Reverse-Engineering the Nerd Oligarchy

From erection monitors to brain implants, the singularity will make you pay for what you don’t need

The other day I was watching Bill Maher’s Club Random, and the guest was tech millionaire and anti-aging geek Bryan Johnson. Part of the conversation was about the apparatus that Johnson wears on his penis to monitor his nocturnal erections. In nerd nasal, Johnson said, “My nighttime erections are the length of the movie Titanic.”

He explained that his organs are differently aged. Despite his whole-body age of forty-seven years, the biometric data have indicated that his left ear is sixty and his dick is eighteen. He claimed that the secret to keeping his dangler barely legal is sleep (bedtime at 8:30 p.m.), diet (no meat, more than a 100 pills a day, no more than 2700 calories a day and no calories after 11:30 a.m.), rigorous and regular workouts, LED light baths, chilling in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and sitting on an electromagnetic pelvic-floor stimulator. Whenever possible, he limits human interaction to chat battles on X, refusing to engage in small talk, not even with those sexually dimorphic intimacy units known as women. Anything that might interfere with his trademark longevity protocol, Blueprint, is the foe, including the unavoidable thing called death.

Johnson calls himself “the most measured person in human history,” though it makes him less like a person and more like the first fertile cross of Vulcan and Conehead. According to him, AI is “probably going change our reality beyond our ability to comprehend. So, given that, it’s possible, possible, that we are as primitive as a caveman. That the ideas we have of ourselves, of the world, of life, of what consciousness could be, are all idiotic.” I guess it never occurred to him that it could be the reverse; that our ideas about ourselves, consciousness and the world around us, having endured two-hundred-thousand years of trial and error, might be truer, more resilient and more robust than anything an AI bot could generate. I wager that AI will turn out to be more idiotic than a caveman could ever be.

However, not having a caveman in my garage, I can only base that wager on the caveman’s modern equivalent, Joe Rogan. His interview with Elon Musk and his foul-mouthed, sub-idiotic AI bot revealed a world view that Jess Bidgood and Nicholas Nehamas of the New York Times described as “by turns crude and contradictory.” I’d go a little further than the NYT bros and call it by turns arrogant and puerile. He shows no humanity, humility or appreciation for nature. His claim that AI will be smarter than any individual “in a year or two” is not only absurd but asinine. AI hasn’t come close to replicating the dynamic complex of emotional, sensory, unconscious and conscious information which the human mind can instantly manifest in a totally unique, individual experience. To put it in simpler terms, as long as humans are too stupid to understand themselves and the universe to which they owe their existence, they will not be able to replicate the human mind, except organically, that is, by bringing another human mind into existence.

Humans are subject to nature. Their intelligence, being organic, is subjectively limited and objectively impossible to quantify. Much of human intelligence can’t be measured at all, because it is subsumed in habit and has become unconscious. The forms of intelligence that we call intuition, instinct and judgement are neither quantifiable nor reproducible. Intelligence is a function of consciousness, which the AI nerds define as self-awareness and try to imitate in their bots. However, because consciousness is organic, it is something that a machine will never be able to replicate.

If AI will never be as smart as a human, will it at least allow us to live longer? Probably not. The humans who live the longest—those who live in the so-called “blue zones”—stay active, eat homemade food in moderation and hang out with their friends and loved ones as a matter of habit. They don’t need Gemini, Alexa or Meta AI or any other algorithm to tell them how to live. They don’t need to monitor their nocturnal erections and take a hundred pills a day. Much of the intelligence that governs their behavior is genetically ingrained or simply a matter of habit. And that doesn’t make them any less intelligent. Quite the opposite: they’ve dispensed with the necessity of thought, which, from an efficiency standpoint, is intelligent. When you consider such natural and normal manifestations of intelligence in the human organism, it’s not the caveman but Johnson who looks idiotic, with his assertion that you need an algorithm, a million bucks a year and a blood donor to defeat death.

In an interview published on Tik Tok, Scott Galloway said of the nerd oligarchs, “I just think that every decision these guys make is reverse-engineered to money.” From that perspective, Bryan Johnson isn’t as idiotic as he appears to be. He’ll sell you a T-shirt with “Don’t Die” or “Death Is Our Only Foe” on it for $37 bucks. His anti-aging algorithm, Blueprint, isn’t designed to make you live longer so much as to generate profit. Like all the nerd oligarchs, Johnson is determined to replace what is free, natural and easy with what is expensive, superfluous and complicated. His nerd utopia is all about monetizing need and generating demand. He wants you to abandon the biologically advantageous behavior that has been refined over two hundred thousand years and buy his Blueprint program, which includes a 400-mg bottle of olive oil for $35 dollars, a 400-mg pack of cocoa powder for $41 dollars and a 2.5-oz pack of matcha for $35 dollars. Never mind that these are all natural products that the idiotic caveman would have consumed and you can buy them at your local international food market for a fraction of the price.

But Johnson isn’t alone in marketing his totally unnecessary nerd utopia. Elong Musk wants you to spend $50,000 dollars on a Neuralink, so that you can move a computer mouse around with your brain instead of your hand. Jeff Bezos wants you to think that it’s easier to ask Alexa to play a song, so that he can collect marketing data and grow the consumer surveillance empire that has made him the second richest man in the world. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to buy his Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses so that you can look cool while listening to music, streaming videos and taking pictures simply by saying, “Hey Meta.” He also wants everything you do and say in a digital file bank, including the homemade porn you make while wearing your Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

By mechanizing and monetizing everything they can, the nerd oligarchy is following the old trope of surmounting social and physical deficiencies by technological augmentation. The erudite Faust traded the devil his soul in exchange for unlimited knowledge, power and wealth. In the 1963 film, The Nutty Professor, scientist Julius Kelp, a neurotic, socially impaired jerk who was bullied by a jock, invented a serum that transformed him into a charismatic hunk. According to his biographer, Elon Musk was bullied as a child for his autism and lacked social “input-output.” To transcend this, he has implanted himself with a Neuralink that he is confident will “increase our brain's output rate by three, maybe six, maybe more orders of magnitude."

But rest easy. As nerdy and bionic as they are and as powerful as they have become—think Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman flanking Trump at his inauguration—they only want your money. And you are still at liberty to refuse to give it to them. It won’t adversely affect your longevity—at least, not yet. Remember, not a single blue-zoner has mentioned Tesla, Neuralink, Amazon Prime, Ebay, Paypal, X, Meta, SpaceX or a condo on Mars as being relevant to their way of life. Richard Overton of Austin, Texas ate Campbell’s Soup, smoked cigars throughout the day, regularly drank whiskey on his porch, always paid in cash, always had a lady-friend nearby and never went online. He lived to a 112. However, that was before Bryan Johnson’s “Death Is Our Only Foe” T-shirts hit the market. If he had worn one of those, who knows now much longer Overton might have lived?