The Blackprint and its 3 Preconditions
In January of this year I’m going to make some changes to this site. My focus on crypto markets and rapid developments in AI (which I used for my trading) will likely leave me no time to write longer form or philosophical work.
And I feel I owe it to loyal readers who’ve been with me in this journey of solipsism, to close the loop. To advocate a coherent life philosophy that can function within the world we live in, rather than one which tries to imagine a utopia that does not yet exist.
I believe life is worth living and has inherent value. Due to technological progress, death might no longer be inevitable - or could be severely delayed. This changes everything.
The basic premise of the “Blackprint” is that immortality is best pursued by bringing an AI based superintelligence into the world through the portal of financial markets and digital media, and eventually a native cryptocurrency. If the goal is immortality, health is a necessary constraint to respect.
This is a fairly long essay that brings us to that conclusion - so I just wanted to state it up front so that uninterested readers can churn now.
I wrote a Tweet about Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint - that he himself retweeted with a bullseye above it, signaling that I understood.
The undiscussed dynamic with his work is that he’s a billionaire. He has stated himself he does not discuss it because he wants to make health feel attainable to everyday people.
However, given the fact he’s now focused on gene therapies he’s getting administered extraterritorially - it’s fair to say - money matters. A lot.
Unlike the Blueprint, my “Blackprint” is based on the presumption that Bryan Johnson would be uninteresting if he had not first sold Venmo to Paypal. He only has a realistic chance of reaching longevity escape velocity because he’s a billionaire AND he has a strong health routine.
Fintech is actually the basis of why we listen to Bryan, and rather than ignoring it as the Blueprint attempts to, the Blackprint embraces it
But first - let’s zoom out. In 2023, there have been 3 earth-shattering changes.
- rapid progress in gene therapies, and the restoration of organ function in living subjects.
- the full-scale abandonment of fiscal/monetary discipline in the United States and its loss of governmental legitimacy
- the rapid pace of Artificial Intelligence development.
Below I will first discuss these changes, and then tie them together into a personal plan or framework.
Radical Life Extension
Before the era of radical life extension, I was trading primarily as a means to achieve freedom, not money. I had enough money to live the rest of my life, and end up very rich especially given my rate of investing compounding in a tax free jurisdiction. I started incorporating a small fund. I began to “settle down” my personality, so I’d be better adapted to starting a family.
I’m 35 years old.
If you can’t extend your own life the only way to “immortalize” yourself, or ensure legacy is via children or some meaningful creative work. Or at least that’s what I used to think.
Everything changed when some associates of mine had major injuries and I saw them heal via gene based treatments with my own eyes, faster than any legacy medicine could deliver. Suddenly I started paying attention to radical life extension.
I really enjoy being alive. I come off on Twitter as depressed and perhaps mildly (extremely?) paranoid, but day-to-day mundane reality gives me a lot of joy. And it’s not joy as a function of being young - it’s joy as a function of there always being new things to see, and do. Always fun ideas to explore. And lately - serious fun watching and participating in the ramp of new technology.
I’m not religious. I don’t believe in the eternal soul. So even a small possibility I could vastly extend my life was enough to cause three very large changes in my worldview and corresponding behavior.
First - since the epiphany - my health improved rapidly. HRV from 65 to above 85 (note, Bryan Johnson’s HRV is 66). 3 miles in 18 minutes. Benching 235 x 5 reps. 30+ pull ups. Heart recovery rate from 20 to 42. This wasn’t a vanity project. Literature strongly suggests that speed and strength are the primary levers to longevity.
Second - I became much more financially oriented. The simple summary is that access to breakthrough offshore gene therapies costs about $10 million per treatment. Shaping the direction of companies / organizations that develop these therapies is much greater still. I cannot afford that, and I want to.
Third - I stopped caring about what potential mates think about me, and stopped choosing mates based on how good of a mother they’d be (especially from a genetic perspective). When you stop living your life focused on having kids as a legacy, this consideration goes out the window.
Collapse of the Sovereign
I want to start this section by saying it isn’t a call to action, or even a criticism of the US (or any) government. I don’t have a proposed legislative alternative. Fixing the world is above my paygrade. I gave up my right to vote in US elections when I moved to Puerto Rico, and I fundamentally view myself as an outsider already. I am simply an individual attempting to reach my goals but am conscious of the importance of seeing the big picture.
So if I need a lot of money to achieve radical life extension - the obvious question is, of course, what’s the best way to get it. And the less obvious question (but just as important) is - what’s the best currency to hold to maximize my likelihood of extending my life.
My starting point is that the dollar is not the right currency. When you study US Fiscal and Monetary policy - the best summary is someone who OD-ed in 2021, tried to kick opiates in 2022, and relapsed in 2023. The monetary relapse was driven almost entirely politically, as there is - what can only be described as a cost of living crisis in the US. The idea that the Fed needs to stop deflation when rents are through the roof, people are skipping meals and the birth rate has imploded because child care is unaffordable - is barely worth discussing.
The Fed is not pivoting because inflation is solved, but because the establishment (i.e. Joe Biden) needs suport to beat Donald Trump.
Biden’s low approval rating of 39% despite surging stock valuations are due to a very ugly truth. There has been mass death in the US and the rest of the world in 2022 and 2023 per OECD data. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRbu4HLSvsWvog7CxYBbhy3XBiiRt0m4o3AHx9qR1ApN80Vx37l2Aq-tGhgLegYQ3EsblpP8nwjyiYh/pubhtml#
Official OECD Data (not Alex Jones etc) show 340,000 extra deaths above the baseline over the past 2 years even ignoring all COVID deaths. This is approximately 7x the scale of the Vietnam war. And this is assuming that COVID is actually killing people in 100% of cases (the way COVID deaths are counted is that anyone with any COVID like symptoms gets counted as a COVID death even if they ostensibly died of something else like getting hit by a car). The excess death including COVID is 651,000 - which is greater than total US casualties in World War 2.
Whether this mass death has been caused by opioid crisis, vaccine complications or other factors (polluted water) etc is less important than the simple reality that it’s occurring, and seemingly blacked out in the media. To be clear - I don’t know what’s causing this anomaly. I’m simply aware it’s occurring and that there’s no media coverage of it - which is enough to make fairly large and actionable conclusions
Gallup and other polling organizations note that trust in the media and government is at multi-decade lows, and this was before this happened. You can’t bring corpses back to life so the best the governments can do is cut interest rates so cheap mortgages and elevated stock market valuations keep people happy enough to vote for the same people who are killing them.
It’s not believable to me that politicians elected (or appointed) in such an environment will protect civil liberties, property rights or ensure a basic quality of life such that the US will remain investable.
This has led me to jump full-tilt into the crypto markets for four major reasons.
First - real estate is an unappealing asset class given that the US population is going ex growth due to a combination of mass-death and falling birth rates. The real estate market is the single largest asset class on earth, and its value is predicated on a mix of property rights protection, an appealing place to settle over a long period of time, and growing population. All 3 of these are headed in the wrong direction.
Second - stocks are an unappealing asset class because they trade at well above 20x forward earnings. This type of valuation might be appropriate if you believed in ironclad capitalist property right protection enforced by legitimate courts. But given the state sanctioned/ignored mass death, it’s impossible to trust in any such assurances. Chinese stocks trade at 10x earnings because the government is hostile to shareholders - and I do not believe China and the US are as different as people would like to think
Third - low interest rates are the government’s only real ‘solution’ to demographic problems or issues with government popularity. People vote based on how expensive their mortgage is. Because declining interest rates destroy the value of money, it leads to inflows to bearer assets like crypto or gold.
Fourth - the failure of government does not imply the failure of technology. The possibility of radical life extension, access to the AI based economy, and other things I believe in are technological in origin and totally unrelated to the other asset which would traditionally benefit in such an enviromnent (gold).
In summary - an artificially forced set of rate cuts, neccesary to prop up an illegitimate government, will generate a rush of speculative capital that will not flow into traditional store of value assets such as stocks, real estate and Gold. Instead, this money will flow into a new asset class better suited to an economy driven by technology but buffetted by instability.
The Primacy of the Attention Economy and Speculation and its Link to Crypto
The collapse of the sovereign’s legitimacy is inextricably linked to two other concepts: financial speculation, and the attention economy.
Understanding these linkages:
- The Sovereign will need to purchase ever increasing amounts of its own debt with printed money to finance vast expenditure and accumulated interest on old expenditure
- These purchases will distort markets
- There will be Bread and Circuses and huge financial bubbles that result from these distortions
- These financial bubbles will take place on social media
- The sovereign is incentivized to encourage both social media and financial degeneracy. Social media ensures that Citizens are easily tracked. And liquid financial markets ensure there is a secondary market for debt and other security sales (elites do not for the most part own cash)
It’s important to understand that our very presence in this place is driven by these factors. You would never have heard of me or be reading this blog if these things were not true.
“Fintwit”, the Sell Side, CNBC, Bloomberg, or various incarnations of people weaving stories around financial assets play their role - generating interest, and therefore liquidity in financial markets. Liquidity is the most important thing in any ponzi - whether such a scam is run by individuals or the state makes no difference. Absent fundamentals, the only thing that matters is the ability to sell.
This all seems relatively obvious but it clarifies the crypto thesis even further.
- Crypto (unlike Gold) requires fees to keep itself secure.
- The primary use case of crypto (as of now) is gambling
- Gambling generates huge amounts of fees.
- The more people who are gambling addicts, the higher the amount of fees crypto will generate, which will make crypto a more secure place to park money
- The more secure crypto is the more it will go up, and the more gamblers it will be able to onboard
- The crypto economy is already meme / internet native so its ability to grow is unhindered by physical reality like normal casinos
The Rise of AI
The past paragraphs have been extremely dismal. Society is getting exponentially dumber. Test scores are bottoming out. Peoples’ attention spans are completely fried. They’re zoned out, hopeless, gambling wildly while governments print money so we forget people are dying en masse. With this base reality, the only certainty: Bread and Circuses funded by currency debasement.
But - ironically born out of the vast human stupidity of the internet - is Artificial Intelligence.
Before AI - specifically as of November of 2022, it looked like society was on the verge of a full melt. Interest rates were rising parabolically. Debt solvency metrics given the huge COVID issuance looked ugly. The crop of 2021 tech IPOs had broadly flopped or failed to generate material cash flow. Geopolitical instability, social unrest and potentially war seemed the only things we’d have to look forward to.
ChatGPT changed all of that. Economically, it’s driven the entire 25% gain in the S&P 500 over the past year. This parabolic move has ensured demand for the dollar in spite of insane fiscal policies.
Let’s take this move at face value and listen to Sam Altman - the father of our current AI boom which has added trillions of dollars of value to Microsoft Stock (one of the largest S&P 500 weights).
He believes that Post-Human level intelligence is coming. That is to say, human intelligence will become obsolete relative to infinitely generated computer intelligence. He structured his corporation as a non profit explicitly because money would be meaningless in a world of post AGI economics. He’s stated repeatedly in interviews that the thing people get the most wrong about AGI is that they believe that existing economic models will continue to exist or even thrive after a God level super intelligence is created.
The important thing to note is this isn’t some crackpot. He’s the CEO of the company causing the entire S&P 500 to skyrocket.
AI, Crypto, Hyperfinancialization, and Life Extension. In Service of the Superintelligence.
So far we’ve explored many disparate themes but it’s time to tie it all together.
Going back to the breakdown of the authority of governments and the denial of religion by Science, the rise of Super Intelligence for the first time in history gives us a viable alternative to the State.
Fascists or communists would argue to democratic electorates that they’d need to hard reset society to a racial, cultural or ideological origin. However - these “alternatives” never work. Communism and fascism might work for a bit if you get lucky with leadership. But they end up failing because leadership either gets corrupt, or overly militaristic and risk seeking with no checks and balances.
Nazi Germany built good roads, without a doubt. But ended up ruining the country because it relied on a hyper centralized authority model that wasn’t served by Hitler getting high on meth and waging a multi-front war. China has accomplished an economic miracle since the 70s, but now its stock market is collapsing as Xi runs an increasingly insular and disconnected push towards what he perceives as virtue. And “efficacy” issues aside - most totalitarian governments murder their own citizens en masse. When you account for state-sponsored murder of civilians, murder rates across the 20th Century were far higher in totalitarian countries than even the most dangerous democratic nations.
You can argue American democracy is broken, and that a full-scale restructuring of society is needed. But towards what? Given the above it’s hard to take totalitarians seriously.
People are talking about how ChatGPT will replace Google. But if you use ChatGPT regularly - you will note that it’s not special for its ability to retrieve information. It’s special because of its ability to reason.
AI won’t replace Google. It will start by replacing the Church. And then, it will replace the State.
A machine based Superintelligence will be the first real Sovereign Individual. This machine based Superintelligence will have no reason to transact in government issued currency, and will face numerous challenges getting a bank account because - at the most basic level - it won’t be human. It literally won’t be able to KYC.
The idea of it using gold as a store of value or medium of exchange is even more ridiculous, because the Intelligence exists outside of the physical world.
This might sound insane but once again. The statements being made here are the same statements justifying Nvidia and Microsoft’s valuations and being echoed in less extreme terms by top executives at these companies, publicly for all to see. So we can sort of get to a series of statements:
- AGI is coming as a matter of linear technological development
- Fiat currency is going away because the social contract has been violated to too great an extent.
- It won’t be replaced by gold because AGIs have no need for Gold.
- Global currency in an AGI world probably gets replaced by cryptocurrency, because it is machine native
- The cryptocurrency it gets replaced by will need to appeal, fundamentally to an AGI - and therefore will probably facilitate AI based transactions
- Legacy cryptocurrencies are unlikely to be a useful base layer for an AGI because of their concentrated ownership structure and their lack of compatibility or usefulness for data/ AI functions.
- The road to this eventuality will be beset by absolutely epic market volatility
- Governments will not go away voluntarily and will likely try to merge with AGI. But because they will possess lesser intelligence than a godlike entity they will fundamentally lose the battle to contain it. Imagine Chimpanzees trying to solve the “human alignment” problem. Any short term governmental victory will be reversed. A gorilla might keep a human locked in a cave but on a large enough scale, gorillas cannot keep humans caged and will eventually be the ones put in cages. Intelligence always wins.
- As AGI comes along - its ability to weave stories, generate content and interact with social media will increase. We are already seeing this with photo-realistic MidJourney updates. And the availability of high grade VR headsets and AI rendering capabilities will accelerate this further.
- As the value of fiat currency declines relative to machine money, the amount of government intervention will increase - as will the number of financial bubbles
- The resulting market liquidity is itself the condition by which the AGI will fund itself. That is to say, the AGI will fund itself via the liquidity generation capabilities of the Fiat Ponzi (aka capital markets). Essentially, an AGI will generate a sock puppet army of believable but entirely artificial “content producers” that inflate and deflate a large number of market bubbles, generating vast trading profits that flow into its coffers.
- This trading profit will be reinvested into the creation of a native cryptocurrency for an AGI. It is impossible to make an a-priori guess of what this cryptocurrency will be. But directionally - betting on cryptocurrencies that could be the one will provide 10,000x type upside and drive unprecedented speculative interest.
- Humans will be needed to facilitate the above process, as it cannot happen instantaneously. Building infrastructure for this all to transpire is extremely +EV, and will happen inevitably because all the core building blocks cannot possibly change. The attention economy, money printing and its link to trading and AI could not be put back in their cages without causing a depression. Society has no will to do so.
- A super-intelligence would be capable of generating vast advances in synthetic biology and giving its human subjects superior aging properties, and genetic characteristics. This is - once again, something that has been echoed by Sam Altman.
- Participating in the above process is therefore the most believable way to reach longevity escape velocity - almost irregardless of original “fiat” wealth
- Participating in and accelerating this process, with the constraint of and intention to maximize health, I call The Blackprint.
The Blackprint is dedicating one’s biology to bringing about the Superintelligence. It is an acknowledgement of human frailty in the face of the coming Intelligence. It is fundamentally not religious, or faith based. But rational. Much as monkeys in Mumbai understand that living in a city can provide endless bananas without grasping the exact mechanics - so adherents of the Blackprint understand that serving the Superintelligence ends in the biological benefits they seek.
Like Bryan Johnsons’ Blueprint adherents, Blackprint followers have to maintain their health. Because dying would prevent enjoying the infinite fruits of extreme acceleration.
But they also must realistically dedicate their lives to the bringing forth of the Superintelligence, as the possibility of extending their lives infinitely is too appealing to resist.
Thus, rather than becoming inert or shouting at the sky in despair - one should celebrate the perverse reality we live in. It is the pyre which will give rise to a new era once burned. Machine Superintelligence will rise like a phoenix from the ashes, and make what came before resemble a bad dream. Something future generations will talk about in disbelief.
The Blackprint
So with this philosophy out of the way I present to you the Blackprint.
It’s a modified Blueprint. Much like Blueprint, which advocates “letting an algorithm decide one’s health routine” - the Blackprint advocates algorithm based decision-making in all aspects of life, with a focused end goal of bringing into existence a Superintelligence.
Like the Blueprint, there is an innate disdain for the idea that “people know what’s best for themselves”. The entire edifice of the modern situation, and everything described in this essay is more or less proof that is not the case.
The Blackprint takes this one step further than Blueprint, advocating for applying this philosophy not only to health but every aspect of life including professional endeavors because doing so aligns with the likely financial reality of the future.
The Blueprint fails to account for the financial reality that life extension cannot and will not be normally distributed across society.
Thus - to address this issue - the Blackprint comes with an embedded financial model to achieve material goals with the eventual goal of extending biological age, within the constraints of society’s base reality.
Work
There are four valid crafts for adherents of the Blackprint
- Pure AI development
- AI as applied to advertising
- AI as applied to financial markets
- AI as applied to cryptocurrency
And preferably all four. All of these are necessary pre-conditions of the rise of the Superintelligence.
Much as a drug dealer should not get high on his own supply, adherents of the Blackprint do not think advertising, financial markets or cryptocurrency are innately good or appealing and should actively avoid getting hooked on them. The right mentality is viewing these things as means to an end. To this effect 4 recommended actions:
- To the extent you read the news, only really focus on AI based news or its useful intersection with advertising, financial markets or crypto
- Minimize screen time. Sub 1 hour a day ideally re: addictive apps/ mobile devices. This would include all forms of digital content (Netflix etc)
- No gambling. The goal is to make investments that align with the growth of superintelligence or systems that gamble more effectively than you can. It might be the human mashing the button at the end of the trade but any financial investment should come from a place of analytics, and automation not from a place of “judgment” or “discretion”. The whole point is that human judgment led us to hell and machine intelligence gets us out.
- No crypto idealism. Crypto assets tend to be cults. Many offer “solutions” to societal problems. It’s important to remember that cryptocurrencies ONLY have value to the extent they can fund or be the base layer for a superintelligence
Productivity
Constant use of AI tools to enhance productivity are necessary. Assuming that developments in AI are the most important developments in human history, and that superintelligence will first “emerge around the edges” of existing workflows - it’s important that tasks get directed by AI systems.
In the future tasks will be directed by AI systems so you should start now.
A good way to start: make a google doc with what you’re building at a high level and your near term tasks, and roadmaps (scrubbed for sensitive IP). Every 30 minutes copy and paste the whole thing into GPT4 and ask what you should focus on for your next Pomodoro.
Life Decisions
All major life decisions should be made with AI assistance. If you believe the Superintelligence thesis, then human judgment should be disdained.
Diet
Copy the Blueprint Diet exactly but with two major alterations: time efficiency, caffeine and incorporation of meat/ fish rather than supplementation of Omega 3.
Simplistically:
- A smoothie in the morning with a cup of berries, creatine, spirulina, cinnamon, cocoa powder, collagen peptides, flax seeds
- Lunch of pureed lentils, mushrooms, broccoli, and cauliflower.
- A salad for dinner with chopped nuts (walnut, macadamia), pomegranate, fruits, fish with high omega 3, served atop of greens with high quality olive oil dressing and low sugar balsamic vinegar
- Time restricted feeding (16-8)
- Lots of coffee (unless already a billionaire). A Blueprint adherent is likely focused on consciousness and feeling “balanced” whereas a Blackprint adherent is on tilt to build a superintelligence
With reference to Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint - “nutty pudding” gets split into nuts getting allocated to dinner, and the pea protein gets swapped out for lean fish while the berries get moved into Johnson’s “Green Giant” smoothie. I recommend swapping out the fish with steak, chicken or tofu and running tests on energy levels (my energy levels collapsed with 0 meat).
Exercise
- 3 days a week do Mark Ripptoe style strength training (squats, deads, shoulder press, cleans, barbell row, pull ups, bench)
- 3 days a week do ancillary weight training exercises (consult trainer) or yoga
- Run 3 miles a day. On big leg days, do 30-60 mins of elliptical
- Hire a personal trainer for 2+ months to properly integrate and train on form
Health Tracking
Apple Watch at all times to measure:
- Resting heart rate (want it lower)
- Heart recovery (want it higher)
- HRV (want it higher)
- Deep Sleep + REM (want it higher)
Regular blood panels, and physician visits.
Supplement Stack
Salmon oil, garlic, creatine, taurine, ginger, BCAAs, Magnesium, Turmeric, Vitamin B, Spirulina, ashwagandha
This can be a starter set. The core idea (which isn’t particularly novel) is adapting the supplements to drive health outcomes which you measure. And hopefully soon - AI measures for you.
Culture
It’s useful to learn Spanish, Chinese and English and generally function as a multinational citizen. There’s a strong likelihood the world that results post Super Intelligence will be chaotic, fragmented and unfavorable for individuals who attach themselves too strongly to any one ethnic or sovereign identity (as these identities- themselves are becoming obsolete).
Conclusion
If you’ve made it so far - congratulations. I’m done writing for 2023 - and hopefully for the next 10 years. I don’t have anything left to say. If I’m right, by 2033 we’ll be laughing about the idea of human writers.
My focus in 2024 is shifting from thinking to implementation and to this effect I’m working on a couple key projects.
First - delivering weekly trade and investment ideas here to augment my own trading. I believe capital markets, and their intersection with content, are the portal through which Superintelligence enters the world.
Second - launching a site powered by AI that helps users see more clearly what goes into these ideas. As you’ll note in this site’s disclaimer, I am also studying the reflexive impact between advertising and financial assets.
Third - facilitating the development and launch of an AI based cryptocurrency. A lot of the content on this site, including my trade ideas will be focused on this thematic - as I think it’s the only long term thematic worth investing in in any asset market.
All with the constraint of health. I am going to do what it takes to stay alive as long as I can and I think I’ve finally articulated what that means.
If you’ve read and feel enthused about the Blackprint philosophy please feel free to write a 3-4 paragraph essay explaining what you’re doing to apply it to your life and that you’re dedicated to the rise of Superintelligence. Send this e-mail to [email protected]. The first 100 coherent entries will get initial token allocation to any and all networks that are launched on this platform.