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June 19, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
56:04
Episode 51 - Scott Talks with Naval Ravikant, No Politics
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Featuring Naval Ravikant.
Naval, say hi.
Hello, everybody. We are here to talk about everything interesting.
Maybe not our usual topics, but everything interesting.
We're going to go places.
And I would like to start with this question.
Are we a computer simulation?
Thanks for starting with the easy one.
This is my number one question people ask me, because that's my view, and you know my view.
But give me your updated view.
I've got a couple of thoughts on it.
I don't have a concrete view.
Obviously, it's statistically likely that we're in a simulation just because of how these things develop.
The simulations develop simulations.
But I would say...
Wait, for the people who are new to this...
Just give them the one-sentence explanation.
Okay, so on a long enough period of time, a sufficiently advanced civilization will invent a simulation and go into it.
And since the universe has been around for a really, really long period of time, it has probably already happened many, many times over.
It's statistically likely given how long it takes to do it versus how long the universe has been around.
So that's why a lot of people just think mathematically speaking we are in a simulation.
But, I would say, on top of that, what's interesting is if you look at Buddhism as sort of a philosophy, and if you look at the simulation hypothesis, a lot of things that are true in Buddhism are true in the simulation hypothesis.
Like, they call it Maya, the great game, the illusion of the world.
Really? Right, that's the reference.
So there's already simulation type references.
Well, but is illusion a simulation?
Because there's a different intention behind those two things.
Somebody created one and the other one was sort of an accident.
The intentionality is a really good question.
What the Buddhists would basically say, we're all one thing, which you could argue in a matrix type thing, yeah, we're all made of the same code.
So we're all basically one program that's running.
When they talk about the multiple lives hypothesis, which there's no proof of by the way, but it's just like their religion, right?
That's like someone playing the game over and over, and then what is enlightenment, Buddhism, is realizing the whole thing is a game.
So you can map the simulation hypothesis in Buddhism onto each other very nicely.
I've often had this upgrade to the simulation hypothesis that plays off of that.
That if there were something called reincarnation and were a simulation, could it be that the creator of the simulation, working from a software kit, because every kid can make his own universe now, it's the future, they say, I'm going to put myself as the character and I'll play different lives.
So there'll be something about me that I take to each of these lives.
Maybe it's a central characteristic of me, but not all of them, that sort of thing.
It's a fine hypothesis.
There's no evidence for that, of course.
I think one thing that doesn't get discussed in the simulation hypothesis is if we create a simulation, the simulation is never going to be as good as a real thing.
Because the compute power that we have to simulate another complex system, you just use up all the atoms and molecules and energy in your simulation.
You're creating a world where people are hallucinating their reality, which is exactly our world.
Some of the strongest argument that we're in a simulation is that the way you would conserve resources is exactly what we see.
So if you were the maker, you wouldn't say, The universe is infinitely large because you can't program it.
You would say, well let's say it started as a small thing and it's getting bigger but it's got an edge and you can't get there.
How convenient that nobody can go with the speed of light because you can't get to the outside and find out you're in a simulation.
And how the universe, quantum mechanics, the smallest forces and particles are actually discrete.
You can't go below that, right?
So there's a level below which you're just not allowed to peak.
The universe isn't analog and continuous.
It's actually discrete and quantum, which does lend itself more towards programmed in the simulation.
And even weirder, also slightly compatible with weird science, the fact that we are being observed in this conversation might be the only thing that makes it real.
Because if you and I had this conversation and nobody saw it, You would have the option of going home and saying, we talked about agriculture.
It was a good time.
And I could have a memory of, you know, we talked about science and we had a fight.
And it wouldn't matter.
It would never have to be resolved.
Yeah, and this is the same thing in quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpretation, where they basically, Niels Bohr and other scientists working with him, caused this little revolution because they basically said, reality doesn't exist unless there's an observer.
That's what the quantum differential split experiment was showing.
The observer is as critical as the observed.
The wave-particle duality doesn't collapse unless there's an observer there to see it.
I don't have enough conversations about the wave-particle duality.
That's why I love talking to you.
I'm not a physicist. I'm an amateur.
I just read this stuff. All right.
We're only doing the hard questions today.
Free will. Free will is a good one.
Free will. Do we have free will?
I say no, not in any way that isn't just mechanical.
In other words, the laws of physics do not end at your skull and then on the inside there's something called magic and free will and spirits and souls and stuff.
I think there's just a little moist computer happening in there and it does what it has to do given the inputs it has.
So I agree with you.
I think that we don't have free will because it's an unbroken chain of particle collisions from the Big Bang until now.
But I will make one tweak which is that doesn't mean it's predetermined.
We are living in a complex system and the only way to model the next move in a complex system is by having a computer of equivalent complexity to step forward.
So you can't model what happens next in our universe without a computer that's much larger.
But is our ability to predict it, that doesn't change its nature.
That's correct. I agree.
It's still free will, but it's still indeterminate.
We still have to move forward to find out what's going to happen.
Oh, right. It's a surprise to us.
That's right. It's a surprise. And there's no entity out there, just computationally speaking, that knows the surprise, that is watching.
So you're saying that nobody can predict...
The future? I think...
Are you trying to trademark that too?
Careful, he's going to file for a trademark.
Here's to the future.
Everybody, simultaneous sip.
Are you ready? Alright, so...
Here we are, just bouncing around.
And... One of the things that we've talked about before that I always liked your points of view is on strategies for success.
And if I were to give you, there are lots of variables you need to get right.
I'm going to list them, and I want your quick opinion on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 means, oh, this is like a really important thing for success, and 1 is, no, you don't even need that.
Number one, hard work.
Three or four. Maybe like early on, like seven or eight at some point, but yeah, really three or four.
In Silicon Valley, there might be exceptions because you're playing games, winner take all, trying to build the next $50 billion company where only one can win.
So the number one, by definition, is also going to hit 10 on everything, right?
For general people, going through general life, just trying to be successful, hard work really doesn't matter that much because we live in an age of infinite leverage.
Technology, capital, media make it so easy to multiply your work that what you do and how well you do it is so much more important than how hard you do it.
Who you know, your network.
Scale of 1 to 10, how important?
Network. It wasn't that important for me early on, but now as I look back, I realize that there were some networks that really mattered, like moving to Silicon Valley.
That's a network that you go into just by moving there.
That was a critical decision.
My college network, I don't think, mattered that much.
For me, I tried to create work that people would see and recognize, and the network sort of emerges.
Now, you may be using network at sort of a higher level where we're both operating, but how about that first job?
That advice, the advice that you just...
No, that's like an eight or nine.
It's really important because where you start out...
It makes it a lot easier, fewer hops for where you end up.
I just didn't start there. So network-wise, I started closer to zero.
So I think that's why I have a little reaction to it shouldn't matter, but I think it does matter.
So what's the quick story of how you got traction For a phenomenally successful career, starting with literally nothing.
Can you boil it down to, well, there was this job, this person I met, this thing I did?
No, it's true. I was a total unknown kid in New York City from a nothing family with no single-parent household, immigrants, trying to survive kind of situation.
I passed the test to get into Stuyvesant High School.
And that was it. That saved my life.
Once I had the Stuyvesant brand, then I got into an Ivy League college.
Once you're into Ivy League college, then I was in tech.
That network mattered.
It started with no network, but Stuyvesant is like one of those intelligence lottery situations where you can break into an instant validation network.
You go from being blue-collar to white-collar in one move.
So you had a singular advantage.
Your academics were spectacular, so you had a path that was just open to you.
Actually, this is what I love about Stuyvesant.
It wasn't about academics. My academics weren't initially that great.
I wasn't a good student. But it was about a test.
It was like an SAT that you took in the 8th grade.
And if you were among the highest scorers in all of the New York City public school system, you got to go to this magnet math and science school.
That's what happened. And if you were number two, you got to go to Bronx Science, which they'll never live down.
And if you were number three, you got to go to Brooklyn Tech and whatever.
But Stuyvesant was the hardest to get into school in all of New York.
And it was public, and you had brilliant teachers and great students, and they would take anybody as long as they passed that exam.
Okay, then this leads me to the next question.
Scale of 1 to 10, importance for success, intelligence.
This is where I'm really biased, but...
I mean, how do you define intelligence, right?
It's one of those catch-all questions.
Do you mean the G-factor, the standard accepted one that they look for in the genetic tests, and is the IQ tracker?
No, I usually think of it...
Do you include street smarts, emotional intelligence?
Let's do what we both want to do, which is skip that because it's really a subset of the skill stack.
So how important is it to have the right combination of skills?
You know I'm leading the witness, right?
Oh yeah, no, no, of course. And I've read your books too.
I've read your whole theory on this.
But I think it's absolutely right.
So to me, the number one thing you can have is general intelligence.
Because general intelligence allows you to get pretty good at everything else.
I would add one more thing.
General intelligence, and you just have to be open-minded.
You can be intellectually curious, open-minded.
If you're smart and you question everything, you'll eventually figure everything else out at a good enough level.
You'll figure out how to hack your nutrition and your workouts so that you do them and you eat relatively well for yourself.
You'll hack your habits so you're not smoking or drinking.
You'll hack your work so that you know how to make money.
You'll hack even your sales skills.
You'll figure out the minimum amount of persuasion.
You'll hack your development skills.
I think intelligence and open-mindedness going together are the Meta things that will then make you pretty good at everything.
And then that's the way you win.
Now, you've probably seen more entrepreneurs before and after success than just about anybody ever gets to see, just from your vantage point.
Of all the people who made it, how many could you tell Five minutes after you, madam.
Like, oh, this one's gonna make it.
And it doesn't even sort of matter what the idea was.
It's hard to tell which business is gonna work because a lot of businesses fail and a lot of good entrepreneurs chasing not good businesses fail.
But the entrepreneurs themselves don't fail.
Over a long enough period of time, when you meet the right entrepreneur, you know they're going to be a winner.
They will be a winner. It's a question of how many times.
So you just have to back them a few times.
So the stock market is broken because we're betting on the bad thing.
We're betting on businesses instead of people.
Definitely at the early stage, it's much more about the people.
As the business gets larger, more mature, it can become like a fortress.
Then it becomes more about the business itself.
Warren Buffett always says, invest in a business that any idiot could run, because at some point one will.
Or he has some paraphrase on it.
I'm paraphrasing him. But the kinds of businesses he invests in, they're irregardless of who's running it.
Buffett plays the wise old nice man on TV, but there's a lot of shady stuff there too.
And one of those is that Warren invests in basically natural monopolies.
He calls them moats, but they're basically natural monopolies.
So, for example, he talked about how Coca-Cola, the reason why Coca-Cola is such a massive business, or one of them, is obviously you're psychologically and physiologically addicted, right?
Once you're used to a kind of drink in your mouth, like you're going to consume it.
The sugar, caffeine, all that is obvious.
What people don't realize about cola in particular, cola has one characteristic that other soft drinks and drinks don't, which is it has zero taste buildup.
Zero taste memory.
So you don't get sick of drinking Coke over and over.
So literally, Coca-Cola, for an addicted drinker, can take over your entire life.
You can substitute water 100% with Coca-Cola.
And people do that.
And so Buffett was basically saying, this is why Coke is a great business.
Now, he mentioned this offhand to an MBA lecture like a decade ago.
If he were out there saying this right now on Twitter, people would be like, my God, this whole company is a predatorial company that is basically hacking people's genes and taste buds to essentially get them addicted to this horrible substance that can replace drinking water with sugar water and make them diabetic.
How does he get away with this?
I'm not calling Buffet out.
I'm just saying he's invested in natural monopolies that are basically addictive drugs.
He might as well be investing in weed companies that basically control distribution and shove down all their components.
The other things he sells are like junk food and candy, right?
Yeah, exactly. They're all the things that...
And look, many of them are great, and these are all legal businesses, and I think it should all be legal.
So I support Warren.
God bless him. He should go do all this.
He talks about investing in businesses that are mullets, but those are natural monopolies.
Until your business is a natural monopoly, it's all about the people.
They're really illegal drugs.
It's even better than being a natural monopoly.
Because you can make money selling cocaine even if other people are selling cocaine.
I hear. That's what I hear.
It's the nature of things that are physiological or psychological to us that we just form deeper bonds with them.
Like Gillette, for example, or like a toothpaste or something.
When you're putting something in your mouth, you're used to a flavor.
You can just get addicted at a physiological level that just a mental addiction is not an issue.
To that point, could you hold up your water bottle?
This will make sense. So this water bottle came with several other frozen water bottles in Amazon's food delivery.
So now they're doing food delivery to your house.
And they used to have these cold packs that once you got them, they would make you sort of angry as a consumer because you'd be like, cold packs?
What do I do with these?
I don't want to throw them away.
I don't want to store them until you come back for them.
You've just made me a little angry and I just got your product.
And now they replace these with water bottles that you were probably going to use anyway.
You know how to recycle these and you feel like you've got something extra.
You're like, oh my god, this is the smartest, most awesome thing.
I got a bottle of water. So in that way, they're making a little bit of a little dopamine or whatever the chemical reaction is, that every time you get a package from them, you're getting a little, oh.
So it's what Apple does when they do their packaging.
You fall in love with it before you actually touch the actual product.
So Amazon is not only providing me with water today, but back when I was doing my first tech startup that I was running, Opinions, back in the dot-com boom, The first one.
We would make a big heroic thing out of hard work because we were young kids.
We didn't know any better. We thought it was all about how hard you worked.
And so everyone would compete to spend time at the office.
So we would sleep underneath our desks and we kind of made a big deal out of it.
And we used to get, this on Amazon was pretty new, but we used to get books and CDs and stuff delivered from Amazon.
And our computers would come from Amazon.
And they would pack everything in these rice and corn-based packing foam.
And so we would eat it.
So, you think it's new that I'm drinking Amazon's packing material 20 years later.
You've been eating it for years. I've been eating it for decades.
Delicious. It's America.
I'm still alive today. Alright, my next question.
Decentralization. The big buzzword.
Unless you're working in the area, you hear it, and it's like, we hear this decentralization blockchain and whatnot is going to change civilization.
But can you give me the human being explanation of what the future might look like?
Yeah, so what blockchains do is they basically, look, humans, we're just groups, we're cooperators, we're networkers, right?
We build networks. English is a network, the United States is a network, the US dollar is a network.
Uber is a network, right?
So we just have all these networks that operate our lives.
We cooperate. That's what makes us special as a species.
That's what allows us to beat up all the other species, because we can cooperate across genetic boundaries, unlike even ants or bees who have to come from the same hive or the same nest.
So humans are network cooperators.
Suck it, bees! Exactly.
But our networks have to be controlled because there's always cheaters in every system.
In a network everyone's contributing resources but the people who are giving more resources need to get more and the people who are not giving resources, consuming more, need to pay more.
So you need somehow to run a network.
You need to control who gets in, who gets paid, who pays out, who has to do what work, who is cheating, who's not doing their job.
And so these networks have historically been run by individuals who eventually become kings and tyrants and emperors, or they've been run by elites or aristocracies, or they've been run by democracies, which are like mobs, or they've been run by companies like Uber or Facebook.
So we organize networks through these different government systems.
How do you organize and run a network?
And what I would argue what blockchains do is they bring a fifth form of governance into the Today, purely digital, but eventually including physical networks.
And that form of government is like a market.
In a blockchain system, what happens is basically a piece of code running in the cloud that says, hey, we need certain resource.
Let's call it, we need storage, right?
Anyone who contributes storage into this network will get paid.
And anyone who needs storage out of it will have to pay.
And we're going to track this all online.
We're going to keep track of the little debits and credits and a little ledger.
And that's a blockchain. A blockchain is just a piece of code in the cloud that nobody owns that's doing that.
And it's punishing cheaters who use too much storage or break the rules.
And it's rewarding people who bring lots and lots of storage reliably.
That's all it is. It's a protocol.
So now bring that to, you know, can I still need a sandwich?
Yeah, yeah.
So, what broad proteins will do is they will build these giant permissionlessly programmable, uncensorable networks.
Permissionlessly programmable means that unlike our current money system where if I want to write code and I want to send money or receive money, I have to work with Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, pay huge fees, I can't do microtransactions, I can't send macro transactions, I can only operate within a very tight band, I need their permission.
So, just people don't code that stuff in.
So the financial world has been immune from programmers.
It has been shielded from technologists and programmers.
But now we're going to make finance programmable, which means that the engineers and the technologists are going to take over the privilege of signature printing money from bankers.
So that is a big thing.
That's the money craze around cryptocurrencies.
So what is eliminating The banking gatekeepers with their rules.
We're placing them with code. Imagine if your bank was actually a decent website, where you could actually go and it would behave like Amazon.
The way Amazon treats you, what if your bank treated you that way?
What if they had all those features and functionality online?
The fact they don't, it's an antiquated permission-based system.
It's not just banking, it's just the entire finance industry.
The other piece that's really important is uncensorable.
So now you can actually start building things where you don't have a gatekeeper in the middle taking 30% or you don't have it being shut down for people somewhere in the world like when Twitter is not available or Facebook is not censored or like how the Chinese social media companies are running.
But will it make a big difference in that way?
Because people like to self-censor.
So somebody gave an example recently of a homeowner's association saying, hey, does that restrict your rights?
And I'm thinking, well, yeah, it does, but people move there because of that.
Of course, yeah. At some level, all laws are contractual social self-censorship, right?
It's basically we get together as 300 million Americans and we say we're going to live in this piece of land.
This is the rules and controls we have to prevent us from going insane and killing each other.
How likely is some big institution going to insert itself into the decentralized world as say either, I don't know, an insurance against something or a guarantor of some kind, which is really all banks do, you know? I mean, there will be big centralized actors who will try and do things, but fundamentally, as long as blockchains are sufficiently decentralized, they're bigger than any country.
They still haven't been able to shut down BitTorrent.
How would they shut down Bitcoin? It runs in hundreds of companies and thousands of independent nodes and miners, and the code hasn't really been changed.
Bitcoin is kind of impossible to stop at this point.
If there are 10,000 rich people in the world who believe in Bitcoin and will take it and give it as legal tender, then it's good as a store of value.
Then it is a new independent form of a store of value alongside gold or oil or any of those.
What if? And I love this question because it's so naive, but it's hard for me to believe that a government such as ours couldn't say, you can't use Bitcoin, it's illegal now.
Couldn't they detect it?
I don't know for sure.
I don't think so. Because first of all, it's just code.
Code is just speech. But they could catch it on your device side.
Well, it's a First Amendment issue.
You can't make code illegal anymore than you can make speech illegal.
This battle was fought by Bill Clinton back when the Clipper chip stuff was going down, and he wanted to basically ban PGP exports and stuff like that.
But there are examples of apps that are illegal, right?
You know, child porn is illegal.
That's content that's illegal.
So the government can do anything it wants?
As far as I know, that's the only one that's illegal.
For example, even having plans to make a bomb, like the anarchist cookbook, I don't think that's illegal.
Really? Yeah. So I think, in fact, that's political speech because that's how you would revolt against your government.
You need to know how to build a bomb or a gun or whatever, right?
So Cody Wilson, when he's defense distributed, when he's publishing the 3D printed gun schematics and how-tos, that's not illegal.
So freedom of speech is a big deal.
First Amendment. The big one.
But if, let's say, we were a dictatorship, we could...
If we were a dictatorship, we would...
And the government could, you know, at the device level...
Again, perhaps. Again, perhaps.
What they would do is they would start filtering...
Like a dictatorship, they want to block all cryptocurrencies, would start filtering internet traffic.
It would have to basically drop all crypto-related traffic.
That is problematic for many reasons.
One is you can hide crypto traffic in other traffic.
Second is I think other traffic will be hiding inside crypto traffic eventually.
Like to access certain websites, you'll have to go through crypto traffic.
And thirdly, you can sync cryptocurrency blockchains just by broadcast from satellite.
I could have one computer hidden inside Inner Mongolia and it's receiving signals that can sync the Bitcoin blockchain and then I can serve as a validator for the new electronic goal for people in my community.
So say tomorrow the government says, we've got our own cryptocurrency and Bitcoin is illegal.
And you say, haha, but we'll get away with this so easily you can't make it illegal.
And then I say, well, we can catch 10% of you.
Yeah, sure. Okay, so that's not even true.
Because a government that's doing that, at that point, the shit has hit the fan.
That's a terrible government. We're in a Venezuela slide.
So today in Venezuela, they're arresting people for Bitcoin mining.
And they're shaking them down.
But yet people are doing it because it's the only way to survive.
What if the government simply did it through persuasion?
And they just made a case.
They said, look, our Our crypto has got more security.
We don't want old people getting ripped off with the fluctuations of Bitcoin.
It would be easy to imagine that the government made a legitimate case.
Well, they already have that.
It's called the US dollar. So it doesn't offer anything new.
It could be the replacement.
That's not true of all blockchains.
There are many other things blockchains do, like programmability and allocating.
We could use it for allocating energy grids or for allocating bandwidth or all kinds of interesting things.
But at least Bitcoin is basically insurance against politicians.
It only has value because It's not politically controlled.
The moment you have a cryptocurrency that is controlled by a dictator or even a democracy or a mob or by an elite or by a company, it's nonsense.
It's an oxymoron. It has no value.
So all the value is there because it is an extra-sovereign currency.
If Bitcoin can be stopped by governments, then Bitcoin will be worthless.
By the way, that's why today the total value of all the Bitcoin in the world is still like 1 20th of the value of gold.
Because it hasn't been around that long.
The markets are still putting a very low probability that it will survive.
They think it will get stamped out by the government or that the code will somehow end up being weak or broken.
But if those things aren't true, it's going to go 20x from here.
When you say the world...
I mean the markets. Bitcoin is trading in a very efficient, very liquid market.
Alright, let's see what kind of comments we're getting here.
There's still 1.4 thousand people watching this and I think it's time for a simultaneous sip.
How many do you normally get? You know, for some reason, I think it caps around there.
Only rarely do I get more than that.
I remember, I haven't seen you on Periscope in a long time, but one of the very early broadcasts that I was on, when you were just first starting out, you were trying to get to 800, and I remember we were counting down, waiting for them to come in.
Exciting times. Yeah, exactly.
Some of these are over 100,000 ultimate viewers in replay.
Wow. Alright, let's see what kind of questions.
Somebody asked a prediction about the future of Bitcoin.
That's sort of quasi-investment advice.
Do you stay away from that?
Yeah, I don't do investment advice.
Do your own homework. So that's my policy as well.
What's something that you and I philosophically disagree on?
Family. Oh.
You don't have your own biological kids.
Oh, okay. Why does it matter to have a biological kid as opposed to adopted or stepkids?
Well, hold on. Now you're turning this into a virtue signaling thing.
Adopted and stepkids are great, but he's trying to win persuasion out of the gate because the way he's framing this.
So I have to make adoption look bad for me to make any point.
I like you. I like to win my arguments before they start.
Trump calls it setting the table.
I don't claim to be at your level of persuasion, but I can see that one coming a mile away.
No, we're not going to talk about adopt and foster kids.
Adopt and foster kids are wonderful, and we should all adopt kids, because kids are beautiful.
So it's not compared to...
And we're not talking about people who can't have children, because if you can't have children, you can have children, and life is still fantastic.
I'm just saying that having children, having your own biological children, if you can, and if things permit, If you have already fostered children, it's a wonderful thing to do.
I just don't think it gets enough credit.
I don't know that I disagree with that.
What part do you think I disagree with?
It's obvious that people do that.
You told me in the past that you have stepchildren that gave you enough of that.
Oh, no, I don't think I get the same thing that a genetic parent gets.
That's right. So I think you get a couple of things.
One is, you get this amazing hormonal release where your genes are finally relaxed.
I can rest my genes.
Thank God. Yeah, exactly, because you are here because an unbroken chain of your ancestors from tadpoles still now replicated, and you're the first one who's going to miss that branch.
And you're basically missing it because you're too lazy, because you can't be bothered, right?
Well, I think at some point, your genes will punish you over it.
So we all have this natural evolutionary need to reproduce.
So even if you're religious instead of evolution, you know that people want to reproduce for whatever reason.
It's a basic thing. Because we are reproducers.
That's why we're here. But I have this unique situation where I am reproducing as you look.
My ideas, at a very deep level, my ideas are now being captured forever.
I've got books on all kinds of topics.
And people who have been following me for a while know that I've been doing this somewhat intentionally.
I mean it's more than one goal for what I do usually.
I can be reproduced in software.
I think that these days, a lot of times you want to have an impact more than you want to have kids because at some level you know that memetic replication is more effective than pure genetic replication.
That said, you're a biological creature.
You're mostly body with a little bit of mind.
Your body's got to come along too.
A big part of my not wanting to have kids is that I didn't want to pass my genes along.
You have fantastic genes.
Well, you know, at the moment, I had a very unhealthy childhood, so without getting into the details...
Okay, but we got Scott Adams, we got Gilbert, we got Persuasion, you know, we got lots out of it, so...
Well, that's great for you, but what about me?
No, I did not enjoy my...
Well, within the next decade, we're going to have the technology to do genetic sequencing of embryos, frozen embryos at scale.
So at that point, what you can do is you can basically have a ton of frozen embryos through IVF, and then you can sequence each of them and see which ones of them are the least likely to have genetic issues that you're concerned about.
And then you can select the kind of...
Or I could build a software simulation in which I give birth to my virtual children within the environment.
The virtual reality is just not going to be good enough for a long time for that.
Although here's one theory, which is based along with your hallucination hypothesis, which is that We're going to invent a VR at some point that's not anywhere near as good as our real world.
In fact, it's not going to look very good, it's not going to sound very good, but it's going to have the huge advantage that it's good enough because you can control it.
It's a holodeck instead of this world where you have to go with what reality is as opposed to what you want.
As dating is to porn on your computer.
Exactly. It'll be the porn to dating.
That's actually a very good way to put it.
And it'll be good enough that at that point you either just take the sacrifice, but the only way to make the sacrifice is you have to wipe your memory.
Because otherwise you're always comparing to your real reality.
So what you'll do is when you go into that VR sim, you will set it up temporarily and erase your memory that you're in a sim.
Which is how it will work for us.
We might be living in some larger reality, but this one we like better because we've engineered better for whatever we want.
Like I built my own life, you've programmed your own life, right?
Not think about your old life.
You have to wipe your memory. And you have to suspend disbelief and pretend this matters.
You have to think it's real. But that's very much the matrix model where there's a real you with tubes in your head somewhere.
But that's a model where it's not some other person who's put you in.
It's you. You've put yourself in.
It's your movie. You've wrote it.
You're starring in it. You've just wiped your memory so that you can accept the fact it's a low-res sim.
And so you can believe it.
So basically, in your model, you're using an organic human being as a really shitty data storage unit.
Because you don't need the person in your model.
Oh, you mean like the physical person?
Yeah, once the person has built the little feedback loop that gives consciousness to its imagined new world, it can delete its organic body.
It doesn't need anymore. No, I think you may want to go through multiple rounds.
So I was just seeing this great video on the internet that was somebody who's explaining Hofstadter's book about consciousness and the eye.
Go to Lesher Bach or Metamagical Fimas or...
Oh, Consciousness and the Eye.
Consciousness and the Eye. Yeah, he has that one.
The smart way of saying things that I kind of was feeling but didn't have the smart words to put on it.
And the idea is that, and this is my bastardization of him, so don't blame him for anything I say.
But that consciousness is just the ability to sort of broadcast what's going to happen next, your expectations, and then judge how close you are.
You know, judge the delta. That friction between what you think is going to happen in a moment and what it actually does is all you're really experiencing.
That's what gives you the feeling of reality.
I think of it as a memory prediction machine.
The brain is a machine that takes the past memories and uses them to try and predict the future.
And then below that, that's the mind, and then below that is just consciousness, just raw consciousness, which is just awareness.
But what does that mean?
Can you give me a mechanical description of consciousness?
Because I just gave you one.
It's just the friction basically between the expectations and the observation.
Oh, that's interesting.
So consciousness is the friction between the expectations and the observation.
Because if you had no expectations, you would have no feeling of stress.
And all the feelings that, good or bad, the heightened feelings, are your most conscious.
You're most conscious when you're in pain or really happy and stuff.
And so you can see that when things are going just the way you expect, you go to your lowest level of consciousness.
It's the least friction.
That's pretty good. I like that one.
I think we've settled on that.
No, I need to think about it a little bit more.
I mean, for me, consciousness, I've always thought of it as, you know, the Buddhist view of consciousness is the base property of the universe.
Like, it's all consciousness, right?
It's just is-ness.
It's just the experience of the mind.
But isn't that just sort of the word that doesn't have a contact?
No, the value, the definition of consciousness you used implies expectation and future, which implies kind of some doing.
It's, you know, it's not just a pure existence.
There's just a pure awareness layer that we have.
Where we're just aware of everything around us, right?
But who's doing the awaring?
There has to be a subject that is aware.
Awareness isn't a third party.
Well, there doesn't have to be. The Buddhist view is that awareness is a fundamental property of the universe.
It's just the universe is just aware.
Everything is aware. I like the belief systems where there's just a given.
Yeah, it's an axiom.
Descartes said, I think, therefore I am.
That latter part doesn't necessarily follow, even that's a jump.
But I think, what he means by I think, he means like I'm aware, right?
Like I'm here, I'm aware.
So it's the one constant you've had your entire life.
From the moment you were born to the moment you die, you will be aware.
Everything else will change. Everything else is not a given, you know, fluctuates around.
That awareness is consciousness.
When Descartes says, I think therefore I am, he's now taking it to the mind.
He's basically the same as a layer above that, where I can also plan for the future, regret the past, and move around.
Which is very close to what I said.
The thinking part, I just gave a little bit extra description of it's predicting and then comparing.
But by your definition, something that isn't actively a memory prediction machine is unconscious, which may be true.
But it also implies that when you're not doing memory prediction, your level of consciousness goes down, which seems to run counter to the way I think about consciousness.
Are you substituting consciousness for soul?
No, I try to avoid soul.
Well, but it feels like they're both the big unstated given that is hard to define.
There's no good language for metaphysics, right?
The words are overloaded, they mean different things to everybody.
Let's check in with the folks here.
Is there any topic you want to hear?
Let's do one more quick topic.
And it won't be what's your favorite movie.
Souls are real, somebody says.
Consciousness exists. What did Neval Scott University teach?
That's a good one. Oh, okay.
Let's do that. Alright, we're running school.
Alright, you go first.
First class I'm going to run is actually on persuasive writing.
And this is kissing up a little bit, but I'm going to send them to your article, The Day You Became a Better Writer.
And then second is I'm going to send them to the...
What is that School of Persuasion?
Dale Carnegie School of Persuasion.
Our schools are going to be very similar.
Up till this point.
Then Nutrition. I think it's not that you're going to tell them one way is right, but you're going to make them cook.
You're going to make them log themselves and see what makes them feel good and they'll kind of learn over time.
To learn a system. Yeah, learn a system.
For figuring out the optimal nutrition for themselves.
Because what is correct is very dogmatic and that target moves around so much that I almost consider it a political process.
Mathematics for sure, but it's got to be fun.
It's got to come through application.
So make them build instruments in physics or play in the chemistry labs, but always take a mathematical bent towards it.
Make sure they understand the underlying mathematics.
That's really like a core foundational thing.
Of course, reading and writing, you know, be a persuasive one I threw on top, but very important.
What else do you teach in school?
Fitness, right?
But again, fitness is find some sport that you love to do and learn the basics of what builds muscle versus what builds speed and what builds flexibility and so on.
History, I would just drop.
I would just introduce them to Google and say, here's some nice books you can read in your spare time.
And I know someone's going to get pissed off and I'll be like, what about history?
There's always some history professors.
Something's got to go, right? Something's got to go.
It's not infinite class.
Exactly. You have finite time.
So things like history and geography and even literature.
You can read that on your own.
Here's a ton of amazing literature books that we highly recommend that you read in your spare time when you're curled up on a couch.
And this way, you read the literature you're going to enjoy as opposed to literature that I just rammed down your throat that you're going to hate.
So those are things that are hobbies that people do for fun that somehow got turned into school.
There's not as much of an educational requirement over there.
Can I throw a few in?
I like all of those.
I think I might have quibbled with the math because some people just will never use math.
Well, here's where math is so important.
Because all advancement in the world today that's like high intensity and high values come from technology, right?
And technology is applied to science versus applied math.
Well, I'm agreeing with all that part.
I'm just saying that everything else you said, I would make everyone do.
And math, only if you have aptitude.
Okay, fair, fair. Technology, I would get everybody comfortable with technology, including basic computer programming and understanding how hardware and chips, you know, high level work.
I would add to that, strategy.
Absolutely. Strategy for your own life and then strategy for other things.
I'm continually amazed, as I talk about world events and stuff, That there are strategies that are obvious to anybody who's been sort of in the business world enough that they've seen all the different forms of strategies.
Then you see it in the political world, and you go, oh, well, that's a strategy.
I recognize that. And other people are saying, my god, I think I'm seeing something insane, or that didn't work last time.
And I'm thinking, Do you not recognize the strategy?
Yeah. It's funny because people always ask me to recommend books on game theory and I'm embarrassed to say I haven't really read books on game theory.
I just know it because I grew up playing a lot of strategy war games as a kid.
And so everything that I see in business or in politics, I can easily map it into, oh yeah, that time I was Napoleon attacking Russia.
And that guy was negotiating with me and this guy was offering this.
How did I work it out? So I saved a special question for you that just dovetails perfectly into this.
Which is the better strategy?
Becoming better friends with your friends, or finding a way to work with your opponents?
And take this from any realm, from the world to business.
Clearly, if you can work with your opponents, you've got it made.
You win every time.
And let's look at some examples.
It's a super set, just by the mathematics of it.
I'm going to give some examples before I get to my bigger point here.
So if it's two companies who are competitors, if they can find a way to work together, they're probably better off.
I've been making the case that...
I'll try to keep this non-political.
Cooperation is the human advantage.
Anytime you can cooperate with more other humans, you win.
That's why in the tech industry you move to Silicon Valley, or you go to Hollywood for acting, because now you can connect to more people who are like-minded, who are in the same environment, ecosystem.
This is why people inherently want to network.
That's why people brag a little bit subtly about their Facebook crafts or whatever.
Because the more people you can work with, the richer you will be.
That's just built into the human species.
So it seems to me that...
Exactly. Wherever you're looking at a situation like, how can I succeed?
Ask yourself, Who is my opponent and how can we break that?
Because that opponent-ing is friction.
I think the first thing is, not to get too metaphysical, but we've already been there.
The first step, I would say, at least for me, is not declaring anybody your opponent.
In that sense, I think Kanye has a better high ground maneuver than Trump does because it's all love-based, right?
Because a lot of times the people that we think are enemies, they're just one way.
They don't think of us that way.
And over time when our ego softens and we get over whatever wound real or imagined that they inflicted, we'll realize they're not really our enemies and never were.
So I think it's better just to assume you don't have enemies.
So I've been saying that the definition of the golden age, which I believe we're entering, is when things are generally moving in the right direction on all the big stuff.
But more specifically, we realize that our remaining problems, the biggest ones, are psychological and not physical resource problems.
Does that ring true to you?
Do you feel we're in the golden age yet?
I think we're in the golden age in the sense that technology, capitalism have created such abundance that all humans can now slide into a world of very low infant mortality and low poverty.
Just the rate at which people are coming out of poverty and diseases like malaria and so on are being eradicated.
The world's just becoming a much, much, much better place.
It's just unevenly distributed.
In a weird way, though, it's also creating this perception that things are getting worse.
I don't know where that comes from, but there's this perception that everything is getting worse.
If you look at the mass statistics, By and large, things are getting better across the board.
So I agree with that. Psychologically, you could argue there's a perception gap.
It is a persuasion problem.
There's probably also a redistribution that has to happen because there's lots of people and lots of moving parts.
It's happening so fast.
You look at how quickly China modernized and how much money was made in China.
That's where now the earning gaps are the most extreme.
You'll have people who are literally decabillionaires and the people who are living in the dirt trying to make a dollar a day.
So, the faster it happens, the more volatile it is and the more the extremes you see.
But the world is headed toward massive prosperity as long as we don't blow up the engines that create it, which are basically capitalism, technology, and trade.
So, perfect example, North Korea and the United States thought they had this big problem that might only be solved by nuclear war, but it turns out We didn't want to attack them and they didn't want to die.
I'm cautiously hopeful.
The North Koreans have done this before.
They're really good at playing us and our public sentiment.
The difference is, this time we know it.
How do we know it?
Well, I think that's...
Probably the single most common criticism of the process is, hey, watch out if they've done this before.
Even Pompeo, I think.
Oh, I see. They know that we're watching for that.
So if they don't have a mechanism for getting what we want first...
They're unnoticed. What was interesting this time was, for the first time, the U.S. started cracking down on Chinese companies that were evading sanctions with North Korea.
And the Chinese didn't stop it.
So you actually had the US doing enforcement.
So I think this really came down to China.
I'll bet you a lot of this was just Trump, every time he threatens China, you know, some of that is like, and you better give it to North Korea or else we can punish you financially.
I think it was a case of everybody realized that there wasn't a reason to be at each other.
North Korea will be richer and the people who run North Korea will be richer and South Korea will be richer and the US will be richer.
It's basically taking a boot off the neck of the world.
Peace in the Koreas would be massive.
It was the largest DMZ, the largest, most militarized border in the world.
It's been militarized the longest.
It's the most unstable.
When you look at all the why would the world end scenarios, it usually shows up number one on the list.
How would the world end scenarios?
So removing that is a huge relief for everybody.
So to my earlier point, I'd been writing for over a year that there was probably a way to get to a good solution.
We don't have it yet, so getting ahead of ourselves, but it looks like it's gonna be something good.
And that too was because I had a lot of experience negotiating contracts and whenever you can introduce new variables, that gives you more leverage.
And when reunification became part of the question, suddenly Everything's different.
Because if you're talking about reunifying, and you're really doing it, it's obvious you're not playing around, then verifying nuclear weapons doesn't mean the same thing, because why do you nuke your own country?
Reunification does a lot of things.
In the abstract, it also puts up the model of what happened to Germany, which was, in the end of the day, quite successful, even though it was painful for Germany to go through it.
It creates a lot more spoils to be carved out.
So, you know, would you like X after your definition or do you want Y? That depends on kind of how you behave right now.
So it creates all these imaginary goodies that you can then start handing out.
So I talk about the power of contrast when you're negotiating.
And I don't know that we did this before or didn't do it as well, but apparently South Korea Presented to North Korea specific plans for modernizing different zones of North Korea and industrializing them.
And they painted a picture.
It's like nuclear annihilation.
This is good stuff over here.
This is a big difference.
And very much like happened in China, as the Chinese Communist Party slowly takes the country towards being more capitalist, the people who are in charge get rich.
Surprise! So this generation of people, whatever you may think about them, the elites who are in charge of North Korea, they don't get punished, they get bribed.
But it's better than the current mass of North Korea and their children, their children's children living in virtual slavery and the rest of us being under a nuclear threat all the time.
So I think it's a win-win for everybody.
At some point we just said, okay, we're going to pay you a massive bribe to go away, but here's the catch.
The bribe's not coming out of anybody's pocket.
The bribe is through the increased prosperity that we're going to create by having a gradual transition towards freedom while letting you guys keep the spoils.
I mean, that's really what's going on here.
But it also has to come with a stick attached where if you don't, then there's, you know, we've got to take you out right now before you're too big.
So to me it looks like everything's going well.
We've gone to a thousand when we've been above it.
I usually start wrapping things up.
So is there anything you would like to add?
Anything you thought about and said, oh I wish I'd said that better.
I'll tack this on the end.
I got a question for you.
I have a hypothesis on this but I'm curious to hear yours.
Kanye and Trump don't run together.
Don't run together. What do you mean?
Oh, as a ticket. As a ticket, yeah.
Because people have been speculating about that.
I think that's impossible. They're both alpha egos.
Neither of them could be vice president.
I've described Pence as, no matter what you think of Pence individually, he's a perfect vice president.
Because, first of all, he's never made a single gaffe.
Right. But he's the black and white version of Technicolor Trump, so that's what you want.
You want the number two to look like a nice spare tire.
If you needed to go five miles, you could, but let's not do that.
And Kanye and Trump would just be, which one should be president?
Right, right. And then who does the left run in 2020?
Because my theory is, and has been for a while, that it's all going to be fringe candidates from here on out.
It's no mainstream, elitist candidates pushed by the center.
So who is that on the Democratic side?
Don't you think it depends who they think is going to run on the Republican side?
So you're talking about running against Trump?
Yes. Let's call that person the sacrificial lamb.
Because they're going to run lots of candidates, and there'll be this big food fight.
And it could be somebody whose name I don't even know right now, and very likely.
But it could be somebody they're getting ready for the one after, and they just need to get them bruised, test them out a little bit.
I think if they're smart, they'll run somebody who's like a younger version of Bernie.
If they could find a younger celebrity version of Bernie, that person would have a shot.
It looks like Eric Swalwell is trying to emerge.
I don't even know who that is, so you might have just put him on the map.
He's always on CNN and Fox News.
That's why I don't watch TV. Which makes him unique, because most of the politicians tend to be one or the other.
But he's gone into crossfire.
And while I don't agree with a lot he says, I would say that he's definitely got some game.
You can hate everything he's doing, but you've got to appreciate he's picking up skills pretty quickly.
So I'd watch for him. Good prediction.
I think he would lose to Trump fairly easily, but I think he's playing for the one after.
Well, you predicted Kanye ten years ago, so I'm paying attention.
I predicted he was a master persuader before I had that language.
I think it was 2008.
One of my best early calls, except for my book, The Religion War, where I predicted So if you're going to call things, and I think the audience wants you to call a cryptocurrency.
Besides when tokens?
No shilling. I have no prediction on cryptocurrency.
So I think I'm...
New York versus California people.
What's my favorite toy?
Oh, well, I have lived in both places.
I will tell you that New York personalities are very different, and there's a frankness and a rudeness that seems more normal if everybody's that way, but you move that stuff to California or the Midwest, and suddenly people get worried that you're a little bit crazy.
So I had to learn to act Not New Yorker, you know There's a better way to say that I'm sure but I had to I had to take off the New York for the popular New Yorkers are more fun to talk to Californians are more relaxed I think New Yorkers are more provocative in every way.
That's true. Whatever the boundary is we're gonna go So let's sign off.
Yeah, I think we've done it Thank you so much This was probably, will be our best Periscope ever.
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