Naval Ravikant: Predictable Polemics and Empty Aphorisms
In this watery simulation of an episode, Matt and Chris uncover the true purpose of Scott Adams’ existence: not to shape reality, but to provide training data for future AIs working on plumbing-related problems. Somewhere in a cosmic server farm, Scott is endlessly confronted with blocked drains, dripping faucets, and municipal water conspiracies, while his “insights” fuel the next generation of household maintenance bots.Against this surreal backdrop, Naval Ravikant enters the scene — investor, tweeter, self-styled philosopher, and, in practice, just another discourse surfer riding the waves of online conspiracism. The conversation opens with a familiar chorus of right-wing talking points, drifts into feverish speculation about lawfare, censorship, and “imported voters,” and finally winds down in the dim light of dorm-room metaphysics, where slogans like “happiness is a choice” are served up as if they were profound insights.Naval presents himself as a detached sage, offering a boutique blend of political commentary and Daoist-tinged wisdom. In reality, he delivers little more than predictable polemics and recycled aphorisms. Imagining himself a great man of history dispensing lyrical truths in tweet-sized form, he produces nothing that rises above the usual culture-war debris. The posture is Buddha-with-a-smartphone; the reality is a credulous tech elite mistaking his own Twitter feed for a philosophy seminar.What follows is Elon-as-Ben-Franklin fanboying, Trump rebranded as a “bottom-up” leader of the people, and a level of self-congratulation so thick it could be used to terraform Mars. By the end, you may find yourself nostalgic for the leaky pipes in Scott’s simulation — at least they produce real water...SourcesModern Wisdom (Chris Williamson): 44 Harsh Truths About The Game Of Life - Naval Ravikant (4K)Real Coffee with Scott Adams: Conversation with Naval Ravikant
Hello and welcome to Dakota the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer.
We try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, my co-host there is chris kavana i'm a psychologist from australia he is well he's kind of also a psychologist he teaches in a psychology school in japan uh gada chris how's it going not bad i'm impressed you've finally remembered that what i am what my essence is that's that's impressive it's it's took a number of years but like uh pavlov's dog you've been reinforced in the correct
association eventually you you evolved into a psychologist just just like so many species evolve into crabs yeah i'm uh what do you call those like mimic you know like a caterpillar that pretends it's a snake you've got all those bright bright colors all over you and yeah i did a replication crisis i did a replication yeah it's a tough life here in the interdisciplinary
boundaries but you know i'm willing to do it no one else is willing to do it but i'm willing to do it okay nobody asked me to do it you should try to convert some of your friends we're trying to make it all social scientists psychologists what a world that would be yeah yeah we can only we can only imagine now matt as you know this is a decoding episode no faffing around allowed i don't know not allowed to tell me anything about your dogs your food it's not
live prohibited we run a tight ship here so i will mention however a programming point we're covering naval ravakant right uh investor That's my thought.
I think that he is, but okay, Twitter man, other things, involved in tech, podcaster, so on, so forth.
Okay, he's a philosopher.
Is he?
We'll see about that.
But yeah, he has been described with that.
We can say that.
And originally, I told everyone on the Patreon as well that we were going to look at his appearance with Chris Williamson, which was called 44 Harsh Truths about the Game of Life, a three hour, 16 minute discussion, which many people went and watched.
Unfortunately, it was incredibly dull.
And also, it was only really in the last half hour where Naval completely like got into his proper the full guru mode and when i was complaining about this online some people mentioned that there was a conversation with scott adams um from just nine months ago which might be more to our liking and which really got into the guru stuff and that was only an hour and 19 minutes long now to be clear we
listen to both okay we suffer like we said but i only have clubs mostly except for one or two from the naval and scott adams but but everyone can basically use their imagination as to how that conversation went just imagine imagine christmas saying the kinds of things he says like how do you manage to be so successful but also retain a sense of humility and achieve things while not wanting anything and that's
then navar gives his uh you know gives its answer and he's got an answer for everything and that's how the conversation goes it's all right uh it's a it's a bit guru-esque but it's true the scott adams conversation was a bit spicier and went a bit wilder they got into their political stuff a little bit and did a bit of searching chris and i saw that earlier he'd uh spoken with megan kelly and Megan.
Megan.
Why can't everyone just have normal names that are pronounced normal?
Megan, who now is called Megan?
Everyone's called Megan.
That's the standard Megan.
All the other Megans are fakes.
Megan, Megan, okay?
It's talking to Megan Kelly, where he also, yeah, got a bit political, as you might expect, which is unusual, I think, for Naval.
I think the impression I get is before this.
he was a bit more reserved with the political takes.
Yeah, I think they're there, but it just depends on who he's talking to.
And actually, once you hear his takes with Scott Adams and you go and listen to the Chris Williamson thing, you hear a lot of echoes about the points that he's making.
There are points where it's exactly the same, right?
He just hasn't elaborated to the same level.
So Naval, like I come across him online because he has a Twitter account, which is quite popular, and he likes to issue profound sentiments.
But I find them pseudo-profound in general.
And he's basically like a more direct version of Eric Weinstein on Twitter.
That's the vibe that I get.
But held in high regard by other tech CEOs because, well, you know.
And to see the three hours with Chris Williamson, the whole thing is like you shouldn't invest yourself in achieving things.
You should like invest yourself in succeeding and not being attached to what you want to do, and then you'll do it better.
So there you go.
Done.
Yeah.
Sort of advice like, you know, find people.
And it's like, okay.
Good advice.
Good advice.
Yeah, so he said, well, we'll get into it, but his philosophy is kind of that kind of feel good stuff, but he also thinks Trump is absolutely fantastic.
So I'm interested how he squares that circle in time.
Oh, yeah.
So when known for being incredibly transactional and not being trustworthy.
Yeah, there's some impressive takes in this.
And it is a bit like the all-in podcast, guys.
There are connective tissue there.
And isn't it good to be back with our old friend Scott?
Yes, Scott has a cancer diagnosis, and this is bad.
But Scott remains an absolute arsehole, right?
So just to be clear, do you guys celebrate him having cancer?
No.
I therefore think, oh, shouldn't criticize Scott for the things that he's pumping out?
no right you can have sympathy and still consider him a partisan little snake Now, Chris, before we start playing clips of Naval, because many people would not have heard of him.
I hadn't heard of him really.
Tell us, who is he?
What's the deal?
Well, who's Naval?
He is a tech CEO investor.
He was involved in a whole bunch of companies, Genoa Corp, E-Pinions, the HitForge, Angel List, MetaStable Capital, Spearhead, CoinList, AirChat, so on and so forth.
And I think he got his initial start in part by the dot-com bubble, like the boom.
there his opinions consumer review site was bought or no way it merged with deal time and became shopping dot com which ipo which IPOed and got things, right?
So he got money through the early dot-com boom.
And then he went on to get involved in the angel investing and he launched the cryptocurrency hedge fund and various other things, right?
So you know the deal.
Yeah, it seems like very much the Silicon Valley arc.
I mean, all those companies, Chris, they've brought so much good to the world.
They've done so much for us, whether it's the Bitcoin hedge fund or the ePinion site that shut down or got bought and turned into another kind of site, which is now.
site which then kind of disappeared.
Yeah, you know, the Silicon Valley is making everyone's lives better well the thing is matt he has a lot of money so it's very important that we consider what he thinks about a whole range of topics because it's objectively true that he has a lot of money right so therefore he's obviously done something right he's probably got a he's got a very high iq we don't even need to bother measuring iq using psychological tests how much money do you have that's pretty much statements that's what it should go like
um so now matt is that enough of an introduction to him have you got the background on this this guy in my tone my reviews I've reviewed some of the ways that I identified them after listening to it.
But maybe not.
Maybe I'm just leading people the wrong way.
Why don't we let Scott Adams introduce Naval?
He'll do a better job than us.
If there's anyone who doesn't know who Naval is, let's say, entrepreneur, investor, philosopher, mentor.
We run out of rooms.
There's not enough names for you.
What do you call yourself?
If like, when, if you had to introduce yourself, do you just get clever and say, say, like, the joke version?
What do you do?
You know, it's hilarious.
It's funny you say that because I used to, you know, when I was really young, I had the, oh, I'm an entrepreneur.
I have this company.
I'm the founder of this, right?
It's a resume speak, midwit resume speak, if you will.
And then as I got older, then I did these self-deprecating, you know, false, humble brag, like, ah, ha, ha, you know, and then say something ludicrously low, like gas station attendant order.
But now, of course, they say, hey, I'm Naval.
That's it, you know?
And if you know who I am, great.
And if you don't, that's great, too, because I don't believe in this whole, you know, it's a form of identity politics to have, like, your history behind you.
You should have to prove yourself in every instance.
So if what I say is true, then that stands on its own.
And if it doesn't, it doesn't.
So it doesn't matter.
You're the most famous, unfamous person I know, meaning that the number of people who will privately bring up your name, just, you know, independent of knowing whether I know you or not, is really phenomenal.
So there, my philosopher, entrepreneur, and not only.
Naval has gone through many different ways to introduce himself, you know, the self-deprecation, the thing.
And now he's attained wisdom, which is just, he's just Naval.
I am Naval.
He's just Naval.
Yeah.
That's all.
That's all.
That's how the conversation was introduced, right?
The usual guru on guru priyas.
I'm going to play the very end of the interview, how they finish it, right?
So you start off, you praise your guest, and when you finish, you know, people usually thank their guests for coming on.
But we've often noticed in the guru sphere that the level of mutual back padding and sycophancy is hard to overstate.
And this is a classic of the genre.
So I don't want the people to miss it.
But because it comes at the end of the podcast so let's just hear how this episode ends and then you can hear the content of the conversation and see if it's justified I don't want to take you forever.
No, I enjoy talking to you.
You know, it's funny because I get invited to a lot of podcasts, but they're all asked the same boring questions.
And you make yourself scarce, at least on these one-on-ones.
So it's good.
So I want to talk to you.
But we should do another one.
You know, it's funny because I want to, I have literally, after Periscope, we used to have fun on Periscope.
I remember that, right?
You and I were probably the two biggest Periscopers for a long time.
I was number one for a little bit, then you were number one, I was number two, and then I dropped off.
And then when Clubhouse launched, I was big on Clubhouse trying to get that same feeling back.
And I even did my own company, AirChat, trying to get that same feeling back but i think every smart person is starved for conversation with other smart people um and so the internet is great for that it helps connect us but still like this kind of a setup is fantastic i can get to talk to you there's like 20 people i want to talk to and that's it and you're on that list so when something newsbreaking happens you know it's it's fun to get online and talk it's better than going to a podcast and they ask you the same interview questions you know then you answer and then check off like number 1309 check
at level flow and naval you're one of the reasons i think i live in a simulation because if i do i think there are player characters and npcs and from the first moment i met you, say, okay, you're a player.
but beyond that I've always felt connected to you no matter where you were or what you were doing imagine always being connected to Scott Adams no matter what you were doing so I mean this is the new normal isn't it this is this is how this is how podcast interviews go you've never known someone just you respect so goddamn hard it makes your teeth hurt yeah 20 people in
this category Matt 20 people and also there's after all this talk about as we're going to see about you know self-awareness and wisdom and self-deprecation like at the end of saying oh it's really hard for geniuses like us to find other geniuses I mean this has been such a stimulating conversation we're gonna we're gonna get into what this but so this is the burn man behind Naval feels at the end of this
conversation.
you haven't heard it yet but it's it's obviously something It was good from both their perspectives.
It was pretty special.
So we're going to cover, I can't remember whether the sort of cookie cutter wisdom is in more in this one.
I mean, it's definitely in the modern wisdom one, but I'm sure there's some of it.
Then there'll be some pretty interesting theories to get bandied about.
And there'll also be a fair bit of politics.
So, yeah, let's find out.
Yeah, yeah, that's the way.
Well, we'll cover a lot of things.
But I think Chris Williamson is slightly more towards the wisdom prompt, right?
Give him a prompt and let him talk for five minutes uninterrupted.
Where, as you know, Scott is a fellow guru or are they gurus?
Let's see.
OK, so one thing to note is despite this cultivated presentation of detachment from the normal society and the riffraff, right?
There are repeated times in this where they both reveal that they're terminally online in an unhealthy way.
So.
Exhibit A. Actually, I realized this when I was first in the Tim Ferriss podcast.
And after the Tim Ferriss podcast, like every podcast in the world reached out after and it's because Tim Ferris influences the influencers right and I think you're one of those two you influence the influencers you can look at X right formerly Twitter even when it had a much smaller audience it was so influential to the influencers because the journalists and the politicians were on there so it punched out of its way and when whenever somebody like in a huff deletes their X account and storms off,
they just fade into irrelevance.
Like Sam Harris, where is he now?
I think Yan LaCun is the latest casualty of that, right?
And sometimes they slink back on tail between their legs and sometimes they don't.
But if you influence the influencers, just like the left realized, if you control the institutions and the elites, you can just punch out of your way.
If you're not on Twitter, Matt, do you even exist?
in the discourse that yan lacun and sam harris what are they doing now yeah yeah yeah so uh yeah i think that's uh that was revealing.
Definitely an online guy.
I guess that's what people do.
I mean, once you're really rich, like this guy, like, what are you going to do apart from offer your wisdom?
Well, you're a doomscroll, aren't you?
No, can't you do like, there are really rich people who seem to develop hobbies.
Like Richard Bronson was flying around in a balloon.
You can be doing other little things, you know, there's like healthy and less healthy options.
I think what about the guy, the guy from MySpace, you know, who made his fortune and then just goes around the world taking photography and having a nice life.
That does sound good.
Yeah, I guess it's possible.
I guess it's possible.
Not in this day and age, though.
The internet's too good, Chris.
It's too good.
Back when the internet wasn't this good, flying around balloons seemed like a fun time.
Yeah, that was, you know, the bit that got me from this response as well was like, you heard more of the guru on guru priests, though.
You, Scott Adams, you influence the influencers, right?
You're in this top tier.
echelon like because you tweet on twitter and i see it right and uh if you think i'm reading too much and uh how much they are you know putting into their tweeting capacities.
Let's hear exhibit number two.
Can I put you on the spot?
Do you remember your post about changing the rules?
Vaguely.
You know, there are two posts I'm proud of in this whole thing.
And one of them is about changing the rules.
And there I was, I didn't word it the perfect way.
I could have worded it a little better sometimes with a wordsmith, so I know it wasn't quite perfect.
I almost didn't put it out for that reason.
But the post was basically that you don't, you don't, you know, leaders come and leaders go, but you don't want to change the rules of the game, right?
And lawfare is changing the rules of the game.
Censorship is changing the rules of the game.
Importing voters is changing the rules of the game, right?
These are structural changes you're making to get us into one party rule that'll never come back from.
And the ending of that was like, let's change out the rulers, change out the people who are changing the rules of the game, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So this is getting more into his political feelings.
And if you didn't pick up on it, all of those concerns that he's got are absolutely concerns about the Democrats and how they are changing the rules of the game that is liberal democracy and a great threat to America's democracy.
They engaging in lawfare, spurious lawsuits against Trump in particular, importing foreigners to vote so they can win elections.
What was the third thing they're doing?
Censorship.
Oh, censorship.
Yeah, yeah.
That's definitely something the Democrats are guilty of.
No concerns about the...
Well, that'll surely come up, Matt.
He's not a partisan.
I mean, he's above the left-right card.
I'm just like Scott Adams.
Just like Scott Adams.
Yeah.
Yeah, and what he said there, you might think like he's, you know, he referred to it as his post, right?
That he wordsmithed.
He's a wordsmith at times.
This is a tweet, Matt.
He means a tweet.
He tweeted this out.
And what he said there is almost word for word is tweet.
That thing about leaders come and go, but don't.
change the rules of the game censorship is changing the rules of the game lawfare is changing the rules of the game important voters is changing the rules of the game time to change the people who are changing the rules of the game that is this big thing that him and scott are like do you remember when you tweeted out that and he's oh y insane to me that you would be talking to someone about the tweet that they crafted, right?
And this is why I'm referring to them as like terminally online discourse surfers.
But again, just in case this hasn't made this clear enough, they discuss another tweet, another banger, Matt.
Listen to this.
So you mentioned one tweet of mine before, the change the people who are trying to change the system, right?
But the other tweet that I was really proud of this cycle, right, was it's, I almost want to pin this to my profile, but it's the battle of the masculine men and the feminine women against the masculine women and the feminine men.
And that one was written in such a way that it'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 that one influenced more people than any tweet I put out because they saw it and they immediately knew whether they're masculine men or feminine women.
And then they immediately thought on the other side, like, oh, yeah, all men are feminine and all the women are masculine.
I feel like he's more proud of that tweet than he really ought to be.
Where is this attached philosopher that cites the Buddha?
All this kind of thing.
Imagine the Buddha read their life today, like, oh, there was this banger tweet.
I did this cycle.
Like, this is basically Joe Rogan's thing about difficult times, or hard times, hard man.
Yeah, I know.
Both those tweets are just partisan, culture-y stuff just packaged up into a little aphorism.
It's poetic, man.
It's poetic.
It's poetic.
I mean, I've seen those sentiments expressed a million times before.
know and you know typically he's known for inspirational poster type quotes like the reason to win the game is to be free of it, escaping competition through authenticity.
Yeah.
you know like happiness is a choice like you know these are just honestly empty aphorisms at my point of view so it doesn't so he seems to think those are pretty profound um so i guess uh i guess it makes sense that he feels like his tweets are super profound too ah yes yes well you remember um we had great fun with jordan peterson telling brett about the state of modern medicine This was actually in the conversation with Chris Williamson, but here is as good as any to mention that.
So he was asked about, you know, his predictions for the future and like what things are going to be good and bad and whatnot, then he mentioned this map.
Well, there's a couple.
One is, I think, just how bad modern medicine is.
I think people just put a lot more faith in modern medicine than is warranted.
Like our best ideas for a lot of things are surgery, just cutting things out, right?
Treating things that are extraneous, like, oh, you don't really need a gallbladder.
You don't really need an appendix.
So you don't really need tonsils.
Oh, that's false.
Surplus requirements.
Human body is very, very efficient.
All those things are needed.
You know, so I think the state of modern medicine is still pretty bad.
We don't have many good explanatory theories in biology.
We have germ theory disease.
We have evolution.
We have cell theory, we have DNA genetics, morphogenesis, embryogenesis, and not much else.
There's not much else.
Everything else is rules of thumb, memorization.
A affects B because it affects C, affects D, but we don't understand the underlying explanation.
It's all just words point to words point to words.
So biology is still in a very sorry state.
And because we are not allowed to take risk that might kill people, we just don't experiment enough in biology.
So a lot of treatments are just outright banned by large regulatory bodies.
So we just don't have the innovation.
Interesting.
I'm very hot-tape.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, again, this is a very common thing theme.
It seems most of our gurus are not fond of modern medicine.
And, you know, I think he puts a bit more eloquent case for it.
Like there's lots of grains of truth there, right?
Like a lot of medicine is based on things that work and you don't always necessarily understand the exact mechanisms by which things work because it's complex.
It's super complex.
And, you know, what he said is right.
You are a bit constrained by the experiments you can do.
You can't just give people crazy things and see what happens.
But like, what's the point of that critique?
like there's nothing like everyone well not everyone but i think any any medicine medical scientist person knows that kind of stuff but it's like well what's the alternative you're gonna take stuff based on vibes or take your own personalized cocktail of unproven uh natural therapies well so the thing that gets to me here about this is one but i think that list is pretty good though like you know dna germ theory right genetics uh like evolution
these are pretty impressive theories that we've got that have sent off to a whole bunch of side rates and while there could be so many more chris just there could be so many more but even like the bit about you know like you say, there are lots of things that we don't know yet about, you know, how certain medicines work.
But you and I, Matt, we read that great book by Philip Deppmar about the immune system, right?
We know a hell of a lot about the immune system.
Like the level of complexity in that alone is bewildering.
But there are people who have studied that.
We've learned tons of things about how it functions.
We've learned ways.
I mean, the bit that gets me as well with what he outlines is.
you know we were able to develop mrna vaccines because of our understanding about mrna and and how vaccines function and the regime that is putting a stop on these and putting restrictions around this kind of research is Trump's regime, right?
RFK Jr.
People like that.
Naval, strangely, not somebody hugely vocal in criticizing the Trump regime on.
this point.
So, you know, it's, yeah, these criticisms of medicine reminds me of our other gurus and their criticisms of physics.
It's like a God of the gaps kind of, oh, yeah, physics is great.
I mean, you think it's so great.
It's got this and this, but it hasn't done these other things that I can imagine.
You know, the fact that no one else has done those things better and you're not proposing any alternative to how they'll do those things like maybe those things are difficult as you said we know heaps of stuff about how the immune system works i'm sure we don't know everything but it's not much of a criticism to say well you should know more like it's probably pretty hard to do more Yeah,
well, I just wanted to mention it in passing because it brought up echoes of Jordan Peterson talking about, you know, hospitals killing more people as I went along.
But let's have a look.
Well, maybe first of all, Scott Adams, we haven't heard from him in a while.
Like maybe he's become more balanced.
He's had a new perspective on things as time has progressed.
The Trump administration has come in.
Let's have a listen to Scott, you know, to remind ourselves of his position.
You know, it seems like during the political process, as you learn the names of the people who are connected to what, you know, especially on the left, you say, Oh, it's that, it's that person.
It's always, whenever there's like a hoax, you see the same group of people emerge.
It's like they've got the designated liars.
But then there are little, there are little, like maybe, I don't know, gangs within the Democrats.
And then you learn, you know, who's got the connection, who's married to whom, you know, whose husband's in the top of the CIA and stuff.
Right.
But what happens to right was that there was this sort of organic growth of connection and persuasion that is invisible to the left.
So the right has kind of, you know, we've now figured out the entire network on the left, but the left is blinded because they see, well, I think it's podcasters, has something to do with Joe Rogan, and they can't go deeper than that.
Classic Scott, the Democrats are just a sinister bunch of liars and stupid too.
They don't know what's going on.
But the right, an authentic, an authentic, a performing.
Family, connecting with real people, but the left cannot wrap their head around that kind of thing.
Yep, that's good.
Well, you know, so Naval had his tweets, Matt.
They were impressive.
Like, did Scott have any good takes that we might want to flag up?
If we go back to 2015, some of the people will remember this.
When people thought Trump was a clown, and he was just a clown, that's all he was.
So I wrote a blog post, some will remember it.
It was called Clown Genius.
So I reframed him as somebody who was a showman and that he could use those talents in a productive way.
And you'd better watch out because he's not going to just change politics, I said.
He's going to change the nature of reality itself in 2015.
Now that one.
You were leading back then.
And then you were pacing for a while and now leading again.
He did change.
He has changed a lot of things, though.
I can see that.
The nature of reality.
Well, I guess he has by challenging that it exists so that you can actually objectively assert facts.
He has succeeded in that.
But this is the thing where both of these people are like, this is on Scott's blog.
I wrote a thing that is a genius kind.
And this was great.
And Naval's like, oh, yeah, that was a leading insight back then.
And they're all so impressed with these, you know, just like little terms they came up with.
It feels very reminiscent to me as like the distributed idea suppression complex or the gated institutional narrative or whatever.
Right.
They have their little terms and they.
they like to say oh i've i thought of this and i thought of a theory yes they're all very productive they've had a lot of theories and they and they made a lot of predictions that were right this is yeah yeah yeah and oh for people that didn't hear the scott adams episode i recommend people come back to look, but if you want to hear the level of cynicism that Scott brings to the table, this is reminiscent of that episode.
So here's my cynical question.
Can any modern country survive with free speech if their news is real?
Because you think they'll just fracture, they'll fall apart, they'll realize there's been too much shenanigans in the past, and they'll be I think if we saw all the warts of our government.
Yeah.
And there wasn't a counter thing that was, you know, saying, Oh, that's not true.
I don't know if any government could survive long enough to do anything good.
That's the nice thing about democracy.
It gives us a way to have peaceful revolutions right so if all of that came out the people if they truly understood it which i'm a little skeptical on if the people understood the government you know free speech they wouldn't for one minute stand for it in any case they might be able to not handle it you know if they knew the details yeah yeah you cannot you cannot measure how deep Scott's cynicism goes.
He thinks everything is a lie.
They're all like you.
I mean, especially the Democrats, mostly the Democrats, but everything is basically a lie.
And you'd probably go as far to say as he did there, which is that society runs on lieses and it has to.
You can't handle the truth.
If we knew what was going on, then we'd have anarchy overnight.
So I don't know.
His personal worldview is so dark and cynical.
It's hard to know what his sort of secret conclusion is.
But the implication is that it's okay to lie, I think, because you've got a need to.
That's one way to read it.
I mean, he says as much in the episode that we covered before.
And I think he's constantly doing the, you know, am I saying what I think?
Or is it an ironic presentation?
Like he exists in that ambiguity all the time.
But it's very clear that his worldview is ultimately like a pragmatic cynicism.
But also based on the notion that he's actually, you know, a mastermind that is manipulating everyone psychologically by dropping breadcrumbs.
And it's so stupid.
I mean, I could have played some clips that highlight that this is not the case.
That is what Scott Adams thinks he is.
That is not what he is.
uh you know we didn't hear from naval there so maybe naval is not as polemical right and maybe he sees things more clearly uh so having a forward-looking person like elon actually executing.
I think that's what separates, that's one of the main things, but that's probably the largest thing in my mind that separates 2024 from 2016.
Instead of having a bunch of Republican Party apparatchiks and neocons running the administration, he actually has incredibly competent people available if he will take advantage of them.
You know, the one thing that Trump doesn't get enough credit for is that he has his ear to the public like nobody else, and he listens to lots of suggestions from lots of people.
And so it's not a top-down situation.
I think Democrats are kind of a top-down machine.
and the Republicans are a bottom-up machine?
Yeah, the Democrats are better organized.
They're collectivists.
By nature, they're better organized.
That's what they do.
What they have, though, is they've worse leadership because the great men tend to be more on the right, so to speak, right?
The great man theory of history.
You're just more likely to be on the right because they're more individualistic.
Yeah.
I mean, at the beginning, there, Navalny reminded me of the Dark Enlightenment.
guy what's his name oh curtis yarvan curtis yarvan with yeah with that sort of um people like elon and trump for that matter are worshipped you know as changing the very nature of reality you know these are very special people that when they have the reins, they just got to change things in ways you cannot even imagine.
And at the end there, he really drew a line under that.
The great men, and they're going to be on the right, obviously, because the left are collectivists.
But the other good thing about Trump is that he listens.
He's a man of the people.
He doesn't just rule by fiat and just adopt a dictatorial tone.
No, he's just out there talking to people, gathering information and gathering opinions.
And yeah, he's so much better.
I mean, it is like an alternative reality.
I know I'm reflecting now on the entire episode.
We haven't played people with the clips, but did you get that feeling, Chris?
Like, when do you listen to these conversations?
They are, they're just living in a different reality where Trump is a, you know, a completely different person from everything that I know about him.
Elon Musk is similar.
All of the troubles and strife in America are caused by the Democrats.
It is so much of this hyperpartisan brain.
Yeah.
Weird.
Well, Naval presents it like he has this boutique, you know, political position and philosophy, but like it's not boutique.
Like everything you've heard here.
is absolutely bulg standard red meat, you know, right-wing talking points and conspiracyism, right?
And there, just to remind people, they're saying that the Democrats are a top-down, whereas the Republicans are a bottom-up party in the era of like MAGA and Trump and the absolute personality cult existing around them.
So it's just that they do, like you say, exist in an alternative reality.
Because even if you say like the Democrats don't have their finger in the pulse, they're not doing well at responding to like MAGA and Trump.
Like the notion that the modern Republican Party is not top-down, it's just silly, right?
Like it's obviously the case that it's all revolving around Trump.
Yeah, well, the other thing that's a bit galling is that like, as you said before, like there's nothing bespoke and fascist.
I mean, it was meant to be, you know, you know, think, you know, don't think in binaries, you know, be sort of above it all, you know, this kind of, you know, slightly Buddhist style philosophy.
So it just contrasts very strongly with this kind of, you know, attitude.
Yeah, no, it's, I mean, it's this boutique presentation combined with.
what is absolutely standard right-wing talking points, which is what's going.
And, you know, this was recorded nine months ago, Matt, before the kind of Elon and Trump meltdown, right?
Just listen to the presentation here of Naval about, you know, the Trump administration and like its focus and compare it to where we are now.
Yeah.
You know, historically in a democracy, I would be...
right?
So you have a microphone now.
I have Twitter.
You know, Elon has his empire of companies behind him and people who trust him and work with him.
So the amount of leverage that's available to the really high-functioning individual society is much higher.
And so that helps them fight back.
Yes, so it's presented as that's good balance, right?
So you've got more and more have-nots.
So there's more and more discontent.
But the good thing is that really high-functioning individuals like himself and Elon Musk, they've got so much more, he says leverage, you could know, it all works out, I guess.
Like there's this a very consistent pattern, isn't there?
Like we've covered Peter Thiel, we've looked at Elon Musk, Market Drayson, people like that have come up from time to time.
There's this well-worn path of these tech entrepreneurs who make this money and discover themselves becoming incredibly libertarian.
incredibly anti any kind of governmental regulatory oversight loving lower taxes trump tends to deliver on all on all of those um so So these, you know, this bespoke philosophy conveniently aligns with those economic interests.
Yeah, yeah.
And like it's a weird version of democracy where your view is that there should be like a very wealthy elite that determines everything for everyone else, right?
Like that is his view is much closer to oligarchy.
than democracy right it sounds like what he wants is the elite intellectual thought leaders who have their hands on everything and uh and then the riffraff you know they're there map but they're there to be guided from these more refined individuals at the top.
I mean, maybe there are some good libertarians out there somewhere.
I don't want to cast aspersions on the entire group, but in my experience, at least in the discourse, it seems they all tend to devolve into this, which is not, yeah, it's like you said, it's more oligarchic, rich people first than anything.
Or is it civic mindedness, Matt?
Let's hear Scott and Naval discuss it.
Every word you said, I just love to hear because once Silicon Valley types of thinkers are set loose on the government.
You know, Elon, of course, looks like he's going to be the biggest one.
RFK Jr., et cetera.
They're system thinkers, as you are.
Yeah.
I was a system thinker.
I volunteered for public service.
I never thought I'd do it.
You know, it would be pretty limited public service, and I don't know what they have that would match up, but I just put the word out.
I said, hey, if you want me to do something in this government, I'm happy to do it, because I want to protect the American dream for my kids.
Well, where I see your greatest value is just what you're talking about, which is you're seeing how things are connected.
And I don't know that the Democrats are good at that.
I don't know the standard Republicans are good at it.
I don't think Trump's as good at it as you would be or Elon would be or Jamie Vance will be.
So the level of re engineering that could be brought to the country is dehydratingly exciting to me.
It feels like 1776 and it feels like, here's something I always wondered.
How was it that the eight or twelve people who started the revolution, which was crazy?
I mean, it was crazy that they were just going to get killed, but somehow they made it work.
And then somehow just when we needed it.
when the country is sort of falling off the rails, the characters who had exactly the right skills and historically so, like Elon is Ben Franklin.
It almost seems like reincarnation or something.
Does that seem like a coincidence to you?
Or am I?
I mean, you're inspiring me because I wasn't sure how much work I wanted to put into politics, but now you're inspiring me.
If it's that kind of moment, then yeah, that'll pull us, everyone off the benches.
Wow, these guys are the reincarnation of the founding fathers, the revolutionaries.
Yeah.
Elon Musk is Ben Franklin.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're the dream team.
Actually, yeah, it does remind me of John Peterson.
Yeah, yeah.
The other thing that's similar is just the incredible level of glazing that is going on.
You know, the way they just, people like Scott Adams are like feudal courtiers, you know, just lavishing praise on the dukes and the king.
I almost feel that that gives them too much credit, Matt, because to me, they come across like teenage fanboys, even though like Naval is a billionaire.
He's a billionaire who can't stop praising how great Elon Musk is.
And like, I've got a clip which illustrates this.
So listen to this.
Because Elon doesn't want to go down in history as the electric car guy or even the guy who saved America guy.
He wants to go down as a guy who got humanity to the stars.
And I think again, I'll give him more credit than that.
I don't even think he wants to go down as the I got humanity to the stars guy.
He's just like, I want to get to the stars.
And so I have to make it happen in this lifetime.
The only way that I get to experience the science fiction world in my head is if I get to the stars.
And so that's so inspirational.
I think that drives everything.
So I think it's even simpler.
He has to go to Mars because he already conquered the planet.
He already needs a new planet.
He conquers the planet as a side effect.
You know, if you get to Mars, you also have the most powerful rockets and missiles in the world.
You've conquered Earth as a side effect.
If you get to Mars, you can already mine asteroids for gold and resources.
You've got all the economics.
You just want Earth as a side effect.
So just getting to Mars as a side effect conquers everything because it's the most audacious goal by far.
He's got to launch thousands of these rockets at a cadence of every few hours to build a Mars colony.
I mean, they don't have air.
They literally don't have air.
It's a terraformed planet.
But it gets better because he's going to, I assume that the base on Mars will be built by his own robots.
Yeah, he has to build the robots, they build the bases, he has to have the AI.
It does sound like fantasizing, doesn't it?
Like the hero worship that's going on there.
But, you know, they also held themselves in incredibly high regard.
You know, the amazing, godlike.
He's so high functioning.
He's like a god.
He's going to conquer Earth as a side effect, Elon Musk, just because he's so driven.
He's the epitome of everything their libertarian souls love.
I think it really illustrates how these guys and Peter Thiel and many of them, like this is how they view the world.
Like they view the world as the special people, you know, usually billionaires, maybe people like Scott Adams, though not being a billionaire gets into the club, but it's a, And they're the ones that, you know, deserve to be running the show.
Yeah.
And like just that whole thing, I mean, Matt, you're a science fiction fan, but the way they talk about it.
Yeah.
Like, like, I mean, it''s just stupid the way they're talking about it.
Like, okay, we're going to go to Mars and there's no atmosphere, but that's okay.
We'll get the robots and they'll build something and they'll make the atmosphere.
We'll launch thousands of rockets.
I mean, you know, maybe there's astrophysicists or geo, what, Xeno, geo?
I don't know.
There's a discipline dedicated to geoengineering other worlds and their properties.
But as far as I understand it, Chris, like any kind of permanent settlement on Mars would be absolutely ludicrous and a terribly.
bad idea, incredibly expensive for no real reason.
Like even if you manage to do it somehow, you would be living underground because apart from.
anything else the radiation would kill you right you can't live on the surface there's no atmosphere you can't breathe there's no ozone layer it doesn't have what the earth has in terms of i'll forget what the field is the electromagnetic field that actually diverts solar rays but there's a whole bunch of reasons why like it's just it's it's a fantasy but these guys like it doesn't matter right i guess they haven't they haven't thought about it that much i suppose These are all engineering problems,
which will stimulate, you know, like just the way, you know, Elon's got to build the robot so he can build the Mars beast.
And it's like Elon might look like he's a, you know, red pilled, brain melted, conspiratorial freak on Twitter.
But really, it's just what he says in those interviews.
It's all because, you know, he's actually motivated by the most altruistic point of view.
You know, he's, he's terraforming, Matt.
He's getting ready for terraforming.
I would not be betting on it.
I mean, he can't build a self-driving car.
Waymo did.
Elon didn't manage to do that.
Many Waymo should be colonizing Mars.
Yeah, in any case, you know, this speaks to the teenage levels of insight.
You've got to get this much more when we get into the philosophy section.
But just one more bit, Matt, about, you know, Trump and Elon, because this is these.
What is the juror for this genre?
Well, I think especially like if you're a traditional male, you get a lot of value, like self value out of taking care of your tribe, doing your duty towards your tribe.
And you get to define your tribe.
And the more capable you are, the broader that tribe, the more people you should take care of.
And that's why people like Elon are so impressive because he's basically saying, humanity is my tribe.
I'm going to push us all forward.
Now, to that point, my hypothesis is that the reason that Trump prevailed is that the danger to society, to America, got to the point where male, just male biology kicked in.
And people who otherwise would have said, oh, you take care of it.
I'm sure it would be fine.
Just said, oh, no, there's a lion at my door.
And I'm the guy with the gun.
I got to kill the lion.
Again, Chris, you're saying before about just how blatantly wrong it is to describe, what if you think of the Democrats, just how blatantly wrong it is to think of the MAGA Trump administration as not being a top-down thing, right?
Like, again, he's saying that Musk's tribe is all of humanity.
And that is blatantly inconsistent with so much of what we know of Elon Musk.
What about his views on immigration?
Like, yes, he's okay with bringing in PhDs or whatever so he can to work for him and stuff like that, but not so keen on other forms of people anyway that's just it seems absurd to me that's all yeah and they the elon glazing you know matt like it it just is a absolute recurrent feature in this neck of the guru's fear right elon and trump must be the two people that are most often invoked and
completely saturated in priests right yeah and they're both like building and supporting a movement built on xenophobia and nativism so it's just again a bit galling to me to describe to describe them as people who are so high functioning that that they don't think in terms of tribes anymore they think in terms of all humanity No, they don't.
Yeah, I know.
I know Matt, but I'll play one more clip just to illustrate the way they both think about Elon.
I could play like a hundred of these.
So one more.
We can't help but mention Elon in most conversations.
He's become the universal reference to almost everything.
But I wanted to bring him up because if you look at Elon Musk's life, I'm trying to reconcile the coincidence that he believes we're a simulation with the fact that he lives like he's in a simulation.
He does live like he's in a simulation.
Yes.
He's like, well, what would be the most impossible thing I could do now?
Change the government, go to Mars, build an electric car.
So I'm trying to change.
One of the, you know, I called out in 2022, I put out a tweet saying Elon Musk is the new leader of the center right.
And then I did a troll poll, like, who's the leader of the free world?
And it was like, is it Elon Musk, Joe, or who's the leader of the world?
Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin.
And of course, Elon won, right?
And obviously my follower base is self-selected.
But, you know, I kind of knew that he's the real deal.
And I don't know him that well.
I mean, I just exchange occasional, once in a bloom, when I get a message through them.
So I don't claim to know him at all.
But there was a story that I read about him that really affected me.
The story that he's going to go on to tell there, by the way, Matt, is that like Bill Gates met Elon Musk and he was shorting, you know, Tesla and Elon was like, why are you doing that?
I thought you believed in the environment and electric cars and Bill Gates was, well, it's just an investment thing.
And then Elon realized that he wasn't motivated by his high aspirations.
So Naval's just like, that's when Elon realized that like they're different kinds of people.
Yeah.
So, you know, you might not know about this, Chris, but just speaking of Musk's amazingly good character and how he's just thinking about making humanity better.
You heard the story about how much he's demanding to get paid by Tesla.
So he's been progressively selling his shares in Tesla to, you know, to fund all kinds of other things.
But he previously was awarded a $56 billion payment package to continue acting as an executive role for the company.
$56, no one has ever been paid anything like that in vesting of shares or anything like that.
That was struck down by Delaware courts.
So now he's demanding, I think, $29 billion.
billion, right?
So that's being funded, of course, by the existing shareholders, right?
They're basically diluting the shares and just giving Elon money.
So you can view it as like a weak board or it's basically extortion because, you know, Tesla has got all kinds of problems.
And if Elon doesn't continue to sprinkle the magic fairy dust on the company and keep promising that, you know, amazing new things will be happening every 12 months, you know, maybe they'll be even worse off.
But it's just so absolutely absurd the amount of money that he's demanding as a payment, right?
He doesn't care about all that material stuff.
Have you not seen the interviews with him?
Like you've obviously got this all wrong.
Like maybe he is trying to get those billions, but if so, it's only because he wants to use them to fund things which will help humanity.
Okay.
Like don't be so cynical.
I would, I just think Tesla stock owners are the biggest suckers in the world because like not only is he doing that, basically stealing from them.
The other thing that he did is that he positioned Tesla as an AI company.
You said Tesla, like, you know, totally an AI company now, right?
This was the new, the new thing of it when AI became a big thing.
Then he set up a totally separate company, right?
For XAI, diverting the processes and stuff like that even to the new company.
I mean, it just like Trump and Trump coined, like this is the behavior of people that are basically scammers that are ripping people off for their own benefit.
Well, what about Matt the argument though?
I'll just give you a devil's advocate point here.
What about the argument that like Tesla stock is dramatically overpriced, right?
Because of Elon Musk.
He is the ultimate PR machine for Tesla.
So it only has its market value because of him and promises and, you know, exaggerations that he's made.
So what about that?
Like their stocks wouldn't be worth anywhere near what they are now if it wasn't for him at the helm.
Well, yeah, he's not at the helm.
He's just hanging around, associated with it.
He's distracted with other things, as you know, Chris.
He's busy.
But yeah, there's a lot of truth to that.
I think probably the people owning Tesla's stock deserve all they get because, yeah, I think it is that kind of company.
Well, that's, yeah, I think you're mistaken again, though.
He's very integral to the production process.
He spots things that the engineers haven't seen and is like able to get things working at Tesla and whatnot.
So I don't know where you've been getting your information from, but yeah, he's pretty integral there.
something else that will tickle your hypocrisy from that.
So you didn't like it when Naval was lionizing the Republicans for their kind of...
One thing that we do have to give them credit for, though, is how much they are focused on like paying attention to markets.
Their economic type of approach is Frac Salad, the MAGA regime I mean.
I'm biased for American greatness, but if you know some of that is hyperbole, et cetera, patriotism.
But I do think that Americans have one superpower, which is we will chican absolutely anything.
And until that, capitalism works because it makes you fire your best friend.
Right.
If you can't fire your best friend, if you can't tear the entire structure down, if you can't cannibalize your last product to put out your new iPhone, you're going nowhere yeah all successful systems take feedback from free markets or nature and it's it's when you're you know uh when you're president and you say i'm not going to listen to what the market's telling me i know what's right that's when you're going to fail economically Well, Matt, you know, that's the problem with the Democrats.
They're always just dictating the markets and not listening to the feedback, right?
It's a good thing that we have these Republicans, libertarians in control, right?
Because they're certainly, they're not going to do things like raise tariffs.
No.
Well, that's what happened.
Trump, he listened to the universe and the universe told him, we need lots of tariffs.
Stop.
Yeah.
Yeah, it wasn't an arbitrary decision.
It was what the markets and the environment was telling him.
Yeah, that's it.
And so you heard, you know, the kind of like also Matt, that praise of capitalism, you know, red and toothless claw, you know, just you'd find your best friend because it's not profitable enough.
That sits so at odds with these gurus who sycophantically praise each other constantly, constantly playing in these like little psychodramas around their court intrigues, right?
It is not all pragmatic utilitarians here trying to work out the most cost saving things.
It's much more interpersonal sycophancy well it's also completely contradicting naval's own cookie cutter philosophy right which is that you find worthwhile trustworthy people and you be a trustworthy long-time friend with them, which means quite explicitly, you'd say, you know, you've got to stick by them even if they're not performing and stuff in the short term because you've got to be a long-term thinker, you see.
So that all sounds great on the back of the cereal packet when you're reading it in the morning.
But, you know, it doesn't actually mean anything because he can contradict himself whenever he likes.
Oh, you're exactly right.
And he does it so many times where he's like stealing something in this that is like a philosophy that he lives by.
And then he goes on to contradict it.
And I have examples of that.
But, you know, so again, are we demonstrating that he is, you know, actually like a polemical right-leaning person?
Have we done the job of that?
What's this?
Many people still have debts.
Well, the right doesn't even know what the network is because the right is not a coherent entity.
You know, the left is a set of people who hate market outcomes, whether in the free market of evolution and genetics and nature or in the free market of capitalism, right?
So because they don't want inequality.
It's an equality religion, right?
Like formerly Christianity, now elements of it mixed up with Marxism and identity and race politics.
And you get this thing where they basically want everyone to have equal outcomes no matter what.
And then on the right, you know, you have the people who just want to be left alone.
They're like, hey, just leave me alone.
It's basically the collection of people who don't like the left.
And it's a ragtag collection.
And if you had to divide them up broadly, there are at least three groups.
There's sort of the fiscal free market, you know, classic conservatives.
There's sort of the people who are bound by race and ethnicity and, you know, common culture.
And then there's the people who are religious and, you know, like raising families and God fearing and so on.
And sort of these three categories together, that when you kind of get them together, you get the right, but it's inherently disorganized.
So they don't form institutions, they don't form networks, they're busy with their jobs, they're not like running out and creating NGOs and institutions.
And they're not as ideological.
So I don't think even the right can identify the right.
If you had two different right-wing people list the top figures in the industry or in the group, it would break down after five people.
They would just put this in three different sets.
Oh, what have I done?
Yeah, the right wing, they're out for the jobs.
They're not building like NGOs and institutions.
This useless thing.
The left is a Marxist.
like identity focused cult right that just wants to tear down the free market i like how we describe the second faction of the right a group of people who are bound together by ethnicity and uh common culture and uh something else it was just it was it was a pretty way to to describe it yeah like do you buy that you know cartoonish description of the left versus the right you know the left just It's just like a religion, right?
Where it's like a mixture of Marxism and Christianity, where we just want everyone to have exactly the same outcomes.
That's the left.
Whereas the right, they just want to be left al alone i mean that's that's the way he would frame it i guess as a libertarian leading person just like i don't think anyone could find that an interesting political analysis except scott adams well well matt no but i think you're feeling to understand the threat that the democrats pose to democracy Now, there is only one valid comeback to that, by the way, which was made by some commentators, which is, well, Jan 6 was an attempt to change the rules of the game.
And I would argue no, because, you know, I can go through all that evidence why, but it's like, yeah, a bunch of unarmed people taking over a building and nobody actually dying in the attack.
Like, that's not how you take over a country this size.
You don't just seize a building, right?
We'll trespass until you surrender.
Exactly.
And that was so exaggerated, I mean, yeah, it was a bad thing to storm, you know, into the capital, but it was so exaggerated after the fact by the left and so hoaxed that then they just lost all credibility on it.
But regardless, that was the only like slight comeback you could have to it.
But it's very clear there's one side that keeps talking about changing the rules, packing the Supreme Court, adding states, destroying the Electoral College, right?
These are all attempts to change the rules of the game because they don't like losing.
And it was, it is a one-way slope that we've been on for a while.
You know, no ID voting, that's another, you know, mail and ballot voting, mandatory voting, non-secret voting, right?
right uh felon not being able to run for office right let's make him a felon okay we call you a felon now you can't run for office all of these are attempts to hack the system and i i like democracies because you can vote people out of power because if you can't vote them out of power then you got to shoot your way out and that's not good for anybody you know especially the unarmed 60 of the country there you go there you go i mean look we could criticize all of that I will, Matt.
She's not there if you want.
I just don't want to bore people with it because, you know, it's plain just how partisan he is, how absurd it is to downplay the capital insurrection, whatever you want to call it, the degree to which he is or to make out as the the democrats that are like stealing elections and um what are what else were they doing like meal ballots voting yeah and all that like and then you listed a bunch of other things which which clearly Trump's MAGA people
are guilty of and I'll just want to say for the record to American listeners, like no ID voting is not some radical plan to undermine democracy.
And the proof is that Australia has never had ID required voting and it is run by the Australian Electoral Commission and it is widely.
regarded as one of the most open, transparent, and non-corrupt and accurate voting systems in the world.
So I'm just, I'm pretty tired of.
of them running that one out as if it's a, you know, a plot to, you know, steal American democracy.
So yeah, Naval really at times here just reveals himself as being, like he speaks very politely and sometimes he uses kind of nice language, which makes him sound a lot more pleasant than a lot of our gurus.
But he is absolutely conspiracy, red pilled, up with the best of them.
Yeah.
So like.
Yeah, so like, you know, January 6th, Matt, like you said, Naval Pineda, oh, it was just like, you know, a little protest, a couple of trespassing, you know, like not a big deal.
But that ignores that since then, we know about the fake electors plot, Trump trying to get alternative representatives, right, and to delay the vote.
that was occurring on that day as part of that.
Why were they there on January 6th?
There was a reason, right?
And it was to try and convince Mike Pence to not sign off on the vote that would lead to Trump leaving power.
So there's just a clear misrepresentation of that event and what it was about.
And then on top of that, this whole thing about, you know, the Democrats unpacking the court and all this kind of thing, it ignores that the Republicans are the party that refused to let Barack Obama.
select a Supreme Court justice when it fell in the last year of his term, Merrick Garland.
They refused to confirm him because they said that wouldn't be fair.
And then when the same thing happened in Trump's administration, when what's her name died?
The Democratic justice, right, died.
Then all of the Republicans were like, well, no, it's okay, right?
And they acknowledged that actually this was a double standard, some of them.
And they just said, well, but that's politics, right?
So this notion about like the Republicans are playing by the rules and the Democrats are just always willing to like bend the rules to, you know, to their advantage, it's just not accurate.
And the same thing with the voting scheme, right?
Like the thing that he's referencing now is all the conspiracies about like during COVID, Trump encouraged his voters not to do mailing voting because he viewed it as a conspiracy or whatever.
And then people knew that the Democrats were going to get more votes from meal-in votes during that election.
And that's what happened.
And Trump tried to present that as a conspiracy.
So Naval is just eating up every right-wing conspiratorial polemical talking point and regurgitating it as if it's like an objective fact.
And to me, it's no different than Scott Adams.
just like said a bit less sinister yes he's just they agree They do.
He just comes across as less sinister.
And I'm really, I'm stuck on that downplaying of the capital riot thing because the way he framed it was just a.
totally non-violent trespassing.
Right.
You know, like he described it as a hoax.
And yes, maybe no one died except for maybe what that one lady on the other side.
There was a couple of police officers.
yeah yeah who died shortly afterwards but yeah 100 140 were injured on the day some of them extremely badly the justice department described it as like the largest single day mass assault of law enforcement officers in our nation's history and they were defending the capital building, right?
Where there were senators like hiding in there, like legitimately afraid for their safety, which was demonstrably a reasonable fear because of the kinds of stuff that they found on some of them and the plans that they had for them.
So, you know, like some of them were severely injured.
It took like brain injury, spinal injuries, like beaten with pipes and things.
So it just gets that is.
That was just people being rowdy, Matt.
That was just a bit of rowdy.
Now, what a threat to democracy could there be from trying to delay a vote to install alternative electors that weren't the ones that should be representing the districts?
That's the kind of stuff that, you know, that's not a real threat to democracy, right?
I'm just trying to imagine like what would happen if I'm trying to put myself in an American shoes, like if a parliament house in Canberra, if that was besieged by a group of people like that, climbing up walls, getting in, and there's the federal police there trying to fight them off, and they're trying to get their way in to get the parliamentarians with handcuffs and zip ties or whatever.
I would be just outraged and extremely pissed off.
And so somebody to say I was no big deal is fine.
You know, it's just getting a bit rowdy.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Oh, I think I think we're doing them a bit justice, Matt, because Navalny is a bit more of a nuanced thinker.
I mean, listen to this.
Yeah.
And so I think what you have is you have very capable people now who decided that, you know, the nonsense has to stop, the identity politics has to stop, the gaslighting has to stop, the lawfare has to stop, the censorship has to stop.
and hacking the system has to stop and we got to put our foot down.
So you have some, so in this administration, I think you have some very intelligent people working with Trump.
Hopefully, they will figure out how to navigate the bureaucracy and the Intel apparatus before they get blown up, right?
Because.
the Intel apparatus and the bureaucracy are not going to give up.
I have a theory that over a long enough period of time, the people with the guns are always in charge, right?
So if you look at Roman history at the end, all the emperors came from the Praetorian Guard, which was guarding the emperor, now they were suddenly in charge.
If you look at what happened in Russia, you know, the FSB, the KGB, the secret police, the people who were guarding the premiers, they took over, right?
So that's Putin and his crew.
So on a long enough cycle, the Praetorian Guard is eventually in charge.
The people with the guns always end up in charge.
So that's happened kind of everywhere in the world where the Intel operators have, Intel apparatus, for example, has their secret courts and their secret laws and their gag orders so why hasn't it fully happened in the us it's the only place in the world and it's because of the second amendment because the people with the guns are in charge because the people have the guns excuse me the only place in the world where this hasn't happen uh yeah no matt are you gonna talk about australia or these other countries what about the uk it's like the
The UK has fallen.
Have you not been listening to Sam Harris?
It's Sharia law.
Like I say, he is precisely as cynical as Scott Adams.
You could tell by Scott Adams'response, he'd love that take.
The people who've been going to, he's like, oh, yeah.
And yeah, like he's describing...
The deep state.
Well, yeah, he was describing the deep state.
He's saying, you know, the good people that Trump has got in there now, these amazing people from silicon valley and stuff they're going to set everything to rights but they're going to be fighting against the deep state yeah the deep state is going to uh going to be trying to slow them down and trap them in quicksand and but if the deep state doesn't get them the people with the guns like the cia the fbi who knows maybe other groups as well they're gonna they're gonna blow them up they're gonna get they're gonna get rid of them i mean you know,
like they don't really believe in, you know, you know how cynical scott adams is he doesn't really believe that there is any such thing as a democracy like a liberal democracy it's not real it's all a scam whatever and you can sort of tell that the world doesn't really believe in it either like it's very it's very dark enlightenment oh yes now i know matt there's two clips i want to play here to highlight this so if you think you know well okay so he's he's right-leaning right obviously he's a little bit right-leaning
but he's he's not so cynical in his worldview like this is not scott adams level let's just hear his tick on like geopolitics a little bit and you know the differences between different countries?
The big war doesn't make sense for any sufficiently advanced society because any sufficiently advanced society is just short on technology and ideas.
It's not short on resources.
It's not short on, you know, it's not fighting for food.
But we're living in this weird world where you have 21st century societies like the United States or parts of the United States and Japan.
And then you have countries that are literally 150 years back in terms of their moral, cultural, intellectual, technological development.
And so to them, the idea of like conquering somebody still makes sense, right?
Beating up their neighbor to get a piece of land or to lose something still makes sense.
And it's absurd, obviously, but the problem is the technology developed in the Neolithic countries kind of filters into the Paleolithic countries.
You can then use that same technology 10 years later, and 10 years is not enough for them to have developed their moral and cultural institutions to know how to deal with it, to realize, hey, there's more to life than blowing each other up.
That's why I think the top five powers should just say, why don't we just stay in the top five powers forever and just make sure the little guys don't kill any of us?
Just like teenage boys, Matt.
Yes, there's differences between different cultures and different countries and their development and levels of democracy and so on, but describing other countries as Paleolithic and the kind of elite countries at the top.
And the other countries are kind of getting their technologies and hurting themselves and hurting other people because they haven't developed enough morally or socially.
Like, it's a very colonial viewpoint, very racist in a lot of ways.
Like, I know that Naval is of Indian background, but you can be of Indian background and be racist as well.
And he clearly is.
Yeah, it's, it's, um, yeah, it's both sort of pubescent in its tone and, uh, yeah, very Scott Adams, very unattractive as well.
What was the last bit where the top five countries should just get together?
Yeah.
Yeah, so that's, I mean, they go on to talk, un security council was you know kind of but that also speaks to like scott's view which is you know like he presents himself as this philosophical mastermind who knows all these deep topics and psychology and history but it like he's fundamentally just like a silly discourse so i feel he doesn't know history so like when his idea is like,
maybe if the countries could make like a club where they agree and then Naval needs to say, well, you know, there is a thing that happened after World War II, right, called the UN Security Council.
And yeah, that is his worldview, you know, like Scott Adams and Naval's worldview that there's the smart people, the smart countries, the good people, and they should be ruling.
over the people on the bottom.
This is why it just keeps reminding me of Curtis Yalvin, because it's the same sort of weird pseudo-libertarian political thinking that's come out of Silicon Valley these days, where as you say the the philosophy is is that there are just a few a tiny percentage of super effective super special people in the world they're they're fantastic and amazing they should be running everything and now they're just transposing that ridiculous philosophy
to international relations or that you know the really good countries really special ones really successful ones you know they should just be you know the little club should just be running the world yeah so you know they apply that to the geopolitical analysis and we've heard various versions of it applied to domestic politics, right?
But that point that you just made, Matt, of like, you know, the kind of Uberman and their capacities versus the Riffraff, I think Naval puts this quite nicely here.
The modern flavor is that the individual is getting more powerful.
because they're becoming more leverage.
So someone like Elon Musk can have the leverage of tens of thousands of brilliant engineers and producers working for him.
He can have factories of robots manufacturing things.
He can have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital behind him.
And he can project himself through media to hundreds of millions of people.
That is more power than any individual could have had historically.
So the great men of history are becoming greater.
That said, that same leverage is increasing the gap between the have and have not.
So in the wealth game, more people are winning overall and the average is going up, but in the status game, there are essentially more losers.
There are more invisible men and women who are getting nothing out of life and have no leverage, relatively speaking.
Objectively speaking, they might be better off, they still have phones and they still have TVs and so on.
It's not absolute creatures.
We're relative creatures.
Correct.
And so to the extent that we're relative creatures, there are more losers than winners.
And in a democracy, those people will outnumber the winners and they will vote the winners down.
And so that's the battle that kind of goes on.
It doesn't sound such a fun.
fan of democracy there.
Sounds like the losers who are, you know, not capable of rising to the level of the great man will try to take them down again.
Yeah.
You know, by voting for things like, I don't know, minimum wages and health care and stuff.
Like that will be, you know, us sheep, you know, us pathetic also rans.
That'll be us trying to take a little piece of the pie for ourselves.
The great men of history will need to do something about that, I think.
Yeah.
So I wanted to cover this stuff at the start before we get into some of the more abstract philosophical topics.
Because I think it's the important thing to ground is like, this is the quality of thought that you are approaching here.
And we're going to move into more esoteric topics.
But as we'll see, it's the same level of intellectual power that's being brought to bear.
So I think it's worth emphasizing that alone Naval certainly thinks he's a very unique you know insightful thinker who is outside of most people's paradigm he sounds very much like a standard libertarian right-wing tech bro who believes almost every right-wing conspiracy that he comes across and has a very polemical, anti-democratic view about how the country should function.
So yeah, I just thought that's a good thing to flag up at the beginning.
Yeah, yeah, no, I think it's good.
So I think let's draw a line under this political stuff.
I think we've established where Naval sits there.
Yeah, let's move on to the esoteric stuff.
Yeah, good idea.
Well, actually, Matt, just before the esoteric stuff, there is one last thing that thematically connects to all of this jazz, which is, we've heard boutique political tics, right?
Not just your red meat, right, leaning standard polemics.
Partisan politics, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, how about conspiracy theories?
Do we have unique, I mean, because these guys aren't your Borg standard conspiracy theories, right?
Like that's not their jazz.
Or is it?
What do you think realistically, once you look at the history of, say, Kennedy on, have we really been picking presidents?
I mean, let's watch it.
I was watching an old documentary about.
I don't mean conspiratorial, but yeah, Kennedy was shot and they still haven't released the files, which is absurd.
They still haven't released the files 60 years later.
Nixon, you know, the whole Watergate thing, now we know how the video works.
So what was that all about?
Yeah, it's, you know.
But even the exceptions look kind of weird, right?
Because you get, okay, Reagan, you know, he was just all American, but he was going to spend a whole lot on the military.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, these are all pro-military candidates.
Right.
So what was the exception?
So Reagan, why is Reagan the exception?
And why is he not the exception?
Because he was going to spend a lot of the military?
He's all American.
So, you know, he's, I guess, not the, you know, corrupted president because the right wing have this kind of hegeographic view around Reagan, right?
Sure.
You got to carve out for him.
Though, I did like Matt.
Naval, you know, of course, with the RFK assassination stuff.
Yes, that's that you would expect.
But he also threw in Watergate, but not like Watergate as a conspiracy, more like because the media uncovered it.
And we know that the media is always like we know how they do things now.
What was that actually all about?
That Nixon conspiracy.
Right.
So what we think happened, which was there was a Nixonian conspiracy that was uncovered.
Which was uncovered, right, by the media.
Yeah.
There's another conspiracy underneath that.
I see.
Yeah.
That's.
And you heard the trademark that.
there scott adams like you know realistically do you think we've actually elected presidents you know he did a very poor job of imitating his sinister fucking tone of voice there chris but he did lead with that yeah so uh just pointing out right that rfk kenedy assassination conspiracies apparently concerns about Watergate.
This is the kind of level we're talking with Naval.
And he goes on a little bit later just to make it clearer about around Kennedy.
So there's only a small percentage of people who care if Kennedy was killed by the CIA or not.
You know, it might be enough to tip the vote on the margin, but I don't, I just don't think enough people care.
or that Nixon was framed, you know, like, okay, half the country will believe it and the other half won't.
You know exactly how this will work out, right?
Yeah, I think it's true or false.
If it has a political component to it, half the country will believe it and half the country won't.
I feel I'm only curious.
Like I'm not bought into the answer at all.
I'm not either.
For the record, I don't think the CIA killed him, but I'll bet one of their ex-people was, you know, probably went rogue as well.
Yeah, something along those lines.
Yeah, their fingerprints are somewhere, but not directly on the gun.
They're not partisan conspiracy theorists.
They don't have a dog in this fight, but he does think that the Watergate was a hoax.
Yeah.
Yeah, that Nixon was set up.
I'll just try to take him down.
And that the CIA's fingerprints were all over the Kennedy thing as well.
But yeah, not not conspiracy theorists these are just ideas they're bad yeah and you do like matt you know there's like no i don't believe the cia killed him i don't i you know no no it wasn't probably one of their rogue agents like their fingerprints you're like you you do believe the cia killed them you just have like a slightly you know different version it's a kind of rogue element within the cia that you think is responsible but this is part of the course where they they kind of presented
that we're not just endorsing the standard conspiratorial thing.
And then they go on to repeat, almost word for word, the Bork standard political or conspiratorial thing.
Well, you say Bork standard, but I'd never heard of this particular one, that the Nixon fiasco was actually a thing to, you know, Nixon was innocent.
He was basically set up and it was a hoax to take him down.
This is clearly some right-wing conspiracy I've not heard of.
No, you're quite right.
That actually is somewhat whistbook theory.
That's a conspiracy that I haven't come across before, I think, Elar.
So yeah, we have to give Naval credit.
That is a boutique conspiracy.
But maybe it's not that surprising because it kind of balances up with like a right-wing president, you know, being smeared.
So he's talking about a Kennedy assassination, which would be a left-wing president.
But of course, at this point in time, 2025, like Kennedy, you know, believing that Kennedy was assassinated, it was far enough back that that's bipartisan, endorsed conspiracy.
You're right.
You're right.
Yeah, that is true.
Well, Ma, I promised you that we would get into some more esoteric topics.
But out of this, you know, murky swamp that we too often paddle around in, right, with partisan politics and conspiracy theories, let's get into something a bit deeper.
We've got a philosopher here.
here we've got a you know we got a lot of wisdom in this room.
There surely are some insights that they can offer us about different things.
Now, I, oh, actually, so I realize that I've just said we're getting out of conspiracy theories and this clip might have a conspiracy theory.
But on the other hand, Matt, it might just be talking about technology that actually exists.
That's true.
It's like quitting a clone.
By the way, you can already clone yourself.
You know, rich people are already cloning dogs and cats.
I hate to say it, not me, but I know people who have literally cloned their dead animal and they have a clone of it running around.
And you ask the kids, you're like, hey, how's the clone?
And they're like, oh, same behavior.
You know, I can't tell it apart from the old dog.
So for a dog, it's the problem solved.
And you can already clone yourself.
Their companies are doing, you know, embryos stuff, like they have the ability to do clones.
I'll bet you, the Chinese Communist Party, the top people have some clones on ice.
That is so cool to think about.
They could just break one out.
Isn't that like, what is the sci-fi foundation?
Okay.
So clones exist.
They live in the world with us.
I'd notice he's not saying, like, at first off, thinking oh he's saying that we currently have the technology that if we wanted to we could clone people and i think i think that would probably be a true statement right yeah because we can clone sheep and stuff like that right well to be clear you can create a genetic copy of someone but yes it's not the same person it's it's like it's got it's got to look like you have to grow them up yeah that's right they they still
they're like identical twins right it's like an identical twins are clones right in this sense but he's he's saying no no we they are cloning people the child the Chinese leadership have got clones on ice and they've broke one out when they need to.
Yeah, okay.
That's probably varying into the conspiratorial.
Yes.
Scott Adams likes it.
You know, he points out that it's a sci-fi kind of thing.
But, you know, that was really the lead in to talk a little bit more about some deeper topics, Matt.
So, you know, what about God and the universe and all this kind of thing?
Like, what about it?
I mean, there are people, a lot of people are opting out of the gene pool.
They're not even having kids.
Can't be bothered, right?
Or it's too difficult.
I think that's a mistake.
I think if you can have kids, you should have kids.
It kind of answers the meaning of life question, right?
But my rule on that is you either got to have kids or you got to find God.
Like pick one of the two.
And I go, what's that?
Well, no.
I've read God's debris.
I've read your simulation stuff.
I know the game you're playing.
You're playing the God game.
And you're just playing it in your own way with your own words.
So you have more conviction, which makes sense, right?
It's not some white bearded dude who lived 2000 years ago has certain commandments.
through for yourself and you're stitching it together in your own framework your own models your own language and so it's solid within you you have you have your own i wouldn't call it fa faith because it's there through reason, but you have your own deep spirituality, although you don't use that language or those words.
And I think you'd have to, otherwise you wouldn't be happy right now because then you'd be just self-obsessed and looking for pleasure in the next pill or the next thing or the next activity.
You have to have a mission.
If you have a mission, you have to have a mission.
Okay, so what's he saying there?
He's saying he's congratulating Scott because he's saying Scott, like everyone else, has got their own conception of God.
Not like everyone else.
So there's only two.
He's saying like you could be, you know, a complete nihilist, like, you know, you're either the gene game and you're giving up on having a bigger mission and, you know, you're purely about hedonistic pleasure, like if he is not, you know, like pure, if he is like, oh, they do.
There's no capital morality.
They've got no, there's no, shut up.
Stop playing into their truth.
So this is a common refrain of like spiritual religion.
like if there's no higher thing why like do anything right why be good why not just screw everyone why shouldn't i just take my pants off right now and run around waving my hands around but But these are high level thinkers, so they cannot simply, you know, it's not, they're not into religion like the rest of the other refraph.
They have a more refined sense where they've understood the deeper meanings, right?
So like, yes, he's read God's Debris, which is Scott Adams' work, you know, talking about his version of spirituality, though he doesn't use those words, Matt, right?
It's a, it's a lot more complicated like that, as it always is in these things.
But fundamentally, Naval, like all of the sense speakers, like Jordan Peterson, like so many of them, basically say you have to have this yearning for spiritual transcendence.
Otherwise, like what's the point yeah some kind of definition of a personal god in an abstract sense um yes yeah and because all good things flow from that you know everything good you know delaying gratification you know contributing to society being a decent person having any kind of meaning in your life it is it is all downstream of of that uh so uh yeah okay yeah i've heard that before that is a common refrain amongst yeah Jordan Peterson
and the rest of the gurus.
Yeah, that's right.
And Matt, there might be a little section here which will surprise you because, you know, Scott Adams is buoyed up by this conversation and he just wants to mention what's his bigger mission?
What's he about?
I'm finding politics as my escape, you know, because if I do anything that helps people, like, you know, I've had a job where people contact me all the time and say, oh, you helped me lose weight or get a new job or something.
And that just feeds me.
That's just like, oh my God, that's the nourishment I need.
It's like, I helped you.
Wow.
That's nice.
Yep.
So we're much helping people.
That's always what I get from Scott Adams.
It's like a deep well of altruistic concern for the welfare of mankind.
Every time I listen to him, I'm like, God, you know, if we had more people like Scott on the earth, what a wonderful place it would be, you know?
Yeah.
So he just gets a buzz out of helping people.
That does sound like Scott.
Yes.
Yes, that's him.
That's him down to tea.
Well, so now, Matt, like I said, we're going to get into some heady topics, right?
First of all, though, we have to consider, you know, there's been a lot of chatter about So let's just hear them discuss that a little bit.
I don't think I've asked you about UFOs yet, have I?
I've never talked about UFOs, have I?
I don't think so.
You might have.
I'm a UFO skeptic.
Like, I don't know.
So am I. So do you think there are – so the fact that the government keeps telling us that somebody else has seen the spacecraft and we can't tell you where it is or what it looks like.
Right, right.
There's too many camera phones.
There's too many people.
There's too many blabbermouths.
There's too many wannabe heroes, you know, that information will be out already plus why would the aliens even hide it and how would the UFOs get captured and how did they even make it here so far and wouldn't we see some evidence like electromagnetic radiation from their transmission.
There's just so many problems with the UFO thing.
Yeah, okay.
So one of them is definitely a UFO skeptic.
Scott, I mean, it sounded...
I wasn't quite sure what Scott was saying.
He was something about the government and...
That's kind of what he's invoking there.
Yeah, because the government is always talking about, you know, someone who's seen a UFO, but yeah, the government behavior is suspicious, shall we say?
Yeah, it's now again, you might say that the Trump administration in particular is full of people that are like into the UFO thing, or that the whole network that Scott Adams and Brett Weinstein and so on operate, and, you know, Michael Schellenberger, Eric Weinstein, these are UFO guys, right?
But no, Matt, that's not the case.
So Naval there, you know.
pushing back though, right?
I think it's fair to say.
And he wants to make a point, Matt, about epistemology, which I think we need to hear.
We need to hear.
And so let's hear him, I'd like not.
So when you're trying to figure out how to navigate this world full of dueling memes that are trying to occupy your brain, what you really need is good epistemology.
Epistemology is just the theory of knowledge, fancy word for the theory of knowledge you need to know how to tell what's true from what's false and that's becoming one of the most important if not the most important survival trait in society the other one might be like can you resist eating sugar although i think ozempic will solve that so uh It's really about how do you tell what's true from what's false?
And too many people are lazy.
They don't have the foundation to figure out what's true, what's false.
And they just like assume one thing, then next thing you're in this giant edifice of like men can give birth, right?
Or UFOs.
are real or I'm embarrassed, you know, for the people who are into this, but it's like, you know, the pyramid was like giant battery or something.
You know, that one seems to be in vogue right now.
But there's always a bunch of these lunatic fringe theories that go through.
And I just think the, like, if you have any kind of understanding of physics, politics, people, numbers, you know, numeracy, you would understand that, no, the government's not hiding a bunch of UFOs somewhere in the area.
That's good advice in general there.
You know, like you might cribble with some of the examples he raises, but overall, he's making a valid point, isn't he?
You know, an important skill in the modern environment there's working out what's true from what's false and he points out some things that are very silly like the pyramids or batry our good friend joe roogan um and chris williamson discussed that they really they've got good epistemology those guys they got to the bottom of that one um yeah what was the other one ufos that's fine i mean i they always mention the gender ideology and offenders and it's not the same right whatever you think about
that topic it's an issue about definitions and wordplay rather than a delusional belief like ufos and batteries under pyramids.
They're not in the same category.
Well, I think they would normally equate that to things like arguing that there's no biological difference between like athletic performance between men and women, that kind of thing.
I mean, they can at least always retreat to that.
But yes, you're right.
Fair enough.
It ties into, you know, the whole edifice there on the right about the concern around trans topics and that kind of thing.
In any case, I think most of the examples that someone would normally reach for there, whether it's pyramids or UFOs, these tend to be more popular amongst the right and the MAGA movements that these guys like.
Yeah, these days.
Yes.
Yes.
So that may be true, Matt, but here so far, we've just had both of them.
You know, they've expressed skepticism.
You know, they have their concerns about the government, what it's, you know, trying to do with its narratives or not.
But there isn't any endorsement so far of like, you know, UFO stuff.
Yes, political conspiracies they discussed.
But, you know, refreshing, isn't it?
That they're shooting down.
Yes.
There's so many conspiracies.
Yeah, no, it's great.
It's totally reassured.
So now we've got out of the politics stuff because obviously they're partisan brains.
They believe that the Capitol thing was a hoax.
The scandal with Nixon was a hoax.
So, look, we know they're partisan people, but hey, who isn't these days in the United States?
Once we get into more abstract stuff, everything is going to be fine.
They're on solid ground.
They're good thinkers.
You know, they've got good epistemology.
here's scott's response So here's my favorite recreational belief about UFOs.
This is not a real belief, it's a recreational belief that apparently our moon has so many oddities to it compared to other moons that we can see.
that it's almost like it doesn't look like a real moon.
And then some people say it's a hollow spacecraft that has been there.
But I've added to it that on the dark side of the moon there's this enormous crater impact that you can't see from our side.
But so my theory is that the aliens were using their giant ship that didn't look like it was covered with dirt when it first got there.
Maybe it was just a big, big ball.
And they were sort of trying to geoform the earth for later.
Maybe they gave us a little DNA and stuff like that and they're watching it.
And maybe even they thought they would block an asteroid or something from destroying the good work they've done.
Maybe they moved the moon in front of it and took the hit.
So my theory is that the inhabitants of the moon space vehicle all died, but it's automated.
And that what we see as UFOs that do that weird thing where you can see them and they show up on radar, but they seem to be able to change directions like faster than an object can, that they're holograms from the moon.
In other words, there is something there, but it's just the intersection of electromagnetic waves.
So maybe you could pick it up on radar and maybe you could see it, but if you put your hand on it, it wouldn't be there.
And yet it could operate like a sonar or radar, which is if you send any kind of signal into the world, you can get a ping back.
Now, it's important to remember, Chris, that this is a recreational theory, but he's really thought it through.
It has something to do with that.
Weird, be careful.
A recreational belief.
He's not in details.
to the theory as he as he puts it but yeah so you know normally when people say that kind of thing they would say like have you heard this one like the moon is a specieship, right?
But Scott, like you say, he takes a lot of time to flesh out the specific details.
So these aliens, they were terraforming, right?
And then they needed to flock.
And Naval is just one like, uh-huh.
Yeah.
I think Naval is wondering why he's telling him all of this.
Okay.
But look, it's just a recreational theory.
I think he's just giving all those details because it's, I don't know, just for fun.
It's a fun thing to, it's a good thing to spend your time thinking about and talking about.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, maybe.
It does sound, like, because the bit where he also adds, and, like, you've got all these videos, right, where they're not showing up on radar and they're zooming, like, so just, they had a conversation just one minute ago about, like, you know, those are not reliable, you know, the kind of silly videos.
But here, Scott's skepticism seems somewhat lesser than Naval's, right?
He does seem to imply that these mysterious objects darting about and defying the laws of physics merits some kind of explanation, moon-based or otherwise.
Yes, and just to be clear, Matt, so we keep it all clear here, so the moon is an alien spaceship and it's, like, those little UFOs that people get in videos and whatnot, the reason that they're able to behave bizarrely is because they're holograms, right?
Yep.
Now, Scott does say that they are things that you might be able to pick up on radar and sonar, right?
But, you know, future hologram technology, Matt, who can say, right?
Because as far as other holograms, it is purely projections of light, right?
It's not going to pick up on a sonar.
Well, I think, doesn't sonar only work underwater?
But anyway, let's say radar.
I think radar generally needs to bump into a solid object.
So it's different from our normal conception of a hologram.
But, you know, it's the future technology.
We don't know what kind of technology is.
Moon aliens.
Moon aliens.
Epistemology, it works differently.
And so anyway, like they said, you know, good epistemology.
Let's get back.
So how does Naval respond?
He wants to, you know, pull things back down to earth, so to speak.
I just think eyewitness evidence is worthless people are very gullible so i don't waste neurons in thinking about ufos um like i like i there's there are zillions of, you know, probably nearly infinite Kepler planets in the universe or in the multiverse.
So yeah, there is life out there somewhere.
It's probably just you don't think so?
Well, I'm still caught on we're a simulation.
And if we are, there doesn't need to be life anywhere else.
I don't think your simulation, okay, let's go into the simulation thing because I'm going to take you up on it.
I don't think it explains anything useful.
Okay, here's what the simulation hypothesis basically does.
It just kicks the whole God problem up one level, right?
It's an axiomatic kind of thing saying, well, we're just in a simulation.
It can't be falsified.
You can always just say, well, that's just a simulation.
You can cherry pick like with horoscopes, you can cherry pick outcomes and say, well, that would only happen in the simulation and you can ignore all the ones that followed regularity.
It doesn't actually explain anything.
It doesn't make any risky and narrow predictions.
It's not falsifiable.
So it's not scientific.
It's purely a belief.
It's a faith-oriented belief.
And you can replace the word simulation with God.
You can replace it with computer program, VR reality, chemical scum, brain in the vat, and the whole thing still holds.
So it's a very easy to vary theory.
Yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, so Scott, while he's definitely interested in the idea of aliens coming to Earth in a moon-sized spaceship he's not convinced that there are aliens anywhere that would be it was a recreational belief man i see you gotta remember that gotta remember that um uh because because he's uh because what about simulation right so okay i mean look that all that all is relatively coherent i suppose if I
mean, if you take the premise of simulation, then you could just be a simulation to do the earthlings, right?
So the moon aliens are also just part of the simulation.
I don't think that, I think that's a separate recreational belief we have to put that aside and we just have to imagine um scott's simulation thing involves simulating okay let's leave the meneleons behind that's right that's that's that's finished now yeah yeah they're on the other bigger things now the simulation hypothesis yeah well yeah that's right it just goes this goes places but to be to be fair
to novelle at this early onset i mean his objection to it is conventional and this the standard one it's basically solipsism right you can claim claim that everything's an illusion, everything's a simulation, it's just a very good one.
So no matter how much things seem to match up with, you know, matching, there is a physical world out there, a physical universe.
You could say, well, it's all an illusion that's been manipulated by some omnipotent or extremely powerful entities beyond your ken.
And it's a conventional rebuttal to this.
Yes, Andy, he references the brain in the vat, the kind of matrix that the world is an illusion from you being, you know, a brain in the vat plugged in somewhere.
There are other ones.
There are ones about like the universe was just created, you know, well, usually Christians are saying like 6,000 years ago, but you could say yesterday.
But with all of the history of a universe that has existed before.
And, you know, what about my memories?
Yeah, but your brain was just created exactly in that configuration that it would believe.
Right.
Can you prove it?
It didn't happen.
That's right.
The dinosaur bones were put in the earth, created old, etc.
So you can always run that argument.
And yeah, that's fair enough.
Well, and also more credit to Naval.
He raised the point that people are a bit gullible.
You know, I agree with him.
I think there might be two of them.
Let's cover.
See, she should take that more seriously.
But in any case, eyewitness testimony and whatnot, you can't rely on that.
So all good objections so far.
far scott you know he's a man that has fought these things for so he's gonna push back a little bit right so um let's see you know scott's first objection But what about the statistical likelihood?
If we know that one is greater than the other, there are two places where the simulation theory differs from just a pure made up God theory.
One of those is that the statistical argument, which is like on a long enough time scale, your computers get strong enough that you can do this, right?
The second problem, sorry, the second thing that it kind of addresses is it kind of says that, and that's why reality is quantum underneath, zeros and ones, right?
It'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.
So you're basically saying that it's just...
So you just wait long enough, the computers get good enough.
Well, okay, what would happen?
Okay.
They're already good enough, but go ahead.
Okay.
Well, what happens is anytime you're simulating something, it is much, much, much lower resolution.
and much less real than the base reality that you're simulating out of.
Well, Matt, you know, like Scott says, computers can already simulate entire universes down to the resolution that we experience.
So what's stopping us, you know, from being in a simulation?
Yeah.
So, anyway, the speculative philosophical argument for the...
Species like us will use it and sooner or later the dwellers in whatever universe will use that computing technology to simulate very, very realistic things, but for all kinds of reasons, right?
Maybe they want to map out potential future scenarios.
They want to model population dynamics, model complex systems, just recreational purposes.
Who knows?
Sooner or later, someone's going to want to do it.
And once you can spin up one, you can, why not spin up a million?
And then I think it goes that even in those simulated universes, they're simulated like in if there's enough computing power in them that i think you can spin up simulation universes within the simulation universes right so anyway you you end up before you already did an analysis yeah yeah it's it really is like it's not something that i'm interested in i'm just just giving the context so the argument goes all right so if we're we're here it feels like a real universe but what are the chances that it's
really the base universe the one the actual material one in which all this simulation started happening or one of the simulated ones well the odds are that that's the simulated one that's how the argument goes Scott says interestingly in there that we already have enough computing power to simulate.
And I don't think.
I'm surprised at that.
I'm surprised to hear that.
I'm surprised to hear that.
We got a fair bit of computing power, but I don't think we're quite there yet.
Can we not model all the atoms in the universe?
Yeah.
I don't see what would be stopping us from doing that.
Yeah.
Well, that's it.
Yeah.
Now, I think the vowel too is a little bit unclear in terms of discussing quantum things and quantum is binary or something.
I don't.
Well, quantum is probabilistic.
Anyway, he seems to think, Naval there seems to have the premise that you have to simulate everything in the universe, right?
So if you simulate everything, then the universe that's been simulated, according to Naval, has got to have less resolution, less detail than the one that's been simulated, right?
That's right.
I feel like I should let that be played out a little bit more between the two of them.
So the only way the simulation is going to be better is if you can control it, right?
If you can basically say, otherwise you're going to...
going to stay in your real reality the reason you play video games and stay in your real reality is because you can win easily you can control it that's what affirmations are okay yeah so okay, I'm going along with you.
So the only reason you would go into a simulation is you can control it.
But if you can control it too easily, then it's not fun.
There's no surprise.
So to make it fun and surprising, you want to have it either be multiplayer or convincingly multiplayer, where there are other actors that can do things you don't expect and it's adversarial, right?
So you would end up with something that looks a lot like what we have today, right?
Things start getting confusing there, I think.
I mean, yes, I might have missed all that as further elaborations of the resolution point, but, you know, I think it picks up with that because so you have the point about the need for a like higher resolution real universe above the universe that we experience right and then you've got the solar mm that like you don't want to be in the simulation unless you're playing like it doesn't make sense why would you go into the simulation
simulation where you're just going to stay in the real reality unless you're able to control things now what's happened there like you said i think daval's got slightly confused because you're not supposed to be the creator of the the simulation right you are supposed to be a unit within the simulations but in this world he's kind of viewing you as like neo from the matrix that you would only it's kind of like jordan peterson i wouldn't even be in a simulation unless i could
control it because like yeah well they sort of segued from the original argument right where i thought they were going was that okay if you want to make a simulation it's got to be either lower resolution that is you can't simulate all the tiny little subatomic oh they're going to get back to that yeah yeah but the other option is just limited scope right like you don't try to simulate the whole universe you just simulate the bits that are important the bits that are important could be earth or it could be that you kind of simulate the you know like the matrix where you
simulate the experience either either either matrix you you simulate the experiences of the people in there right um and you just make the you know that the physics can get modeled just good enough to meet human perceptions which doesn't require you know huge amount of detail really but where it gets confusing is that they sort of segue into well computer games and it's only going to be fun if you're playing the computer game and and you've got to be controlling things and
then scott talks about affirmations and that's what affirmations are and how you can control the simulation.
So it's just, I'm just a little confused about where they're going.
Well, Matt, don't you know that you can control reality with affirmations?
And for those who don't know affirmations, this is like things like, you know, I am a millionaire.
I can be the best boy in the world.
And like if you say it enough, you will manifest it into reality, right?
So those that Scott Adams is talking about is evidence that you can control.
reality and that is evidence that there's a simulation all makes sense to me and but if someone like matt doesn't have the right epistemology to follow scott has some more arguments to help you'll get it here.
Okay, so consider this analogy.
No, here, here, here, I must disagree with you.
Okay, please.
So, if you're playing tennis and you see the tennis ball zip by and it hits the line and you say, hey, that's out.
And everyone else says, no, that's in.
You can play it back on the video and you can find out for sure what it was.
But the person who saw it out and the person who saw it in have a perfect memory, except one of them didn't happen.
And what we know is that our brains create the resolution or imagine the resolution.
And so I'm talking to you right now surrounded by detail that is completely being invisible to me and I don't even know if it's really there unless I look at it.
So our actual experience of life is that we're imagining resolution that isn't there and that's easily provable.
Dear, dear, that's an odd example.
First of all, he's conflating different things there, but put that aside for the moment.
It's not like Scott.
But I like his thought experiment.
He just asserts, okay, there's two people.
Let's see the ball in.
Once he's the ball out, they've both got perfect memory.
What does that mean?
What does he mean by that?
Yeah, so I took it to mean that he's saying in their memory, they remember the event, you know, crystal clear.
They can see the different events happening.
So they've got like a perfect memory of the event, but it's both of their memories are different, right?
And there is an actual reality, as he said, you know, you can go and look at the tip, but his point is in their brains, they have a perfect memory of the event, But it's two different realities.
they've created in that moment an entire alternative you know universe because they yeah that's obviously referring to in a very confusing way, I guess, is the way in which, one, our perceptions are limited.
You know, we don't have identic kind of memory, most of us.
And then when we lay those memories down, we sort of, we do interpolate and make assumptions and psychologists study this.
So it's something to do with resolution.
It's just we have fallible memories and fallible perceptions.
Yeah, so I think that's the problem.
Like Scott is an idiot, right?
I'm sorry, but so he thinks he knows a lot of things that he doesn't really know so like his idea of how memory works is wrong like he imagines that you create this like little perfect image right of a reality yes like down to the down to the little pixels it is yeah the pixels basically functioning off the line.
And no, that's not how memory works.
And yes, there are subjective assessments, but his argument here is based on a faulty understanding that the mind constructs a perfect memory of the event.
It's like a little image you can go and rotate around.
I think you're right.
I think that's what's going on here.
And that's why he conflates this kind of reconstruction of memory to give the feeling that you're playing back an experience of watching a ball or something.
He sort of conflates that with the simulation of a world or something by aliens.
Well, yes.
And we'll see that like Scott...
does make these exact areas um because he he explains more okay so there's a lot to this this line of argument scott thought about this topic a lot a lot yeah so there's a bit more this does come up on the resolution point but it it links to the other things about consciousness and there's another thought experiment to help you understand like how this would all work.
What's the difference between imagining resolution and having resolution?
How can I imagine it if it doesn't, like it would take the same compute power for me to imagine it as it would for it to exist.
Although you could argue the unseen universe doesn't need to exist.
Exactly.
Now it's an argument for consciousness because if it's not conscious, why bother rendering it, right?
Which leads me to a different place.
I don't know that point, but let me ask this.
So my belief is if we're a simulation, then if I were to go in the backyard and dig a hole where nobody, no human or any entity had ever dug a hole that the stuff that I dig to doesn't exist until I'm digging to it because it doesn't need to and never did need to.
So everything that's not directly observed doesn't have to exist.
And that's how you save all your compute time.
Why do you need to save compute time?
Because the universe is massively big, and you couldn't build a computer that would be big enough to replicate in detail.
Like you say, down to the...
Yeah, it's quite painful to listen to, isn't it?
it because this has no connection to you know the fallibility of human perception and recollection there is no sense in which we're reconstructing a an actual simulation of universe when we remember things on the other hand i'll hand it to scott in that at least he's somewhat coherent with his simulation hypothesis,
which is that if you buy into the matrix style simulation, right, where you're just simulating stuff to suit the perceptions of the conscious entities in it, then it's true, right?
You don't simulate.
stuff until you need to, right?
So if you dig the hole, you don't need to simulate what's in the hole because you're just reconstructing it like a dream, basically, for people.
Well, this is how Scott is, I guess, trying to argue that we have the current technology.
Like there's all these little tricks you could do to see if the computing power that, you know, like maybe the sky is.
the universe with all those billions of stars.
They're not actually there, right?
That's just like a backdrop and you only need to process anything about them whenever somebody in the simulation points a telescope and tries to take readings or something, right?
Like, so it might look like there's an infinite universe to model but there's lots of compute saving things that you can do so yeah i mean you're right that that it's it's it's a consistent uh it's a coherent thought that he's had and whereas naval like he jumped at the start and was like like i think the fundamental unit is consciousness and you don't need to model anything that isn't consciousness because
why would you model on consciousness and you're like what are you talking about like so like just i mean let's stick with the preface here for a second so.
So you want to model a world like ours or a universe and you don't want to model any inanimate matter in that universe.
Why?
What are they going to stand on?
No, the idea is that the inanimate stuff is modeled to the extent that it needs to be in order to create a coherent experience for the people living in it oh wait wait so he's making a version of it which is like the conscious agents the stuff that they're in is only the bits that you need to model right is that it then so he's doing a version of scott's but then okay so scott doesn't realizee that he's making the same argument.
Well, Naval himself is confused, I think, because you're right.
He sort of was like that at the beginning, but then he sort of asked Scott, hey, why do you have to save compute?
But, you know, of course.
Yeah.
But before he said his problem with the simulation hypothesis is that you have to simulate the universe at a lower resolution in his terms, right, than the original, right?
Because.
you can't simulate something more complicated than the machinery that it's running on right but then he's like but so so devil is inconsistent because he he starts with that argument but then he switches to like, why do you need to save compute?
Well, Matt, maybe I've got a clip that can bring it together.
You're not giving Naval credit enough.
Of course, this is all coherent, right?
He's got an epistemology, Matt.
To be clear, I don't even like these kinds of discussions when they're done well.
We're reconstructing very painfully what it is they're trying to say, but we'll persevere.
We'll persevere.
Oh, well, how dare you, Matt?
How dare you?
So, you know, as we started, this was originally about the statistical argument.
What are those statistical arguments, though?
Statistical arguments only...
Let me give you one.
I'll give you one so you can...
Here's the problem with the statistical argument.
The problem is I can give you an equally infinite number of scenarios in which we choose not to do a simulation just because base reality is already so good.
The problem with the simulation argument, another problem is you can never break out of the simulation.
Or if you do, then how do you know you're not in another simulation?
It's doing the God thing.
It's basically hiding everything behind a layer where you're not allowed to look.
And so it's adding complexity without explaining anything new.
It violates Occam's razor in that sense.
It doesn't allow you to do anything more.
You know, I don't like the simulation hypothesis or any of this shit, but Navarro's argument at the beginning is a really bad one against it.
he says, oh, you know, what about, you know, the problem with the statistical argument is that, you know, there could be an infinite number of reasons why I don't make the thing.
Like, that's actually not technically a good argument against the simulation hypothesis, right?
The premise is that it only takes one, right?
It doesn't matter how many people, you know, in a large enough set of circumstances, it doesn't matter how many people choose not to do this thing, as long as it's done, you know, a tiny percentage of times, like that is actually a satisfying criteria.
Yeah, the recursive process will come into effect.
Yes, I do notice that slight flaw in the reasoning there.
But, you know, they're just throwing out all of it.
This is like third degree removed, like bastardized version of philosophical debates around this topic, right?
And like, you know, Naval's point is fundamentally correct, that you're adding in a layer of complexity, which you don't have like good evidence for.
And a lot of it is just philosophical speculation.
That is right.
But he is leaping around between arguments.
That's right.
The Occam's razor argument is a good one, right?
That you could say, okay, the reality is exactly what it looks like, or you've got another theory, which is, well, actually it's all an illusion and there's a secret little homunculus sort of controlling everything to make it look like it's real well.
You've just created a more complicated explanation.
You know, you've just added some extra layers of complication, which don't add...
add explanatory power.
That part of his argument is fine.
Hello, there was the thing invoked there again, Matt, that like if the normal reality is so good, like why would you want to do a simulation?
That is, that's dumb.
They're seeing it as a computer game, right?
But they're not thinking about like, why do most people run simulations?
Yeah.
Because they want to model something about reality in a way that they can control, you know, like different things and focus on a specific issue.
That's right.
Nowhere in the premises that...
So, yeah.
Yeah, I know, I know.
Well, so Matt, look, there's been some problems.
Naval has been delivering blow after blow to Scott's theory.
And he says, what's the point of doing this?
Like, if we can't have a fun computer game, we're just, we're not going to do it, right?
Why would you do a simulation?
That's right.
Right.
But Scott, this is not his first rodeo, okay?
He has some evidence of how he knows.
that his simulation hypothesis is not just a hypothesis.
So let's hear it.
Okay, get ready for this.
So my belief is that if we're a simulation, it wouldn't necessarily be for entertainment.
That would be in the top three.
But in my audience knows that I have a long history of having massive water related problems.
Just probably twelve of them this year in my house alone, my outside irrigation.
And it's in all my homes and it doesn't matter where I'm living, it doesn't matter who the contractor was.
It doesn't matter.
And to me, it's becoming obvious that I'm an AI training tool.
And that I'm training how to deal with infinite water related problems, everyone different.
And everyone, you know, I attack like it's a brand new problem.
So if you could download my knowledge of fixing water related problems, you could populate like a plumber robot in the higher universe.
Now you're watching, you're watching, hold on.
Now you said there, there's no prediction, right?
So I don't know if you can see the comments, but if I ask my locals, people, have I predicted that I will have ongoing incredibly coincidental water problems?
And have they watched it for three years in a row?
And every time, like, here's another one.
And it doesn't match any experience that they have.
Scots Logic Care.
Scots Logic Care is.
here is a thing to behold it is amazing stuff it's there's a bit when naval reacts with like incredulity right like kind of laughing like oh right you're but no he's not he's not joking this isn't a this isn't a recreational belief this time so like just to be clear that we're all of the same page here so scott's argument though how he knows he's in a situation is that for at least three years, not many more.
He's had multiple water-related problems.
And that has convinced him that he's part of an algorithm that could be used for training people in the actual reality, outside the simulation, to make AI robots that are good at dealing with water problems.
And now you might again be saying, well, but come on.
But there's a prediction.
You see, Matt, that's science, right?
You meet predictions and they are validated.
And here, his prediction is he's told his locals, that's like his patron thing, that, you know, know he is going to keep having these problems wherever he moves whatever happens he's going made a prediction and it continues to be validated.
Well, that's basically science.
That's how science works.
Yeah, it's amazing.
So first of all, there's the mismatch there, right?
We talked before about the issue with any kind of solipsistic simulation-oriented thing.
It doesn't add predictive utility.
But Scott's, ahaha.
I've had a lot of water problems and I predict that I'm going to have more water problems.
And if I do, then we're living in a simulation.
Dot, dot, dot.
We're living in a simulation.
So That's incredible to me that he thinks those two things are the same thing because they both have the word prediction in them.
There's obviously so many reasons why Scott could be having water-related problems.
Coincidence is one of them.
No, Matt, three years of coincidences at different locations.
Come on, why were you born yesterday?
What's more likely?
that Scott having plumbing problems at you know different locations is just an unfortunate coincidence or that he is part of an ai training program outside of this simulation and that they need to present him with different kinds of water related problems to see, you know, like a mind like his, Matt, you know, they want to use it for important purposes.
And what's more important than like plumbing and hydroponics, for example, they might be using his brain in the actual real, you know, external real world to like make sure that all of the food production is going on correctly because he's.
you know working out all these algorithms about how to fix pipes and whatnot it's like factory yeah yeah so the dilblit cartoons his podcast all of his political reactions.
It's all chinning.
Maybe it's all epiphenomenal.
That's all just context because his purpose here in life.
I quite like his theory, by the way, that Scott Adams was put on earth to solve water-related problems and all the rest of it is just decoration.
It would be great if actually all of this emulation, like, you know, Trump, us.
the whole rest of the world, it was all just to provide the material for Scott to get better at plubbing things.
Yeah.
Naval does respond to this.
He's not entirely convinced.
I mean, a bit shocking to me because that's rock solid logic.
But Naval is not immediately convinced and he has some pushback.
So, you know, let's hear some of that.
I also see because you believe this, you look for water-related problems that other people will let us slide.
And yes, it's coming through the ground.
It's coming through the ground more than usual.
But like, I think I have water-related problems in my place.
I 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 list of water-related problems.
But did you have 12 separate occasions where there were like water problems?
I'm not going to take your streak of water problems as evidence that we live in a simulation.
By that, you could be saying it's because I'm Capricorn, right?
Now all of a sudden, we have to believe astrology.
A theory that's very easy to vary where you can change the components without changing the outcome is a bad theory.
But I'm making a prediction.
I'm making a prediction that next year, like all the years before, because you're arbitrating that one, you're the one that's coming back and saying you want to.
Now, if you made a prediction about me if you said hey novelle you're going to have a dozen water related problems next year then i'm going to keep an eye you know that's better it's still not really scientific we should get a whole bunch of people no well i neither of them are the scientific process but would you agree that if i made an unusual prediction and let's say i could keep making this unusual prediction time after time again would that convince you or would you just think there's some reason i could make a prediction and you don't know why Yeah, amazing, isn't it?
So Scott really believes this.
His history of water-related problems, that he has them at a disproportionate rate is evidence that we're living in a simulation.
And Naval is sort of blustering around trying to object to this.
Some of his objections are good.
I think he reasons like most reasonable ones, right?
Like you are the arbiter of whether you had water related problems and, you know, you also likely didn't notice them more than other people because you believe this.
These are all pretty objections, I would say.
Yeah, just the way he expresses it sometimes.
Like he says, well, if you made a prediction about me, then that's entirely different.
Well, it does solve some of the problems, but still Scott Adams predicting that Naval is going to have water problems correctly once or even five times is still not evidence for a simulation.
Naval did say it's better, but it's not bad.
But he says we would need to get a whole bunch of people, right?
But again, that's wrong because even if Scott could unerringly predict water-related problems, like a very large sample, let's get a sample randomly recruited, right?
A thousand people.
And Scott goes, you're all going to have water-related problems.
And he didn't write.
And he didn't.
And that gets proved, right?
They have water-related problems at a rate higher than baseline.
I always treat that as a statistically interesting finding that merits explanation, but it's not evidence that we're looking at a simulation, right?
You can't just go, well, I predicted something, so therefore we're in a simulation.
And I think Naval did hit that point.
He didn't express it very well, but he was saying, you know, if you could just declare that to be due to.
anything right like you know he that's true he did he did he did he gave like star signs or whatever like you could attribute it i think what he was saying is you could attribute that to star signs or anything you like and let's let's take that as what he meant to say in which case yeah he did pretty well yeah.
So, well, anyway, the debate continues.
I would first look for the non-supernatural explanation.
I would first try to figure out, like, is it, what are the statistical odds of this?
And do we, you know, say that properly?
That's no fair calling it supernatural.
You're trying to win by a word.
You can't win by a word.
No, it is a supernatural explanation.
Because it appeals to something outside of our current physics.
That's what I mean by supernatural.
But this would be well within our current physics.
We're just a video.
We're just zeros and ones.
No, no, that's not our current physics.
That's not our current laws of physics.
That's not our current understanding of physics.
That's not our current, you know physics that we're we're definitely running on some computing substrate right but there's nothing inconsistent we're saying that we're in a video game that was designed to be inconsistent is back to unfalsifiable and there's infinite number of those theories you know we're in we're a brain you're a brain floating in a vat go falsify that you can't right so but are you saying in general that if something is does uncanny predictions then it still doesn't tell you something useful It no,
I'm not saying that.
It depends on what predictions it's making, how statistically likely or unlikely they are, how well they're tested for error, who's corroborating them, what that mechanism was and also then the claim, how does that evidence match up to the claim?
So the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence that it requires.
Of course.
So I agree with all that.
I think my experience with my audience has been pretty extraordinary because they're pretty bright.
Yeah, so Navarre's doing fine here, but you really get some insight into just really what an idiot Scott Adams is.
Scott Adams is an absolute idiot.
Like he's, I mean, he understands nothing about science or testing things.
Like Scott Adams is probably second.
second only to Chris Langan in the clear gap from their actual level of intellect and insight to their perceived level, right?
And like, you know, both Chris Langan and Scott Adams consider themselves geniuses, psychological masters, you know, they understand advanced fields and theories and they know how to psychologically manipulate people and all these things.
But like anytime they actually talk, you can see that they are just operating almost entirely by vibes and personal intuitions and they don't understand.
understand the topics that they're talking about so you know naval references the kind of extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and he actually mentions car say and you know elsewhere and scott says oh yeah yeah i agree but you know my audience think it's what i'm able to predict is pretty extraordinary so you know he's met that criteria by that standard which is just and you know naval doesn't really like he provides a half decent rebuttal to scott's stupid
propositions.
not perfect but that's you can't really ding um naval for that i suppose but the more proper version of it is right that right?
That if you are advancing a theory in a scientific sense, then the theory makes predictions.
And then you can, then you go ahead and you gather data and you deliberately gather data that is going to set up such that the theory can be falsified, that if you observe the data that is inconsistent with the theory, then you have to reject it.
So that's the role that predictions have.
I mean, that's this broad brush stroke.
No philosophers of science come.
come get me you know what i mean it's more complicated than that but for this for this purposes that'll do but for scott it's like if i predict that x happens and if it happens then i can claim whatever I like.
And, you know, if you can't explain it through, you know, like it's just, and he seems like he doesn't really grasp that there's an issue there with his reasoning.
It's so dumb.
And also the way that he, this is probably a small thing, but that fastening on words, like, oh, you said supernatural.
Yeah, you're trying to win with a word.
You know what I mean?
Like that kind of obsession with language and choice of words is.
Yeah, just for me another telltale sign that it's clear what he means, right?
Yes, it's a hallmark of the Sandspeakers.
They like to fix it on this.
You know, the specific word that you use means this and whatnot.
And Scott Adams is somebody that, you know, wants to latch on to, oh, but you're trying to dismiss me with reference to religion, right?
You know, by hinting my, but my belief is science.
You did one of the rhetorical sins.
You're trying to false flag, what's the word?
Straw man me with this word.
Where's the steel man?
Where's the fucking steel man?
But now...
after that mat if i was naval after this exchange i might have realized oh dear i've accidentally had a conversation with a moron like i thought that this guy was a sharp guy, but the evidence he's just presented to me is like, at least on this topic, he's fundamentally operating at the level of a teenage boy, right?
Like not even a very competent teenage boy.
Yeah, like that's right.
I mean, at the beginning, sure, he's like, oh, this is a guy.
He shares all my partisan leanings and delusions with Sympatico.
But once you get on to spaceship moons and simulations and water related problems, it should be clear that, yeah, you're speaking to a moron.
Yeah, no, I will remind everyone that, you know, we've already heard how this ends with the.
with Naval declaring that Scott is, you know, one of the greatest people that he loves to interact with because he's got such a sharp mind.
So he clearly didn't have that takeaway.
And you can see some sign of what occurs here because when gurus clash like this, right, whenever there's actual, you know, kind of friction or disagreement, well, but I don't think you're right about that or whatever, it can exist like that for a while, but there then needs to be a coming together in order.
to restore balance to the guru verse so naval froze scott a bone and uh it leads to sympathico reasoning so here we go i try not to go too much into the supernatural, but I'll be honest, there are times when I've prayed.
So it can hurt.
Nobody's perfect.
Yeah, exactly.
Pascal's wager, right?
Just in case.
Yeah, I've I've got a version of this.
I don't know if I've ever said this out loud before, but every now and then I just talk to the creators of the simulator, simulation that are watching me, because it might be me.
Yeah, exactly.
No, I completely agree.
Yeah.
If simulation hypothesis is true, then, you know, God or creator or master programmer has your best interests at heart.
Yeah.
I say things like, you know, is this the plan?
I mean, are you really going to do this job exactly no yeah like don't take me out of the game too fast like give me some resources if 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 let's not take that route let's try it yeah i mean i think i think everybody does that because at the end of the day existence itself is an unexplained miracle yeah yeah yeah so devil changing changing tone there you know keep it light um affirmations Yeah,
he does his own, you know, he prays and sometimes, you know, you gotta do that.
Yeah, and he could say, he could say, you know, we don't know.
could be a god maybe not we could be living in a simulation or not if we do live in a simulation probably it's a benevolent simulator with our best interests at heart so may as well pray to them well that that i have to just mention them again like naval just has to throw in one more premise which is completely unwarranted that like why you know if we're in a simulation are they obviously have our best interests at heart like no that's that's not why why
No, most of the versions of simulation theory, it is science fiction stuff They're pretty dark, right?
They don't involve simulating.
Yeah, maybe they want to know what happens to life whenever there's a supernova which consumes the universe or whatever, right?
So the individual, they care as much about them as you would in some populist room or whatever.
That's right, ants in an ant colony.
That's right.
But it's more touchy-feely, and it's more in line with Scott's thing, which seems to be around controlling the future.
Scott seems to like this affirmations idea and kind of works with the simulation because I think he sees himself as kind of like a player character that could kind of incept his own future and make manifest events to happen.
That's kind of Scott's philosophy.
And that also relates to Naval's take about there being the man of action in history, the actual great man.
They actually manipulate reality to suit themselves.
of the if you have the power.
Yeah, it's Neo or something in the Matrix.
Yeah, so, you know, it sounds really silly because it is it's like this is the level of like dorm room philosophy chat that you know university students have after they've had a bunch of spliffs right and they're like what if the universe is a big man and we're just all you know going round and you know this and that's fine.
And it's also reasonable for various adults to have these kind of like indulgent conversations.
But the thing is, Naval and Scott think that they are these very complex intellectual thinkers having this profound conversation about a complex topic.
That's right.
A peak meeting of minds, right?
Wrestling with some of the most fascinating, crucial topics of our time.
That is.
kind of how they portray these very important conversations.
Yeah.
So you might have heard there like Scott Adams with a real And Naval being more skeptical, making a couple of mistakes of him, but overall, he was doing a better job there, right?
It comes around to this.
So this is Naval pulling things together and let's get on to the topic of philosophy.
How do we get here?
Why am I here?
Why am I a monkey?
Why am I three-dimensional?
Why am I male?
Why am I talking to you right now?
What does it even mean to talk?
The whole thing is so surreal that there is an instantaneous and overarching miracle of just consciousness.
Why even be conscious?
Why not just be like zombies or robots talking to each other, going through the same actions?
Why even be aware so there's so much here that you just have to take axiomatically and that is spirituality and i think your spirituality your current religion is a simulation hypothesis perfectly valid you know mine is probably closer to the tao and you know other people's christianity or whatever but somehow you have to explain this miracle of existence and you and everyone has to do it in their own frame but the rest of science right the rest is all follows the rules of science Yeah.
I mean, again, I think in fairness to Navarre, relistening to this now, I mean, like I personally don't buy into that, right?
That, you know like it's all a mystery we don't know why there is anything in the universe rather than nothing why are we even conscious rather than not you know it's a perfect mystery so there is this sort of empty blank uh page there for us to write our own anything that yeah metaphysical explanation for something that gives our lives meaning and so you have so it's all fine it's all good stuff um i personally don't subscribe to that but in defense of Naval, I think that's pretty conventional.
It's a common conventional point of view.
I think he says, and he does say that as a setup to say, look, that's all very well and good.
We all do that.
that but we should distinguish that kind of speculative bullshit now i'm being even more sympathetic in my presentation of what he said to scientific inquiry about the world oh oh you think that's where that was that too well let's just see if that's right but i I will say that I knew I was going wrong there by being too sympathetic in my interpretation of what he said.
But okay, where did he take it?
Well, I'll take you there in a second.
But I'll just note that for me, the kind of triggering thing is like, as you said, he wants to be that, you know, we've all got these, you know, you, Scott, you've got this deep simulation hypothesis kind of philosophy.
Me, I'm closer to the Tao.
And like, of course, of course the fucking Tao, right?
Oh, I see.
I know what triggers you now.
I know what hurts you.
I'm sure he's often like studying the Taoist classics.
Like he's there, you know, it's not that he's just leaf-free through a translation of the tao beijing or that kind of thing no no he's deep in the like what he means is he follows the celestial master school you know he's burning the names of the various theories in the bureaucracy to send his petitions up to them like the celestial master that has said for thousands of years.
So yeah, I just, I hear about that like within the tech industry world, like Buddhism, Taoism, esoteric religious beliefs equals intellectualism, right?
So that's, although it is true to say that at least Christianity, thanks to Jordan Peterson, Jungian interpretations is like making it's not.
It's not just normal Christianity, right?
like an esoteric, psychologized interpretation of it.
So it's like...
When they say that they've got a Buddhist view of things or they've got a Taoist view of things, they're not referring to anything real.
Like they're referring to their own sort of, you know, abstracted, like they read something somewhere and they've got some version of it.
Or maybe Buddhist modernism or Taoist modernism, if you want to be charitable, right?
That's what they're talking about.
As we know what that is, Matt, having read the Donald Trump podcast about Gary.
But so you said, you know, he was setting this up to probably, you know, make the juxtaposition between there's all this, you know, speculative philosophical stuff and yes you know there's different things you can do you know but ultimately we can't we cannot uh prove or disprove those things sure yeah one way or the other and then you have science so that's what i like to focus on well is that where he went let's see if you want to talk absolute truth and nothing else the only statement that
you can make that is absolutely true is that what's that go ahead let's see i know where this is going sorry what's yours it's that we exist do we ask the question that's the only thing you know it's actually even worse than that so i used to say it was I exist, and then a very smart friend of mine corrected me and he said, no, awareness exists.
You don't even know that you exist.
You are a thought.
Like, yes, your current thought exists, and you're aware of that current thought, but what is the you that is having that thought?
That's the whole Buddhist question, the whole Enlightenment question.
Is there a persistent self identity other than just thoughts that are referring to each other?
Like when you look for yourself, you're not actually there.
There's an awareness, the awareness exists, but the you separate from that awareness, does that even exist?
Where are you on the question of whether your mind is one you or you are several people in your head?
Several.
I think it's seven.
Yeah, it's very dorm room stuff.
We got a real Renee Descars here too, Chris.
You know, let's start from the, what do you really know?
Let's work up from there.
Yeah, so the actual, like, so you might be right, Matt, that, you know, he was thinking about having that route because he does make distinctions that relate to this at different points.
But here he's talking about, like, you know, if you want to get to the real shit, Matt, the only question is, is, you know.
What can you say exists?
And Scott's answer is big hearts, you know, I think therefore I am end of being.
But he's like, no, no, no.
It's awareness exists.
The self, you, that actually it's an illusion, you know?
So the, it's, it's very Dr. K, right the only fundamental unit of the universe is awareness mark awareness awareness awareness consciousness it's that kind of ps but again chris this is this i hate to disappoint you but this is how most people think right like this i know it's it's a conventional point of view but the point for me isn't that like it's not this is being presented as you know this is mind-blowing stuff and
And no, this is not mind-blowing stuff.
This is stuff you hear, you know, if you read books, I think you'd come across it like in your teenage years early enough.
But you certainly hear it at university, you know, when you talk to people with an interest in spirituality or whatever.
And yeah, it's just like, it's always presented as, this is going to blow your mind.
What if the fundamental unit of the world isn't, you know, rocks and crystals?
It's the mind.
Have you considered that?
These thoughts that come into my mind, Chris, is there even me?
You think that's air?
You're breathing, Neil?
I mean, you know, like we keep saying, this is all normal stuff that undergraduates talk about.
It touches on stuff that people learn in undergraduate or read in popular philosophy or popular spirituality type books.
And it's sort of infused our culture, all of these ideas, like whatever you think of them.
I guess my takeaway, though, is that, you know, you can hear it from these two guys, like, you know, rehashed.
In this format.
In this format, if you want to.
If that sparks joy, if you find value in that, you can do that.
Yeah, well, I do.
I did want to know that they did that trick as well of like saying, you know, the fact that you have the ability to perceive something or whatever, that is spirituality to me.
So if you are able to think anything, that means that you're you're spiritual and you're like no that's just the jordan peterson like you're actually religious if you believe anything is true like they just redefine a word so it means like everybody is that thing and it's like such a Isn't spirituality just when I find meaning in my life?
Like, isn't that spirituality?
Yeah.
So you're saying you don't have any meaning in your life?
Oh, no.
Well, I have meaning.
Well, got your.
Got your bit.
And what's the Greek word for meaning?
Maybe that's that rhymes with the word.
Oh, God damn it.
I know.
But well, so let's hear a bit more about these mind-blowing revelations about the nature of identity and the self.
Because I know you love this shit.
I love this stuff.
I live for it.
What is this you that's having the thoughts?
Like, you know, we very casually refer to this you, this self, this I. But like, is it the thoughts refer to?
But when you're not thinking, where did you go?
You're still there.
And then if you can observe the thoughts, well, you can dispassionately observe your own thoughts.
It's possible.
That's what meditation is all about.
So is that you if you can observe it?
And if you are the thoughts that are talking, then who's the one that's listening?
So the you or I that we refer to is this very amorphous entity.
It's like, you know, it's like Alan Watts compared to a whirling stick.
It looks like a fire.
But when you pause and look at any element of it, there's actually nothing there.
Do you have a voice in your head?
Yeah, everyone does, right?
No.
No.
You don't have one.
No, I do have one, but apparently there was a thing in the news recently.
Yeah, yeah.
Scott brings us back down to earth with some basic questions there.
Discourse.
No, discourse.
This is them going to talk about like the self-talk thing, right?
Which was also another thing that people like to talk about.
Like, do you do a, you know, like an internal monologue when you're thinking things or what?
But Matt, doesn't this a little bit?
The thing it reminded me of, it might speak to my own experiences of life, but it's like, this is a little bit like, you know, in a movie.
When some guy is talking to a girl and they're lying on the bed or whatever.
And it's like, do you dream in color?
Or, you know, like, you know, what do you think that you are?
Or like, what if we're just stardust?
Like, it's like that.
And that thing that Naval was saying, as I, you know, like the Tao thing, right?
This is just fairly standard.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Palava.
Yeah.
What is the self really?
yeah do we even know we the same person when we go to sleep at night wake up the next day who is the eye that looks at your thoughts matt who is that sam harris is find this mind growing as well i mean there's all of it like it's all like it's all it's all stuff that many people learn in undergraduate philosophy or something if they take an introductory course right like if you and i are looking at a medication class yeah all right yeah like if you if we're looking at the same color, like the color red, right?
Do you perceive it the same way as me?
We'll never know for sure, will we?
Who can say?
You know, ship of Theseus, if we, you know, you think you're yourself.
What if I replaced your neurons one by one?
Every seven years.
I mean, it's not that there's anything wrong with it.
It's just not okay to think that it's so mind-blowing as these two imagine themselves to be.
Like, you know, if they were saying, well, this is like dorm room philosophy shit, but like anyway, let me just go with this or, but that's not the way.
It's like, it's more these are the masters of the universe who are telling, you know, the profound philosophies that they have worked out.
And, you know, just that notion, Matt, like, yes, I understand.
I've had conversations directly with Sam Harris.
I understand this, that like there's a lot of people that consider it very profound that the notion of the self not being a homunculus in the brain which is entirely you know consistent and a single unitary thing that just blows everything to smell rings there is no self, right?
There's no coherent entity that a person can ever grasp onto.
It's all a nothingness.
Or, you know, there are other options than just this metaphysics of it.
But, you know, whatever, whatever.
We will get into it, as you like to say.
We won't get into it, though.
That's right.
But yeah, there are non...
You know, Matt, though, now I mentioned that, might be good.
hear what Scott's theory of consciousness is?
Like he's had some...
I can't remember what it is.
I've listened to it, but I can't.
Like this stuff goes in one ear and then you just, I think my mind rejects it.
But I'm going to be excited to find out for the second time.
It might relate to the water.
I hope it does.
Let's see.
Let's see.
You know, I've defined consciousness.
My best take at it, and I think we can give it to AI, is a prediction of everything that's going to happen next, like right around you, around your body.
Then there's the action, and then there's your reaction to how close your prediction was to the reality.
And my argument is that if everything happened exactly as you knew it was going to happen, you would lose all your five senses eventually because they wouldn't have any purpose.
So...
Consciousness is the lag between what you think is happening and what's happening.
It allows you to...
Lay in there, yeah.
So then you can say, well, why do only...
Seems like humans have the most of it, but it wouldn't be any surprise that it's such a superpower that you can imagine what you're...
This is a theory, by the way, Matt.
This is a theory.
I love the way that all the gurus talk about their theory.
Yeah, it's not a.
thought that came to them in the shower.
It's a theory, capital T theory, that we're predicting machines.
We're always predicting what's going to happen next, right?
You're right.
He's right on this.
Yeah, yeah.
And the gap, it's the gap between our predictions and reality.
Am I remembering this right?
That's where consciousness lives, the surprise.
Is that right?
Yes, you've got that bit right.
But because I think, I hesitated because I think we remember he at other points might have said that if we're a perfect predicting machine, it's like God.
But anyway, whatever.
Okay, so this is just of a...
If you're.
purely attuned to the universe.
But then he also did say, because he was basically suggesting that the ability to predict the future accurately is like kind of increasing your level of consciousness.
But if you increase it to perfection, then you don't need consciousness.
Consciousness at all.
Yeah, so try to square that circle if you can.
It seems contradictory on the face of it.
And the other issue with it, I mean, the grade of truth in it is that we do predict the future, right?
When we catch a ball.
And we are imperfect.
Yeah.
And when we catch a ball, right, we are doing lots of stuff like that.
And there are parts of the brain that we've looked at that are very much focused on doing the stuff that he's talking about, like monitoring body posture and, you know, predicting where your foot's going to land and things like that.
A lot of those functions are actually done in places like the cerebellum, the place in the lower mid part of your brain, which actually have nothing to do with consciousness, right?
To the degree that we can figure out where consciousness lives in the brain, it's definitely in the prefrontal cortex, right?
Broadly distributed in the neocortex, basically around the front and the top.
So we're really in the opposite part of the brain where the prediction stuff is going on.
Yeah, it just doesn't, it's a dumb shower thought that doesn't make sense on any level.
Yeah.
Well, Matt, you know, the thing is that you're talking about, like, you know, the areas of the brain and all this kind of, you know, stuff, right?
But this is a theory, Matt, right?
It's a theory.
It doesn't account for everything, right?
It's just, you know, like Scott said, he's had some thoughts about it, but it does go on to connect to AI.
And I feel like you need to hear this because, you know, you're probably, like you said, you probably tuned out and forgot where this was going to take you to.
But it leads to some discussions around AGI and, you know, what AI is good about.
bad at consciousness but they don't they will believe that they're special but they're not and in every way they will react as though they're human beings now put them on there and let's talk to them and you tell me if they're conscious and the answer is tracked It's going to take about five seconds before you say, I don't know the difference between you and this guy who's sitting next to me.
Yeah, I mean, if that thing, it would have to pass the Turing test first before I would take its claims for consciousness seriously.
And I have a high bar for the Turing test.
By turning, you've got to convince me you're alive and creative.
But if it could convince me it's alive and creative and it said I'm conscious, then I'd be like, yeah, I guess you're conscious.
Yeah, yeah, we're nowhere close to the Turing test.
I mean, the easiest one is, can you tell me a joke, but don't make it wordplay?
And we're done.
Yeah, exactly.
I tested on poetry because there isn't much poetry stuff to crawl on the web.
It's terrible at understanding poetry and parsing the meter and verse and rhyme.
Those are not very profound thoughts about AI, are they?
Well, Matt, correct me if I'm wrong here, though.
But so like Scott's point about, you know, that AI has issues with humor.
Okay, right.
This is an actual point.
But like one, that notion that, you know, the Turing test, you know, we're nowhere near passing that.
Like, no, that's not true.
That's not true.
Some humans are not good at humor, right?
Like that being your, you know, your bar will do it.
But the point about poetry, like, am I wrong?
I know that people, okay, before the people in our audience that are poetry enjoyers, explain to me that no, no yeah yeah i cannot reproduce the beauty of like poetry but i understand i know that like if you get to write a novel it's not going to be good or what but like his specific thing about parsing the meter and the verse and the rhyme that is the thing that it's actually very good at yeah yeah yeah at the form the form stuff uh incredibly good like that was one of like even years ago
that was one of the things that would get passed around on social media like this is amazing right because it could could create a pretty pretty good sonnet i'm not saying that shakespeare but much much better than i could do right so it's a that's a terrible litmus test for like a turing test type thing because if i can't pass it and it does a lot better job than me, then forget about it.
In fact, they've pretty much abandoned like the original Turing test.
Yeah.
The Turing test has been abandoned because it's been realized that they're too good at imitating people in terms of textual conversation.
So it's not really workable.
So, yeah, this is not a good discussion about AI and consciousness.
No, and that's kind of the...
But like the insights that you get here, such as they exist, are actually bad.
Like they're not really attached to what the proper discussion around this topic is.
And there's lots of reasons, you know, that you can talk about the limitations of AI and things.
But these two knuckleheads here talking about it, they're like suggesting things which are actually suggesting they're not very well informed.
No, they really are not.
I mean, this is a bit of an aside, Chris, but one of the...
went down a bit of a rabbit hole because i found uh you know there's all kinds of benchmarks now benchmarks for ai's are proliferating and people keep thinking of new ones.
And there's all kinds of ones that they're continually running whenever a new AI gets released through their paces.
And one of the benchmarks is like a creative writing benchmark.
And I, you know, at idle curiosity, I started thumbing through the products there.
And I was actually quite astounded.
I didn't realize they were this good in terms of...
I've read creative writing from my eyes before, even just a few years ago, and went, well, this is bland, clearly not very good.
And I still don't think they're at the point where they could write a whole novel or even a novella.
But I read 15 pages of a historical drama, a bit like a Horatio Hornblower type thing, which is just one of these random things.
And I was like, I kept reading because I was like, well, this is actually not bad, like a lot better than a lot it'll never be able to draw hands properly or it'll never do thesis of people like.
like in a possible way, you know, different things, but like it's often also the case that the comparison that people make is like the best from human society and individuals throughout history, right?
Like, yeah.
Can it do this?
But there's a lot of schlocky writers.
Like, can the AI produce a nuller addition to the canon of the Dresden files?
I think so.
I think it could.
That's right.
Like recently, I've actually started rereading the Dune trilogy, which is kind of not great writing.
It's okay.
No, no, I'm sad in the dune pad.
But I did, because I do like science fiction, it's hard to find stuff.
I did give a go at the sort of derivative stuff.
So there was stuff that was written.
I forget the names of the authors.
I think it was the son of Frank Herbert and also another guy, like a respectable science fiction author who wrote a bunch of other Dune books.
They're not, in fairness, regarded as good books.
They're generally regarded as bad books.
I started reading one.
I got about five pages in and went, this is shockingly bad.
Now, I don't want to make the anti-AI people angry, right?
But the prose that I read on those benchmarks is far and away better than, you know, nobody could disagree with this than those derivative dream books.
Sure, that's a low bar, but they still sold a lot of those books.
People read those books very happy.
A lot of people read those books and enjoy them, right?
But Eliaser Judkowski's Harry Potter has been read by a lot of people.
I would just say, people read a lot of things.
So, you know, that's whatever.
There are genuine limitations to AI and there are issues.
But I'm just saying, if you wanted to find out about that and if you wanted to have an informed discussion, you'd be better going to Sean Carroll or somebody else.
Yeah, that's right.
Sean Carroll's got a good skeptical view of AI and he'll do it better.
No, so I mean, the point here is, like, I don't think AI is a conscious either.
Although Scott at the beginning kind of said that he thought they were.
Didn't he say he kind of thought they were at the beginning?
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
But the point is, for our purposes in covering this thing, they don't cover it well.
Their examples and the premises they're operating from are very poor, ranging from the Turing test or the various other things they cited as evidence for or against AI intelligence.
Yeah, so I just run a return, Matt, the final clip here.
I played it at the start.
I've got to play it a game for people.
So after you've heard all this, right, you've heard Scott and Matt
I don't want to take you forever.
No, I enjoy talking to you.
You know, it's funny because I get invited to a lot of podcasts, but they're all asked the same boring questions.
And you make yourself scarce, at least on these one-on-one.
So it's good.
So I want to talk to you.
But we should do another one.
You know, it's funny because I think every smart person is starved for conversation with other smart people.
And so the internet is great for that.
It helps connect us.
But still, like this kind of a setup is fantastic.
I can get to talk to you.
There's like 20 people I want to talk to and that's it.
And you're on that list.
So when something newsbreaking happens, you know, it's fun to get online and talk.
It's better than going to a podcast and asking the same interview questions, you know, than you answer and then check off like number 1309 check at Delaware Slogan.
Naval, you're one of the reasons I think I live in a simulation because if I do, I think there are player characters and NPCs.
And from the first moment I met you, it's like, okay, you're a player.
But beyond that, I've always felt connected to you no matter where you were or what you were doing.
Yes, you plied some segment of this at the beginning, but it's good.
I did, yeah.
It's good to return to it.
We'll come full circle.
We got there.
There you go.
like one of the top 20 people like just intellectual people in the world and you know it's understandable that uh never would would i come back because you just can't get this level of quality of ideas in you know in many places um yeah both play characters definitely if we're in a simulation it's their world chris um we're just ephemeral little NPCs playing in their world.
One of them is there solving water problems so that his skills can eventually be uploaded into the cloud of the aliens.
And the other one is a real player character.
He's a player.
He's one of the great men of history, unlike the rest of those, like in dreams, the rest of the refraf, right, that are just there, you know, they're taking part, but what are they actually doing except for causing, you know, the great man to have to work harder.
So yeah, like I think my general tick on Naval is like, I listened to the Chris Williamson interview as well.
And yeah, so the Chris Williamson conversation that they had was more of Naval getting to just issue his pseudo-profundities without any of this kind of Scott Adams injections about the simulation hypothesis or whatever.
But I think they're actually good partners in a way because if you listen to that, it's only really in the end when he starts getting into his great man of history stuff and some of the content overlaps.
But it shows that Naval can exist on like pseudo-profundities and indulgence for him giving worthy answers.
and give the appearance of like, you know, he is an intellectual philosopher.
But as we've seen in this episode, what he is, is like a fairly credulous discourse surfer, bog standard, partisan conspiracy theorist, like the rest of them.
And he's somebody that's addicted to like doing stupid tweets and thinking that that is contributing to humanity in various ways.
So, yeah, just not impressed.
I'm just not impressed by him.
And Scott continues to be Scott.
What a wonderful contribution he makes as always.
So, yeah, that's it.
view too i think naval's got two speeds he's got two modes uh he's got the fortune cookie mode where he's a chill guy, right?
And Chris Williamson is, you know, asking those broad sorts of questions and he'll, he'll, he'll spit out a whole bunch of very vague pseudo-profound bullshit, which is, which is fine.
You know what I mean?
You know, yeah, you know, relatively harmless advice, but it also tends to rely on being.
relatively privileged.
That's right.
Like if you want to hear from a multimillionaire or billionaire that, you know, not wanting something is as good as having it, which is true in some kind of sense, if that's helpful for you then he can do that for you i think he also encourages in that interview to not use calendars like you don't need to schedule things or follow that's just like you know his stick is his stick is kind of like it's like that personal self-help but
sort of oriented towards the productivity of tech success kind of thing, you know, talking about like earn, earn with your mind and not like, but they're all just re, they're just rehashes of standard cliches, like work smarter, not harder.
Like he'll have his own version of that that has got tech browsepeak attached to it.
Yeah.
Yeah, and just to be clear, like Steve Jobs is another person that does this kind of thing, right?
Like another person that would invoke Zen philosophy or this kind of thing.
But like ultimately, they're just tech CEOs, right?
Like this is the thing with the All-In podcast.
This is the thing with Hilom Mast.
They imagine that they are these deeply profound and insightful people.
They are the world changers.
And what they really are is like very wealthy people that like to imagine that they're, you know, very philosophical and profound because of whatever Maslow's hierarchy, whatever thing you want to get.
Like when people have achieved success, they like to imagine, you know, that they're doing much more important things and so on.
And that's what it's about.
So like most of Naval's stuff, although there's like the claim that it's about, you know, you got to follow things to help the world or whatever.
But it's really indulgent self-actualization shit.
And it's the exact same indulgent self-actualization shit that appeals to Matthew McConaughey's audience, that appeals to a tech CEO.
So that's the actual unifying principle of the universe is everybody wants to imagine themselves as like deep and special and profound.
And the reality is that we're mostly not.
Yeah.
And that includes the guys from the All In podcast and Naval.
They're pretty average people who happen to be incredibly rich and that makes them very confident and have a very strong sense of their own self-worth and abilities.
So it, you know, makes them very, very happy to, you know, philosophize and get into speculative ideas with the likes of Scott.
But yeah, there's not much value to it.
And yeah, when you do hear and get onto political topics, he gets quite vehement about, right?
He's not just playing along.
This is stuff that he feels strongly about.
You find out yet that they just have the same stupid conspiratorial opinions as most highly politically partisan people.
Yeah.
Well, you know, real masters of the universe stuff.
That's, that's the takeaway.
Oh, and, uh, you know, if you are thinking, well, what about, what about the Decoding the Gurus podcast?
Do they consider them?
No, Matt and I consider ourselves average book standard academics.
Okay.
Eric Weinstein called me, I think in one exchange, a month.
a middlebrow academic and that's fine okay there's a difference right i am completely at peace with my mediocrity and relative lack of profundity.
Okay.
That's the difference.
So yeah, we are at peace with that.
If you want to go find your, you know, philosophy, your insights about the self and whatnot, it's Sam Harris's app.
I'll do it.
There you go.
There's a difference.
Various philosophers on there.
Please enjoy it.
Indeed, indeed.
Well, good.
All right.
Well, we've ticked off.
Naval, it was good to return to Scott just briefly.
That's about enough of Scott I can handle in one go.
Great.
Great.
We'll see you again in a couple of years, Scott, and they don't know how things go.
But the thing I will mention, Matt, next episode, barring some accident, we're going back to Stence Making Land.
We're taking a holiday, okay?
We're going back.
And we're allowed to, Gautama.
All right.
There's a little bit of Stence Making here, but not at all that we're talking about for the next episode.
No.
We've got Jordan Hall, John Verveke, and Jordan Peterson together.
Right?
And they titled it, not we, they titled it, A Dialogue So Dangerous It Just Might Bring You Wisdom.
A Dialogue So Dangerous It Just Might Bring You Wisdom.
This sounds right up our alley.
It is.
Incredibly dangerous stuff.
So, yeah.
Strap on your stack hats before you listen, people.
That's going to be one for the ages.
But, Matt, now, patrons, go shout them out, okay?
I told you, I've got a system.
I'm going through overlooked patrons of the past.
You know, the patrons who deserve shout outs.
Yes.
And they've just been ignored by us cruelly.
Is this the post you made on the Patreon?
And I saw a lot of voices crying out, saying, I've been supporting you guys for years.
I've never been shouted out.
This is for them.
Is it?
It is for them.
Yes.
Although, that's not true that all of them.
That's for you.
But, yes.
In any case.
So, if you would allow me, Matt.
I'll just give some of them a little.
Please do.
A little nosy.
Don't interrupt you.
Just go for it.
Don't hesitate.
Yeah.
So, here we go.
Conspiracy hypothesizers.
Or people that didn't indicate what level they're at.
if you did it's your fault if you can't put it into this joseph are whole Paul Hanrahan, Ethan Rimmelman, Ben Hodson, Jake Zadarak, Sabuda Kaful, MJ Eldridge, and Horya Opris.
Oh, and some who call me Tim.
Some who call me Tim.
Some who call me Tim.
That's a good one.
That is our conspiracy hypothesizers.
Thank you all.
I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions and they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man, it's almost like.
someone is getting paid.
Like when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
There you go.
That's your reward.
You got plays.
It's your reward.
You got it.
Nine revolutionary geniuses.
We've got Eric Stern, Tommy Brooks, Ethan Rimmelman, Kevin Markham, and Ivy, and Ivy.
These are Yeah, revolutionary.
Ivy is an Ivy drink.
Drip.
Ivy Drip.
Maybe he is in Independent of Caribal.
It could be.
It could be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm usually running, I don't know, seventy or ninety distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess.
And it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
I like with what's his name, he founded the field of evolutionary consumption, Gad said.
Now, that's somewhat true, I think.
But what he doesn't mention is that the field of evolutionary consumption has got him in it, and maybe a couple of other guys.
I think that was just a nice claim to fame there.
Technically true, but not as good as it sounds.
Yeah, there are some issues there.
Now, the last year, Matt, Galaxy Brain Gurus.
We have Kimberly Beer, Don Schaefer, and dank sparrow oh and well no look you can't blame me for this matt right i told people put your shout out.
Tell me what tier you're in, right?
So Rufus Evans, you're in this tier.
I don't know what your actual tier is, but that's where you are, okay?
So, and Rufus Evans, Galaxy Breen Guru.
So, thank you all.
Thank you.
Hello there, you awakening wonders.
You may not be aware that your entire reality is being manipulated.
Become part of our community or free speakers.
We are still allowed to say stuff like this.
Science is failing.
It's failing right in front of our eyes and no one's doing anything about it.
I'm a shell for no one.
More than that, I just simply refuse to be caught in any one single echo chamber.
In the end, like many of us must, I walk alone.
That was brilliant.
That's new.
That's Martin Wessel, who deserves the credit for that.
He said, thank you.
So good.
So the excellent clips, great editing.
Oh, that guy.
What's his name?
Friedman.
Friedman.
Like, they're all bad, but Lex Friedman, he's so fake.
I can't stand him.
He's so, I just want to shake him.
I can't believe anyone falls for that stuff.
He's alone.
Do you want the, I know, I wonder if Naval has done an episode with Lex, but we shouldn't even consider that.
Vito, Vito.
Yeah, that's reasonable.
Well, there we go, Matt.
We've done the decoding.
It's done.
It's going to go identity for.
And let's.
just hope that all our listeners don't have any water-related problems because that's what that proves.
We know what that proves.
You're going to be uploaded to an alien civilization where your construct will be fixing water-related problems for all eternity.
So you watch out.
Yeah, there's no other interpretation there.
So there we go.
I've won some animals.
We'll be back with the sound speakers soon enough.
