Bryan Johnson - A 50 year old 18 year old

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So there’s this guy who measures his nightly erections, doesn’t go out into the sun, and strives to delegate all his decision making to an algorithm called blue print. Certainly a nut job, but a nut job who has explored many of the thoughts I’m very interested in. Depression, purpose, sleep, exercise. Here are my notes.

Stuff i love

  • Sleep is sacred (note he was depressed for 10 years)
  • Doesn’t drink, beause it messes with sleep. Mitigated by having wine for breakfast, but even that messed with his sleep so he stopped
  • “The you in the moment”, can make terrible decisions and has no accountability. This begs the question, who gave them permission to run the ship and screw over others (note, this scales up to
  • Move everything from the rider to shaping the path (What he calls blue prints)

Goofy stuff

  • Doesn’t go out in the sun during the day, bad for the skin
  • Measures everything he can including evening errections
  • (I can relate) Hates seeing grey hair, but also hates dying his hair (I took some stabs at dying my beard)

Sleep

How good a nights sleep you have is really sets the difficultly level of the next day. How could you not go all in on this.

Don’t Die - Voices in his head

He wrote a book, that is a conversation between the voices in his head. I was dissapointed he didn’t name them, like I did :) Interesting, he has a voice named scribe, which I never thought about, but turns out I also have a scribe.

Who holds the reins, morning or evening Igor

A core concept is there are really two Igors, the morning, who is full of discipline, and the evening one who makes terrilbe decisons. Who should have “control of the body”? I think future Igor would prefer morning Igor, but when evening Igor is in control, he’s king of the world with accountability to no one.

Why not defer control to an algorithm?

Sounds scary, but we do this easily to google maps, and we no longer get lost. Honeslty, and even if it’s not ‘perfectly optimal on every instance’, it’s great on the integral. I’m not sure if I’d want to do this, but I’m not sure why not. It’s not like I’m doing a great job of it myself.

I also try to do this for my finances using zero index funds vs lottery tickets.

Attitude to others

He is like, I want to be an inspiriation, don’t feel you need to do what I do, just realize it can be done, and let it be an inspiration

Changes he’s made me consider

Changes he’s made me implement

  • Re-inforce my importance of sleep.