The Exchanges

Q So if you were going to try to replicate that experience for somebody else, and to make them think bigger than they could even imagine, and maybe get on a health journey similar to yours, are there words of wisdom that you would give somebody to try to kick start an Ecuador in their mind?

A Yeah, I do this with my eighteen-year-old, my son. To his credit, he is attentive, he's curious, and he's willing to listen, and he's trying to figure out what game does he play in life, because he's Wise in that he's listened that you're born into games in society, like you're born as an American, you're born into capitalism, you're born into, like, all these norms, and then we learn them, and they become invisible. So we don't realize we're actually in games we didn't choose to play. We're just playing it. And then we tried to become number one if you're competitive in one of those, those different tracks. And so what I've tried to suggest to him is don't assume that any game being played in society is your game. Extract yourself. Evaluate them for what they are. I guess I would summarize that and say, don't try to be number one. Try to be zero. And number one is like you're going for rank in a given game. You're trying to be other players. A zero is, this is like a different concept. Zero is principle thinking. You're trying to come up with a new idea, a new game to play. And so I guess the advice would be try not to feel overpowered by societal expectations. Of what they want you to play.

AI assessment note: “what I've tried to suggest to him is don't assume that any game”

Q you tweeted about certain acts that we take now today, you think of as committing violence against ourselves, which I think is really powerful, because when you assign words like that, then actions can change. What do you mean by committing violence against yourself that's different than how most people might? Except for the people these days who say words are violent, in which case none of this is relevant.

A Yeah, it was a thought experiment I did that what would A century from now, what would they say that society had done to change reality? And so we as a species have been moving towards increasingly less violence across everything, and I was suggesting that a reasonable continuation would be that right now we commit these acts of self-destruction, like we overeat, or we drink, or we stay up late, we miss our bedtime, and these things increase our chance of death, They increase our speed of aging, and they increase, you know, probability of disease. And it's kind of insane As an intelligent species that we would willingly do things that would shorten our life or cause death. And we justify and we say, well, we live only once, so live fast, die young. So we have all these really pretty stories and justifications, but they fall short in the context where the future's at. And so I basically said, I'm going to say any action that I take that increases my speed of aging, going to label as an act of violence, and I'm going to shift it. And so I'm trying to basically model out What is the future of being human? And I'm trying to live that. If we try to explain the future in, like, Blade Runner, you go to 20 49, you see flying cars, you see droids, but humans are identical. They have the same thought processes, they have the same minds, they have the same ticks, they're the same, like, p…

AI assessment note: “any action that I take that increases my speed of aging, going to label as an act of violence”

Q You've talked about a lot of different ways to decrease your blood pressure to a level of an eighteen-year-old. So if I kind of zoom out and look overall at people like my father and most people who are struggling with blood pressure, this is very tactical, but what would you say to them? Is the answer just go and get pharmaceutical drugs?

A You can use drugs, yes. You can also significantly improve that through diet, sleep, exercise, and usually when these kinds of questions come up, it comes back to the basics. You can do more esoteric, expensive therapies, but I mean, the headline with Blueprint is that it's two million dollars a year. It's not. It's, you know, like, 1500 dollars a month, which includes your groceries. It's just expensive for me because we measure. It's that quantification which is so expensive, and the research. The actual doing it is very low cost, and so, yeah, diet, sleep, exercise, what people already know, it's not sexy, and it's very hard to do, and that's why I think most people just don't, they don't do it.

AI assessment note: “You can use drugs, yes. You can also significantly improve that through diet, sleep, exercise”

Q How do you push back on that, or do you?

A It's a bit of a, a too simplistic of a rule to universalize. That is not to say that intuitions are not valuable. Like, you're legit, your body's legit doing computation, doing pattern matching, and you're probably able to generate wisdom that your conscious mind can't. And so, it's not that it's not good, it's just that it's a data point among a larger set of data points. And some people, I think, will encourage that, go with your first decision, and then don't look back. Others will say, be more mindful. It's probably individual, but there's not a clean answer, because people are trying to simplify the complexity of life, and they're trying to say, like, here's a rule. And so, for me, the rule is, don't trust your brain. And then of course, if, if someone says, okay, how do I not trust my brain? That just made things worse for me. Now it's really problematic, but it invites you to start a new game. So for example, if you learned that there are, we have each have 188 proven cognitive biases. They're shortcuts our mind makes to try to make sense of a really messy reality. And so your brain is always making the shortcuts to help you make sense. But then the trade-off Is like, it may not be as accurate. It's like confirmation bias. If I'm trying to find something at what I really believe about a new I concept, I'm going to find information. If it confirms what I want to believe, …

AI assessment note: “It's a bit of a, a too simplistic of a rule to universalize.”

Q So if you were to give advice to, let's say, your kids, or the next person, before almost any of the blueprint, is it get your power of place and community right, and your person or partner right? Like, do you think those are even more fundamental than, than the health aspects?

A Yeah, or I'd say, if I could speak to myself, I would say, and I was trying to help myself problem solve, I would say, what do you feel paralyzed by? And once you identify that, then What is the strength you feel that this thing has upon you? Like in that moment, leaving my church, my religion, like my existential existence felt unimaginable. And leaving my marriage with my three kids, I was like an all in dad. I worked really hard. And so my identity was so built up into that. So those things felt impossibly hard to break. And so how trapped do you feel and how impossibly hard do they feel to break? And if you can identify those two things, you probably can put your finger on the thing that's, you know, potentially responsible. Not always. This is for my case, but that definitely was what kickstarted this next phase of my life. And so others are just genuinely in a really bad spot. And for them, I would say, try your very best to get your basics right. Like go to sleep on time. Like make sleep your number one life priority. Do well on your diet and exercise and just try to get the basics in place. As your number one life priority. Probably has the most powerful starting point change.

AI assessment note: “leaving my church, my religion, like my existential existence felt unimaginable.”

Q Do you think that you're attracted to it because it is the most played game, which means that you have For most competition, which means it might be the hardest game?

A No, I think it's interesting because I, I, my education's primarily from biographies, and I like reading throughout history and looking at a person in their time and place, and they identified something impossibly hard to do, and then they're able to see the thing and then do it, and at the time, people thought they were crazy or that they were unintelligible to that time and place, but then their thing became inevitable and normalized, and we just forget That it was ever crazy in the first place. And so if you take that notion and you apply it right now, then if you say, what is the most ambitious, craziest thing we can imagine as a species? And one is don't die. But two is what is, how big is consciousness? What we know what it feels like to To learn, and to crawl, and walk, and run, and to fall in love, and to have heartbreak, and we have these certain things we know, but just like if you pose this question a few hundred years ago, how big is reality? You would have gotten an answer that would have dramatically underestimated the size of the microscopic world, the size of the universe. We're, we're living in this, the fraction of what real reality exists, and so I, I wonder if the same question could be applied to our consciousness. How How big is our conscious capabilities? Are we living in a fraction of its ability? And as we start applying tools of artificial intelligence…

AI assessment note: “No, I think it's interesting because I, I, my education's primarily from biographies”