it now before you got to dig the well before you're thirsty you can't wait till you need something and then be like hey buddy that's not how the stuff works this is a skill set i wish i knew 20 years ago and it takes a few minutes a day to get it going and keep it maintained again this is a free course jordan harbinger dot com slash course is where that is and most of the guests on the show actually have done the course and

subscribe to the newsletter. So come join us and you'll be in good company. Speaking to building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Brian Johnson. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. And there's a video of this interview on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. This show is produced in association with Podcast One in this episode was co-produced by Jason Needs a Trust Fund to Philippo and Jen Harbinger. Show notes and worksheets are by Robert Fogarty. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show. is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode.

So please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much

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