06. DON’T YOU KNOW I’M LOCO?

JOHN HOLTEN: Hi Eva!

EVA KELLEY: Hi John.

JH: How have you been sleeping lately?

EK: You know, when you think or dream about someone and wonder how they are, because you haven’t spoken to them in a long time, and then they text you out of nowhere?

JH: Yeah, I guess.

EK: What’s up with that?

JH: I know right.

EK: Remember Phil Kennedy, the neurologist who implanted his own brain with a self-made device?

JH: How could I forget? If you haven’t listened to our last two episodes, I’d suggest you check those out (Episode 4 and Episode 5). In them, Eva travels to Atlanta, Georgia, to visit Irish neurologist and biotech researcher Phil Kennedy who had surgeons in Belize hack into his own brain and implant him with something he made himself because the FDA revoked its approval of his studies on human subjects. So he figured, hell, he’d just do it himself. His aim, I should mention, is to develop a human speech prosthesis for locked-in patients, to enable communication.

EK: What if we could interface our text messages, interface commands to robots, or even send someone how we’re feeling in that moment? Dr. Kennedy’s main concern about this is that it could create new and unsettling advantages for an elite, and an even bigger gap between classes would occur if only those rich enough had access to this kind of brainpower. But there are people working on this new technology, who are less sceptical and perhaps more excited on how this will shape our future.

JH: People like Bryan Johnson?

EK: Exactly.

JH: Who is Bryan Johnson exactly?

EK: Bryan Johnson was born in 1977 in Utah. He was raised a Mormon. When he was 19, he went off as a missionary to spread the good word in Ecuador, and while there, he decided he wanted to focus on improving people’s lives in the here and now, not in the afterlife. By the time he was 30, he was running Braintree, an incredibly successful tech startup processing online payments for e-commerce companies like Uber. In 2013, he sold it to eBay for 800 million dollars.

JH: That’s a lot of money, almost a billion dollars.

EK: Then, five years ago, he announced: »$ 100 million of my personal capital dedicated to investing in inventors and scientists who aim to benefit humanity through quantum leap discoveries at the operating system, or OS, level.« Backed by 100 million dollars of his personal capital he founded a company called Kernel based in Venice Beach, California, developing advanced neural interfaces, and OS Fund, a venture capital firm investing in early-stage science and technology companies.

JH: So Bryan Johnson and Phil Kennedy are somewhat working on similar things but on total opposite ends of the spectrum, at least financially?

EK: You could say that. When I was with Dr. Phil Kennedy I asked him about Bryan Johnson, because they all know each other in the brain world.

EK: Have you heard of Bryan Johnson? What do you think of what he is doing? PHIL KENNEDY: Yes. Very futuristic. But what is he doing? He’s got so many projects going on. EK: True, he has the OS Fund he has all these sub-companies with. PHIL KENNEDY: He’s got all these weird things going on. Well fine, he is very futuristic. I have talked to him and he said his main emphasis is on developing a communication device, but only externally. So what I did, going deep, well not deep into the brain, but just on the surface of the brain, is out. Nobody in California likes that idea.

EK: So John, there really was only one place to go after Atlanta.

JH: And one place only: California.

EVA and JOHN: This is Episode 6 of The Life Cycle: DON’T YOU KNOW I’M LOCO?

// Excerpt from “Insane in the Membrane” by CYPRESS HILL JINGLE BRYAN JOHNSON: This is a famous picture from Hollywood. But it’s my girlfriend basically. This is about dimensionality of cognition. This is about storytelling, J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien, who created worlds, and then Arrival. EK: This is Harry Potter? BJ: And Gandalf. EK: This is you and your girlfriend? BJ: This is my girlfriend, yeah. This is basically the dimensionality of human … this is the future of us, and then Arrival is about rewriting the OS of humanity. EK: This is a creative room. Can I give you this mic?

JH: Wait, where are you?

EK: Ok, so let me describe this room for you. I’m in Bryan Johnson’s office at Kernel in Los Angeles. And the whole room is extremely creatively decorated. On one wall there are these huge alien letter signs from the movie Arrival, if you remember those round things, on another you have Gandalf and Harry Potter raising their respective wands, electricity wafting from the wands. It looks like they’re about to charge in battle. While on the third wall, two skeletal type figures represent Bryan Johnson and his fiancé Taryn Southern, who is an actress, youtube personality, singer, and TV host [EDITOR’S NOTE: and self-described AI artist], and embrace each other – and if I remember correctly, reach out to each other for a kiss? Also, there were a bunch of those floaty magnet sculpture things I was super fascinated by.

JH: There is a lot going on in this room you’re interviewing Bryan Johnson in. I’m really stoked you got to visit Bryan Johnson, because to me, he represents the classic Silicon Valley-type venture capitalist who has turned his mind and money, lots of money, toward substantially improving, as he sees it, the human condition. Really quite grandiose in ambition.

EK: Totally. I was super excited to get to meet him. To me, these Silicon Valley types seem to operate on a different plane of existence. Not in the sense that they’re above the rest of us or better than us, but it’s as though they view the world from a different point of view. Maybe they are more zoomed out of themselves. It’s really fascinating to me.

JH: In short, this is a very rich man who believes humans can evolve substantially further with the help of technology so that they can fully understand their brains, and interface with the brain in a way we currently don’t even imagine. Besides kernel, what else is Johnson’s OS Fund putting money into?

EK: All sorts of things. On their website, they list their areas of interest as »biogenomics, neuroengineering, synthetic biology diagnostics, computationally derived therapeutics, enhanced intelligence, applied science materials, energy, data.« To name just two companies, Synthetic Genomics, which is all about synthetic biology, and Human Longevity Inc., also a genomics-based company. What’s genomics?

JH: Genomics is the study of genomes, which is the genetic material of any organism.

EK: But the mind, the brain is really what Bryan is focussing on with Kernel. I began by asking him what Kernel does and what its goal is. And I just want to say in advance, the audio might be a little hick-up-y here and there. First of all, I was so excited about talking to Johnson and seeing his decor that I didn’t pick up on the window being open, so you might hear some outside noise. And then also one of the mics wasn’t picking up sound. So, apologies for that. I hope you’ll be able to hear the conversation clearly.

Hopefully, your ears will end up in that magical place where they get used to the poor audio quality and suddenly perceive it to be totally fine.

But don't worry, I'll come in and summarize what Bryan is saying when the audio gets especially messed up, so that none of it is lost on you. We're also uploading the full transcript on our website, thelifecyclepodcast.com, in case you want to go back and read that as well.

BRYAN JOHNSON: I started Kernel two and a half years ago after selling my company Braintree to eBay for 800 million dollars. For the first time in my life, I had enough money to basically do anything I thought was worthy of the attention and resources. Up until that point, I didn’t ever have money. I grew up with very little. This gave me serious pause in terms of: If I can basically do whatever I want in the world, what do I do and why? I spent years trying to answer that question and ultimately arrived at the brain or the mind. The reason why is because I was trying to optimize for the decision-making of what single thing I could do in the world that would benefit the most number of people. But I didn’t see anyone in the world-building tools that would allow us to better control our minds.

EK: So, when Bryan, who grew up with very little, suddenly had 800 million dollars to his name, he wondered: Ok but ... now what should I do with it? And he arrived at a very noble question: What single thing can I do in the world that will benefit the most people? His answer: Focus on the brain and create a tool that will allow us humans to actively play a part in our evolution.

EK: At this point, I’m still unsure as to what exactly is being made. So I ask Johnson to explain to me what kernel is really, really doing.

BJ: We are building technology to non-invasively read out brain activity. Right now, the brain is inaccessible, it’s a black box.

EK: Bryan tells me that the brain is inaccessible at the moment. It's a black box.

He says: “We can draw our blood, measure our heart rate, take our temperature, but it's very hard to access our brains.” “There is no good way,” he says. “You can use an FMRI machine, but they're big and expensive, or use EEG but the signal is very poor.” So Bryan is building technology to non-invasively read out brain activity. He wants to enable the digitization of our brains.

BJ: We’re trying to enable the digitization of your brain.

EK: I have to admit, some of Bryan’s explanations, as interesting as they are, were a bit vague at times to me, because there were no demonstrations of any devices or a clear explanation what mapping the brain might entail. It was hard for me to imagine what this would look like exactly. But from what I can grasp, we need to rid ourselves of the vision of needing something physical to digitize our brains. Because the brain emits so much energy, these waves can be picked up externally.

JH: Johnson talks about a »brain read-out« which would allow to look at your thoughts in a printed stream of consciousness. Just to echo again my main man James Joyce. Stream of consciousness, interior monologue, insight into our minds … kind of like a shopping receipt, a list of your thoughts.

BJ: There’s a whole range of things that are potential and that are possible once you get a readout of the brain. So this is basically the beginning stages of neural readout.

EK: So Bryan is saying that once you have a neural read-out, a whole range of things is possible. And you immediately imagine things we're familiar with, like: Can a brain interface help me learn faster? Can it help with my anxiety? Could there be a system in place, like a watch, that vibrates and reminds me to soothe myself when I've had an anxious thought for the 48th time that day? And then he says: “An eco-system could emerge. If our brains truly came online, it would change the way we interact with the world and ourselves.”

BJ: But you can see how an ecosystem could emerge if our brain has truly come online. It changes the way we interact with the world, and with ourselves.

JH: This is where it gets potentially a bit dystopian for me. Sure, joined-up thinking, an ecosystem of online thinking is a nice idea. It’s what we started to get with social media and live streaming. Then he brings in politics, and suddenly we have this horrible vision of mind control in its purest form.

BJ: It is a result of the combination of our minds. In the beginning you have the same situation where any topic you care to talk about, whether you and I worry about the political situation, climate change, or terrorism, or a relationship problem I’m talking about, or I’m anxious, whatever we’re talking about, it sits on the other side of the brain. So I thought, it’s interesting, we spend all of our time looking at things downstream from the brain. And there is basic research going on looking at the brain itself, but the hole I saw was, I wasn’t seeing anyone in the world-building tools that would allow us to better control our minds.

EK: Basically, Bryan's point is that everything we're worried about or think about, from personal to global issues, is looked at outside of the brain. And so Bryan thought: We spend all this time looking at things that are downstream from the brain, but nobody is building controls that would allow us to better control our minds. And so, in a more advanced scenario, he proposes: Could I have an apparatus that helped me avoid manipulation by outside forces, like before a vote?

BJ: Even in some more advanced scenarios of where now there’s just a lot of ... this past election year in the States was contentious in many ways, because there were attempts at manipulating voter opinion, which is not anything new. But could you have an apparatus that helped you avoid being manipulated by outside forces? I guess all these questions mind, if we can build a technology that allows people to have awareness inside their brain and then better have control.

EK: At this point, I jumped in and asked Bryan whether or not being able to resist manipulation by introducing new technology into the brain also opens up the question of you being more vulnerable to be manipulated by outside forces trying to influence your brain, basically your brain being hacked.

JH: A bit like in that movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise. What did he say?

EK: He agreed with me. But he suggested that we’ve reached a point with technological solutions to things that the ultimate liberation or personal empowerment would come from understanding our brains better, and that throughout history, breakthroughs always bring with them a reevaluation of ethics and a period of trial and error.

BJ: At this point, this is all speculative.

EK: He stresses the point that this is all speculative and that the reason why he indulges in this speculation is that we don't yet know if we can read out neural activity, and we don't yet know what we can actually even do with any of the signals, so he paints a very large range of possibilities, and we'll just have to wait and see. Bryan feels like things are off in the world right now, our political systems are broken, big tech companies are manipulating us, and currently, individuals are on the losing side of this and are being taken advantage of. He ultimately wants Kernel to empower people, so they aren’t, often unknowingly, trapped in systems, and pushed around to do things that aren’t necessarily in their best interest.

BJ: In many ways, I feel like individuals are on the losing side of the situation. The individuals are the ones who get taken advantage of by the system. So in building Kernel I would love to give people more power in their relationship with themselves and the world so that they are not unknowingly trapped in systems, and they are able to be pushed to and fro. This is really an attempt at trying to empower people to live the life they want to live, to counteract the forces where people end up doing things that may not be in their best interest. Ultimately, I think, as I contemplate Kernel longterm, we can focus on fixing the things that are broken. That’s certainly important. But I do come back to this question all the time in my mind of: What is the aspiration of our generation? What do we really care about?

JH: So he admits that there will be bad sides to some of this. That the technology will be abused or perhaps it’ll be misunderstood or misapplied, but that is the price we’ll have to pay.

EK: Yeah. He is quite realistic or fatalistic about this. He uses contemporary examples to help illustrate the point.

BJ: I’ll point to Facebook (in that the decisions of Mark Zuckerberg and his team have been highly consequential to the world).

EK: Like Facebook, for example. And how the people who bring these new technologies to the world, have a huge responsibility of being thoughtful of the consequences it could bring to our entire perception of the world. But at the same time, you can't control what the individual will eventually use the technology for.

BJ: I will say that I think about this nonstop. Especially about those things, and how we can structure this technology so that it can be used for the best possible purposes with the lowest possible downsides. But I also want to be very real in acknowledging that technology is shipped into a broad ecosystem and people just use it for the reasons they want to use it for.

JH: This is super interesting to think about. It makes me stop and think. Because new technology is dependent on people – individuals – who have a responsibility and a power. This is in the news these days with all the power that new tech companies have acquired. And aside this though, it reminds me of an artwork by the artist Hughgcooney published on YouTube way back in 2009 when I still lived in Ireland, back when mind control might have seemed a little less possible than it is today with the likes of Bryan Johnson actively making whole companies around it.

Hughgcooney »The year is 2050, and wanking has become close to impossible … Yesterday was one of the hardest days of my life. The babysitter systems keep malfunctioning in my house. Every time I try to masturbate, the house notifies my mother that I’m wanking via mind alert. She mind alerts me to ask me what I’m doing, and then not only am I thinking about my mother, but she is live with me in my head while I’m masturbating. When she goes live with me in my head when I’m masturbating, she can see all of my fantasies, including the fantasy about me and my mom arguing about whether mind alerts are an invasion of privacy and how they make wanking tricky. And the thought of this just gets me hotter than the inside of somebody’s head who is just being mind alerted and ratted out by their house for having their mother catch them fantasizing about their mother catching them fantasizing about their mother catching them fantasizing about their mother catching them fantasizing about their mother…«

EK: Honestly, I guess this is a totally valid concern. But at the same time, it’s also so telling of our human condition that when we imagine this incredible new technology, we immediately jump to the question: But can I still masturbate in peace? Think about it, if you could sync your mind to certain people in your life, your family, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, what would you safeguard against? You might be able to say: We want to be alerted when the other thinks of cheating. But then even if you don’t want to cheat, you’re going to think about it just because you’re not allowed to think about it. It’s like when I say, don’t think about peanut butter. You’re thinking about peanut butter right now.

JH: I am, actually! That’s so true.

EK: Gotcha!

JH: These are really helpful examples to think about this stuff.

EK: And this is where Bryan says, it’s a bug of the human mind that we ascribe tremendous importance to ourselves.

BJ: A feature or a bug of the human mind is that we ascribe to ourselves tremendous importance, individually. EK: You want to eradicate that? BJ: I’m saying it’s a feature or a bug, I’m saying it’s a thing. If that’s the case, why can’t I imagine a future where the primary operating system of existence is based upon harmoniousness and not competition?

JH: When I listen to this, the first thing I’m struck by is the language. Transhumanism is roughly speaking a broad movement considering human evolution to be unfinished and believes that technology can enhance humanity. Transhumanist thinking is so often couched in positivist terms.

EK: What’s positivism?

JH: It’s seeing the world in strictly scientific ways where things need to be able to be proven in mathematical or scientific ways. It’s often found in the language used. You have the word “feature,” “bug,” or “operating system,” but do you really want to think of your body as an operating system like your Mac or like a computer game? Here at Klang, everyone is always talking about fixing bugs and putting in features, and all this is for a game, not a person. We’re not robots.

But I should mention that a lot of my own understanding, and I guess prejudices in this domain, comes from a book I read when I first started thinking about transhumanism, To Be A Machine by Mark O’Connell, published by Granta a couple of years ago. It’s really funny, and humane, and curious. O’Connell looks at all these different aspects of transhumanism. It really opened my eyes to the new age of technology we’re in.

EK: Whether we like it or not. I like it. I’m never really sure how much you like it.

JH: There are definitely aspects to it I don’t fully understand. But this stuff is happening, it’s out there, so one way or the other it is super important to think about it. As a fanboy, I tracked down Mark O’Connell, made a very bad recording of a very rambling chat when I got to ask him about the language of computer science being deployed when talking about humans and their thoughts.

MARK O'CONNELL: That question of language in how tech people, broadly speaking, talk about the mind as though it were a piece of software, and the brain as if it were hardware. Bryan Johnson talking about bugs and features or whatever – is an underlying theme in the book. Usually it’s done strangely unselfconsciously as though it’s just a given that the mind is a software. Obviously, we need some kind of metaphor to conceive of consciousness, because otherwise it’s completely inconceivable. The history of technology has provided these presiding metaphors for how we conceive of ourselves and our minds. Hydraulics, and then steam, then the mechanistic clockwork. Then software is obviously the big one there. But the fact that it’s a metaphor has almost become invisible. If you say, “The mind is not a machine,” people will be like: “Well, it kinda is, right?” It’s confusing because what even is a machine?

EK: So you need metaphors to talk about the mind. Ultimately, we don’t know what consciousness is, where exactly it resides, what it looks like. Think back to Phil Kennedy’s scepticism. That to have EEG products, so brainwave products, you have to go into the brain. That’s what Dr. Kennedy says. He says there is no way around it if you want to make an instrument or interface out of it. Here is Dr. Kennedy again:

PHIL KENNEDY: If California don’t like it, no one else is supposed to like it. Give me a break! But everybody says, we wouldn’t invade your brain, now, would we? Well, if you want to do it, you are going to have to. For certain things. For communication, no, you don’t. Because you can use EEG or many other external techniques. That is fine.

EK: A big issue a lot of people have about the future is fear. Bryan Johnson’s optimism is refreshing, and he’s right: Progress is unavoidable. It’s human nature to want to improve. Fighting change or progress, or pushing against it is a much scarier outlook on the future, in my opinion. Of course there is a responsibility that comes with igniting or pursuing progress. You don’t want an evil mastermind to make the rules. So I guess it comes down to whether it’s good people or bad people who design our future. And then of course to come back to Phil Kennedy’s concerns, who will have access to the future?

BJ: I had this conversation about the future of technology in the brain, I don’t know, two thousand times. I can almost predict the responses I get when having these conversations, because you raise the topic and someone’s amygdala immediately fires up: what am I going to lose; who is going to do bad things; inequality, the government, the Russian hacker … These are the default thought processes that we have accepted. Those are all legitimate fears. What I would highlight however is the inevitability of the situation. This technology is moving forward. Oftentimes, people approach these conversations as one of luxury, not of necessity. The question is, do we even have the luxury of opining on the fact that whether or not this technology is going to market if it’s going to create inequality? I don’t think we do. I think it’s an inevitability. It’s coming to market. It will come to market at a certain price point at a certain rate of adoption. That’s just what happens with technology. Therefore, I would rather put my thought processes into how to help ensure this thing is done correctly. As a society we need to get our heads around how to collectively move past this conversation of these fear responses, which are legitimate, but we need to move on to solution creation, because it’s coming too fast for us to be stuck. If we look for example at how long it’s taken society to debate civil rights in the US, we are a couple of decades into this debate and we still haven’t solved it. It takes a long time. To contemplate brain technology, it’s going to be on our front doorstep faster than most people realize, the consequences of which are more significant, and therefore it behooves us to thoroughly scrub this and try to prepare so we minimize the surprise experience.

EK: The inevitability of the situation. That’s what Bryan wants to highlight: It’s inevitable, it’s coming to market. People’s first reaction to new technology is usually one of fear, he says, and he finds that these conversations are often approached as ones of luxury, not necessity. But it’s coming. Faster than we think. So in order for us not to be taken by surprise, we need to move past the fear and move on to solution creation instead.

I wondered: Where does Bryan get his optimism from? Especially as he’s someone who constantly confronts himself with future scenarios. How does he manage to shield himself from becoming defeated about it? Because I feel like oftentimes, the more someone knows about a topic, or scientific topic, the more disenchanted and negatively realistic they become.

BJ: There are a few things at play. A couple of books have been written over the last couple of years. Steven Pinker, and the gentleman who wrote Factfulness [EDITOR’S NOTE: Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Rönnlund are the authors of Factfuness], these authors make these arguments that the world is getting better than any of us realize.

EK: Bryan is optimistic about the future because he believes in the “cognitive revolution.” He says that if he were to look at a current human, and how current humans behave, he would probably feel very pessimistic about the future. We struggle to adapt. Real change in society is usually very slow. But, he says, when we bring the brain online, when we truly digitize what is going on inside our brain, and we have the tools to control our cognitive revolution, and we can do that not only individually, but as a society, we open up possibilities for us as a species that we’ve never had before. Because, think about it, Bryan says, we have never had tools powerful enough to really change ourselves. We go to self-help groups, therapy, read, go to school, but changing who you are, how you think and behave is incredibly challenging. He says: With new tools in AI, we are walking into a brand new era of possibility we have never had before. Later, when I ask Bryan about the apocalypse, he tells me: I hope we can get to a point in the coming years, where we can shift the entire global narrative from one of pessimism and apocalypse to one of tremendous optimism.

BJ: I think that’s it. Why can’t I imagine a future where the primary operating system of our existence is based upon harmoniousness and not competition? Right now, the world is defined by competition. Through capitalism, through the inherent process of evolution, our genetics, our competing. Why couldn’t we get to a state of harmoniousness, why is that so outside the realm of possibility?

EK: So for Bryan it comes down to imagination. Are we willing to imagine the future as being different from what we currently understand?

JH: Listening to him made me think back to Episode 3 when we talked about the possibility we’re living in a simulation or the possibility of living in a simulation. Are we really happy with reality as it is now? When we ask that question, usually we’re not. That’s why we have people invent things, and things are pushed forward; in a way that’s what Silicon Valley so often gets excited about. Changing things up, disruptive technologies, life hacks…

EK: Speaking of that, Bryan actually wrote a plan for the human race.

BJ: In contemplating these questions of: Where are we going to go as a species? It’s funny. Earlier this year I wrote a plan for the human race. Saying that sounds a little ridiculous, but the observation was that as humans, we are really good planners. You and I planned to have this podcast, we plan for weddings, children, careers, and even death. We plan for everything. But what seemed missing to me in the world was that we don’t have a plan as a species. We can solve problems, but there is very little aspirational contemplation of what we can become. I see that as the highest value area where I’d like to see more brains in the world allocated to that, of posing that question for us to explore collectively. Because it’s absent from our collective imagination, outside of the dystopic futures we largely see played out in Hollywood. And I think, for very good reasons, it’s very hard to imagine futures we inherently can’t imagine.

EK: If we were to write a plan as a species, what would that be? We can solve existing problems, but there is very little aspirational contemplation of: What can we become? Bryan says.

EK: So, on his plan, Bryan talks about things like future literacy. He describes that as follows:

»Future literacy is the ability to forecast approximate milestones and create the capacity to reach them, regardless of contextual change. It’s the act of creating mental models for an emerging future while living experimentally and adventurously. If enough of us become future literate, we stand a chance of surviving ourselves.«

EK: So Bryan’s plan consists of seven steps. Basically, he tries to imagine that »if we adjusted a few things, turned a few knobs, and set off in new directions. What if we could not only survive, but create an existence more exquisite than we can even imagine?!«

EK: Why are you smiling?

JH: I just loved the image of turning a few knobs and setting off in new directions, and Bob’s your uncle.

EK: You can read the entire piece on his website, bryanjohnson.co or on Medium. But I just want to read out the first bit of it:

»We need future literacy to survive. I don’t go to pools. I don’t drink margaritas. Somehow, here I am, sitting at a pool with a margarita in hand, editing my 82nd draft of a plan for the future of the human race. My girlfriend is worried people might think I’m crazy. “Baby,” she posits, “most people just want to make it through the day. Who really gives a shit whether humans survive in 200 years?” She’s kind of right. Fortunately, tequila takes the edge off.«

JH: Wow, that’s the beginning of his plan? I love that. All the techno-optimism and futurism mixed up with a Californian swimming pool and a margarita in the hand. It’s just like a J.G. Ballard short story. Seriously, once again, we are back where we started. The end, the apocalypse, the extinction of the human race.

EK: Once again we realize that the apocalypse is on everyone’s mind. Something we’ve all thought about at some point, probably even talked about with someone. I couldn’t help but ask Bryan about his idea of the apocalypse. And in true Bryan Johnson fashion, I think this is one of the most optimistic answers I’ve heard on the apocalypse.

BJ: I agree that the apocalypse has been hyper-normalized. It’s more of a sport now. Like you’re saying, it eases conversation and gets people to be familiar with each other. I think the reason why people do this is that it’s a coping mechanism with the powerlessness that people feel. Again, I think people intuitively know a lot of things are broken right now. They view their inability to do anything about it as desperate. Why would you sit in that feeling of desperation when you can go to a happy place and joke about it, then reconcile with it saying, I think the following scenarios are going to happen. What I think could change in this scenario is, if you give people tools that gave them better control over themselves, their groups, their ability to change the big powerful systems that stop things today, I think that conversation would change. And I think that technologies like enabling brain interfaces where we truly empower individuals could be one of the biggest shifts we have ever seen, could empower a momentum and aspiration, because, I would ask the question: Why are we not excited about the future? The answer is of course that we feel things are off. On the flip side, the enthusiasm the blockchain put into the world, this brand new technology, the enthusiasm and the passion it generated was unbelievable because people saw in it the ability to reconstruct politics, economics, commerce, and everything. The blockchain has struggled to find its place in the world, but still, one should give people technology powerful enough to make large scale changes and find new paths of contemplation so they’re not obsessed about the apocalypse, they’re instead obsessed with what they can become, because then they’re obsessed about the exciting things in life. That’s where I hope we can get in the coming years. We can shift the entire global narrative from one of pessimism and apocalypse to one of tremendous optimism.

JH: That’s an optimistic note to end on. I’m really glad that you had fun times in California, Eva. Maybe next season, I’ll be looking up to travel to the other side of the world.

EK: Yeah. You snooze you lose, you know.

JH: Anyway, everyone remember to like and subscribe wherever it is that you listen to your podcast, and always do reach out to us, we’re delighted to hear from you: contact@thelifecyclepodcast.com is the email.

EK: The Life Cycle podcast is produced by Klang, and written, hosted, and produced by John Holten and me, Eva Kelley. This episode has also been produced by supplement connoisseur David Magnusson who did the mix and sound engineering. We’d like to thank our executive producer Mundi Vondi for making this possible. And special thanks to Bryan Johnson and his people, of course, for his time, as well as to Mark O’Connell.

JH: This episode was recorded in sunny LA, California, a very rainy and cloudy Dublin, and at the Klang headquarters in Berlin, Kreuzberg.

EK: Thanks for listening!

JH: Goodbye!