Episode 413 Scott Adams: Talking to @Naval Ravikant About All the Important Stuff

Come on in here, everybody. It's going to be a fun time. You'll be sorry if you missed it, but if you're listening to me now, you don't have to worry about that. I apologize for the chainsaw that's happening right outside my window. I can't use the microphone on this because I'm using the guest feature. And I'm going to be introducing Naval Ravikant in a moment. I see you just joined and Naval, you just have to. You have to submit yourself to be a guest and then I will select you and then we're going to find out the secrets to the universe. But before we do that, and as Naval is getting set up, we will enjoy the simultaneous sip. And oops, I see some people are joining. Naval is here. I'm going to get Naval on. Oops, we're going to add Naval.

And.

As soon as that's live, Naval, are you there?

Right here. Can you hear me?

Yes. Hello. Do you have a beverage with you? I have some tea that will suffice because as far as anybody knows, my cup is full of tea as well. So join me, will you, for the simultaneous sip, Whether it be your thermos, your mug, your chalice, your stein. Here it comes. Now, I think most of the people on here know who you are, Naval, but could you give those somebody who has never met you and has never heard of you if you were to give your own introduction? Because when other people introduce people, they always botch it, you know, they always get something wrong.

Yeah.

If you were going to give your own quick introduction, what would it be?

I'm a primate from a small planet that is circling a star in the Milky Way galaxy. Born in the 20th century in India, immigrated to the US first generation immigrant when I was nine years old. For the American dream. Was fortunate enough to realize it by becoming a technology entrepreneur and angel investor. And like every person, as they get older and hopefully a little wiser now turning into a pseudo philosopher.

Well, you left out a few things because your modesty, your modesty may be preventing you from saying, but angel list, of course, is something.

Yeah. I started a company called Angellist, which connects startups and entrepreneurs, startups and investors. Largest online investing platform for startups in the world. Largest recruiting platform for startups in the world. Largest launching products platform for startups in the world. Also made early investments in Uber and Wish and Postmates and a whole bunch of other companies that have done reasonably well in the tech industry. I tweet a lot. You know, I got Kind of obsessed with Twitter. It's sort of my art form. And I'm always cooking up a bunch of other things on Twitter. I'm probably most famous for a tweet storm on how to get rich without being lucky and also tweet a lot about philosophy and happiness and things as I learned them. Twitter is sort of my diary.

All right, so I'll add my filter on this. I've said this a number of times, and I'll say it again. Naval is actually the smartest person I know in person. There may be smarter people in the world. You know, I'm sure that, you know, out of 7 billion people, I would find somebody who's like, oh, that's the new smartest person. But in terms of people I've ever met, he's the smartest person I know across so many fields that, you know that that's the unique part. You're smart across a number of fields. So I thought what would be most entertaining for the. The people on here is for me to just ask you some questions on a number of interesting topics. Are you game?

Y. Before we get into that, has anybody ever called you out on why you do the simultaneous sip? Have you ever gone to an explanation?

Many people have understood why I do it, of course, is a pacing and bonding and sort of a. Training wouldn't be the right word, but it is kind of that. When I'm associating the delicious taste of coffee, the yeah, for most people is a pleasurable experience. It activates different senses than just hearing or seeing. Now you've got the memory or the actual experience of the taste, the experience, how it makes you feel, etc. And so as that gets associated with my product, which is the periscopes, some of that goodness just comes across. But it's also causing some addiction. I understand from a lot of people.

Yeah, it's extremely Pavlovian how you're associating caffeine and that warm, comforting feeling, the anticipation build up when the periscope starts. The physical motion, the alliteration and simultaneous sip, the branding. It's beautifully done, it's overtly manipulative, and yet it works well, to me, is the hallmark of great persuasion.

I'm not sure I would do it if my theme were not how to persuade. So, you know, you sort of have to model what you're doing. So as long as I'm overtly, you know, obvious in how I'm doing it, you can feel that. You can feel the effects while watching. While watching the Technique, which is very powerful. You know, that you can actually feel the persuasion, even if you're saying, no, don't persuade me with this, damn it, it's working. So that's very powerful. Yes. Did you have any other questions?

No, no. It's. Well, it's very well done. I was admiring it because when you first started it, I thought it was so overly manipulative that, you know, I was like, it wouldn't work on me. And yet on the occasional times when I managed to watch your periscopes, and it's usually later in the day I watch the reruns, I'm always a little. I'm a little annoyed at myself that I find myself reaching for a cup of something.

Well, you know, the other thing that's interesting about Periscope is that it's. It's the first personal broadcasting experience I've had. Meaning that it's broadcasting, but normally, like, I do interviews, there's satellite interviews where you're just in front of a camera and you're talking to maybe a million people, but you don't feel anything personal. It's like you're talking to a camera. You're listening to something in your ear, but in Periscope, actually feel connected to the audience, in part because of the comments in real time.

I agree. I think Jack and team are really onto something here. I've wanted this feature for a long time, and I've asked Twitter for it, and I even had a friend working on the side building something in this space because it didn't exist. And of course, now he's sort of disappointed because he spent a lot of time and Twitter launched this. But I think this is a. In a sense, it's a new medium. In a sense, it's a thread. If you look at podcasts today, the majority of podcasts are one off interviews because any single speaker runs out of things to talk about. And you're actually very rare in the periscope world or in the podcast world because you continue talking to a camera with no one talking back. Now, obviously, the feed from the audience is new. It's replicated in Twitch. If you see that people watching video games, the Twitch streamer is talking at the same time to their audience who's talking back. But I think this brings back talk radio, but modernized for the Internet. So I have a sense that especially with this ability to dial people in and they're going to need some moderation feature to figure out who you should connect in, who has a good mic setting, who's not going to make an idiot of themselves on the air, so to speak. But I think this could replace large chunks of podcasting.

Not only that, I think it could replace the news because people are feeling pretty underserved because the two sides and all they get is the two sides. But one of the things that I like to do is talk to people that I don't necessarily agree with and I want to do a lot more of that. So as soon as Twitter can do the video split screen, and I'm sure that's, you know, somewhere on their product roadmap, pretty soon I would imagine that's going to change everything because once I can get to climate, people who disagree on here, then we're going to have some fun.

Because yeah, the news is not really news anymore. You know what it's really like? I think both the Internet commoditized distribution of facts, so the news just, basically just became entertainment. And then on top of it, you also had CNN once you had 24 hour news channel, you had to fill it and there just wasn't enough news to go around. So now it's all opinions and entertainment and heck, we can all offer opinions. We don't, we don't need someone anointed to offer an opinion.

Yeah, you know, I hadn't thought about information being commoditized. You're right about that. The way I've been looking at it is that everything went bad when we were able to measure the impact of the different content. So as soon as we could find out that the news wasn't getting clicks and the, and the gossip was, it was all over. You know, we're a capitalist place. We got to follow the money. So let me, let me, let me ask you some big questions and if you want to pass on any of these questions or you just want to ask me a question, sure. I'm dealing with this question of how to know when to trust the experts. And we see this across fields from climate change to border security to anything else. And science especially, because there's so many examples where science was unified but then wrong. Some examples I hear. I'm no science historian, but for many years doctors thought that ulcers were caused by stress. Now we, now we know that's not the case. People thought that the food pyramid and everything we knew about nutrition was sort of settled to only find out it was completely wrong. It was about as wrong as anything could be.

Yeah. So not, not to get into the politics of it, but just in general, to me, science, the foundation of Science is doubt. Scientific things are things that are falsifiable, independently verifiable, and make very narrow and risky predictions. And scientific things. It's not done by consensus. That's politics. The moment you got to get a whole bunch of people to agree on something, that's politics. The hallmark of science is you make a scientific claim. I can replicate or verify that claim on my own. That claim has to make a set of predictions that are novel and unlikely and narrow in how they're defined. They're hard to vary after the fact. So if I come back and say, well, you didn't match up with your prediction, you're not allowed to move the goalposts too much. And then those predictions, of course, have to be falsifiable. There have to be tests that could run in the real world that may prove those things to be false. And this is not me, this is Karl Popper.

Well, without getting, without getting political and you can defer on this, does climate science meet that test?

One of the reasons I don't talk about climate science at all is because politics, it has nothing to do with science. People arguing their politics all day long and they get angry if you pick the wrong ones. And I don't think, I don't know how you could make it scientific because there's only one data point called the Earth and we have to kind of watch it play out. So the most compelling argument I find for climate change is Nassim Taleb's precautionary principle, which basically says, we only have one planet we're playing with, so if you get it wrong, it's catastrophic. Don't screw this up. And the best argument I find against it is that the moment something is so politicized and emotional and you have people with climate scientists in their title, they're hardly going to be objective anymore because their life depends on it. And I just think incentives are superpowers. So I just stay out of the fray. I would say in general, like, I'm a little disheartened as an environmentalist and as a father of a couple of children, that everything is about sort of this global environmentalism where we have to deal with invisible greenhouse gases and invisible long term effects that are not really here today and we have to sort of risk the Earth's economy on it, when I would much rather that we focus on local environmentalism. For example, most of the carbon emissions are going to come from China and India, and China and India are not going to sit back and not modernize or stay third world countries just because we are rich and now suddenly have found environmentalism. I think the much more compelling argument is to go to them and say, hey, let's clean up your rivers because you don't have water to drink that's safe. Let's clean up your air because it's too polluted and your children are coughing and getting sick. And if we turn them into environmentalists by cleaning up their local environment, then I think they'll be much more inclined to clean up the global environment. Societies naturally become more environmentalist as they become richer. North America is a net carbon sink because it is reforested so much, because we value gardens and forests and trees now that we're rich and now that our population is going down. Actually, the best thing you can look at for climate change is if you. The single best thing you can do for climate change is what China did, which is China had a one trial policy and then China just got richer and now it's below the replacement rate. So the latest estimates are that the Chinese population is dropping precipitously and they're actually worried about retirements and economic impact from that. But I think that's going to do a lot of good for climate change. I also think people like Elon Musk are an inspiration in that they are using the private sector and technology development to build better technologies that makes real change. I've never seen government save the world, at least in my lifetime, or, or if it does save the world, it's against other government like World War II. So, you know, private problems, private solutions.

I actually had it on my list to ask you about the Taleb view that we only have one planet. If there's even a small chance that this is sort of an extinction situation, that you have to act on it. But here's the problem and why I disagree with that line of thinking that fits. If you only have one extinction problem or if you have unlimited money, then you could do it. You can go.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. Economics is a study of opportunity costs. And in fact, who was it? Nick Szabo, brilliant, brilliant cryptographer and technologist, categorized this whole line of arguments into what he calls Pascal scam. Pascal's wager, of course, being you should believe in God just in case. Cause if there is a God, you show up in heaven, you didn't believe you're going to hell. But the problem is that when you're talking about uncalculable probabilities of a large number of events with sort of infinite outcomes, the Human brain can't do that math. And so then it just basically resorts back to emotion and instinct. And here's a very simple way of seeing how politicized the whole climate change debate is. People literally decide on this so called science based on which political party they belong to, Right. That just right there tells you it's not a branch of science, it's a branch of politics, right?

Yeah. And I've been doing a deep dive with, you know, with the public as part of my co conspirators to see if I can get to the bottom. And I'm genuinely undecided about how worried I should be because the deeper I go, I keep finding that both sides are lying so grossly that there's gotta be some truth that's more true on one side or the other. But there's so much BS from both sides that I don't know how to penetrate that yet. But I have some ideas.

I'm working on that. Yeah, it's a tough problem because, you know, at this point you're not even allowed to have the conversation, which is another, another indicator that you're out of the realm of science. Because the hallmark of science is doubt, Right. You're allowed to doubt in science. There'd be no progress in science if there was no doubt. So, you know, the moment you stop, you stop being able to have a discussion. Now it's politics. When you try and shut people up, it turns into shouting, which is kind of where it is. I mean, if climate change is happening, let's say that it is happening, and let's say it is being caused by humans, I still don't see the solution. I just simply don't see how you can stop the world from doing what they're doing. You can stop India and China and the third World from modernizing without some kind of a war and economic sanctions that are so ruinous that it just destroys the whole economy.

Well, let me be devil's advocate. What you could do is develop greener technologies at a more aggressive rate, and then economics does the rest.

Yeah, that is the way out. But even to the extent that greener technologies are being developed, you know, the history of the human race is the history of extracting more and more power from the natural environment and delivering it where we need to, you know, all the way from burning oil and coal to like creating the laser. So in a sense we are headed towards a model in which we will mimic Mother Nature. And Mother Nature generates most power through nuclear fusion, and then it transmits it through Solar energy and conduction and those kinds of things. So I think we'll end up there just for, just for efficiency reasons and just for power performance reasons.

So you're the perfect person to ask. So when I bring up fusion, what I get is it has never worked before. It's the flying car of energy, it's pie in the sky, it will never happen. At the same time, there are no fewer than, I believe, 10 legitimate funded startups working on fusion who all think they have a line on it to solve those unsolvable problems. And then the context is everything that didn't work. Well, everything that works started as something that didn't work. You know, the airplane wasn't the airplane until it was. Cell phones weren't popular until they were good enough. You know, pretty much everything. So is it nonsense to say fusion won't work because it hasn't worked yet?

Yeah, fusion will definitely work. It works in nature. It's just a question of when. It's a question of does it happen in 10 years, 100 years? Does it happen in orbital space? Does it happen on earth? It obviously already works in nature. It's how the stars are powered.

But just the engineering.

Yeah, the engineering can absolutely get there. The issue is that we just haven't done enough iterations because we overregulate and shut down nuclear experimentation. We don't have a model of experimenting and iterating with nuclear plants. If you look at, for example, if the when the first airplane had crashed, we'd shut down all new airplane development. Or when the first motorcycle had crashed, we shut down all motorcycle development. Or even when the first steam engine blew up. People forget steam engines used to blow up, killing everybody around them. So you just need to be able to iterate a lot for technology. Technology development is done through iteration. The problem is you get a few high profile problems like Three Mile island in Fukushima and then just the fear of invisible particles destroying us and giving us cancer. You know, it's something out of a horrible movie, just sort of shuts everything down. So we need to find a way to experiment and iterate a nuclear fusion at a fast rate if we're going to get there.

So I had a suggestion, I'll run this by you. That we pick some desert area where even if there's a meltdown, it doesn't really much matter.

Yeah, I think that's, that's one way. There's also passive fail reactors where like under passive situation, if you pull the plug on them, like nothing goes wrong. It's the other way around, they can only fail actively. People are obviously talking about cleaner byproducts, but I actually think the most inevitable place will get developed if nowhere else is Mars. Exactly. As one of your commentators is saying, like if we go to Mars, the last thing you want to do is live in a biosphere with like an artificial bubble trying struggling for oxygen. You know, life on Earth is hard enough, like going to a place where oxygen is even harder. But what Mars is really good for is for scientific experimentation and building so iterating nuclear fusion plants on Mars. I don't think anybody will care. Nobody cares.

Well, I care because I've watched those sci fi where the Mars population becomes more technologically advanced than Earth and then they attack.

We just pricked their bubble.

All right, so you've probably met enough investors in that space that when you say fusion will be solved in an engineering sense, the stuff that is considered almost impossible, how confident are you that and could you put a window on that?

I can't put a window on it. The reason I'm not as confident as I like to be is that I don't really see team successfully raising lots of money and building it. Because I think there are still major environmental and regulatory impediments. If the environmental regulatory impediments weren't there and if there was a fast iteration cycle. The way tech development works, it's not like you raise $100 billion and go into a corner and beaver away for 25 years. The way it works is that you ship something two years from now and then something two years later, something two years later. And that adoption cycle doesn't exist because you just. The regulatory red tape combined with the minimum threshold to get a working plant going are too high.

But why would a fusion startup be doing it in the United States? Why don't they just take up base in some desert country someplace where there's just no people?

I think at least right now, fusion startups can't raise the amount of money they need to raise to make meaningful progress. I could be wrong. I don't necessarily look at energy investment that much, but just the sums of money required are too high. And I haven't yet seen that kind of geographic arbitrage that you talk about. Because this is not just about long term development. Anything you build to kind of pay back investors and justify the risk would have to actually power something in the short to medium term. And if you're sitting in the desert, there may just be no one nearby for you to send the power to.

Well, suppose the U.S. government said, this looks like it's a $5 billion thing no matter what we do. Here's $5 billion. Could it get us there?

I don't know the number, but I think that a Manhattan Project like approach could get us there. If we basically said, hey, this will not only provide humanity with free abundance, but also solve a lot of environmental issues in the long run, we should just hunker down and put our best scientists and a lot of money behind it. I think that would be smart. You definitely have to get the private sector involved with some kind of incentive scheme so that they iterate fast. You'd have to have good testing. You'd have to make sure you don't just end up with a generation of fusion scientists now who have to defend their jobs. And so they'll even cover up things that aren't working. But I think it's definitely feasible.

All right, give me the. I'm going to ask you the question that I even hate to ask, because I can imagine how many times people have asked you this. The future of crypto. Now, I'm sure blockchain will be around, but are any of the cryptos gonna make it?

The current batch of cryptocurrencies? Well, you know, a lot of them have been pretty unnecessary and sketchy. I think there's three or four groups of cryptocurrencies that are interesting in their own right. The first is called bitcoin because it's a store of value Swiss bank account in the cloud, and it's insurance against malfeasance by politicians. I consider bitcoin political insurance. So, for example, if Alexandria Ocasio Cortez or Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders impose socialist policies in the United States, you could see bitcoin skyrocket similarly in other parts of the world. Like if you're in Venezuela, if you had the ability to get bitcoin and use it, you'd be much better off than trying to hide dollars in your mattress or gold bricks or certainly the Venezuelan Bolivar. So I think that that is one category of crypto that I don't think will go away.

It's basically, yeah, sort of connected to that. I had an idea that I ran by my audience the other day. I want to get your opinion on it, which is if there were some country, let's say Switzerland, that could be a government in a box, that could just come into a failed country and say, look, we're definitely not going to take over because we're not even bringing a military, you're going to hire us for two years. We're going to, we're going to build a government that has some credibility, and then, then you're up and running. We're going to leave. And as long as they didn't bring in their own army, probably pretty credible. And I can also imagine that they bring in maybe a crypto solution, because currency is always a big problem in those situations. Would anything like that work, do you think?

Yeah, there are multiple country scenarios that could work. One scenario is some small country that's coming out of an economic crisis decides to adopt a crypto coin as their native currency. And if they just bought up a bunch of it first, then by legitimizing it, the value of the remainder would go up and make that country extremely rich just for having been early adopter and having made the network effect happen.

Now, let me just interject for the audience who doesn't know all of the ins and outs of this stuff. One of the reasons that the US dollar has value and will continue to have value is that the US government accepts it in the payment of taxes, so it'll always have a use. So as long as the US Government says so. So in your example, as long as there's a country that says, yeah, we'll take this in taxes, boom, it's got value.

Exactly. Exactly. Right, yeah. So, you know, in terms of a country adopting legitimizes it, it makes it sort of an economic fait accompli, and the first adopter knows what's coming up. So they either mint it themselves or they buy up a bunch of it and every citizen in that country can basically retire. Actually, I have two retirement schemes for entire countries if you have a moment. Sure. So one of them is, let's say that you're small. Let's say you're Venezuela and you recover from the brutal Chavez and Maduro rule, and then you roll out infrastructure to adopt a cryptocurrency. You pick a new one that's smaller than bitcoin but still very good. Like Monero or zcash are one of the ones that's basically a bitcoin fork, but brings in privacy and anonymity, so it's even one level better. Or you just fork bitcoin. You can just use bitcoin too, but you know you're going to adopt it. So you buy up 20% of it, then you declare that it's legal and you're going to use it. And the remaining 80%, you know, people start seeing the, what's called a Shelling point. The gathering points of people run and buy it, knowing that the second country and third country will adopt that. And then it becomes really valuable. Now all your citizens have this cryptocurrency. You pick and then you all retire because you've just got all this wealth. It's almost like you're declaring the next US dollar as a reserve currency. You just happen to hold a bunch of it.

Now is there a version of that that pays off the US debt while not replacing the US dollar?

Yeah, well, the US debt is denominated in the same currency the US prints. So the US will never have trouble paying off its debt. It'll just end up in an inflationary scenario. But there's some evidence that a lot of hyperinflation tends to occur when you have external debts to repay, not internal. So you just kind of like Germany, Weimar Republic, for example. I mean, it can happen in both, but that's where it's been more common. The other scenario I think is more interesting, which has been less talked about the other way for a country to get rich. So look at something like the United States. Right. And now I'm going to wander into an area where I really shouldn't, which is the immigration debate. Right. Which is the problem with immigration is that you have privatized gains and socialized losses, right. Some people benefit from immigrants coming in across the border and other people lose. So for example, as a tech employer, I benefit from, from skilled immigration because I get to hire people at lower cost than I would hire Native American, you know, local Americans, or if I'm some, you know, farm owner in California, I benefit from low cost migrant labor. If I'm a politician, you know, who's in the left wing side, I may benefit from illegal immigrants who I know are going to be legalized and then vote my way. So I'm importing voters, right? So there are these privatized benefits, but then the average American who's looking for a job gets out competed or because we live in a welfare state where anyone can go to the emergency room and people talk about socialized medicine and we have welfare system, you know, the burden falls on everybody. So the average American loses out on something. So how do we rectify this? How do we get everybody on the same page? Because it is a nation of immigrants, It's a melting pot. It's a lifeblood economy. Lifeblood of the economy or has been traditionally. So I would say say that a way to do that is to cut everybody in on the action. So let's say we securitize citizenship, we give every American citizen an extra passport. So you Scott, you get a blank passport, I get a blank passport. Everybody on this periscope gets a blank passport. And then we can choose who kind of comes in within some vetting restrictions. They can't be terrorists, they can't have record, et cetera. But I may choose to bring in a skilled computer science worker, you may choose to bring in your housekeeper who's been really friendly and great but doesn't have have the right to come in as a citizen. Somebody else might say actually I just want to retire. I want to find the hardest working immigrant who will come in and do twice as much work as I would have and I'm pretty lazy and cheap and then they can just me half and I retire. Somebody else could be fleeing a dictatorship and will give you a million bucks in savings very quickly. What will happen is a market will form around these passports and you'll be able to put a dollar value on it. So you will know what the cost of letting in the immigrant is and what the benefit is and, and you can collect it yourself.

Only one passport per your can do.

As many as you want. But you know, I'm just making it simple. So basically the overall effect would be that we could sell America and retire. So for 300 million passports every American could retire. So we double the nation's population over time. But every American of the current generation would have a basic income, would have all their needs met, they just wouldn't have to work. We could be artists, we could be poets, singers, musicians, inventors, whatever we want it to be. But there's plenty of room. And as long as you make it true merit based and you create a market around it, you can do this. Now the best side effect of this is that you also get good governance out of it. So if a new president comes in and starts passing policies that make it's no longer want to come in, then the value of the passports will immediately go down. And so you will vote that person out of office because in your most valuable asset, which is more valuable than your house and they're destroying the value of it.

Now, now, now in this idea, does it matter whether you have secure borders or it's only a question of whether people coming in are, are legal or illegal?

Well, I mean you have to have a secure border. Otherwise like what's the, you can't, you can't sell access when access is open. You know, I, look, I, I'm all for legal immigration I think we should have lots more of it. I'm a legal immigrant and I think legal immigrants bring a lot to the country. But you know, most countries in the world do sensible merit based immigration. It's not just who showed up first. And I think most sensible people agree that, you know, America is a melting pot. We do well because of our, our union, not because of our divisions. And we do want more legal immigration. But I think. Yeah.

Have you heard of the. Any good arguments for open borders? Because I've been claiming, somewhat provocatively that there isn't anybody who actually thinks that. There are people who say it, but if you talk to them in private, they would say, ah, now it's more of a conceptual thing.

Yeah. I've never met anyone with a good argument for a completely open border. Just because every try to define the word country without using the word border, you can't. There's no definition of a country or a state that doesn't somehow use the concept of a border. There's no concept of an organism without a border. If you didn't have a border, like parasites from the environment would come in and literally eat you alive. Your house is actually just a border around the rest of the environment. So, you know, words are just borders around concepts. Like borders are intrinsic to things. You can't have things without borders.

But the closest argument I've heard is it's funny and how bad it is because the closest argument goes like this, all right, assume all the countries in the world get rid of their borders and I go, okay, stop, stop. We're not talking about anything that can ever happen. Yeah, right, because, because even the open borders people would agree that if only one country opens their borders, that's not really what they're talking about.

Right.

And I don't think there's any chance China is going to open this border.

Yeah, I mean you can't. You also can't have a modern welfare state. You can't have services for people. You can't take care of the homeless, you can't take care of the sick or the poor or the elderly without borders. I mean, look, I came from India, I love India, I love Indians. But if you open the borders completely, then why wouldn't the 7 or 800 million poorest Indians just move here tomorrow? Like if I were them, I would. It's completely rational. Just because they haven't come up to the border and walk through. But hell, you know, we can organize a voting system. Like for example, here's how I can solve the whole Open borders debate tomorrow. You know, I can run a free shipping service from India to here and believe me, everybody will want to close border pretty soon.

Right? All right. I love that passport idea. Basically giving everybody a piece of the pie and selling. Selling the American experience.

Yeah, I mean, in extreme case, you could even build a full market around it. So let's say that, you know, let's say that China is being governed poorly. Right. Or India is being governed poorly. Another country could come in, buy up a whole bunch of passports, vote the current people out of office, put better politicians in charge, and the value of the passport would go up and they would basically have done LBO of a country, a leveraged buyout of a country where they would have bought a giant piece, they become an activist investor, raised the value for everybody and sold everything off at a huge profit.

I feel like there are some problems with this idea.

That's the science fiction version.

Yeah, good question. And stop me if I've asked you.

This, but by the way, we've already said enough that I'm sure that some journalistic troll will take everything out of context and generate some hit and headlines out of this. So if anybody wanders into this or if anybody sees that happening, I hope you'll them out and encourage whoever's reading or listening to come and watch the whole episode rather than resort to clickbait journalism.

I literally was just reading a Buzzfeed article about myself. I don't know, I saw it when it originally ran. It's like a year old in which I said something somewhat tongue in cheek and there was a whole hip piece on me for saying it as if I had meant it completely seriously. So, yeah, it's a problem.

Yeah. It actually comes up in your search results because looking for one of your books and it came up somewhere in the top 10. Yeah, I mean, those kinds of clickbait farms I think will eventually go out of business. I think eventually we're going to end up with one or two actual news delivery organizations like AP and Reuters. And then we're going to have a long tail of independent journalists, mostly operating through Twitter. And then we'll have a couple of large entertainment and opinion organizations, you know, which just sort of reinforce your biases. Maybe New York Times on the left and Breitbart or Wall Street Journal or someone else on, you know, on the right or center. Right. But basically where people go to get their ideas reinforced and validated with some data.

Does it feel to you? I've said this on Periscope before, but Our social media platforms and other inventions. It seems like we're recreating a superhuman being with all the parts. In other words, Twitter is like the mind of the Internet. In other words, that's the idea, dense argument, politics kind of thing. Facebook is sort of like the emotions and the family, you know, Instagram's more like your visual sense. And it feels like we've just. We're just recreating parts of a human almost to create some kind of a godlike entity that has all the parts of a human accidentally.

Yeah. I think an AGI and artificial general intelligence is much more likely to be an emergent property of the Internet rather than something we create in a lab. In that sense, you can think of cryptocurrency as how it gathers resources for itself and things like Twitter and so on, or how it communicates. You know, here's an example of how an AI could emerge. Every time I send you a text message today, if I mistype something, it autocorrects. Right. Eventually it'll correct for sentiment. We're like, oh, I know Scott and Naval are trying to get together, but they need to coordinate a time. Let me suggest a time. Oh, let me even know that they want to get together before they do and suggest they get together. Right. At some point, the Internet is completely running our lives. If you're an Uber driver, this is already true. The Internet orders you around what to do all day long. For many people who are getting emails from their bosses, a lot of these are driven by events on the Internet. How long before this becomes sophisticated enough that we just symbiotically all connect together and create the AI in a Borg like fashion.

Yeah. So we're just components of a larger mind at that point. Yeah, well, my head is spinning a little bit on that thought.

Who.

Who is running the country right now? And I asked that. Here's the context. You know, we have a political system, et cetera, but we observe that our politicians pretty much have to do what the people ask them or else they get voted out. Who is it who's influencing decisions at this point? Who is the biggest power source?

You see, you have to follow it back up the chain. Right. So first you think, oh, it's obviously the politicians. But no, the politicians are elected by voters. Okay, well, now, who gets you voters and votes? Well, it's been historically a combination of mass media and money buying votes, not explicitly, but through advertising. But as we saw in the last election, mass media sort of failed to make its case, or traditional media failed to make Its case and advertising didn't work. You saw Jeb. Every time he spent money, he went down in the polls. So just going further back up the chain, it's all happening on social media. And on social media, you could say, as Nassim Taleb points out there, intolerant minorities of activists who create memes and create and control the discourse. But even further back up, if you have to look for the greatest concentration of power, it's the people with their thumbs on the scale. It's the people who are writing the algorithms to control the distribution on social media. And I think this is a very dangerous place for Facebook and Twitter to be in. Like, I've been very explicit about this, but I think Twitter could be a very powerful and permanent entity, but only if it becomes a protocol and not an app. See, today, Twitter is actually three different things. Twitter is a protocol underneath for delivering messages. Twitter is a software app that you run on your screen. And then Twitter is a media company, like the whole moments thing, and all the people that they deplatform, they promote, and the verification, all of the badging stuff that they. They do. And that should actually be three separate things, because Twitter, the protocol, can survive forever. But if you bundle it with Twitter, the media company, it's only a matter of time before the politicians say, wait, you choose the next president? Well, then we got to control you. If you have that level of control, then we get to have that level of control on you. So I think Twitter's got a short period of time to go to being an open, unbiased protocol. Let people build their own apps and media companies on top that can filter or censor or reject or promote. Because otherwise you cannot have a monopoly on the news, especially if you're overtly outwardly influencing it and you have an editorial team. I just don't think a democracy will stand for that.

Would you think it would work if we just had government oversight of the algorithm? Even if perhaps it's not public? But let's say there's a judge of technical judges who look at it and say, okay, that at least intends to be fair?

No, because any process you create becomes a honeypot to be captured. Any process. So if you have a bunch of judges, then everybody wants to control those judges. You have some voting system, People want to hack that system. I think the only way out is to just decentralize it. So Twitter, the protocol, should accept a message from anyone and deliver it to anyone who wants. And then people can choose what app to run on top of it and what media editor to have on top of it, if any. That's the only way out.

But how do you then. How do you manage to use Twitter's language, the health of conversations? Because we tend to, you know, the more open and free things are, the faster they head to the toilet.

There's no. There's no objective definition of a healthy conversation. What you consider a healthy conversation is not what somebody else does. It's a pure objective.

Well, let's just say. Let's just say in terms of fake news, you know, and you can.

You can have, publish and subscribe mutant block lists. So every time someone that you trust or some organization that you trust identifies something as fake news, they add it to a block list list, which you subscribe to, and it's automatically blocked out of your client. And you encourage your friends and family to listen to your version of the truth and subscribe that same block list. It's how the world works anyway. You choose which newspapers to read, and they're essentially whitelists and blacklists on the news.

But wouldn't you imagine then that someone would become the most, let's say, most influential blocker, and let's say it's me. Let's say I start blocking people and people say, I don't want to figure it out myself. I'll just block whoever Scott blocks. Then suddenly, whoever's the big one becomes unusually powerful. Through who?

Yeah, but at least that way it's competitive. If you're doing a bad job, people can ignore you, take you down. They have choices. It's like today. Who's the blacklist? New York Times. The New York Times would probably be running the most influential blacklist or block list. Right. So it wouldn't even be you. The Wall Street Journal would be up there. You could. But the whole point is, the reason capitalism works is because of competition. So it would essentially be competitive market in editing, in editorial. Whereas today you just have one small, unaccountable team in a corporate office somewhere doing it. And their political biases are quite obvious. Open the moments tab and see whatever the latest outrage is. And you can just tell kind of what the people with their thumbs on the scale of thinking. And by the way, this is not to call out Twitter. I actually think Twitter's heart isn't the right place. I believe Jack understands this, and I think the Twitter team is interested in longevity of the platform. I just think right now they're caught being a rock and a hard place because each side wants them to take sides. People screaming at them all day long and sort of human nature to try and make your friends happy. And I think it's very hard to walk back to a point where you're impartial and neutral. That said, if Twitter doesn't do it, there'll be a blockchain based protocol version of Twitter that will replace it. You know, 10, 20, 30 years from now. There are at least a dozen good Twitter clones in development that use blockchain technology. They're not all quite there yet, but they will be good enough that you know, three, four, five years from now, if there is an opportunity or a reason for a large block of people to exit from Twitter, there will be a new social media in the cloud, happy to receive them.

Is blockchain going to be efficient enough to hold a major platform like that?

That's part of the reason why it hasn't happened yet, but it absolutely will. There's no fundamental technological reason why it can't scale. Especially with social media, you need a much lower grade of censorship resistance than you do, for example, with a Swiss bank account. Swiss bank account. If I'm bitcoin, there's hundreds of billions of dollars worth of value in there. So it has to be locked super tight. Social media, okay? Worst case, you hack it, you create some fake news, you're going to have millions of dollars worth of security, not hundreds of billions of dollars of security. Much more tractable problem.

Now, if we get to a point where nobody has their thumb on the scale and the regular news is sort of discounted, I've said that power will turn into the product of whoever, whether it's a person or organization that has the best product of influence, meaning skill to influence, knows how to do it. Times reach, meaning size of audience. And I've speculated that if I reach a million users on Twitter, that I'm running the country.

Most credible man in the world. Yeah, certainly if you reach the right million, well, every day that passes, it gets easier and faster to build your audience. For example, a great tweet that I saw was that PewDiePie on his new news channel. This is a YouTube blogger who I've actually never listened to, so I'm talking secondhand now, but I think he's a kid out of Sweden or something like that, and he runs a very influential kind of a YouTube entertainment channel. But just his news broadcast alone get three times the viewership of the number one and number two rated cable news shows. So PewDiePie is the most trusted name in news. So distribution is free. If you've Got something interesting to say. Distribution happens instantly. Like you. And I could say something very insightful or controversial here. And if a billion people needed to hear it, you can bet a billion people would hear it. My how to Get Rich Tweetstorm on Twitter, by the way, across the whole set, it has about 40 to 50 million impressions, and that's just on Twitter. I'm not even counting the blog pages, the PDFs. I've not marketed one bit. I've never spent a dime on it. I haven't published a book. Right? So when one random guy talking about how to make money can get 50 million impressions based just on the content, distribution is irrelevant. It's all about credibility. It's all about judgment. It's all about how much do people believe you and what you have to say. The message will get out well, and.

The credibility is related to how influential you are, which is a set of tools. Yeah.

Credibility comes from your ability to predict the future correctly and your track record for doing so, combined with your influence and your ability to convince people that you predicted the future correctly or can. It's a combination. It's a combination of influence and actual predictive power.

You might be amused. According to the audience here, who is making comments, we started glitching like crazy on this last topic. So I'm not sure if it'll work on playback, but a number of people lost some of that.

Okay, well, I could hear it just. I could hear it just fine. So if you could hear me, hopefully it's stored somewhere.

Let me ask you some other questions. Universal Basic Income. Is it inevitable because of the world of robots, or is it the worst idea ever or something in between?

I think there is a form of Universal Basic Income which works, which is free services. So, you know, do the thought experiment of if we. If we all had degrees in hardware and software engineering, okay, and we were all perfectly knowledgeable engineers, what would the world look like five years from now? We would all be retired and our robot servants would be doing everything. Even our thinking would be done by electronic brains. We'd have unlimited entertainment from robot actors and virtual actors. We'd have unlimited food from robot farmers and so on. So technology can create massive abundance. And it's literally only just a lack of knowledge that holds us back. It's a lack of education. So I think we can get to a form of UBI where your cell phone is free, but it's not free because the government gives it to you. It's free because Google gives it to you. Right? Because Their robots want you to watch their virtual reality show that is accessible through their phone.

But wait, you're only going to get free stuff from a corporation if they think they can influence you to buy other stuff?

Yeah, at some point, I mean, you have to do something your life. I don't think people just want free money, because if you just get free money, you have no meaning. Look at trust fund kids who never had to work a day in their life. What are they doing? Right? They basically fly off the rails.

But wouldn't you say 10% of the population is going to be perfectly happy to stay on the couch?

They can and they already do. I mean, what's the labor force participation rate? Right? Not everybody works and not everybody works full time, so that's fine. Some percentage of the population will always subsidize some other percentage of the population. The problem I have with UBI as a straight cash transfer is that is a straight slippery slide into socialism. And slippery slide is not a fallacy. That is actually just how humans work. So the moment you basically say, oh, you can vote yourself all the money you want, then first it starts with 99% voting themselves all the money from the 1%, then 98 from 2, 97 from 3, and it ends when 51 at the bottom vote themselves all the money from the top 49, at which point you have a complete economic meltdown. So I just, I understand that technology driven leverage is exacerbating the gap between the haves and the have nots. You were actually the one who said, what if it's not the rich are getting richer, but the smart are getting richer. This was something you said years ago that I thought was very intelligent. The problem is that if you just reallocate through pure force violence voting, there's just no bottom to that. You end up with Venezuela. So I think it's much better and safer for everybody if we do a combination of technology enabled abundance, where for example, education should be free. At this point, the idea that you need to pay half a million dollars to go to an Ivy League university and sacrifice four years of your life so professor can lecture you in a lecture hall is absurd. You can already get all the MIT courseware online. You have things like Lambda School where they'll literally pay you to go to school school, or why Combinator where they'll pay you to start a company and while they train you. So it's just a matter of credentialing and the current economic and the current generation coming around to understand that. So these things will be too cheap to meter and almost free. And that will be the real universal basic income. By the way, nobody who has a degree in computer science, even if it's from an online school, is looking at the UBI as a potential outcome. Right. Knowing how to manipulate computers and robots is the modern equivalent of reading, writing and arithmetic. So what we're dealing with is we're dealing with the last generation that didn't know how to read at some point and they're like, how are we going to make a living? We don't know how to read. And the economy is switching to a white collar economy. So that's really what's going on. It's a one time transition that needs to take place. This is not something we should wreck our economy forever around.

Let me challenge you on the slippery slope. You knew this was coming.

Sure.

So I've called the slippery slope an illusion, meaning that everything will go forever until there's a reason for it to stop. So therefore, that explains basically everything. Everything will go until there's a reason to stop. But there's always a reason to stop.

Inertia.

Yeah, yeah. And I would point out that since we already have many democracies and in every democracy, the poor do have the power to vote themselves all the money. And it hasn't happened.

It hasn't happened because until now the US was a republic. And so republic slows things down. And for example, money and the elites had a lot more power in that situation. The US was designed as a republic, not as a direct democracy. The founding fathers feared mob rules just as much as they feared tyrants. But what's changed is now with the presidency having a lot more power. You know, as television and media came along, the presidency was the most visible office. And so it just gained more and more power. And every time a Democrat or Republican was in power, they consolidated more power into executive actions and into the media bully pulpit of the presidency. For example, the presidency is not allowed to go to war. We're not supposed to be able to bomb anybody without congressional approval. Yet the President now can attack a country at any time. There used to be no such thing as an executive order. Now that's like a very commonplace thing. I think 200 years ago, if the President said, I'm not going to enforce that law because I don't feel like it, that would have caused a hue and cry. No longer the issue. The President couldn't talk to 100 million people by going on TV. Now obviously that happens. So we've become much more of a direct democracy because of those kinds of things, because of the consolidation of power in the presidency and social media and crowdfunding and billionaires running for office have also turned it much more into a direct democracy. So I do think the republic aspect of the United States is breaking down to some extent and that is leading more to a direct democracy, which will lead to, I believe, greater nationalism on the left and communism or socialism on the right. So I think we're degenerating into a.

Direct democracy, but we're also completely changing who's in charge, because who is influencing on social media, etc. So wouldn't it depend on whether the balance of influence on the Internet is pro socialism or antisocialism?

Yes, this goes back to the people with the thumbs on the scale. The people writing the algorithms have an inordinate amount of power as to where everything ends up. Yeah.

All right, so I had thought that the future of education is going to turn into like a, a film model where like Hollywood forms a team that is together only for the purpose of making the movie, and then they go on to other projects. And it seems to me that that's the way online education will go. So instead of the boring person standing in front of the classroom and you're just filming it as if you had never considered, you know, the differences in the online, you know, and the advantages you have versus creating a product as maybe a great presenter, a great writer, a great graphics group, a great editor. And there it seems to me that if you were to compare online training to in person now, in person is either better or at least sort of similar, but long term, would you agree that the online product, especially once you get to VR and everything else and ability to customize for every, for every student, isn't it going to be 10x better than education is now?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the best teacher in the world for any given topic will teach everybody in the world about that topic. Like you should probably be teaching everybody in the world about persuasion and influence. There's nobody better. So why would I go listen to number two when number one is available? My how to get rich tweet storm, you know, I'm actually turning that into a larger media that I'm going to give away for free. But once that's done, you know, you can learn from other people, sure, you can add to your knowledge, but everyone should consume the best of any media. You can already see this happening with kids in YouTube, right? Kids are learning so much from YouTube. They're going on to YouTube. My younger cousins even told me that they would go to their high school and college classes, listen to the teacher, and then they go home and watch Khan Khan Academy to actually learn the material. Like that's literally how they were absorbing it properly. So we're still in the YouTube phase of this. Eventually gets the Netflix stage of this where you will have exactly, you say big budgets to create it. It's not going to be just video though. You also need interactive elements. You'll need peer help, but you could imagine. Here's something interesting about the Internet. When the Internet touches a business, it tends to go from a group of medium sized competitors and producers who are separated by geography and regulation into being one or two or three gigantic aggregators and a huge long tail. So journalism will end up there. There'll be Twitter, Facebook, maybe the New York Times, maybe the Wall Street Journal, and a long tail of small journalists. All the ones in the middle will be gone. You see this across the board. You'll even see this in media and music. You see YouTube and Netflix is the big aggregators and you see a long tail. So the same way in teaching, you will see two, three, four gigantic schools which actually produce the content and produce the tests for the accreditation. And then you'll have a long tail of millions of tutors. So someone like you, for example, could be on Lambda School or their equivalent or YouTube and you could be the influence expert as voted by the audience. You have the most views, you're making a living from everybody watching your videos. You have a team that helps you produce it. And then for actually on the street practice, there's a whole bunch of Scott Adams trained or certified devotees who basically will sign up with you and coach you one on one on Skype or whatever the equivalent is.

Somebody is asking what a long tail is. The best example of that is Amazon. Instead of selling just the best sellers and the ones, the books that everybody wants, back when they were mostly books, they could also cover a book that only sells two copies a year. So the long tail is all the little stuff that you could never buy economically before.

Yeah, and even beyond that, in the past you had to publish a book which was this giant chunky object. And now you have a long tail of blog posts that explain the same concept from a thousand different facets. And then for each blog post you have a long tail of tweets. So it's fractal, it just goes all the way down. Right.

All right, here's my favorite question for you. And I love the fact that you didn't tell me what not to ask about. Because what is the biggest illusion of life for average people? What illusions are they suffering under that are the most, say, the biggest obstacles to them having a better life?

I think the largest illusion is the illusion of meaning that anything kind of matters because you're going to die. And the moment you die, like this all goes away. So I think that's a big one. I think related to that is the illusion of free will because you're here from it, you know, an unbroken chain of particle collisions from the Big Bang till now. So you're kind of just. It's your DNA reacting to your environment. So thinking there's a separate cube making decisions is a hallucination. And then I think there's also just the illusion of reality, which is it's very high odds that we're statistically living in a sim, as you've talked about in the past, a simulation. And I think that one's even worse than people realize because, you know, when people think, oh, we might be living in simulation, they think of the Matrix, right? They think, oh, it's like the Matrix and, you know, where, like, I'm Keanu Reeves and I'm Neo and I'm trapped and there's that real world above. Well, the thing is, if you understand simulation theory, it's statistically likely that not only is there one level above, there's zillions of levels above you. So in the Matrix, Neo doesn't actually get out, he just pops one level higher. And now he's even more deeply trapped because he's trapped in a shittier environment and he's convinced it's real, which is the ultimate trap. So now he's not even looking for the next level up, even one level beyond that. It's worse than that because statistically likely, if you're in a sim, you're not some real world character representing a sim. You're actually an NPC. There's, you know, millions more NPCs in Call of Duty than there are real players. So you're just. You're. You're probably just a computer simulation. You are. And as the Buddhist would say, you know, you're kind of made of the stuff of the world, right? You're not separate from it. So I think there's. There's a couple illusions for you.

So I have a thought about the likelihood that we'll find intelligent aliens elsewhere and other planets. And I used to think the common scientific thinking, which is that the universe is so big that surely they're not just others, but probably lots of civilizations because the statistics of it is so overwhelming. Unless were a simulation. Because if you're a simulation, you don't really have to write the world that nobody's going to visit.

Absolutely, yeah. This is the rendering problem. Like if you look at a 3D graphics game, they don't bother rendering or creating any part of the world you're not looking at. And quantum mechanics hints at this, which basically says the observer affects the outcome. Without the observer it's not clear anything is happening. Also, this is a lesser well known aspect of physics, but a very important one, which is the principle of least action. The principle of least action basically says that some energy, some unit is minimized. In all of physics, like basically particles follow the most efficient path. The universe is maximally efficient. If you look at light, for example, as it travels through water versus air, light always takes the fastest, most efficient, most energy efficient path. So our universe is designed to or just happens to be maximally efficient. So in a maximally efficient universe, you wouldn't bother creating or rendering things that you don't need. So yeah, that's not to say that we may not have an alien encounter or two, it's still possible and we may have already had, who knows? It's just unknowable. But that said, the universe isn't going to bother creating and rendering lots of things when there's no observer there to see it.

Yeah. So the I've been collecting evidence that you would look for if you were a software product, in other words, a simulation, what would you look for? And as you said, you conserve resources, so you don't render things that nobody's going to look at. But you would also make sure that people can't see what they're made of. And sure enough, in quantum physics, when you drill down to smaller and smaller and smaller, it just becomes something like probability. And it's only there if you see it.

That's right, it disappears. Yeah, but I mean that, that has to be the case. So there's, you know, every formal system, including science or math, ultimately rests on belief. So in that sense, like you can chase religion and math all the way down and they have the same roots. There's only three ways, there's only three ways to resolve the why question. Because you can always keep asking, well, why is it that way? Well, why is that that way? Well, why is that that way? Right. And you keep drilling down. There's literally only three ways. Way number one is you have circular Reasoning chicken or egg? The egg came first. How did that come? Well, the chicken came before that. So that's obviously false logic, but circular reasoning. A second is you can have it be axiomatic, right? Which is, well, we just take this belief to be true. And the third is infinite regression. Those are literally the only three ways that you can get to the bottom of anything. All three of them are sophistry. All three are loopholes. So at the end of the day, even math has axioms that you just have to take for granted. A simple axiom that we all take for granted is the world is going to be behave the same way tomorrow that it did yesterday. The laws of physics can be exactly the same way. That's a belief. That's an unfalsifiable belief. So even science at the bottom, at the bottom of it is a belief and nothing can be known for sure.

So I'm watching the comments go by and people are just begging me to ask you if you're a Christian or you believe in God. This is a question you can take a pass on.

No, it's a good question. I think it's a very personal thing. I don't think anybody should believe in anybody else's rendition of God. To me, God is just a fancy word for existence. God is a fancy word for universe. If there was a God, where would God stand, right? Where would God sit? Where would God's home be? To me, it's obvious that God has to be the entire universe. The universe is God. It's just a definitional game. So, you know, one set of people say God, another say universe. They're saying the same thing. So to me, existence itself is the thing and we're made of it. We're subroutines in the greater reality.

Does that suggest that God is more perfect in our future? Because we're evolving, creating ways to communicate, and probably in your lifetime we'll be able to terraform planets and create life and all that. So would you say God is more in our future or more in our past under that filter on reality?

Well, I know you're God's debris hypothesis, which is a remapping of the Buddhist hypothesis that it's like we got separated and we're under some kind of illusion. We're all trying to get back to one thing. And I think that's a reasonable hypothesis. I would just tweak it a little slightly. And I think it's all fine the way it is. I think existence just is. That's literally the only answer you can give. The definition of truth is what exists. The definition of perfection is what exists. There is no other definition. For example, if you have some prediction about the future and the universe turns out a different way, the way the universe turned out is true and your prediction was false. So truth to me by definition is what actually exists. Most of the stuff that's going on in our head that are judgments saying this is right, this is wrong, this is the way it's ought to be. Those are false and those are illusions. So I don't think the universe is heading from imperfection to perfection. I think it's just all perfect the way it is. Just it may not be perfect according to my limited, illusory, false self point of view. But that doesn't change that the thing is the way it is, right? Who am I to second guess? So in that sense you could say I am spiritual. On the other hand, it's hard to keep all of this day to day in your head because we're biological creatures that are separated ourselves from the environment. We create a border around ourselves and we try to take care of everything within that border to the detriment of everything outside of that border. And that's just how we got here. So of course we're going to be always judging the external world as imperfect.

I have to rest every once in a while as my brain is processing. So somebody said here that God exists outside of, outside of our reality or something. And I'm thinking that I don't know what that means.

Yeah, well that goes back to the trilemma that I talked about earlier. Well then, okay then who made that God? And where's that God standing? And why is that God? That way, at some point you either go to infinite regression, circular reasoning, or axiomatic. And the ultimate axiom is God. That's the axiom, which is, well, because God, at the end of the day somebody got tired of answering the question why and and just said because God. That was the answer. It's just an axiom. So you can make that axiom whatever you want to yourself, but that doesn't mean there's an objective answer.

I have a proposal for the meaning of life. And I always look for things that are sort of actionable and practical. Nothing that's just a philosophy. And here's what I've noticed, that when people act in accordance with their biological nature, they feel satisfied and they have an interior sense of meaning. And when they're outside of their biological evolutionary channel, that's when they get anxious that's when they think nothing matters, etc. So, for example, you've gone from not having children to having a child. Did that add meaning to your life, or at least the sensation of meaning?

Yeah, absolutely it did.

And that's compatible with your evolutionary biological sense. It feels like, you know, I'm a believer that you can trace back most of our motivations to some evolutionary thing, at least if you use that model of the world and that even things like being productive, you know, doing work, learning, that these things are so tied back to your basic biological and evolutionary impulses that you will have the sensation of meaning when you're acting in a way that's compatible with your biological and evolutionary self.

So I absolutely agree. I mean, evolution is how we got here. And I don't see a lot of parents sitting around saying, what's the meaning of life? It's the kid that's running around right in front of them. Yeah, if you can't explain something about human nature via evolution, you're probably doing it wrong. Human nature is all about evolution. I think where we get trapped, where we get screwed up, is when we're trying to solve society's demand, which is other monkeys with our own demands through biological programming. And I think a lot of the thing that creates unhappiness in modern society is a struggle between what society wants and what the individual wants. And at least today, I think most people have this guilty voice in their head telling them what they ought to be doing. And that guilt is just society's voice talking in your head versus what you intrinsically want to be doing according to your biological programming. Now, the problem is modern society and modern civilization can hack your biology in many ways. We're not meant to consume infinite news, infinite porn, infinite food. Right? We live in an era of too much abundance. So the modern struggle is almost. You have to be a modern ascetic to survive in society. You have to learn how to shield yourself from the incredible violence you can see on tv. You know, if you were involved in a tribe thousands of years ago, if you saw one murder, it would have been so horrified and traumatic, the tribe may have talked about it for years, and it would have taken you a long time to get over it. Now you can turn the TV and flick through 50 murders, no problem, in a short period of time. What is the psychological damage that's done to you? The sugar that you're eating, the crazy porn that you've been watching, the, you know, the drugs that you've been doing, the alcohol you've been drinking all of that stuff. It just throws us so far off balance that I think we're lost from our biological underpinnings. Which is why when people need to recover, they go to an ashram, they go out in the woods, they go to nature, they go on a fast. If I can just. Sorry to keep rambling. There's one idea I can introduce that I saw recently on YouTube. There's a great video about this, this guy, this idea for a dopamine fast. Okay. Which is for one day, every couple of months, he goes on a complete dopamine fast, which means that he just drinks water, he doesn't really talk to other people, he doesn't read books, he doesn't watch tv, he doesn't go to work. You can meditate, you can exercise, you can journal, but that's it. And you can drink water. And so you reset your dopamine receptors back to where you can find meaning and happiness in the ordinary and everyday natural things.

Now, is that what he told his.

Wife he was doing right. When he actually ran after God knows what?

All right, so define freedom. Somebody said on Internet recently that freedom was. You can measure your freedom by whether you have to get up on somebody else's schedule. If you have to wake up when somebody else wants you to wake up, you're now free. And you know, when we were negotiating to do this, you, you mentioned that you want to start at 11 our local time because you don't need to get up before that. And you're more of a night owl anyway, right? Don't you?

Yeah, I went to bed at 3:30 in the morning last night. 3:30 in the morning? Yeah.

So that, that feels like the definition of freedom to me. It looks like we lost naval and then he's back and naval when you, you're going to have to. There you go, you're back. We will be able to hear you in a moment. And he's back. You're there. Right.

Okay.

So do you like that definition that if you can wake up when you want to, you're free?

Yeah, I think that's a really good practical day to day definition. Not having phone calls you have to take, not having alarm clocks that you have to get up to, you know, not having to wear a tie. If you have to wear a tie when you go to work, you're not really free. If you have to be at your desk at a certain time, you're not really free. I think that's like physical freedom. Right. Then I think there's also the freedom to make your choices in life, to kind of live the life that you want to self actualize. And then finally there's freedom from your own thoughts. There's sort of that freedom from your own mind constantly telling you, berating you how you feel. So there's multiple layers to it. But I think as a practical, everyday definition, I think not having to wake up to an alarm clock and not having to wear a uniform to work is a great one.

Now, I wanted to add something to the point. Before this, I got in trouble on the Internet. It was actually the thing I was talking about earlier that BuzzFeed took little, a little too seriously. And I showed a graph of how the number of people living at home skyrocketed at about the same time as the first iPhone came out. And I said, just a coincidence. Now I wasn't being too serious, but there is a part of that and obviously had more to do with home prices and the economy. So that was assuming that's the major driver. But here's the thing. If I had a smartphone, I would have a lot of entertainment and a lot of access to things that give me dopamine without leaving home. You know, if I, if I had a bedroom and mom's cooking, I. I could probably be okay with that for a long time. Whereas I remember my own motivations to get out of the house as soon as possible were because there was nothing in the house that I ever wanted to do. Like, being in that house was just so unhappy, you know, just bored and, you know, etc. But if I had a smartphone, I might not be in such a hurry because it satisfies so many of my social and, you know, intellectual needs. Do you think there's anything to that?

Oh, yeah. The real universal basic income is cannabis and video games.

That is the best thing you've said in five minutes because you. Cannabis and video games, yeah.

Tweeted and quoted. Obviously it's tongue in cheek, but yeah, I mean, look, this is, this is the modern struggle. There is so much of an abundance of sort of cheap, fake, instant dopamine and meaning like, how do you, how do you motivate yourself to do the real thing anymore? This is the thing that every parent is currently struggling with. This is the thing that every teenager is currently struggling with. And I think the next generation is going to have to learn how to conquer a greater set of addictions. Like all the problems of olden times were scarcity, I don't have enough of whatever. Now they're all abundance I have too much of this. I have too much of that. How do I stop doing this? How do I stop eating? How do I stop playing video games? How do I stop drinking alcohol? How do I stop smoking weed? How do I stop going on social media?

Well, not the bottom 20%. They still have a shortage. But the point stands.

Yes, well, I think the. Yeah, that's right. But I think the, at least in a first world society, success and failure in the future and even today is much more about how you control and manage and break addictions than even going out and doing something. Wow. That.

Now I completely agree with that and I've never heard anybody say it before. And I wonder if we'll get to the point where your DNA will predict what kind of an addictive personality you have. Are we already there?

We're already there. In fact, if you look in human history, generally pessimists survive because if you're walking through the woods with a friend, you hear a tiger and the pessimist runs. The optimist thinks it's not a tiger. The optimist gets eaten, right? So historically, pessimists survive and optimists don't make it. But I think in modern society, because we have so many options available to us, optimists do a lot better. Optimists, you know, break up and go find a new girlfriend or boyfriend because there's just many more people to select from. Optimists do well because there actually isn't a tiger in there. It's an opportunity. So optimists do better in modern society. But I think the new transition that's happening is that people who have the DNA to resist addictions will do better. That being said, like, I'll be honest, I have an addictive personality which I have to be very careful about. But it's the flip side of another coin. The flip side is I also have an obsessive personality. So when I learn about something new, I dive into it and I become an expert on it because I can't stop reading about it, I can't stop thinking about it. When I have a problem, I get obsessed and I just solve it. So addiction may also be related to just this ability to focus on something and get lost in something. It's not clear to me that you can have one without the other.

I totally agree with that. Now I heard an interesting idea. I won't, I won't say where because I don't want to. I don't want to spoil it by saying where it came from. And the idea Was that since you can check the DNA of somebody to find out that they have addiction. I'm remembering now, I heard this before. Suppose you had a law that says if you give a drug, let's say an illegal drug like fentanyl, cocaine or something, to somebody who, you know, has that DNA, and let's say there's some way to know that, you know, it's published. Just imagine there's some way to know that. That if you give somebody a drug to somebody who does not have an addictive personality, well, then you're just a drug dealer. But if you give a drug to someone who does have an addictive personality, and it can be knowable whether you look for it or not. But let's just say it can be knowable that you get the death penalty because you basically killed somebody.

Yeah, I mean, it does sound a little extreme, but I think you're onto something there, which is that, like, if I go to Vegas, you know, 90% of people don't have a gambling problem. They're kind of just passing through, using it for entertainment. But there's a small percentage of people who are stuck to the slot machines and they should never have been allowed in the first place. It'd be good to know who those people are in advance so we can educate them. I'm not sure we need to give the death penalty someone who screws it up because, you know, human nature being human nature, people will find their way to addictions. But the better is just the defense, you being armed. What if you knew what your addictions were? So you need to watch out for them, and your family knew to watch out for them, and you just kind of knew to stay out of those situations. I've never had a drug addiction, so it's hard for me to kind of empathize on or to fully understand that. I understand you had a loss in the family, which is very tragic around it, but I'm not sure, like, throwing around the death penalty is the answer.

It makes me feel good, though, because, for the reasons you mentioned, But I.

Agree that there's absolutely something about gene sequencing, DNA, origins of these things to just understand what you're vulnerable to.

Right. I've got a dangerous question, and again, you have the right to pass on this.

Yes. By the way, this entire conversation is probably going to get me deplatformed out of my life.

That's my dog growling or something. All right. I'm seeing in a number of different contexts the conversation about who's responsible for what. And so let Me give you some examples. When Trayvon Martin, I think that's the right name, got shot, he was wearing a hoodie. And then people say, well, if he wasn't dressing like that, you know, there wouldn't have been any problem. And of course, there we saw today, there was one of the judges who's being considered for one of the lower courts had said sometime in the past that women maybe should not drink so much because it contributes to maybe sexual assault. And people. People said, no, no, that's, you know, the responsibility is the perpetrator, not. Not the victim. Of course, now every time I see people talking about stuff like this, and also the. The MAGA hat. If you wear the hat, you're sort of asking for it. No, no, it's really just the person who does the attacking. But why can't people separate what is responsibility both socially and legally? Because that's pretty clear. Like the people, whoever does the attacking is legally and socially responsible, period. But why can't we talk about risk management? Certainly there are things that people do that put them in more risk or lesser risk, independent of whose responsibility it is to avoid the trouble. Why can't we get that right? Do you have any insight on that?

Yeah, I don't. Honestly, I haven't paid attention to most of the things that you just talked about because to me, these are just in the domain of politics. And politics is just the exercise of power without merit. So there's no. You can't put reasons underneath anything political. It's really. People just make up their minds and who they hate and who they like, and then they'll just justify anything. So there's contradictions all around. You know, one side will do something and then turn around and the other side will do it. And the accusations of hypocrisy, but they never stick because, as you say, everyone's living in their own movie. This is not based on reason. There's no reality underneath. Yeah. In real life, you do risk management all day long. Right. Like, if I'm walking down the street, I'm not, you know, and it's in an urban neighborhood, inner city. I grew up in Jamaica, Queens, which is a really rough neighborhood. I would not walk around flashing a wad at 20s. And then when the guy attacks me, I say, it's my fault, you know, it's your fault. Of course it's his fault. At the end of the day, everyone's responsible for their actions. But I definitely put myself in a difficult situation by flashing around a lot of twenties. It's it's just common sense. But you're right, we can't talk about common sense because we're now in the domain of politics where sense making doesn't apply.

You are correct. I think we don't want to go too long because it'll make it harder for people to look at it. So we should wrap up. Is there anything you either wanted to ask me or anything you wanted to add?

Yeah, I actually think that instead of. I'm waiting for you to write the book on hypnosis, you know, of all kinds. Not just persuasion, but just sort of next level hypnosis.

That's what Win Bigley was.

Yeah, but I'm talking about, like getting very systematic, especially at certain. Well, let's just be clear. I've seen your girlfriend. You've got a book to write just based on that. So that.

That would be my charm. All right, well, maybe it will. Now, people have suggested, and I always think of you when this topic comes up, that people who have read a lot and have a good sense of what would be good to read should have their list. I think you do have a list somewhere.

I don't actually have an official list because I've just read so much. It's hard for me to even pick top 20 books, let alone, you know, top 10. Even top 50 is hard for me. But. And I also. My interests wander. I think one of the problems is that the book that appeals to you at a certain point in time, you know, is not a book that appeals to you five years later or five years earlier. So a lot of it is about the reader to the author fit. But I think, like, there are some timeless ones, like in science fiction. I don't know if you like Jorge Luis Borges, Ted Chiang, Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson on sort of science writing. Matt Ridley has written some amazing books. Genome, the Red Queen, Origins of Virtue, the Rational Optimist, the Evolution of Everything. I like you all know of Hari's Sapiens, which I've recommended before, was an amazing book. Will Durant's the Lessons of History. I do read a lot of philosophy and I've basically read everything, but I like Siddhartha, Simple Herman Hesch kind of novel, which is partially or mostly fictional, but still, still really interesting. Seneca, you know, the Stoics like science. Carlo Rovelli is kind of a good modern physicist who writes some good stuff. But, you know, I also recommend reading all the originals. You know, read the Eighth Day of Creation, read the Origin of the Species, read the wealth of Nations. There's no need to. You know, what people do today is, is someone writes a book on evolution, which is interpreting Darwin for you, and then somebody else updates it slightly and writes the blog post. And then there's the clickbait buzzfeed version, and then there's the hot take tweet on it. And people are reading the hot take tweet when they could just go read the wealth of Nations. Right. You don't have to read an interpretation of an interpretation of an interpretation of interpretation. And especially when you're building your foundational knowledge, it's really important to read the basics, the originals.

Well, although the caveat there is that evolution, as your example, has changed quite a bit. So the original theory has been tweaked a number of times.

It's still basically correct. And, you know, and Darwin didn't have the political agenda that a lot of people who are tweaking it today do. Yeah, start with Darwin. You can add the tweaks later. But if you don't understand the basics and you're just memorizing advanced concepts, you're completely lost. It's far more important than life, as you have pointed out, to know the basics really well across a few domains and combine that than to try and be a deep expert in any one domain. The simplest analogy I have to this is mathematics. Everybody at some point in their life sat down to math class and there was a day when they no longer understood the basics of what the teacher was talking about. And at that point, math turned to memorization, whereas up until then, it was logic. So the moment math turned from logic to memorization, you lost the ability to do and learn mathematics beyond that point. So I would argue that, you know, you should always build in a very solid foundation of understanding, and at any point, you're reduced to memorization or reading other people's opinions and taking those as your own, that you need to stop and backtrack.

All right, I like that. I like that advice. Let's. Let's wrap it up here. And to the audience, thank you for hanging in here.

Thanks, everyone.

And Naval, Feel free to have me on your periscopes one of these days.

Yeah, I absolutely will. I wanted to try out this calling feature. This was great. I want to do more periscopes. I'm actually on the hook for it because I promised the Twitter team if they roll this feature out, I would be using it. So here I am, and I'm going to be doing more regular periscopes with guests. Honestly, the hard thing for me here is that we live in a very intolerant environment, Clickbait news, where people want to take everything out of context and sort of attack people. But I think I just have to get used to that. It's hard to say anything interesting without annoying somebody out there. And I guess people's feelings are their problem, not my problem.

Exactly. All right, so thank you very much, and we'll wrap it up.

Thanks for having me on, Scott.

All right, take care.

Bye. Bye.