Podcast Host
About me: I'm a husband, father, Biohacker, American expat living in Bulgaria in Eastern Europe, philosopher, writer, Science Fiction novelist, and an Anarcho-Libertarian Christian Transhumanist (yes, that's a thing!)
I've been a podcaster for over a decade and have a popular show; it's called Limitless: Biohacking Brainpower, Health, Personal Growth & Beyond. That podcast details my obsessive nearly 15-year quest to find real-life NZT-48 (the fictional Smart Drug from the movie Limitless with Bradly Cooper).
Intelligence is something I've been interested in for a couple of decades. I've done Biohacker evaluations of over 200 smart drugs. I've used various brain training modalities. I've upgraded my own intelligence from 100 to 108. And experimented with a bunch of different weird and wacky personal growth things.
My story
I was a digital nomad dude, chasing fast WiFi and skirts around the world. And here in Bulgaria, I found the fastest WiFi and met a beautiful Bulgarian girl who told me, "Only hookers walk and smoke," refusing to stroll with me to a swanky seafood restaurant until she had finished her cigarette. She quit smoking, we got married, and last year we had a baby boy, whose Slavic silver-blue eyes beam with all the brilliance of the future, yet unwritten.
He's one year old now, and it's beautiful to see the spark of his intelligence ignite. Being a father is the most life-changing responsibility, and it really puts all the questions around AI, which I hope to explore in this podcast, into perspective. We are the creators of AI; its parents, in a sense--which is an awesome and terrifying responsibility.
As a parent, you also end up thinking really seriously about the future. You no longer think mere months or years ahead, but decades and even centuries. You question how we might architect a more "pro-human future" that will be a good place for your children to live. That's part of my reason for starting this podcast; I hope the conversations that proceed will have some edifying impact on our co-creation of this new intelligent lifeform which we'll share this planet with.
I'm an author
I spent 1300 hours writing an epic two-part SciFi/Cyberpunk series about a Biohacking cybercriminal who must save civilization from the same comet that destroyed Atlantis 12,800 years ago. The series is entitled Hourglass, which is a double entendre referring to the cyclical mysteries of time and womanly beauty...
AI was my brainstorming partner throughout much of the writing process, and here's the interesting thing I noted: AI is fond of reminding us humans that we need to "touch grass" more; that we shouldn't become over-reliant on technology. If I had let AI write the whole story for me, Hourglass would have ended up being yet another cautionary tale about our species tiptoeing into techno-dystopia. But there's already a bunch of books and movies about that! What I thought would be more interesting is a story about lust; about how the individual's agency over their lust (or lack of it) might mirror cosmic cycles of civilizational destruction. So that's the story I wrote.
AI had a lot to do with this story being brought to life; admittedly, perhaps 10% of the writing is meta-prompted by me, written by AI. I used AI to create an "Odyssey of the Mind" style audiobook (that sounds a whole lot better than my gravely narrating 700 pages). I used AI filmmaking tools to create some epically cinematic trailers for Hourglass, but discovered I hate AI filmmaking!
Get Hourglass as a print, digital, or audiobook
I'm a Christian Transhumanist
Which might have you scratching your head. Here's how I marry two ideologies that might seem like they couldn't be more contradictory...
As it stands, humanity has Paleolithic emotions and impulses, medieval institutions, and godlike planet-destroying technology (to paraphrase Edward O. Wilson). For our species to survive the next few centuries and pass Fermi's great filter, we need a serious upgrade. An upgrade of our intelligence and biology. We desperately need a lot more +150 IQ babies being born and wise centenarians around. Transhumanist technologies like CRISPR will get us there.
But for our species not to annihilate itself, we also need an upgrade in our ideology, philosophy, and morality. We need innovation of the most proven philosophical system: universalist morality. A modicum of universalist morality is what once made Western Civilization great; it was espoused most powerfully by Christ, but it was probably also shared by the Atlanteans many millennia before him, who seeded civilization around the world, raising megalithic architecture on multiple continents aligned to the same stars (yes, Atlanteans, I went there! I did an interview with Bulgaria's Indiana Jones exploring that topic on my other podcast).
Christianity is the "meme" (an idea that takes on a life of its own) that has spread universalist morality the furthest. Bereft of the teachings of Christ, our society will descend into a truly dark dystopia. And, personally, it keeps me grounded, humble, and grateful, but I think that's all I'm going to talk about my faith here.
Why I wear an eye patch...
That's a long story; I explain the eye patch in an advanced personal growth episode of my other podcast.
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