Bryan Johnson has it all figured out. In an interview with Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference earlier this week, Johnson, the 45-year-old American tech entrepreneur, shared his four life principles:
- Don’t die
- Don’t kill each other
- Don’t destroy the planet
- Don’t underestimate aligning with AI
“That is the only thing on our to-do list. Nothing else matters,” said Johnson, who is spending roughly $2 million per year to slow down his body’s natural aging process. “After 13 billion years in the universe and four billion years [of] evolutionary history on the planet, we are steps away from super intelligence and I want to take it to the future.”
Johnson, who has become famous for his outlandish and extreme health protocols, such as taking 61 pills per day and eating 70 pounds of vegetables per month, refers to this “super intelligence,” as “zeroth-principle thinking.”
What is zeroth-principle thinking?
In a 2021 Medium post, Johnson described zeroth-principle thinking as building blocks, or a truly original idea that completely reshapes society for centuries to come, as opposed to first-principle thinking, which looks at how systems interact.
“We are accustomed to first-principle thinking, where you assume the fewest number of things in a particular time frame,” he explained at Brainstorm Tech. “Zeroth-principle thinking is thinking from another dimension. It’s another way of saying talent hits the target no one else can. Genius hits the target no one else can see.”
When AI has been applied to human problems, Johnson believes, it will have been able to “achieve genius-level advancement.”
“As we apply AI to every domain in society, we are going to see a number of zero principle-like ideas, at a rate faster than we ever have before,” he said. “And it’s going to bend our reality, just like special relativity did and germ theory did. Zeros typically come about every couple centuries. Now they are landing at a much faster pace.”
