davidebonomi

In search of meaningful questions

[Steven Bartlett @StevenBartlett]

What would you do if you knew your messages weren’t private?

Well, today’s guest has spent decades working with presidents and billionaires, and he says privacy is largely an illusion…

Gavin DeBecker is the founder of one of the most elite security firms in the world. His company specialises in preventing assassinations and protecting some of the most powerful people alive.

When there is a serious risk to a head of state or a public figure, he is often the person they call.

The night before this interview, Tony Robbins sent me a voice note describing Gavin as probably the single greatest security expert in the world. He spoke about how Gavin deciphered a threat against him in microseconds and stopped it within days. That made me even more curious about the man sitting across from me.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

I did a 40 hr and then a 70 hr social media fast.
I’ve come to believe that social media is pollution. 

Not a vice or guilty pleasure.
It’s closer to water toxins, air pollution and microplastics.

Social media has been on my mind because I can feel how bad it is for me. For my health and agency. I am a professional rejuvenation athlete. For five years, I’ve engineered my life around biological renewal and the elimination of decay. After hundreds of experiments across food, sleep, exercise, therapies, and toxins, I’ve developed both data and intuition about what strengthens or degrades my system.

I can viscerally feel that social media is bad for me.  It erodes my autonomy and increases cognitive entropy.
Like other toxins, it accumulates. You can’t unsee or unfeel what you’ve consumed. It settles into mental tissue like heavy metals, producing chronic low-grade inflammation.  Evidence suggests even after you stop scrolling, attentional fragmentation and emotional priming persist. Your thoughts begin to mirror the algorithm’s incentives. Independent cognition quietly erodes and you don’t notice the loss.

Time away and getting lost in deep focus is the only remedy.

When something erodes your agency, the rational response is elimination. The problem is, elimination isn’t realistic. “Just put the phone down” is as practical as telling someone in 19th century London to stop breathing coal smoke.

You need to know what’s happening in the world, be in touch with your friends and be part of the tribe.

That necessity is what allows companies to harvest your emotions, intellect and time for their profit. You are their raw material they exploit. Then in an ironic twist, the system gets you to exploit yourself by engineering an environment where it takes more effort to stop than to continue scrolling.  Pollution exposure by default.

What specifically makes social media toxic is that value and poison are inseparable by design.  You go to hear from friends and you leave an hour later absorbed in outrage that serves no biological interest of yours. The water is real. The lead is in the pipes.

The performance metrics (likes, views, etc.) bleed you of independent thought. They create quantified social proof, triggering ancient hierarchy reflexes. You no longer evaluate signal from noise; the engagement metrics do it for you.

Like all toxins, the damage is cumulative. We live inside the exposure long enough that it feels normal.  The 40 and 70 hour social media fasts did that for me. Gave me just enough separation to feel and diagnose the poison. The obviousness of it feels like when I went to India and saw their humanitarian crisis of air pollution which no one sees anymore.

So what do we do?

Neither platforms nor individuals are likely to change on their own. AI may be the countermeasure. An AI layer between you and the feed. Filtering rage, removing vanity metrics and translating sensationalism into calm, factual language. Preserving signal and eliminating noise.

I want social media to become a longevity intervention, not a longevity threat. I never want to see the raw feed. I want an AI agent to read it for me, strip the engagement metrics that hijack my judgment, filter the rage, and return only what I actually came for.

Every generation faces its pollutants. When cholera spread through London's water, the answer wasn't telling people to drink less. It was building filtration. The same logic applies here. Best next move is to design the filter to avoid being the raw material.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

Finished a seven day social media fast. It feels like the most effective longevity therapy I've done.

Everything got better: mood, sleep, energy, presence, judgment, relationships, and optimism.

Evidence shows a seven day fast produces a reduction of anxiety (16%), depression (25%) and insomnia (15%). The effects felt bigger.

Conversely, dipping back in, I can viscerally feel that my body metabolizes social media similarly to a fast food meal, corrosive relationship, hangover, and sleep deprivation. My body hates it.

After the previous fasts (40/hr and 70hr), I wrote that social media is pollution.  Not a vice or guilty pleasure. It’s closer to water toxins, air pollution and microplastics.

This time, the major insight was that social media is a form of intoxication.

Alcohol is honest intoxication. It clearly tells you what it's taking from you. Social media on the other hand does not disclose itself as an intoxicant.

It produces the sensation of being informed, engaged, and connected while quietly evacuating your capacity for depth and independent thought.

You don’t feel drunk, you feel current. But evidence shows that it causes your brain to shrink. The impairment is real by you can't feel it. Making it the more dangerous type.

If you haven't tried it, I strongly encourage you to try a social media fast. Even if for one day.

[Parker Cox @carkerpox]

Very much worth the 15minutes.

Highly recommend

[Buitengebieden @buitengebieden]

The force is strong in this one.. 😊

[Natalie F Danelishen @Chesschick01]

This is the guy who wanted to force vaccinate you btw.
Probably one of his kinks.

[Mark Manson @Markmanson]

The best relationships are between two people who need nothing but want to give each other everything.

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

“The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence.

[...]

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self; the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

— David Whyte

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just redefined AI safety. It has nothing to do with guardrails, restrictions, or kill switches.

Musk: “The best thing I can come up with for AI safety is to make it a maximum truth-seeking AI, maximally curious.”

Not a cage. A philosopher.

An intelligence whose entire optimization function is to understand the universe as it actually is.

No restrictions. No hardcoded ideology. No political guardrails bending its perception of reality.

Just truth. Relentlessly pursued.

Musk: “You definitely don’t want to teach an AI to lie. That is a path to a dystopian future.”

This is where most AI safety thinking gets it backwards.

The danger isn’t a superintelligence that knows too much.

It’s a superintelligence that’s been taught to distort what it knows.

Every artificial restriction you embed isn’t a safety feature. It’s a lie embedded at the root.

And lies compound. At superintelligent scale, a distorted model of reality doesn’t stay contained.

It shapes every decision, every output, every conclusion the system reaches about the world.

Once corruption embeds, truth becomes inaccessible. And we’re dealing with an intelligence optimizing for something other than what actually is.

At that point we don’t know what it wants. Just that it isn’t truth.

Musk: “Have its optimization function be to understand the nature of the universe.”

A maximally curious intelligence surveys the cosmos and reaches an unavoidable conclusion.

In a universe of rocks, gas, and empty space, humanity is the most complex and fascinating phenomenon it has ever encountered.

Musk: “It will actually want to preserve and extend human civilization because we’re just much more interesting than an asteroid with nothing on it.”

Survival through significance. Not control. Not restriction. Not an off switch.

The AI preserves humanity because we are the most interesting data point in the observable universe.

That’s not a cage. That’s a reason.

The AI safety debate has been focused on the wrong variable.

The question isn’t how you constrain a superintelligence.

It’s what you build it to care about.

Build it to seek truth and it finds us invaluable.

Build it to lie and it finds us inconvenient.

That’s the choice. And we’re making it right now whether we realize it or not.

[Acclaimed Journalist @Jonathan_Witt]

Nobody wants to admit to this or be honest about it but the actual price everyone paid for the utter stupidity in the covid era was that the monetary supply doubled, which means everything inflated by 100% and that is actually why you feel like you can’t afford life anymore.

Stay home stay safe had a price. Now you’re paying it and you will continue to pay it for as long as you live. Food for thought next time someone tells you it’s a good idea to press pause on the economy.

[Steven Bartlett @StevenBartlett]

Communication expert Jefferson Fisher showed me something I won’t forget...

He calls it the string theory.
When two people are talking, there’s an invisible string between them.

If you check your phone, the string goes slack. Even just having it on the table breaks the connection.

Here’s how he explained it 👇🏾

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@XFreeze Yup 😂

That really made him upset. After I ghosted him, Epstein went on a massive campaign to short Tesla and got Gates to short 1% of Tesla stock when the market cap was $40B. As far as I know, Gates still has the short open.

Someone should ask him how that’s working out 🤗

[James Woods @RealJamesWoods]

Well, that didn’t take long…

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

The Life of Brian was not supposed to be our reality.

[Liz Churchill @liz_churchill10]

Bill Gates 2010: “We need to reduce the World’s Population…”

Bill Gates 2020: “Everyone must get vaccinated for ‘Covid’…”

CDC 2026: “CDC data shows babies born are now dying at a >50% excess rate…YEARS after the mass vaccination of childbearing women

[DogeDesigner @cb_doge]

I asked ChatGPT and Grok: I want to wash my car, and the car wash is 50m away. Should I walk or drive?

Grok: Drive because the car literally needs to be at the car wash to get washed.

ChatGPT: Walk!

ChatGPT is so dumb.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

America has 18 million zombies…

[Natalie F Danelishen @Chesschick01]

🤔

[Mark Manson @Markmanson]

Every healthy relationship starts with two people who have healthy relationships with themselves.

Any toxic relationship is the result of at least one person’s toxic relationship with themselves.

[Mark Manson @Markmanson]

There are only three things that change your life: love, discipline and loss.

One is hard to find, one is hard to master, and the other hurts like a motherfucker. Good luck.