DON'T DIE: Dialogues

by Bryan Zero Johnson

Some people are born into this world and never once question their narrative. To them, the world is not a causal nest of discoverable principles—it just is. However, the mindset of an explorer is altogether different—a wondrous thing. It wants. It craves. It is never satisfied until it encounters something different and never before seen.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

“Men Wanted: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”

this next evolutionary chapter will be sufficiently large that all of Earth’s best minds—that’s us, humanity—don’t yet have words or concepts to explain it. It simply sits beyond our imagination. It would be like explaining microwaves to a hominid stuck with a hand ax.

I believe the great explorers of our age and tomorrow’s age will succeed when they close their eyes and set sail inward.

The most important tool at our disposal is adaptability. We need to be able to adapt as fast as change.

Who needs to pay doctors when you can just check the annual banned substances list?”

Imagine going from a board game, where the rules are clear and comprehensible and the reward and success conditions are laid out, to the actual, real-world, clusterfuck of life, which has no meaning, purpose, or goals other than those we give it. Having to shake off the gameplay parts of a belief system was like throwing a member of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon into the heart of London. It’s chaos. It’s indiscernible.

Once you time bound an infinite game, it does in fact turn into a finite one. To be played, optimized, and conquered. All one must do is defeat the time bound.”

At the time, some of us were depressed. Some of us were lost. We were about to dissolve our respective marriages or our respective religions. Some of you were married to the wrong people. Some of you were wedded to the wrong God. We all had things going on bigger than the mountain. We were physically and spiritually broken, and the mountain was just a metaphor. They always are.

People don’t understand how depression can turn a molehill into a mountain. Imagine what it does to a mountain.”

“Farm Boy says, ‘If I was dying, I would want to first write gratitude notes to everyone who has been a positive force in my life.’ Love it, FB. Love it.”

Even when the dinosaurs got hit by an asteroid or someone was thrown into a volcano in some barbaric Mesoamerican ritual, they died because not enough oxygen made it to their brain at the microsecond level.”

Dark Humor: “Do a stand-up routine in front of my children and one million other people.”

Dragonflies live twenty-four hours.

Last year we had almost nine trillion dollars of digital transactions globally.

People protested seatbelts, medical masks, you name it. People will protest. It’s what they do. This has happened before, and it will happen again. Each of us experiences reality as though it were the first time this thing has ever happened when in reality it’s happened dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even billions of times before.

It is unfair to say that the machines came for our jobs. They came because we needed them to fill in our perceptual weaknesses in a field with ever-increasing amounts of data.

A single charge of your mobile phone gets you twelve hours of usage. Same is true with our thoughts. Our physical actions. To overcome or make optimal use of this limit, we use technology to expand and extend our abilities. There are extraordinarily simple examples like the wheel, language, the bicycle, fire, and so on.

“As you can see, he’s a forward thinker. The writer Frederik Pohl once said, ‘A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.’

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” —A.N. Whitehead

Blueprint: “It is not. If you eat all of it—the nutty pudding, the super veggie, the olive oil, and dark chocolate—just as I do, at the exact time I do, it’s exactly 2,250 calories spread out over optimal times during the day to increase autophagy, reduce inflammation, and to induce all kinds of anti-inflammatory mechanisms. The perfect amount of high-octane fuel. Probably it’ll do you all wonders, too. We don’t have to listen to folk mythologies about what does and doesn’t work. Many people could likely get away with doing this, all in moderation, and see orders of magnitude gains in quality of life without dialing it up to eleven like I do. The benefit is the customization. Nobody’s individual health gets lost in population averages. It’s also vegan, if you can handle that. Pounds of vegetables and nuts and oils, all designed to be anti-inflammatory. It’s not the only way, of course.” Everyone was speechless. It might as well have been the sixteenth century and Blueprint was Galileo trying to convince the room that the Earth revolved around the Sun. A lot more still needed to be done to persuade them.

This is the price we pay for our extreme mammalian intelligence. We have to eat constantly, and we have to breathe constantly to break apart air molecules like little fission and fusion reactors into something we can use to keep our bodies buffered against environmental temperatures.

We give a lot of ourselves over to our machines already. We trust them to give us directions rather than know how to get around town. We trust family and experts and friends and information sources. Those are mostly driven algorithmically now. So we are already parsing the world algorithmically. We receive information algorithmically. We decide how to get from point A to point B algorithmically because our smartphones just tell us to go left or right. But I sometimes get the feeling that my maps application is making me the control condition, making me go down the street and out of my way just so it can get better maps of under-mapped neighborhoods.

Farm Boy: “Back in my small town, there’s a saying all the doctors use. That the best and only way to get people to truly change their relationships with food and drugs and stuff is to alert them they are pregnant or have diabetes. Nothing else works. Ever. You can say they have lung cancer and ask them to stop smoking cigarettes like they tried with my grandpa. People don’t stop. You can ask them to stop using drugs. Show direct proof that it’s destroying themselves, their body, their mind, and their family. Doesn’t work.

Most H. sapiens born in the history of humanity, a little over one hundred billion of us if we’re counting every soul that has ever lived, didn’t live to be even twenty years old.

How sure are you that the AI won’t decide, reasonably, that ‘actually, according to our estimates, you’re goddamn healthy and will likely survive multiple heart attacks and stents until the time medicine advances enough in the coming few decades to give you a replacement mechanical or clone heart whenever you need it. And you sleep well enough so you can lose a few hours of deep sleep, no big deal.

Did you know that about grizzly bears, that before they hibernate, they eat only the brains and eyes of the salmon? Throw away the rest of the body.

I love the quote so much I wrote it down in my wallet. Here it is, let me read it to you all: ‘I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.’

But the fun part is taking these contemplations and applying them to what’s next for cognition. Just imagine this. Just imagine that five hundred years from now people look back on us the same way we do on those Ice Age hominids who couldn’t speak. What if we, one day, will be as far behind cognitively, relatively, as cavemen are to us? Is there any reason to believe at all we have reached the peak of human consciousness and ability? The burden of proof is in many ways on those thinking we have somehow hit a ceiling than it is on anyone claiming we haven’t.

“I think I’m hearing these arguments correctly. It’s difficult for humans to imagine the power of new emerging technology, right? If we were with Gutenberg in 1,450 and we said, ‘Imagine the ideas that will be written about using this printing press,’ we wouldn’t be able to do that much with the prompt. We certainly wouldn’t be able to imagine today. Or when electricity was discovered, did people truly imagine all that it would power? That we’d have a tiny Voyager spacecraft at the edge of our solar system stealing the Sun’s photons to power itself alchemically with electricity? That would be madness to have predicted. Absolute madness. Or when the Internet was created to send large files between universities, could anyone really imagine the Arab Spring or that the world’s elections, celebrities, and wealth would mostly one day exist on the Internet? Our imagination ends at the beginning of the unknown.”

Think how insane the modern world is. We sit with glass boxes in our rooms and can beam almost every single surviving song, picture, or film into this glass box in an instant. And what do we do with that? We use it to look at what other people are doing to feel bad about ourselves. That’s insane.

So why do we do it? Because our brains used to spend time and metabolism to check in on others in our social tribe because that was extremely useful information at one point and because there was a limit to how much information could be gleaned in an afternoon in the African savannah. Pre language, it was just eye contact and body language and who is fighting whom, and who is fucking whom, and who is throwing dirt in each other’s eyes. That was it. That’s what social media was back in our primate days: just looking where other people are looking.

The very nature of our body’s metabolic and cognitive processing is that we can trust it, that we should trust it, that we need to trust it at times. When we need oxygen, sensors in our blood tell the brain that too much CO2 has accumulated in the blood, and so we hyperventilate. When we need water, sensors in our organs tell us to feel thirsty. When we’re hungry, horny, tired, you name it—these are all us giving in to a natural algorithm that evolution made for us, gave us, and never asked whether we wanted. And we know it’s an algorithm because it can be turned off in special cases.

Farm Boy: “I had this herding dog, once, as a kid. All it wanted to do was herd sheep or ducks back home at night. It would nip at your ankles anytime you tried to go off on a walk or ignore it, too. Cutest thing imaginable. And as it got older and older and its knees started getting arthritic, we figured it would enjoy retirement after a life well lived. And so we gave it the cozy, warm barn all to itself full of toys, food, and blankets. We would spend hours with it every day. We didn’t realize it, but for the next few months, what we thought was placid contentment in his body language was actually grief and boredom. It didn’t understand that it had done well or the idea of retirement. It didn’t understand that we were happy with it and loved it and cared about its inner world and were trying to offer it peace and relaxation. All it knew was that it could hear the sheep outside, and they weren’t being herded. Each bleating footstep was probably torture to the poor guy, trapped in his retirement jail. We got it wrong. Very wrong.

‘You only get to decide during optimal cognitive conditions,’ and we know, know for a fact, that late at night when we are literally at the furthest point from the last bout of restorative sleep we had, that we are not capable of making the hard cognitive decisions then. In a way, you revoke its charter. It loses its vote at the board meeting. So to speak.”

I think you’d be amazed at what a truly healthy minimum of nutrients or input our bodies actually need. Our bodies still think the world is scary and lacking. We hoard because for most of life on this planet, hoarding was completely rational.”

‘Elevate and defer your decision-making to the most capable physiological instances of self via an algorithm that is superior to your natural abilities.’

The greatest trick the brain ever pulled was convincing you it knows why you did anything ever.

“Well, then, frankly, I worry about the potential for nation state, totalitarian, and technological abuse if this premise catches hold. It’s a tale told many times over that technology goes first to the powerful and that the number one response to power by the powerful is to hold on to their power as if their life depended on it. And the classic way to do that, going all the way back to oh, I don’t know, the primordial oceans, is to limit the degrees of freedom of any who stand in the way. This is single-celled warfare. This is global geopolitical warfare. It’s always about more or less degrees of freedom though we sometimes speak about it in different terms.

Does anyone have a good name for the AI that oversees all the planet’s health?

I said, “Let’s actually do that poll. It’s a good one. Everybody gives their guess as to what percentage chance humanity has of destroying itself and our planet within, let’s say, within two decades. Blueprint, you lead.” Blueprint: “One hundred percent.” Devil May Care: “Zero percent.” Self Critical: “Eighty percent.” Farm Boy: “Five percent.” Seeks Authority: “I think I started the day at fifty percent, but now I’m more … sixty percent?” Relentless: “Zero percent.” I said, “I’ll go too. Ninety percent.” Cognitive Bias: “Zero percent. We haven’t gone extinct yet, have we? So why would we? It makes no sense.” I said, “Just a number will do nicely. Game Play? Any guesses?” Game Play: “Five percent. I think we can engineer any—” “Just a number will do nicely, thanks. We can debate after. Zero, what do you say? Dark Humor, thoughts?” Zero: “It would be weird for me to say anything but zero percent. So zero percent.” Dark Humor: “One hundred percent. Why do you think I say the things I do? Might as well while we have the chance. There is no posterity to be judged by.” Model Builder: “I’m with CB here, actually. Zero percent.”

Seventy percent of the planet is a liquid that kills us in two minutes if we don’t breathe. That’s insane.

We can’t even look at the Sun without going blind. This is a harsh, hostile world, and yet, still humans try to climb every peak, dive every trench, and continue to be as ambitious, playful, and artistic as we can. It would be very easy to survey the world and give up. I don’t think we will ever give up. The plight of the Endurance is exactly what gives me that hope. Even if all the world dies off and there’s only a few hundred of us left, we will persevere. We will engineer a solution.

We are still fetal as a species. This is the beginning. There will be trillions of humans one day, spread throughout the solar system.

What I mean is, sure, things will change. Deserts will become flood plains, and flood plains will become deserts. The north will de-ice. Greenland will turn into a global tourist attraction with a gorgeous pristine lake at its heart once all its ice melts. Canada will become the richest country in the world when it controls the world’s shipping. Equatorial diseases that many industrialized nations have no experience with will spread as their host ranges expand to include the warmer climates. Some stuff will stop working. Other stuff will be invented that makes things a bit easier or prolongs the inevitability of the changes.

We are just beginning to understand how to program basic materials from scratch. Maybe one day, we will have chemical foundries that can produce industrial-scale solvents and products in a silo, and these could be anywhere in the world. We might become less and less dependent on geography and local resource limitations to supply the world’s food, fuel, and needs. And maybe once everything sort of settles down and we have fusion and clean water for all and food and basic materials can be printed, then maybe we can start to clear out the planet’s clogged arteries.

Dark Humor: “Who the fuck is Zero, and when did he get here?”

Mark Twain demanded that his autobiography only be released 100 years after his death.

Think only, he had said, about the change across the world between 1520 and 2020. It was hard to imagine. Magellan had just become the first to cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Vast, vast tracts of the Earth were still unexplored. Martin Luther had posted his theses only three years prior. You could bump into Renaissance greats in the right cafe. The David, Mona Lisa, and the roof of the Sistine Chapel were considered modern art. With intrepid sleuthing, you could buy or at least find a copy of Gutenberg’s Bible, fresh off his printing press, only a few decades old.