Naval Ravikant is the founder of the world's most influential social network and one of the most influential influencers in the world. He's also the co-founder of a number of successful startups and is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the New Statesman.
00:00:00.880we're live with naval ravikant and if uh the indication from the post on x is any indication
00:00:07.920at all there's gonna be a lot of people here today because i've never seen people so excited
00:00:12.720about anything i was doing and apparently has to do with you so uh i think you've been doing a few
00:00:18.720of them this is you know i go for the scarcity bit if there's anybody who doesn't know who
00:00:24.160naval is uh let's say entrepreneur investor philosopher mentor uh you we run out of rooms
00:00:31.440there there's there's not enough names for you well what do you what do you call yourself if like
00:00:36.080when if you had to introduce yourself do you just get clever and say like the joke version what do you
00:00:41.600do you know it's hilarious it's funny you say that because i used to uh you know when i was really
00:00:46.880young i had the oh i'm an entrepreneur i had this company i'm the founder of this right as a resume
00:00:51.280speak uh midwit resume speak if you will and then as i got older then i did these self-deprecating
00:00:57.920you know false humble brag like ahaha you know i'd and then say something ludicrously low like gas
00:01:03.520station attendant order but now of course they say hey i'm naval that's it you know and if you know who
00:01:11.360i am great if you don't that's great too because i don't i don't believe in this whole um you know it's
00:01:17.200a form of identity politics to have like your history behind you uh you you should have to prove
00:01:22.000yourself in every instance so if what i say is true then that stands on its own and if it doesn't
00:01:26.000it doesn't so it doesn't matter yeah you're the you're the most famous unfamous person i know meaning
00:01:32.160that the number of people who will privately bring up your name just you know independent of knowing
00:01:36.880whether i know you or not uh is it's really phenomenal but but i can just pick somebody out and
00:01:42.560say have you heard of and they won't you know not necessarily the household name but uh
00:01:48.640influencers right it's more uh it's more efficient actually i realized this when i was first in the
00:01:53.760tim ferris podcast um and after the tim ferris podcast like every podcast in the world reached
00:01:59.760out after and it's because tim ferris influences the influencers right and i think you're one of those
00:02:04.880two you influence the influencers you can look at x right formerly twitter even when it had a much
00:02:10.720smaller audience it was so influential to the influencers because the journalists and the
00:02:15.120politicians were on there so it punched out of its weight and when whenever somebody like in a huff
00:02:21.120deletes their x account and storms off they just fade into irrelevance like sam harris so where is he now
00:02:28.480i think yam lakun is the latest casualty of that right and sometimes they slink back on tail between their
00:02:33.760legs and sometimes they don't but if you influence the influencers just like the left realize if you
00:02:39.120control the institutions and the elites you can just punch out of your weight so so you bring up uh
00:02:44.800one of the points i wanted to point to i want to talk to you about you know it seems like during the
00:02:49.680political process as you learn the names of the people who are connected to what you know especially
00:02:54.720on on the left you say oh it's that it's that person there's always whenever there's like a hoax
00:03:00.560you see the same group of people emerge though it's like they've got the designated liars but then
00:03:06.080there are little there are little uh maybe uh i don't know gangs within the democrats and then you
00:03:12.400learn you know who's got the connection who's married to whom you know whose husband's in the
00:03:16.800top of the cia and stuff right yeah but but what happened on the right was that there was this sort of
00:03:23.120organic growth of connection and persuasion that is invisible to the left so the right as kind of you
00:03:33.680know we've now figured out the entire network on the left but the left is blinded because they see
00:03:39.760well i think it's podcasters has something to do with joe rogan and they can't go deeper than that
00:03:44.960well the right doesn't even know what the network is because the right is not a coherent entity
00:03:49.120you know the left is a set of people who hate market outcomes whether in the free market of
00:03:54.320evolution and genetics and nature or in the free market of capitalism right so because they don't want
00:03:59.520inequality it's an equality religion right like formerly christianity now elements of it mixed
00:04:05.360up with marxism and identity and race politics and you get this thing where they basically want
00:04:10.960everyone to have equal outcomes no matter what and then on the right you know you have the people who
00:04:16.640just want to be left alone they're like hey just leave me alone it's basically the collection of people
00:04:20.320who don't like the left and it's a ragtag collection and if you had to divide them up broadly
00:04:25.440there are at least three groups they're sort of the fiscal free market you know classic conservatives
00:04:31.360they're sort of the people who are bound by race and ethnicity and you know common culture and then
00:04:36.640they're the people who are religious and you know like raising families and god fearing and so on
00:04:42.400and sort of these three categories together that when you kind of get them together you get the right
00:04:46.080but it's inherently disorganized so they don't form institutions they don't form networks they're busy
00:04:51.360with their jobs they're not like running out and creating ngos and institutions uh so and they're
00:04:56.240not as ideological so i don't think even the right can identify the right if you had two different
00:05:01.600right-wing people list the top figures you know in the industry or in the group it would break down
00:05:07.200after five people they would just be different sets it's almost like the right is a set of nodes
00:05:12.960and and then there's all these memes and reframes that are they're flying through like if we go back to
00:05:18.5602015 some of the people will remember this um when people thought trump was a clown and he was just
00:05:25.280a clown and that's all he was so i wrote a blog post someone remember it it was called clown genius
00:05:31.040so i reframed him as somebody who was a showman and that he could use those talents uh in a productive
00:05:37.440way and you'd better watch out because he's not gonna just change politics i said he's gonna change
00:05:43.040the nature of reality itself in 2015 now that one yeah yeah you're you're leading back then and then
00:05:50.320you're pacing for a while now leading again but so so then january 6th comes and you know and his
00:05:56.400reputation goes down and i think that's when it was important that the silicon valley the smartest people
00:06:03.920kind of came in and said okay he's not crazy he's not dumb a lot of this stuff makes sense you don't
00:06:09.440have to love the personality that's not what we're voting for and i think elon was the biggest you
00:06:15.360know most prominent of that but you must have seen a lot of that behind the scenes were were you seeing
00:06:21.520dominoes falling like sort of privately i definitely i definitely heard a lot of people basically
00:06:28.320privately say oh my god you know this biden administration has been a disaster kamala looks even
00:06:32.800worse these are like full-on socialists you know they want to seize the means of production price caps
00:06:39.840you know race politics and gender politics like this it's just idiocy and we you know a lot of us
00:06:45.600are in california and we've seen how much california suffered by being a one-party state and then when
00:06:52.160you have just enormous amounts of illegal immigration combined with the push for amnesty birthright citizenship
00:06:58.240path to citizenship etc etc these are all code for flipping votes voters um and so it it the thing that
00:07:05.920i think the thing that really got me off the sidelines was the lawfare just the lawfare and
00:07:10.000then the warfare right lawfare graduated to warfare with outright bullets being fired obviously that's
00:07:15.120more incitement related than you know planned but uh the the lawfare was crossing the line for me and
00:07:22.400i think for a lot of people sorry go ahead yeah can i put you uh on the spot do you remember your post
00:07:30.240about changing the rules uh vaguely uh you know there are two posts i'm proud of in this whole
00:07:37.040in this whole thing and one of them is about changing the rules and there i was i didn't word
00:07:41.760it the perfect way i could have worded a little better sometimes on wordsmith so i know it wasn't quite
00:07:46.080perfect almost didn't put it out for that reason but um the post was basically that you don't you
00:07:53.440don't you know you know leaders come and leaders go but you don't want to change the rules of the game
00:07:58.080right and uh lawfare is changing the rules of the game censorship is changing the rules of the game
00:08:04.320importing voters is changing the rules of the game right these are structural changes you're making to
00:08:10.000get us into one party rule that'll never come back from and the ending of that was like let's change out
00:08:14.800the rulers who are to change out the people who are changing the rules of the game right now there
00:08:18.960is only one valid comeback to that by the way which was made by some commentators which is well jan 6
00:08:24.000was an attempt to change the rules of the game and i would argue no because you know it can go through
00:08:28.480all that evidence why but it's like yeah a bunch of unarmed people taking over a building and nobody
00:08:33.360actually dying in the attack like that's not how you take over a country this size you don't just seize
00:08:37.680a building right we'll trespass until you surrender exactly and that was so exact i mean yeah it was a
00:08:43.600bad thing to storm you know into the capital but it was so exaggerated after the fact by the left and
00:08:48.480so hoaxed that then it just lost all credibility on it but regardless that was the only like slight
00:08:53.840comeback you could have to but it's very clear there's one side that keeps talking about changing
00:08:57.360the rules packing the supreme court adding states destroying the electoral college right these are all
00:09:02.080attempts to change the rules of the game because they don't like losing um and it was it is a one-way
00:09:07.040slope that we've been on for a while um you know no id voting that's another you know uh mail-in
00:09:12.400ballot voting mandatory voting non-secret voting right uh felon not being able to run for office
00:09:18.480right let's make them a felon okay we call you a felon now you can't run for office so all of these
00:09:22.240are attempts to hack the system and i i like democracies because you can vote people out of
00:09:27.120power because if you can't vote them out of power then you gotta shoot your way out and that's not good
00:09:30.480for anybody you know especially the unarmed 60 of the country so um but what do you what do you think
00:09:37.920realistically once you look at the history of say kennedy on have we really been picking presidents
00:09:45.440i mean i was watching i was watching an old documentary about i don't want to get conspiratorial
00:09:49.440but yeah candy was shot and they still haven't released the files which is absurd they still
00:09:53.520haven't released the files 60 years later uh nixon you know the whole watergate thing now we know how
00:09:58.320the media works so what was that all about um yeah it's you know but even the exceptions look kind of
00:10:05.520weird right because you get okay reagan um you know he was he was just all american but he was going to
00:10:11.120spend a whole lot on the military yeah yeah i mean these are all pro-military candidates look i i also
00:10:16.800tweeted that i think the the first act that uh trump should take is the patriot act needs to go and the
00:10:22.880fisa courts and the suffice of surveillance that that goes with it because that's been weaponized
00:10:27.120and turned domestic they as an excuse all they have to do is accuse you of foreign collusion and then
00:10:32.240they can treat you like a non-citizen all your fourth amendment rights go out the window and now they're
00:10:37.520surveilling you and coming after you and as we know the federal register so large you know show me the
00:10:42.160man i'll show you the crime or was it richly's mind like six sentences written by an honest man i will have
00:10:48.080him hang right the the every word you said i just love to hear because once silicon valley types of
00:10:57.120thinkers are set loose on the government you know elon of course looks like he's going to be the
00:11:02.000biggest one rfk junior etc etc they're they're systems thinkers as you are yeah i actually volunteered for
00:11:10.240public service i never thought i'd do it you know it would be pretty limited public service and i don't
00:11:15.360know what they have that would match up but i just put the word out i said hey if you want me to do
00:11:19.360something in this government i'm happy to do it because i want to protect the american dream for my
00:11:23.520kids well where i see your greatest value is just what you're talking about which is you're you're
00:11:29.600seeing how things are connected and i don't know that the democrats are good at that i don't know that
00:11:34.480standard republicans are good at it i don't think trump's you know as good at it as as like you would
00:11:40.400be or elon would be or janey vance will be so the the level of re-engineering that can be brought to
00:11:47.840the country is breathtakingly exciting to me it feels like 1776 and it feels like here's something
00:11:55.760i always wondered how was it that the eight or 12 people who started the revolution which was crazy
00:12:04.480i mean it was crazy that they were just going to get killed but somehow they made it work and then
00:12:11.200somehow just when we needed it when you know the countries were to fall off the rails the the characters
00:12:17.760who had exactly the right skills and historically so you know like elon has been franklin it almost
00:12:25.680seems like reincarnation or something does that seem like a coincidence to you or am i you're inspiring
00:12:32.560me because i wasn't sure how much work i want to put into politics but now you're inspiring me if
00:12:36.480it's that kind of moment then yeah that'll pull us everyone off the benches you know good here's the
00:12:42.080way i look at it um of course i'm biased for american greatness but if you know some of that's hyperbole
00:12:49.120etc patriotism but i do think that americans have one superpower which is we will shit can absolutely
00:12:57.280anything and and until capitalism works because it makes you fire your best friend right if if you
00:13:06.080can't fire your best friend if you can't tear the entire structure down if you can't cannibalize your
00:13:12.160last product to put out your new iphone you're going nowhere yeah all the successful systems take
00:13:17.760feedback from free markets or nature and it's it's when you're you know when you're a president and you
00:13:23.760say i'm not going to listen to what the market's telling me i know what's right that's when you're
00:13:27.120going to fail economically um you know if you say uh no we don't need you know tesla or we don't need
00:13:32.880electric cars we're going to go to space you're setting us back centuries as humanity right you're
00:13:37.680not taking feedback from nature and we could we could just be wiped out on this earth uh so having a
00:13:43.680forward-looking person like elon actually executing i think that's what separates that's one of the
00:13:48.720many things but definitely the largest thing in my mind that separates 2024 from 2016. instead of
00:13:53.760having a bunch of republican party apparatchiks and neocons running the administration uh he actually
00:13:59.920has incredibly competent people available if he will take advantage of them you know the one thing that
00:14:05.600trump doesn't get enough credit for is that he has his ear to the the uh public like like nobody else
00:14:13.040and he listens to lots of suggestions from lots of people and so it's not a top-down situation i think
00:14:20.160democrats are kind of a top-down machine and the republicans are a bottom-up machine well yeah the
00:14:26.320democrats are better organized you know they're they're collectivists by nature they're better
00:14:30.400organized that's what they do what they have though is they've worse leadership because uh the great men
00:14:35.840tend to be more on the right so to speak right the great man theory of history you're just more likely
00:14:40.160to be on the right because they're more individualistic so the left tends to win elections when they
00:14:45.120have a charismatic male leader right you have barack obama or bill clinton right you win an election
00:14:50.720um and that's why also in a lot of countries the first elected female prime ministers or presidents
00:14:56.320are conservative you know the maggie thatchers the indira gandhi's of the world the ben is your
00:15:00.480buta they're actually warmongers all of them right um so you you kind of have to uh the left is
00:15:07.440better organized but they tend to have worse leadership overall and i think that's a pattern
00:15:11.600you see across the board with them well at the moment their their affinity for identity over
00:15:18.320competence somewhat forecast what was going to happen you know not necessarily this election
00:15:25.040but there was somewhat of a guarantee that if they didn't go for merit uh that eventually the
00:15:31.200wheels were going to fall off the whole machine i think that's what happened this year yeah you know
00:15:35.360historically in a democracy i would be um a little more pessimistic just because if you look at what
00:15:42.320the left does well as it gets all the have-nots together and over time the have-nots sort of you
00:15:47.280know outnumber the haves uh and leverage and technology leverage has been making that worse you know the
00:15:52.400yes everybody's better off but the delta between elon musk and the lowest paid workers much larger than
00:15:57.120historically however technology also gives leverage to the winners right so you have a microphone now i have
00:16:04.640twitter uh you know elon has his empire of companies behind him and people who trust him and work with
00:16:10.320him so the amount of leverage that's available to the really high functioning individual society is
00:16:15.600much higher and so that helps them fight back ontario the wait is over the gold standard of online
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00:17:15.360for details please play responsibly essentially we can't help but mention elon and most conversations he's
00:17:23.520become the the universal uh reference to almost everything but i wanted to bring him up because
00:17:30.800if you look at elon musk's life i'm trying to reconcile the coincidence that he believes were a
00:17:36.640simulation with the fact that he lives like he's in a simulation he does live like he's in a simulation
00:17:42.720yes he's broke every time yeah he's like well what would be the most impossible thing i can do now
00:17:48.480uh change the government go to mars build electric car so i mean one of the you know i i called out in
00:17:57.2802022 i put out a tweet saying elon musk is the new leader of the center right and then i did a troll
00:18:02.640poll like you know who's the leader of the free world and it was like is it elon musk joe or who's
00:18:07.360the leader of the world it's uh uh elon musk joe biden uh xi jinping and vladimir putin and of course
00:18:13.920elon won right and obviously my follower base is self-selected but uh you know i kind of knew that
00:18:20.480he he's the real deal and i don't know him that well i mean i just exchange occasional once in the
00:18:25.280blue moon i get a message through him so i don't claim to know him at all um but uh there's a story
00:18:32.080that i read about him that really affected me which was when he was talking to bill gates and bill gates
00:18:37.120had just taken out some huge short on tesla like a billion dollar short or something and uh you know
00:18:43.600and elon was like why would you do that why would you short tesla and bill goes well you know i talked
00:18:48.400to my financial advisors and i looked at the math and there's no way it's overvalued and so i'm going
00:18:52.960to make money on the short and elon goes what do you care about making money i thought you were into
00:18:57.760electric cars and climate change and saving the world what are you doing like trying to save a few
00:19:01.920bucks and betting against like and he just walked away in disgust and i think he never talked to bill
00:19:06.320gates after that and that's when i realized like elon's a purist you know he means what he says
00:19:10.160like the money is a tool for him to get what he's trying to do and so i take him at face value which
00:19:15.760is the crazy thing because a lot of people who set these audacious goals to inspire people
00:19:20.320but you kind of know they don't really mean it elon i take it face value so i really do think he
00:19:25.040intends to get to mars i don't think he's joking about that and i think he meant to get he means to
00:19:29.520get there within a defined window of time and i don't think it's just like an inspirational
00:19:33.680faraway goal i think he's very very concretely going to do whatever it takes because elon
00:19:39.760doesn't want to go down in history as the electric car guy or even the guy who saved america guy
00:19:45.120yeah he wants to go down as a guy who got humanity to the stars yeah and everything again i'll give him
00:19:51.760more credit than that i don't even think he wants to go down as the i got humanity to the stars guy
00:19:56.080he's just like i want to get to the stars and so i have to make it happen in this lifetime the only way
00:20:02.080that i get to experience the science fiction world in my head is if i get to the stars and
00:20:07.440so that's so inspirational i think that drives everything so i think the government was just
00:20:11.520the thing that got in his way well the way so you can get the stars i had an idea it's even simpler
00:20:18.720uh he has to go to mars because he already conquered the planet he already needs a new planet he conquers the
00:20:25.840planet as a side effect you know if you get to mars you also have the most powerful rockets and
00:20:31.280missiles in the world you've conquered earth as a side effect if you get to mars you can already mine
00:20:35.840asteroids for gold and resources you've got all the economics you just won earth as a side effect
00:20:40.880so just just getting to mars as a side effect conquers everything because it's the most audacious goal
00:20:46.720by far he's going to launch thousands of these rockets at a cadence of every few hours to build a mars
00:20:53.280colony the staff i mean they don't have air they literally don't have air it's a terraform a planet
00:20:59.680but it gets better because he's going to i assume that the the base on mars will be built by his own
00:21:05.600robots yeah he has to build the robots to build the bases he has to have the ai to you know pilot those
00:21:11.600robots and control them and the vehicles to drive themselves and batteries yeah there's no gasoline on
00:21:16.640mars it's all got electric vehicles right he's he's thought a lot of this through the two pieces that i see
00:21:21.760him not having done yet although i'm sure he's thought about him a lot or terraform formation
00:21:25.680like how to terraform mars properly um and you could even start by terraforming parts of earth
00:21:30.720you could take deserts and earth and turn them into mediterranean paradises
00:21:34.240um and the other piece that he has to do is drones like he doesn't have a drone company yet
00:21:38.080and you know the future yeah i've been wondering about that it just seems so obviously missing from
00:21:43.360the portfolio doesn't it well i mean we we sort of make it look like it's effortless like oh yeah
00:21:48.560elon you've done it before spin up another company but before steve jobs and elon musk came along the
00:21:53.280conventional wisdom and jack dorsey too the conventional wisdom in silicon valley is you
00:21:57.200can't run more than one company at a time and you would never invest in somebody who's trying to run
00:22:01.680two companies at a time so spinning these up does take effort and you know he's been busy conquering the
00:22:06.320united states so give him a breather give him another three three months on that one but yeah i i expect
00:22:12.880if i had to guess just looking from afar he'll eventually want a drone company but you know in the
00:22:16.960meantime there's andural palmer lucky's company yeah got an oculus and uh then was i think he was
00:22:22.640tossed out for bad reasons um but he was an early early right-wing troll um and now he's doing andural
00:22:29.360which is like probably the most important new company in defense on the planet yeah he's got some
00:22:34.480good good toys there every time i see one of his little ads i think oh i wouldn't want to be on the
00:22:39.120other end of that right but see that's another example of the over-regulated uh world that we live in that
00:22:45.200i know elon's not a fan of is um drone the us is way behind in drone development andural is like the
00:22:51.520one bright spot that's out there but the chinese have such an advantage in drones because dji is the
00:22:57.840world's leading commercial manufacturer and here in the us we got hamstrung a lot by the faa
00:23:04.160a lot of drone companies and drone entrepreneurs had to pivot or went out of business because the faa
00:23:08.240was too restrictive and dji has just taken over the entire drone business so
00:23:13.120if the chinese actually do get drone supremacy above us and i don't think they're that far off
00:23:17.280that's like a form of it's that's the same tier as nuclear supremacy like in terms of you can win
00:23:22.960entire wars entire countries because the next war is not going to be fought with humans can be fought
00:23:26.560with robots like the the lesson of the ukraine russia war is if you can see it you kill it right the
00:23:32.640first one to spot the other one wins it's literally that's the whole game right and because drones are
00:23:37.280guided bullets and so they're the end state of all weaponry is drones there's one exception i can get
00:23:42.000into but essentially all the sub the submarines and the warships will turn to drone ships uh all
00:23:48.160the you know bullets individual bullets will be flying drones they'll turn corners they'll have face
00:23:52.480wreck right so in that world the infantrymen is completely obsolete it's like a mounted knight
00:23:57.840against the musketeer um so we we need to get drone supremacy back pretty quickly or taiwan is gone for
00:24:03.760sure which means we're basically at the old star trek uh episode where where i think they did a
00:24:10.800computer simulation to see who would win the war that's right if you're a loser you 600 000 have to
00:24:16.560go into the you get over here and you die but that's exactly what would happen because it would be like
00:24:20.960hey our drone army beat your drone army now there is one of our drones circling every one of your
00:24:25.760citizens heads you know and we're going to execute 10 because you lost right or because you didn't
00:24:30.160surrender in the first place i mean this is still the end but but do you think we maybe have reached
00:24:35.040a point you know every probably every year in civilization they said that where the big war
00:24:40.560doesn't make sense and it so doesn't make sense that you couldn't even get there accidentally because
00:24:45.200it would just take too many accidents just yeah the big war doesn't make sense for any sufficiently
00:24:50.320advanced society because any sufficiently advanced society is just short on technology and ideas it's not
00:24:55.200short on resources it's not short on you know it's not fighting for food um but we're living in this
00:25:00.960weird world where you have 21st century societies like the united states or parts of the united states
00:25:05.280and japan and then you have countries that are literally 150 years back in terms of their moral
00:25:11.360cultural intellectual technological development and so to them the idea of like conquering somebody still
00:25:17.280makes sense right beating up their neighbor to get a piece of land or to lose something sort of
00:25:21.600still makes sense and it's absurd obviously but the problem is the technology developed in the neolithic
00:25:28.080countries kind of filters into the paleolithic countries and use that same technology 10 years
00:25:34.480later in 10 years is not enough for them to have developed their moral and cultural institutions to
00:25:39.360know how to deal with it to realize hey there's more to life than blowing each other up that's why i think
00:25:44.400the the top you know five powers should just say why don't we just stay in the top five powers forever
00:25:50.960and just make sure the little guys don't kill any of us well that's what happened with the u.n
00:25:55.440right after the after the nuclear weapon was invented many but too many well the top seven
00:26:00.880basically said we're going to hang on to the nukes thank you very much and then south africa and
00:26:05.440israel and pakistan and north korea snuck in and india but originally it was just a security council
00:26:10.800right security council was russia china england france us had nukes and that's it nobody else and nobody
00:26:17.200else gets a say um but drones will leak out more than that and and drones aren't like as apocalyptic
00:26:23.360as nukes right away it's not like a zero to one you go from non-nuclear to nuclear but the drones
00:26:27.680just get better and better and you can see that iran and turkey uh and these countries like they punch
00:26:33.920out of their weight above their weight just because they're advanced in drone development you know
00:26:37.760turkey with the tv2 drones that ukraine has been using and uh you know iran making the shahid drones for
00:26:44.400russia and of course china with dji would you get a robot would you would you get a home robot
00:26:52.400yeah i'm on the list for optimus prime um or optimus whatever it's called optimus prime is
00:26:57.600a transformer optimus the the tesla robot i think i'm pretty far in front of in the front of the list
00:27:02.800i hope uh but look i don't expect it to be that great at the beginning it's probably going to suck
00:27:07.840okay but you have to both support the future unlike bill gates right uh and you have to um you
00:27:15.920have to try the future like if you live in the future you're just so much better off than than
00:27:20.640not living in the future i i buy every random technology gadget that looks halfway interesting
00:27:25.120but i don't have any qualms about throwing it out either i do it for learning because judgment is
00:27:30.240everything we live in a very highly leveraged age one of the biggest mistakes i made was i talked
00:27:34.720myself out of a tesla years ago so i got a tesla later than i should have because if i gotten it
00:27:38.400earlier i would have bought the stock i would have made many teslas worth of money right and i would
00:27:43.360have understood what where electric cars are going what the future of automotive looks like and i would
00:27:48.000have understood what self-driving can do and what it couldn't earlier so just for purely judgment
00:27:52.320reasons to improve your judgment you know you should be pro-tech um so yeah i'm going to buy an optimus
00:27:57.680i can afford it obviously so that makes it easy for other people okay yeah you can wait until it's a
00:28:02.240more finished product but do you think the llm ai is ever going to be able to drive a robot because
00:28:08.480i don't think it is yeah i don't know i mean the transformer breakthrough so what happened was this
00:28:14.080breakthrough this thing called the transformer which was really designed for translation between
00:28:17.920languages and but it also works well for transcription for some self-driving and art generation and so on
00:28:23.920that breakthrough has generalized quite a bit more than this language is because it does art right it
00:28:29.200does like video and art um but yeah i don't think it can generalize this forever and i think with
00:28:34.880these robots they're going to have to give them a lot more real world data and feedback but the whole
00:28:39.760ai boom has now brought a lot more money and a lot more research and a lot more development into ai so
00:28:46.000just people are taking it a lot more seriously and i will say what the optimus robot can already do on
00:28:52.480a machine learn model is actually already more than i think they were able to do under the old
00:28:56.720rules-based systems where they were like coding it by hand so i would say i'm cautiously optimistic
00:29:02.720and uh one thing elon has taught us is just you know stay at it throw the best people at it throw
00:29:08.160a lot of resources at it it's worth it and eventually you'll get it to work yeah it does have the feel of
00:29:13.600we're it's definitely the thing and there's no way to avoid ai but we don't know what it looks like so
00:29:19.760it's hard to know what to what to do to get ready for that well i i don't i don't think one should
00:29:25.200fear ai uh my current read on it is that it's the dawn of natural language computing you can basically
00:29:32.000speak in natural language to computer and it can go through huge unstructured data sets make sense out
00:29:37.680of them and speak back to you in natural language so that alone is a huge breakthrough and then i think
00:29:42.560for highly bounded tasks like driving a car which is actually pretty bounded because there are rules of the
00:29:47.920road and you have a lot of data or translation transcription image generation classification
00:29:54.240there's just a few of them i think it's really good and quite worthwhile but i think in terms of
00:29:59.200like agi and you're having a conversation with it and it's creating new science like i know that's the
00:30:03.840hope i don't see the road to that just now i also think it's a tool like you become more effective
00:30:09.040and more efficient like any other tool so just learn how to use it and you'll be more productive
00:30:13.200you'll be more valuable so i don't know if i mentioned this to you years ago but for over
00:30:18.24030 years i've had a plan that uh i would replace myself with a robot before i go you know so i just
00:30:25.680needed the right level of ai and the ai now believe it or not doesn't allow me to just teach it who i am
00:30:32.960so i could reproduce it like there's a company doing that uh it just they came in my inbox the other day
00:30:39.120and i passed without meeting it but it's a good company and they have good product and good
00:30:42.720technology and they're basically making ai clones of famous people that you can then rent by the hour
00:30:46.800right who is it what's the company do you remember i i do i don't know if i should be advertising or
00:30:51.840not advertising it because i'm not investing so you know does it start with a d yes oh i think i tried
00:30:58.640that one yeah exactly the oracle right the hint on the name um but yeah the thing is i just think
00:31:06.960that's inauthentic i don't think like these ai these ais are mimics right they're patchwork
00:31:11.600plagiarists they can grab little sentences and translate them and combine them but it doesn't
00:31:15.920make sense underneath but when i tried it couldn't remember accurately even things i put in a file and
00:31:21.920say remember this about me okay but that's in practice i'm talking about even in theory we don't
00:31:27.520have anything approaching agi we don't know how creativity works so it's going to be fake it's going
00:31:32.480to be a fake parrot it's it's like if it's literally a stochiastic parrot like a random
00:31:37.840number generator parrot is one way to think about it another way is like i call it a patchwork plagiarist
00:31:42.960right it's plagiarizing your past work and it's sort of stitching it together but it's like a
00:31:47.120frankensteinian output it's not alive so i'm in the process of uh building out a some kind of estate
00:31:54.560trust uh structure so that i can fund my permanent robot that can be upgraded as the ai improves
00:32:02.720so it'll be its own little trust entity well we could work the other way so there's two other
00:32:09.200you're talking about one way to bring you back or keep is to keep you around as a robot uh another
00:32:14.000way is we could just like stick a chip in your brain record everything that's going on and then
00:32:18.880when you die like you know or even while you're alive flip it flip you to the chip turn the brain
00:32:24.080off and flip you to the chip so that's another route a third one is we could just simulate you we
00:32:28.240could just you know record you well enough and create a simulated version if it's a good enough
00:32:31.920simulation why isn't that alive there's a lot of waste with this rabbit hole well well it's also
00:32:38.160going to be interesting because if if i say that the robot is me and who gets to say it doesn't i mean
00:32:46.800it would have to have some kind of rights that are managed by a human being yeah but if i say that's
00:32:52.240a continuation of me right who's to say otherwise there's a great sci-fi short story called lena
00:32:58.320uh and it's about the first human to get his brain virtualized you know like virtually copied and then
00:33:04.400basically he realized it like it's it becomes it goes open source and so everybody starts using for
00:33:10.320everything and then you know 400 years later it's powering washing machines and robot slaves and so on
00:33:14.960and it's always the same guy and he's waking up and he's like oh my god i'm a i'm a robot slave you
00:33:21.120know it's like for the rest of eternity he's suffering in all these menial roles it's a fun story
00:33:26.400but this goes back to the question of which one is real right like in the multiverse which copy of me is
00:33:32.160real i have an answer to that by the way you can come back to that but um in the you know in if i make
00:33:37.520copies of myself with a transporter accident star trek or if i make robot duplicates which one is real
00:33:42.960there's a calvin and hobbs uh strip which i'm sure you've seen it went for a while
00:33:47.200where calvin has this box this cardboard box you know all kids always have the cardboard box game
00:33:54.400something like that he opens it and another calvin comes out so you can create a calvin copy it's a
00:33:58.720cloner and so he's showing hobbs like okay this one's going to do the chores that one's going to do
00:34:03.040the homework this one's going to go you know do that i'm just going to relax but pretty soon
00:34:07.200they're all bums they're all fighting over the food there's not enough clothes they're all
00:34:10.400trashing the place nobody wants to clean up because they're all calvins right so it doesn't
00:34:14.240actually solve any problems uh it just creates duplicates but uh yeah i mean at the end of the
00:34:20.880day the the way to test that is like uh you wouldn't pull the plug on yourself right like
00:34:26.160if you really believe that to you then you're ready to pull the plug on this copy of you and nobody ever
00:34:31.360is um that's that's the real test on it there's a there's a sci-fi short story called the jewel
00:34:37.120and i'm going to blow the punchline so if somebody doesn't want to know it to skip ahead but
00:34:40.880basically it's about a future society in which they put a chip in your brain when you're born
00:34:46.000and the chip it records every action every sensation every feeling of your development and
00:34:50.800then when you hit a certain point in maturity you go in for an operation where they scrape
00:34:55.680your brain out and replace it with a warm spongy material that'll survive forever and they turn the
00:35:00.080the jewel on and you're now the jewel so your brain's been uploaded into the secure chip that you control
00:35:05.680and the rest of the body is all replaceable it's only the brain that the mind that they couldn't
00:35:09.200replace the software so this is how they do it and so our protagonist has like a week coming up until
00:35:14.480his brain is going to be scraped out and he's going to be you know flipped on as the jewel and after a
00:35:19.920while he's like no no i don't want to do this right and and then he goes and then runs off and
00:35:24.000joins some secret society of underground lunatics who refuse to have their brains replaced because
00:35:28.000they're now very much in the minority and they're mortal so they're going to die they age and die
00:35:31.280everybody else gets to live forever so they're kind of crazy and then he finds and then when
00:35:36.160he goes into the secret site and he sort of escaped he finds out actually they turned the
00:35:42.240jewel on two weeks ago so your brain is still there but you're not listening to it you are the jewel now
00:35:47.360do you want to go through with it or not then he goes yeah so then he goes into the operation to
00:35:50.720script the brain out that's the end so so so what you would have so but even that doesn't quite solve
00:35:58.080it right because like if i flipped you to a robot you then robot you would say yeah get rid of meat
00:36:03.760meat suit you know scott he's not necessary anymore but meat suit scott would say get rid of robot scott
00:36:09.680so you you actually independently exist it's a clone it's not you but it solves itself because
00:36:15.600meat scott goes his uh me scott way and the robot goes on forever that's true that's true uh it's it's
00:36:24.400like creating a clone by the way you can already clone yourself you know rich people are already
00:36:28.400cloning dogs and cats i hate to say it not me but i know people who have literally cloned their dead
00:36:34.560animal and they have a clone of it running around uh and and and you ask the kids you're like hey how's
00:36:39.920the clone and they're like oh same behavior you know i can't tell it apart from the old dog so for a
00:36:43.680dog it's the problem solved and you can already clone yourself there are companies that are doing uh
00:36:48.960you know embryos stuff like they have the ability to do clones the i i'll bet you the chinese
00:36:53.040communist party the top people have some clones on ice that is so cool to think about that they
00:36:58.880could just break one out isn't that like the what is the sci-fi foundation yeah oh yeah there's altered
00:37:06.000carbon i think and or rick and morty has some stuff on this but yeah it's uh you know the the future
00:37:13.680is here it's just unevenly distributed right so so let me let me ask you some more questions about the future
00:37:23.040bank more encores when you switch to a scotia bank banking package learn more at scotia bank dot com
00:37:29.760slash banking packages conditions apply scotia bank you're richer than you think what do you think is
00:37:36.640the future of the family yeah so i think the catholic church was right and the contraception killed
00:37:43.600the you know the family it sort of killed catholicism actually killed religion for sure uh
00:37:50.960contraception was a groundbreaking technology right and it changed the nature of the family
00:37:55.040and now we're in this situation where you and you kind of had enforced monogamy in society before
00:38:03.200right uh like and and if you had sex you had a child you needed two people to raise a child you
00:38:09.760know you didn't have washing machines you didn't have cars or whatever maybe etc so you're kind of forced
00:38:14.720into the family unit and now through a combination of uh robotics technology automation contraception
00:38:23.520sex and marriage and childbearing all these things have become highly decoupled right and so a lot
00:38:29.520of people are playing choose your own adventure um but those bundles were there for a reason right
00:38:35.760we're biologically hardwired for those bundles so i would say like the happiest situation is if you have
00:38:40.880a happy family if you're happily married and you got your kids and everyone loves each other
00:38:45.440that's the best of all possible worlds but that's so rare most people you know either fail trying to
00:38:51.440get to that or they don't even want to take the risk because if you try for it and you fail there's
00:38:57.760so much downside that they sort of are opting into all these alternative models um the weirdest one
00:39:04.080that i heard and this is a los angeles story um i don't know if i want to out him it's up to him but
00:39:09.440this guy's having a uh he he has a son with a woman they got they were married they had a child
00:39:16.080then they didn't get along they got divorced okay they're still friends they're obviously raising the
00:39:20.480son you know as divorced father and mother but he decided he wants to have another kid
00:39:27.200and who would he be best situated to have a kid with he's already got all the child support worked
00:39:31.760out he knows they're genetically compatible they still get along they're already raising a child together
00:39:35.760so he's having a kid with his ex-wife and paying her uh i think that he's basically it's like a
00:39:43.760divorce like he's paying her enough to you know it's like the alimony thing but you add for the
00:39:48.480right right you use the same rules that you have with the existing kid yeah so in that sense it's
00:39:53.280probably probably worked out but if you tell people like oh i'm gonna have another kid with my ex-wife like
00:40:00.000that triggers them right that breaks their mind in so many ways and i think it's weird like it's it's
00:40:05.440fine it's probably better than having a kid with someone you don't know or don't love or having a
00:40:09.840kid without a mom you know i know that happens too so it's probably fine but it's weird it's definitely
00:40:15.920weird and people are getting pretty mad at him about it mad enough i think he's gonna write a book
00:40:21.120on the topic and become famous for it he's already famous but he's even more famous right but um
00:40:26.560um my advice to him was i was like just tell him you're gay right just tell him you went gay because
00:40:32.880then it's suddenly okay it's weird how these rules work the exact same thing is happening
00:40:39.680anyway but because you say you're gay it's suddenly okay you get out of jail i've been holding that card
00:40:45.360in case i need it someday it's like well you know i wasn't going to mention it but yeah let me bring it
00:40:50.080up right put on a wig yeah so yeah i i think uh the whole family thing is going to go into um
00:40:58.160permutations that we're not used to i think you're going to see what didn't i don't know if this is a
00:41:04.400fake news or not wasn't elon talking about having all of his uh the mothers of his kids in one one
00:41:10.800building yeah i mean it's that's uh um that makes me yeah yeah it's like mormon style right
00:41:19.520um i mean there are people who a lot of people are opting out of the gene pool they're not even
00:41:23.280having kids can't be bothered right or it's too difficult um i think i think that's a mistake i think
00:41:29.200if you can have kids you should have kids it kind of answers the meaning of life question right but
00:41:33.600it's my rule on that is you either got to have kids or you got to find god like pick one of the two
00:41:38.960and i know what's that well i've read god i've read god's debris i i've i've i've read your
00:41:46.320simulation stuff i know the game you're playing you're playing the god game uh and you're just
00:41:52.160playing it in your own way with your own words so you have more conviction which makes sense right
00:41:55.920it's not some white bearded dude who lived two thousand years ago has certain commandments you're
00:42:00.160thinking it through for yourself and you're stitching it together in your own framework your
00:42:03.760own models your own language and so it's solid within you you have you have your own i wouldn't
00:42:09.680call it faith because it's there through reason but you you have your own deep spirituality although
00:42:16.000you don't use that language of those words um and i think you'd have to otherwise you wouldn't be
00:42:20.400happy right now because then you'd be as a self-obsessed and looking for pleasure in the next pill or the
00:42:24.400next thing or the next activity and that doesn't you have to have a mission if you have a mission
00:42:28.960larger than yourself something that you truly believe in more than yourself and kids are the
00:42:34.080easiest one right and one of the great ones i i'm finding politics as my uh as my escape you know
00:42:41.440because if i do anything that helps people like you know i've had a job where people contact me all
00:42:46.880the time and say oh you helped me lose weight or get a new job or something and that just feeds me
00:42:53.280that's just like oh my god that's that's the nourishment i need it's like i helped you wow well
00:42:58.800i think especially like if you're a traditional male you get a lot of value like self-value out of
00:43:05.920taking care of your tribe doing your duty towards your tribe and you get to define your tribe and
00:43:10.720the more capable you are the broader that tribe the more people you should take care of and that's why
00:43:15.280people like elon are so impressive because he's basically saying humanity is my tribe right i'm going
00:43:20.160to push this all forward now to that point my my hypothesis is that the reason that trump prevailed
00:43:27.920is that the danger to society to america got to the point where male um just male biology kicked in
00:43:36.160and people who otherwise would have said you take care of it i'm sure it'll be fine just said oh no
00:43:41.600there's a lion at my door and i'm the guy with the gun i gotta i gotta kill the lion so you mentioned
00:43:47.920one tweet of mine before to change the people who are trying to change the system right but the other
00:43:52.400tweet that i was really proud of this cycle right was it's i almost want to pin this to my profile
00:43:57.520but uh it's uh it's the battle of the masculine men and the feminine women against the fem against
00:44:03.520the masculine women and the feminine men right and that one was written in such a way that like it's
00:44:09.120it's lyrical it's poetic it flows but it's also true and once you see it you can't unsee it and i think
00:44:15.040that one influenced more people than any tweet i put out because they saw it and they would they immediately
00:44:21.120knew whether they're masculine men or feminine woman and then they immediately thought on the
00:44:25.360other side like oh yeah they're all men are feminine and all the women are masculine right and it
00:44:29.840immediately sorted you it properly sorted you into your bucket and it did it with actually ironically
00:44:35.440identity politics politics but it it works um it does work yeah and so i think like what you have is
00:44:43.920you have very capable people now who decided that you know the nonsense has to stop the identity politics
00:44:52.320has to stop the the gaslighting has to stop the lawfare has to stop the censorship has to stop
00:44:57.920um and uh hacking the system has to stop and and we got to put our foots down so you have some
00:45:04.320in this administration i think you have some very intelligent people working with trump hopefully they
00:45:09.120will figure out how to navigate the bureaucracy and the intel apparatus before they get blown up
00:45:14.400right because the intel apparatus and the bureaucracy are not going to give up i have a theory that over
00:45:19.440a long period of time the people with the guns are always in charge right so if you if you look at
00:45:25.120roman history at the end all the emperors came from the praetorian guard which was guarding the emperor
00:45:29.840now they were suddenly in charge if you look at what happened in russia you know the fsb the kgb the secret
00:45:35.120police the people who were guarding the premier they took over right so that's putin and his crew
00:45:39.920so on a long enough cycle the praetorian guard is eventually in charge the people with the guns always
00:45:44.240end up in charge so and that's happened kind of everywhere in the world where the intel operators
00:45:49.200has intel apparatus for example has their secret courts and their secret laws and their gag orders
00:45:53.600so why hasn't it fully happened in the us it's the only place in the world and it's because of the
00:45:58.880second amendment because the people with the guns are in charge because the people have the guns
00:46:03.360right well but the possibility is that they just use the media so that they could get around the
00:46:10.240gun holders correct correct so the power actually goes to the best organized and armed intolerant
00:46:18.960minority right to win revolutions and wars and even to have the soft powers that revolutions and wars are
00:46:24.400never fought against you in the first place you need the organized group and i think as a society we've
00:46:29.600lost fact of the we've lost sight of where voting comes from what voting developed as a way for
00:46:36.400people who had won wars to divide up the spoils amongst themselves and not fight each other and it
00:46:42.160became a right that was granted to you if you fought for the empire if you had a sword and shield you had
00:46:46.880some land you call you went when you were called by the king or the emperor of the senate you went to war
00:46:51.440for them and so power gave you the right to vote because the other guys didn't want to fight
00:46:57.440you they didn't want a civil war so like let's just divide up the vote amongst us like if you're
00:47:01.840in a pirate ship and 10 people are armed and 90 aren't you crash in some island who's going to end
00:47:06.160up voting it's going to be the 10 with the with the weapons the 90 without the weapons will not get
00:47:09.600a vote especially if the 10 are organized especially if they have a common culture race
00:47:14.480religion nationalism philosophy whatever that's binding them together so it's that power gives you
00:47:19.440the right to vote and now we've gotten upside down where the right to vote gives you power
00:47:23.600where it doesn't matter if you're capable of exercising power or not you get the right to vote
00:47:28.160but how long is that going to work you know if the 51 percent that's unarmed and not powerful
00:47:34.000is voting to stamp and just stomp a jackboot you know on the 49 that's armed eventually that 49
00:47:41.200will organize unless as you say the media keeps them disorganized off balance and doesn't give them
00:47:48.160chance to organize right that's why like the anyone who's in charge is really good at
00:47:52.560breaking up crime breaking up rings organization right they don't want the opponents to organize
00:47:58.960so it's the organized resistance that can win disorganized they don't right like if if there's
00:48:04.160jackboot thugs coming in and kicking down doors if we all fight them at once they always lose
00:48:08.720north korea would be free if everyone in that giant open air gulag could organize an in one action in one
00:48:15.360moment but they can't coordinate so they get picked off one by one like dissidents the same way like
00:48:20.400twitter can you know the old twitter before elon took over kick off people one by one but they
00:48:24.880couldn't all leave in a huff to another side at the same time they couldn't organize because twitter
00:48:29.360is the organization mechanism so the single most consequential thing that freed this country is elon
00:48:36.000bought x and the best tweet i saw on this was from greg fodder he had this great tweet he said i can't
00:48:42.880believe that he noticed that the the 80 percent uh completed imperial death star and just bought it
00:48:54.880they'd basically been building this death star to control all of news media forever and they were
00:49:01.600using it left and right and he just bought it and there's a really ironic there's many ironic sub
00:49:09.920stories in there but one of my favorites is that when he went to buy it he offered the 44 billion right
00:49:15.600i think it was 42 because he loves that number right he's just love he's he's in the simulation so he's
00:49:20.000he's a troll uh he's trolling the simulation and um you're right he's the guy who takes the simulation
00:49:26.880seriously and so are you right and so you guys live your lives you you yolo it you truly yolo it anyway
00:49:33.600you yolo with some faith that there's some wind out there at your back which by the way it might
00:49:37.440be called a religious belief nevertheless um so uh you know they they built this death star and he he
00:49:46.000he goes in to buy it and he offers 44 billion i don't remember 42 and it gets to 44 through some
00:49:51.760accounting stuff but i don't know if you remember but the market crashed hard right then that was
00:49:58.080when the market fell off a cliff and then and he then he realized he was way overpaying the bankers
00:50:05.200all tried to back out nobody wanted to invest he was in over his head the stock he put up his collateral
00:50:10.320had come down and he didn't want to buy it anymore he didn't want to buy it and he was like well you
00:50:15.920know there are too many bots here and they're like well that's not good enough you can't back out
00:50:19.360so they dragged him to court in front of a delaware judge and they made him buy it
00:50:32.240freed us all yeah now i i so here's here's my cynical question can any modern country survive
00:50:40.880with free speech if their news is real because you think they'll just fracture they'll fall apart they'll
00:50:47.440realize there's been too much shenanigans in the past and they'll be i i think if if we saw all
00:50:53.120the warts of our government yeah and there wasn't a counter thing that was you know saying oh that's
00:50:59.280not true uh i don't know if any government could survive long enough to do anything good that's the
00:51:05.680nice thing about democracy it gives us a way to have peaceful revolutions right so if all of that came out
00:51:11.360the people if they truly understood it which i'm a little skeptical on i mean the reality is i think
00:51:17.040most people are single issue voters and the parties are collections of single issue voters and most
00:51:21.440people have one thing they really care about and understand they don't really pay attention to
00:51:24.880everything else so there's only a small percentage of people who care if kennedy was killed by the cia or
00:51:29.360not you know it might be enough to tip the boat on the margin um but i don't i just don't think enough
00:51:34.880people who care or that nixon was framed you know like okay half the country will believe it and the
00:51:39.680other half won't you know exactly how this will work out right yeah i i i have to do or false if it
00:51:44.960has a political component to it half the country will believe it and half the country won't i i feel
00:51:49.920i'm only curious like i'm not bought into the answer at all i'm not either i'm not either for the
00:51:55.920record i don't think the cia killed him but i'll bet one of their ex-people was you know probably went
00:52:00.240road well yeah something along those lines yeah their fingerprints are somewhere but not directly
00:52:04.880on the gun all right i i don't think i've asked you about ufos yet have i i've never talked about
00:52:11.440ufos have i i don't think you might have i'm i'm a ufo skeptic like i don't know so am i so do do you
00:52:18.080think they're so the fact that the government keeps telling us that somebody else has seen the
00:52:25.200spacecraft and we can't tell you we can't tell you where it is or what it looks like right right
00:52:31.920there's too many camera phones there's too many people there's too many blabbermouths there's too
00:52:35.680many wannabe heroes you know that information will be out already plus why would the aliens even hide it
00:52:41.360and how would the ufos get captured and how do they even make it here so far and wouldn't we see some
00:52:45.760evidence like electromagnetic radiation from their transmission there's just so many problems with
00:52:49.920the ufo thing it's kind of uh you know it's okay so when you're trying to figure when you're trying
00:52:55.120to figure out how to navigate this world full of dueling memes that are trying to occupy your brain
00:52:59.600what you really need is good epistemology epistemology is just theory of knowledge fancy
00:53:03.520word for theory of knowledge you need to know how to tell what's true from what's false and that's
00:53:07.760becoming one of the most important if not the most important survival trait in society the other
00:53:12.400one might be like can you resist eating sugar although i think ozenpic will solve that so uh
00:53:18.080it's really about how do you tell what's true from what's false and too many people are lazy they
00:53:23.360don't have the foundation to figure out what's true what's from false and they just like assume one
00:53:27.600thing then next thing you did and you're in this giant edifice of like men can give birth right or ufos
00:53:33.360are real or i'm embarrassed you know for the people who are into this but it's like you know the pyramid
00:53:38.880was a giant battery or something you know that that one seems to be in vogue right now but there's always
00:53:43.840a bunch a bunch of these lunatic fringe theories that go through um and i just think they like if
00:53:49.440you have any kind of understanding of physics politics people numbers you know numeracy you
00:53:56.480would understand that no the government's not hiding a bunch of ufos somewhere so so here's my my favorite
00:54:02.080recreational belief about ufos this is not a real belief it's a recreational belief that apparently our moon
00:54:09.840has so many oddities to it compared to other moons that we can we can see that it's almost like it
00:54:15.280doesn't seem like a real moon and some people say it's a hollow spaceship that that has been there but
00:54:23.200but i've added to it that on the dark side of the moon there's this enormous crater impact that you can't
00:54:29.520see from our side but uh so my theory is that the the aliens were using their giant ship that didn't look
00:54:36.080like it was covered with dirt when it first got there maybe it was just a big big ball and uh
00:54:41.440they were sort of trying to geo form the earth for later you know that maybe they gave us a little dna
00:54:47.120and stuff like that and they're watching it and maybe even maybe even they uh thought they would block
00:54:52.560an asteroid or something from destroying the good work they've done maybe they moved the moon in front
00:54:57.200of it and took the hit so my theory is that the inhabitants of the moon space vehicle all died but it's
00:55:04.880automated and that what we see as ufos uh that do that weird thing where you can see them and they
00:55:11.280show up on radar but they seem to be able to change directions like faster than an object can
00:55:15.760that they're holograms from the moon now in other words the the there is something there but it's just the
00:55:22.000intersection of of electromagnetic magnetic waves so maybe you maybe you could pick it up on radar and
00:55:29.600maybe you could see it but if you put your hand on it it wouldn't be there and yet yet yet it could
00:55:34.800operate like uh sonar or radar which is if you send out any kind of signal into the world you can you
00:55:41.920can get a ping back and it's just the way i just think eyewitness evidence is worthless and people are
00:55:47.200very gullible so like i don't waste neurons in thinking about ufos um like i like i there's there are
00:55:54.560zillions of you know probably nearly infinite kepler planets in the universe or in the multiverse
00:55:59.920so yeah there is life out there somewhere um it's probably you don't think so well i'm still
00:56:07.760caught on we're a simulation and if we are there doesn't need to be life anywhere else
00:56:13.520i don't think your simulation okay let's go into the simulation thing because i'm going to take you
00:56:17.440up on it i don't think it explains anything useful um okay here's what the simulation hypothesis
00:56:23.200basically does it just kicks the whole god problem up one level right it's an axiomatic
00:56:28.480kind of thing saying well we're just in a simulation it can't be falsified you can always just say well
00:56:32.000that's just a simulation you can cherry pick like with horoscopes you can cherry pick outcomes and say
00:56:36.720well that would only happen in the simulation and you could ignore all the ones that followed regularity
00:56:41.760it doesn't actually explain anything it doesn't make any risky and narrow predictions
00:56:47.040it's not falsifiable so it's not scientific it's purely a belief it's a faith-oriented belief
00:56:52.000uh and you can replace the word simulation with god you can replace it with computer program vr
00:56:57.680reality chemical scum bat brain in the vat and the whole thing still holds it's a very easy to vary
00:57:03.360theory um but what about the what about the statistical likelihood if we know that one is created
00:57:11.360there are two places where the simulation theory uh differs from uh just a pure made-up god theory okay
00:57:18.800one of those is that the statistical argument which is like on a long enough time scary computers get
00:57:23.600strong enough that you can do this right the the second problem sorry the second thing that it kind
00:57:29.440of addresses is it kind of says that and that's why reality is quantum underneath zeros and ones right
00:57:34.160it's a system that we're used to so let's forget the second one let's go with the first one for a sec
00:57:38.320so you're basically saying that it's just it's just likely to happen right this so you just wait long
00:57:44.720enough the computers get good enough well okay what would happen okay so they're already good enough
00:57:48.880but good okay well what happens is anytime you're simulating something it is much much much lower
00:57:55.200resolution and much less real than the base reality that you're simulating out of right right just like
00:58:00.880we observe to render that to guide that photon over there so you lose massive amounts of res uh resolution
00:58:08.640so the only way the simulation is going to be better is if you can control it right if you can
00:58:15.600basically say uh otherwise you're going to stay in your real reality the reason you play video games
00:58:20.320in your real reality because you can win you can control it that's what affirmations are okay yeah so
00:58:26.880okay i'm going along with you so the only reason you would go into a simulation is you can control it
00:58:31.200but if you can control it too easily then it's not fun there's no surprise so to make it fun and
00:58:38.560surprising you want to have it either be multiplayer or convincingly multiplayer where there are other
00:58:44.400actors that can do things you don't expect and it's adversarial right right so you would end up with
00:58:49.440something that looks a lot like what we have today right so what so the only reason you would do it is
00:58:55.040because base reality wasn't giving you that feedback and entertainment right if base reality was
00:59:01.040giving you that same level of multiplayer game you would rather stay in base reality because it's
00:59:04.800like billions of time higher resolution in fact this reality would be so unsatisfyingly low res
00:59:10.560you would have to nuke your memory and probably your body to not understand what's going on no
00:59:16.080here's where i i must disagree with you okay please so uh if you're playing tennis and you see the
00:59:22.400tennis ball zip by and it hits the line and you say hey that's out and everybody else says no that's in
00:59:27.200uh you can play it back in the on the video and you can find out for sure what it was but the person
00:59:32.960who saw it out and the person who saw it in have a perfect memory except one of them didn't happen
00:59:39.280and what we know is that our brains create the resolution or imagine the resolution and so i'm
00:59:46.640talking to you right now surrounded by detail that is completely being invisible to me and i don't even
00:59:51.760know if it's really there unless i look at it right so our actual experience of life is that we're
00:59:58.400imagining resolution that isn't there and that's easily provable what's the difference between
01:00:03.280imagining resolution having resolution how can i imagine it if it doesn't like it would take the
01:00:07.520same compute power for me to imagine it as it would for it to exist although you could argue the unseen
01:00:13.120universe doesn't need to exist exactly now it's an argument for consciousness because if it's not
01:00:18.880if it's not conscious why bother rendering it right which leads me to a different place
01:00:24.240so so my everything is conscious rather than to the unconscious stuff isn't rendered
01:00:31.200i don't know that point but let me ask let me ask this so my belief is if we're a simulation
01:00:37.600then if i were to go in the backyard and dig a hole where nobody no human or any entity had ever dug a hole
01:00:44.480that the stuff that i dig to doesn't exist until i'm digging to it because it doesn't need to and
01:00:50.000never did need to so everything that's not directly observed doesn't have to exist and that's how you
01:00:56.320save all your compute time why do you need to save compute time because the universe is massively big
01:01:03.360and you couldn't build a computer that would be big enough to replicate in detail like you say down to
01:01:09.040nice you're taking interesting in the simulation you need to uh you need to conserve compute time
01:01:13.840but from what we see of our universe it is so massive it's potentially a multiverse it has so many
01:01:20.240you know black holes and capable computing power has so much compute power like why why would you need
01:01:26.640to leave this reality like even if you're sitting back okay it's a simulation let's go with that for
01:01:33.680a second doesn't mean you left it though okay what does that explain that was unexplained before
01:01:41.360oh i don't know first of all i don't accept your assumption that that's a necessity for it to be true
01:01:46.960well i i i think the set of potential falsehoods is infinite and truth is a very rare thing so to pluck truth
01:01:55.360out of the falsehood you have to have certain rules for what is true and what is not that's my
01:01:59.120what about what about statistical arguments then statistical arguments only uh it's let me give you
01:02:06.960one i'll give you one so you can here's the problem with the statistical argument the problem is i can
01:02:11.600give you an equally infinite number of scenarios in which we choose not to do a simulation just because
01:02:16.960base reality is already so good the problem with the simulation argument another problem is like
01:02:22.480like like you can't you can never break out of the simulation or if you do then how do you know
01:02:28.960you're not another simulation right it's like it doesn't it is it's doing the god thing it's basically
01:02:35.120hiding everything behind a layer where you're not allowed to look and so it's adding complexity without
01:02:40.720explaining anything new it violates occam's razor in that sense because you've added a new explanation
01:02:45.680in this case the simulation but that new explanation doesn't give you anything it doesn't allow you to do
01:02:50.800anything more it doesn't explain anything that you see or observe and so therefore you've just
01:02:55.840added unnecessary entities in the explanation and just an occam's razor you don't want to do that
01:03:00.800well so let me let me test that okay so my belief is that if we're a simulation it wouldn't necessarily
01:03:07.680be for entertainment that that could be one that would be in the top three but in my uh my audience knows
01:03:15.360that i have a long history of having massive water related problems uh just probably 12 of them this
01:03:22.560year in my house alone my outdoor irrigation and it's in all my homes and it doesn't matter where
01:03:28.320i'm living it doesn't matter who the contractor was doesn't matter and to me it's becoming obvious that
01:03:34.400i'm an ai training tool and and that i'm training how to deal with infinite water related problems
01:03:42.480everyone different and everyone you know i attack like it's a brand new problem so if you could
01:03:47.680download my knowledge of fixing water related problems you you could populate like a a plumber
01:03:54.480robot in the higher universe now now you said there's no prediction right so i i don't know if you can see
01:04:03.760the comments but if i ask my locals people uh have i predicted that i will have ongoing incredibly
01:04:12.080coincidental water problems and have they watched it for three years in a row and every time like
01:04:17.520here's another one and and it doesn't match any experience that they have and i can but i could
01:04:22.800also see because you believe this you look for water related problems that other people would let it slide
01:04:27.200uh and yes yes you ground more than usual but like i i think i have water related problems in my place
01:04:35.840i just you know somebody else takes care of it like i don't think about it you know i don't add it to my
01:04:39.680list of water related problems and but did you have 12 separate separate occasions where there were like
01:04:47.680you know i'm not going to take your streak of water problems as evidence that we live in a simulation like by that you'd be you could you could be saying
01:04:56.720saying it's because i'm capricorn right now all of a sudden we have to believe astrology a theory that's
01:05:01.920very easy to vary where you can change the components without changing the outcome is a bad theory but
01:05:07.360but i'm making a prediction i'm making a prediction that next year like all the years before no because
01:05:14.160you're arbitrating that one you're the one who's coming back and saying your water now if you made a
01:05:18.000prediction about me if you said hey nival you're gonna have a dozen water related problems next year then
01:05:24.000i'm gonna keep an eye you know that's better still not really scientific we should get a whole bunch
01:05:27.520of people no well neither of them are the scientific process but would you agree that if i made an
01:05:33.680unusual prediction and let's say i could keep making this unusual prediction time after time again would
01:05:40.720that convince you or would you just think there's some reason i could make a prediction and you don't
01:05:44.480know why i i would i would first look for the non-supernatural explanation i would first try to figure out
01:05:50.000like is it what are the statistical odds of this and do we you know properly that's no fair calling
01:05:55.840it supernatural you're trying to win by a word you can't win no no it is it is a supernatural because
01:06:01.520it appeals to something outside of our current physics that's what i mean by supernatural oh but
01:06:06.000it would but this would be well within our current physics we're just we're just a video we're just zeros
01:06:10.880and ones no no that that's not our current physics that's not our current laws of physics that's not
01:06:16.800our current understanding of physics that's not our current you know physics that we're we're
01:06:21.840definitely running on some computing substrate right but there's nothing inconsistent with saying that
01:06:26.960we're in a video game that was designed nothing inconsistent is back to unfalsifiable and there's
01:06:32.400infinite number of those theories you know we're in we're brain you're a brain floating in a vat go
01:06:37.120falsify that you can't right so but are you saying in general that if something is does uncanny predictions
01:06:45.520that it still doesn't tell you something useful it no i'm not saying that it depends on what
01:06:50.480predictions it's making how statistically likely or unlikely they are how well they're tested for
01:06:54.960error who's corroborating them what that mechanism was and and also then the claim how does that
01:07:01.520evidence match up to the claim so the more extraordinary the claim the more extraordinary
01:07:05.440the evidence that it requires of course so i agree with all that i think my i think my experience with
01:07:10.640my audience has been pretty extraordinary because they they're i try not to go too much in the
01:07:15.840supernatural but i'll be honest there are times when i've prayed right so i can't hurt nobody's
01:07:22.800perfect yeah exactly pascal's wager right just in case yeah i've i've got a version of this i don't
01:07:28.560know if i've ever said this out loud before but every now and then i just talk to the creators of the
01:07:33.520simulator simulation that are watching me because it might be me yeah yeah exactly no i completely
01:07:40.080agree yes if simulation hypothesis is true then you know god or creator or master programmer has your
01:07:46.960best interest at heart yeah i say things like you know is this the plan i mean you're really gonna do
01:07:52.560this yeah exactly exactly no yeah like don't take me out of the game too fast like give me some resource
01:07:57.600if you want me to be effective right or like i'm not job don't try me i'll fail let's not go through
01:08:04.160let's not take that route let's try a different yeah i mean i think i think everybody does that
01:08:08.400because at the end of the day existence itself is an unexplained miracle right like how do we get here
01:08:13.920why am i here why am i a monkey why am i three-dimensional why am i male why am i talking to you right
01:08:18.320now what does it even mean to talk right the whole thing is so surreal that there is an instantaneous and
01:08:24.080overarching miracle of just consciousness like why even be conscious why not just be like zombies or
01:08:28.880robots talking to each other going through the same actions why even be aware so there's so much
01:08:33.920here that you just have to take axiomatically and that is spirituality and i think your spirituality
01:08:39.280your current religion is a simulation hypothesis perfectly valid you know mine is probably closer
01:08:44.000to the dao and you know other people's christianity or whatever but somehow you have to explain this
01:08:49.120miracle of existence and you and everyone has to do it in their own frame but i think not
01:08:54.000the rest is science right the rest is all follows the rules of science and so what i don't like
01:09:00.240is when like someone says this one i'm correct it's scientific you should believe it because of these
01:09:06.640following arguments and then i'm like okay well what are the implications how do we test it if you
01:09:11.120want it if you want me to believe in the real world it has to be scientific which means it has to
01:09:15.040be testable there's a third category that i will accept which is direct experience but it's only valid for you
01:09:20.800so if you have a direct experience of something you can hold it but your ability to convey it is zero
01:09:26.960because everybody has their own experience and you can't take anybody else to experience it value
01:09:31.680uh i'll give you that i'm going to give you that my personal experience is so bizarre
01:09:38.080that i mean it's not i don't think it's quite elon musk level but i mean you you've got your own
01:09:42.960life that's kind of doesn't matter yeah very surreal yeah i mean how do the three of us exist
01:09:50.240is this really like there's so many things in my life that happen and i'm sure you have the same
01:09:55.120feeling where you just say how is this real i mean just how is this real if you want to talk absolute
01:10:01.840truth and nothing else the only statement that you can make that is absolutely true is that what's that
01:10:09.680go ahead i know where this is going sorry what's yours it's that we exist to ask the question
01:10:16.480that's the only thing you know it's actually even worse than that
01:10:21.040so i used to say it was i exist and then a very smart friend of mine corrected me and he said no
01:10:26.000awareness exists you don't even know that you exist your thought like yes your current thought
01:10:32.160exists and you're aware of that current thought but what is the you that is having that thought
01:10:36.640that's the whole buddhist question the whole enlightenment question is there a persistent
01:10:40.400self-identity other than just thoughts that are referring to each other like when you look for
01:10:45.200yourself you're not actually there there's an awareness the awareness exists but the you separate
01:10:50.080from that awareness does that even exist where are you on the question of whether your mind is one you
01:10:56.160or you are several people in your head several i think it's several yeah i think it's it well so
01:11:03.440there's two questions in there there's one implicit one explicit the explicit is do you believe in the
01:11:07.920agent theory of the brain where it's all different agents you know battling it out or do you think
01:11:12.000it's one unified thing and i think that one yeah it's the agent theory of the brain is more correct
01:11:16.720but then the other question is like is that you are your thoughts you and that's a deeper question and
01:11:21.200that one i go back and forth on are your thoughts you well your thoughts are you mean are your thoughts
01:11:27.520coming from the you what is this you that's having the thoughts like you know you we we very casually
01:11:34.080refer to this you this self this i but like is it the thoughts referred to but when you're not thinking
01:11:40.640where did you go you're still there and then if you can observe the thoughts well you can dispassionally
01:11:46.240observe your own thoughts it's possible that's what meditation is all about so is that you if you can
01:11:50.560observe it and if you are the thoughts that are talking then who's the one that's listening so the
01:11:55.680you or i that we refer to is this very amorphous entity it's like a you know it's alan watts compared
01:12:02.400to like a whirling stick it looks like a fire but when you pause and look at any element of it there's
01:12:07.280actually nothing there do you have the voice in your head yeah everyone does right no no you don't have
01:12:14.080one no i i do have one but apparently apparently there was a thing in the news recently
01:12:18.640again it's eyewitness evidence it's some person trying to be famous you know yeah there were a lot
01:12:25.520of people who weighed in and said they also actually you know what i i take it back i i retract my earlier
01:12:30.320statement you're right i've seen a twitter thread where some appreciably large number of people will
01:12:34.240say they don't have a voice in their head but i would say they still have a persistent self identity
01:12:40.000and it may be events through they think visually um you know they think in feelings um they're not
01:12:47.200necessarily thinking verbally but they still have a strong sense of self and i the classic
01:12:52.000people in history who don't have that strong sense of self are the buddhas right like if you're the
01:12:57.040buddha or jesus or you're like a spiritual figure that you know i don't know saint augustine or
01:13:02.240uh pick your enlightened person right supposedly what they have found is they've seen through the
01:13:08.960illusion of the separate self the ramana marshis of the world right and so they don't take themselves
01:13:14.160as seriously because they know they're not separate from anything that's happening every
01:13:18.400they think and all that remains for them is awareness and consciousness that's what they
01:13:23.440see themselves as you know i i've defined consciousness my best take at it and i think we
01:13:29.120can give it to ai is a prediction of everything that's going to happen next like you know right
01:13:35.920around you you around your body then there's the action and then there's your reaction to how close
01:13:42.000your prediction was to the reality such and and my argument is that if everything happened exactly as
01:13:48.720you knew it was going to happen you would lose all your five senses eventually because they wouldn't have
01:13:54.640any purpose so so the consciousness is the lag between what you think is happening and what's
01:14:01.840happening it allows you to lay in there yeah right so then you can say well why do only um seems like
01:14:09.680humans have the the most of it but it wouldn't be any surprise that it's such a superpower that you can
01:14:15.600imagine what you're going to do before you do it and then you can make an adjustment after that that
01:14:19.760would make you the king of all the animals and let me let me i'm not sure i fully understood your
01:14:25.040definition can you go through it again i really want to understand the definition would be a continuous
01:14:30.560process where you predict what's going to happen next so i pick up the pen and i'm going to drop it
01:14:35.920and i predict it will exactly like i thought but a little off a little off so it's the little off
01:14:42.240that's the consciousness because then i say did that matter do i need to do it differently next time
01:14:47.280and it's only the difference between everything else doesn't matter so so consciousness is only to
01:14:54.080solve that one thing the difference between the prediction and the actual and then what do you do
01:14:58.400about it it exists to solve that exists to solve that and that and that would be why humans went to
01:15:05.520the top of the mountain because when i observed my dog she doesn't seem to be thinking about what happens
01:15:11.360next i think normally when people talk about consciousness or awareness they tend to use
01:15:17.520the term synonymously although maybe they shouldn't but they're more referring to just like i'm aware of
01:15:22.320something like i feel it i have this feeling of being here and i i can you know i have this feeling of
01:15:29.200experiencing these things i know what's going on around me so so if i give my if i give my robot the
01:15:35.920sense of touch or smell is does it have awareness i mean that's the unanswerable zillion dollar
01:15:42.000question we're gonna have to answer that with agi i mean if an agi says hey i'm conscious and it's
01:15:48.000truly an agi it passes the toring test and all that not the fake one that people do on twitter with real
01:15:52.480one um you know then you would have to take it as face value you would have to say sure okay you're
01:15:57.760conscious so so today i find a programmer let's say and uh i say build me a artificial person who's going
01:16:05.120to live in this video game they will imagine that they see things in great resolution but they won't
01:16:10.960they will imagine that they have consciousness but they don't they will believe that they're
01:16:14.960special but they're not and in every way they will react as though they're human beings now put
01:16:20.880them on there and let's talk to them and you tell me if they're conscious and the answer is
01:16:29.040take you about five seconds before you say i don't know the difference between you and this guy
01:16:33.120who's sitting next to me yeah i mean if that thing uh you know it would have it would have to pass the
01:16:40.560toring test first before i would take its claims for consciousness seriously and i have a high bar
01:16:46.320for the toring test by touring you got to convince me you're alive and creative but if it would convince
01:16:50.960me it's alive and creative and it said i'm conscious and i'd be like yeah i guess you're conscious yeah yeah
01:16:55.760we're we're nowhere close to the toring test i mean no it's the the easiest one is can you tell me a joke
01:17:02.160but don't make it wordplay and we're done yeah exactly i i tested on poetry because there isn't
01:17:07.600much poetry stuff to crawl on the web it's terrible it's terrible at understanding poetry and parsing the
01:17:12.880meter and verse and rhyme um but um who's gonna go with this uh you're talking about the little
01:17:20.000simulation guy yeah i forget it's fine we'll kill him um well you know i i i i don't want to take
01:17:30.000care of forever no i enjoy talking to you you know it's funny because i get invited to a lot of
01:17:34.640podcasts but they're all asked the same boring questions um and you make yourself scarce at
01:17:39.440least on these one-on-one so it's good so i want to talk to you um but we should do another one uh you
01:17:44.400know it's funny because i i want to i have literally after periscope we used to have fun in periscope i
01:17:50.880remember that right you and i were probably the two biggest periscopers for a long time yeah i was number
01:17:55.200one for a little bit then you were number one i was number two and then i dropped off um and then
01:17:59.760uh when clubhouse launched i was big on clubhouse trying to get that same feeling back and i even
01:18:03.920did my own company air chat trying to get that same feeling back but i think every smart person
01:18:09.120is starved for conversation with other smart people um and so the internet is great for that
01:18:14.320it helps connect us but still like this kind of a setup is fantastic i can get to talk to you
01:18:18.960there's like 20 people i want to talk to and that's it and you're on that list so when something
01:18:22.960news breaking happens you know it's it's fun to get online and talk it's better than going to a
01:18:26.480podcast and asking the same interview questions you know then you answer them to check off like