Let Us Not Talk Falsely Now

Great! Welcome everyone. The format here is pretty simple. I'm just gonna bring people up, you get to ask a question, and then I'm gonna bounce you back to the audience, and then I'll discuss that question. Unfortunately, I've found that other formats just don't work as well, and I reserve the right not to answer your question, but feel free to ask any question. I think specific questions are better, ones that are practical and concrete rather than these wide-ranging philosophical questions.

I think philosophy is better experienced in the particular than in the general or the abstract because then it can have a real impact on our lives, and I'm just here to have fun just like all the rest of you and learn something. I'm probably gonna make mistakes, and much of what I say is going to be wrong. So please interpret gently, don't take it out of context, resist the urge to tweet things that are sensationalist and out of context. These days, one of the ways I survive on Twitter is by blocking frequently with extreme prejudice, so keep that in mind.

One of the reasons I'm doing a Twitter space instead of just tweeting as much is because Twitter, as usual, continues to be very combative. People like to misinterpret things, take things out of context, and just straw man everything, Rare and Steel Man it. So one of the advantages of a format like this is that I can provide more context.

Enough for the disclaimers. I'm going to mute my mic while I go through the requesters' profiles, and yes, your profiles do matter, and I'm going to figure out who I'm bringing up here.

Hey, Joseph!

Hi, Naval, how do you think about how open source will transform Web 2 to Web 3 startups and companies?

It's a good question. As I promised, even though I know you and respect you, I'm going to move you back to the audience just to stay within the format, so give me one second on that.

So, the question was about open source. Oops! I think I may have bounced him from the space altogether. Apologies, Joseph, I didn't mean to do that. That was a little too harsh. Hopefully, he'll come back in, and shoot, if he doesn't, I will send him an apology later. Anyway, if I did bounce him from the space, I owe him an apology.

So the core of Web 3 is open source. The core of crypto is open source. If you have a crypto application or a Web 3 application and it's not open source, is it really even open source? In fact, I think it was Chris Dixon who said that Web 3 is the business model for open source.

It's amazing to me how many people beat up Web 3 without realizing that this is the heir to the open source movement that's found a business model, and how many of the original OSS folks consider crypto a scam when maybe the answer is to many of their dreams.

So open source to me is fundamental; it's a building block of Web 3, and I think that's as simply as I can put it. You couldn't have Web 3 without open source. Of course, you can have open source without Web 3, but I would argue that Web 3 allows you to take your open source application, actually instantiate and run it in a distributed format, get paid for it, and let the users own their data. That's my definition of Web 3: the code is open, the data is owned by the users, and the network is owned by the contributors.

So, that's probably the three big differences between Web 3 and Web 2 for anyone who's looking for a slightly more precise definition than just taking Web and incrementing the number behind it by one.

All right, we got a lot of questions here, so I'm just going to start. Maybe I'll crank through people a little bit faster. Cyan, I hope that's right. I notice you're connecting; hopefully, you don't have issues.

Cyan, you're on the air.

Hi Naval, thanks for taking me in. So I have a pretty simple question: with Web 3, since we are on the topic, what do you think like just AI and ML kind of found their way into the whole ecosystem? How can Web 3 be more mainstream so that there's no kind of question about it later whether it's actually legit or not? I just want to get this question out from the students' perspective, if you can answer it. Thank you.

I'm sorry, I don't quite fully understand the question the way you're asking. Would you mind rephrasing it in a slightly different way? You left, I think it was something about how can you get Web 3 out there like AI and ML.

Look, these things are going to be adopted on their own schedule. Web 3 is going to build lots of hopefully useful apps that you couldn't have otherwise. Web 3 doesn't have to appeal to everyone; it's trying to appeal mainly to the applications that would otherwise be de-platformed or benefit from decentralization or creating a frontier where no such frontier currently exists. So you can have innovation.

There's no ironclad law of software that all new software movements have to appeal to all people. In fact, you could argue that open source didn't actually transform large chunks of software, and most users never directly interacted with or used open source for quite a long time, but yet it still had a huge effect in the data center in the background in debugging and building the underpinnings of much of what we see on the web.

So I don't think there's any ironclad law that Web 3 has to go mainstream the same way. Like, I don't think Bitcoin has to go super mainstream to be valuable. If it just becomes a reserve asset like gold, how many people actually hold gold as a reserve asset? Not a lot. But it doesn't take a lot for people to park their wealth in something like that and use it as a reserve asset for it to be valuable.

So the same way, I'm not convinced Web 3 necessarily has to go mainstream anytime soon for it to be incredibly valued. If you just have a lot of very smart people tinkering on the edge, building apps, accepting Web 3 currencies, innovating in that whole field, and partaking in DeFi, NFTs, or anything of that sort, it doesn't have to be mainstream. It can still be incredibly valuable because you're dealing with money and memes. It can spread virally, and it can build, hold, and capture value very fast. People have made huge fortunes in crypto without it having even gone mainstream yet, and I think that trend can continue for quite a while, and no, they're not versions. If that's your automatic response, then you haven't studied it enough.

Hey, Ryan, you're on the air.

Hey, you tweeted something. If I could just reread it and then maybe get your take on it. You said, "The reality is life is a single-player game. You're born alone, you're going to die alone, all of your interpretations are alone, all your memories are alone. You're gone in three generations and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It's all single-player."

I mean, I think about this quite a bit myself. I spend quite a bit of time alone, and sometimes it has me thinking, "What's the point?" So I just wanted your take on that. Thanks.

Yeah, it's a good question. Okay, so life is a single-player game. Obviously, it's not 100% true. Life is also a multiplayer game, but I think it's more interesting to consider it as a single-player game because that's not a thought that gets brought up as often. Society always trains us for society's ends, and society is a multi-user organism, so it will train us for the multi-user game. So only the individual can themselves stumble upon the single-player game and that frame of mind and see where it takes them.

So why is this an interesting frame of mind? Firstly, there's a lot of truth to it. So much of the world, so much of is your interpretation of the world. So much of mindset is your mindset to a tree or a rock or a house or even another person. Reality is very different to an object; reality is neutral to another subject; reality is subjective from their point of view. So a lot of this is up to you how you want to interpret it.

Another point here is that the only moment that really exists is now. Even tomorrow or yesterday are just thoughts in the current moment. So, no, nothing exists outside of right now. You're not necessarily going to be around for any appreciable period of time. Everything you do will be forgotten like everything in the past has been forgotten. It's not to say it's meaningless, but it's more to say that you create your own meaning; you interpret your own meaning; you are the meaning of your own life, and that gives a freedom.

Now you can, you're free to interpret this however you want. Inside every person is either a budding god or a budding demon or an angel or a saint. It's entirely up to you how you choose to interpret it. I just recommend that you interpret it in a way that is as close to reality as possible because then you're likely to make fewer mistakes.

If you have the choice, if you must choose, then interpret it positively because it's just better to live a positive experience than a negative one. People who commit suicide, for example, God bless them, but they left the game too early. They were going to leave the game anyway; everybody leaves the game eventually. So you may as well just stick around, see what it has planned for you.

Why do anything? What is this? A problem? Is the problem if there's a lack of meaning? No, it's a form of freedom. If there was a meaning to life, then we would all be stuck trying to figure out that meaning. The moment a person found that meaning and shared it with everybody else, then we would all be enslaved to that particular meaning. So I think it's liberating that there's no meaning to life. You can create your own meaning, and certain meanings that you create or interpret are far more pleasant than others.

Some of them can lead you directly to a life of contemplative bliss; some of them can lead you straight to creativity; some of them can lead you to helping other people. I would argue that the meanings that are the best to create and work on are the ones that self-actualize you against your natural talents, the things that you enjoy doing that puts you in flow, that has some worthwhile benefit either to yourself or to society and doesn't cause extreme negative repercussions for you in this life.

Just be aware that a lot of the things that look like they're good for you are actually just good for you in the short term, and they do cause negative repercussions so long-term. So, to me, part of the secret of living a good and happy life is just understanding long-term consequences of your actions.

So if you create a meaning that long-term will lead you to compound interest in good relationships and in creating wealth for yourself, and not having a very busy mind, and just being able to go through life sort of happy from moment to moment, that's going to be a better life that you've created for yourself. But, yeah, if you want to create a harsher and darker or shorter life for yourself, you should feel free to make that choice. I just don't think it's a very wise choice.

The single-player game frame also robs you of this idea of outside agency. It takes away this idea that you are a victim, that things happen to you, that you don't have agency in your life. I think that the belief that people fall into where they're victims, there are real victims in real circumstances, but they're far rarer than Twitter, what have you believe on Twitter. There are many budding victims who are raising their hand, crying for victimhood, and all you're doing is you're robbing yourself of your agency, you're robbing yourself of your ability to make a difference in your own life.

So even if you have been a real victim, let's just go ahead and accommodate that for a moment. I would say it's still a better frame to basically say, "No, life is a single-player game; I choose to rise out of that; I choose to interpret that." And long-term, when you look back on your life, the moments you're going to be proudest of are when you rose past circumstances that were difficult, when you rose past your suffering and then you accomplished something. That's where character is built; that's where resumes are made; that's where people have their proudest moments.

So if you had no adversity, it would be a really boring game. Imagine a game of, I don't know, Mario Brothers, where there was no jumping and no prizes and nothing to do with no monsters. It would be incredibly dull and incredibly boring. Also, a game that went on forever would get really dull.

So I would say play the game; it's your game; you get to design the board; you just have challenges; you get to design the victory condition, and that's a lot of the creativity. One of my other related tweets is, "The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life," and this one triggered a lot of people, which I love, the tweets that I trigger a lot of people.

But they're undeniably true, which is intelligence is like this abstract concept that we talk about, but the real measure is did you get what you want out of life? And these are two parts in there; it's not just one part. One part, of course, is were you able to hack reality to get what you wanted, but the more important part is were you smart enough to figure out what to want in the first place. And that means there are many booby prizes that simply aren't worth having and then there are others that are out of your reach.

It's ludicrous for me to desire wings or even to travel into a rocket, not into outer space because it's either low ROI effort or it's unachievable for me. So what I want to do is to figure out what it is that is worth wanting. And remember, not wanting something is as good as having it. So if you cannot want in the first place, that's even better.

But the test of intelligence here is getting what you want out of life, but also knowing what to want. So when life is a single-player game, you get to craft it; it's a blank canvas. It's not a negative thing; it's a positive thing. It gives you a level of freedom you would not have.

Multiplayer games are inherently less free; single-player games are more free. I encourage a single-player frame simply because society will not encourage it. You won't encounter it outside of the individual, and also because it gives you back your agency. And it has the benefit of being largely true.

Gabriella, welcome. Thank you. It's fascinating listening to you. I've actually just ventured into this space, and I'm coming from a place where when I say I just ventured into this space, I'm part of a founding team of a social impact platform called Save a Love (Seva), which means selfless service and love.

I wanted to ask you because I'm really in the, I would say, the collective belief that if we bring consciousness and have that intention to bring it into this new space, I really feel that we can ultimately tip the scales of where I would say in real person this world is right now for good. So I may be innocent; maybe I'm naive, but I really believe that Web 3 has that possibility of generating critical mass for good.

So whether we're using it through NFTs, whether we're using it for social impact investment or whatever that is, or actually even having these conversations on Twitter space, I was wondering what do you see the future as in this space because I'm very enthusiastic about it. I'm very hopeful. I actually think that if we didn't have Web 3, I'd be pretty depressed in terms of where we're going as humanity.

All right, thanks for that. So one thing I would be careful about is mixing what is true with what you want to be true, and I see this happening in business a lot where a new business trend comes up. People are excited about it because they want to make money, but then they also start projecting all the other fantasies onto it, and I would be very careful about that.

So what I mean by that is Web 3, I think, is really about decentralization; it's about freedom; it's about innovation. I'm not sure it's about consciousness or self-awareness. I think that's orthogonal. I do think it's better if people are more conscious; I think it's better if they have more agency; I think it's better if they're more self-aware, and certainly, you can use your time and resources to try and connect the two.

But I do not know if Web 3 automatically leads to a race consciousness level. Now, that's a fuzzy term—consciousness—it's hard to define. So let me just go back to something slightly more concrete, which is self-awareness. Self-awareness is just how much attention do you pay to your own thoughts, your own mannerisms, your own being? How much do you critically question who you are, or do you just blindly accept that everything your mind says to you is true and just the way things are?

So generally, I find the people who are more self-aware are more interesting to be around. They're less of a pain; they're more in control of their emotions, and I find it to be probably the most attractive trait. That doesn't necessarily follow from Web 3. The press is completely orthogonal or perhaps there's a linkage in that Web 3 and decentralization force you to take more responsibility personally for the outcome of these systems that we participate in because now you can no longer just be an oblivious user.

You're also an owner; you're a staker; you're a validator; you're a governor; you're a creator. So in that sense, anything that gives humans more agency is going to, over time, force them to be more self-aware, which may lead to a form of higher consciousness. But it's not clear to me that the two connect by default.

And I would caution you to be careful about connecting them by default because then you may end up building a business that doesn't actually make sense in the real world, and we want you to be successful so that you can go ahead and spread the consciousness that you want.

Cool, there's a monkey on the stage; actually, there are two. Sorry, I was on mute. Thank you very much for hosting these! I love these spaces; you have very clear thought, and I'm wondering if that would have been a hindrance to your career earlier on in your life to be so clear and so self-aware like you just mentioned, or how do you think that timing has played out for you, basically?

Yeah, it's a fair question. I think part of it is age. Live long enough and you'll naturally become a philosopher. I think some of it is the times themselves—people are more self-aware these days, and the language of the knowledge of consciousness and self-awareness, either through tools like meditation or meditation assistant or books or psychedelics or whatever—sort of spreading.

I'm meeting more and more younger people who are more self-aware and more conscious than I think was true in my generation. I think there's an underlying question that you didn't ask directly but you hint to, which is, "Hey, can I make money now and be conscious later?" Or flipping it around, "Is being more self-aware or conscious going to get in the way of my making money?"

Possibly. I don't want to say it as a free lunch here because I don't think there is some. Some of the most self-aware people that I know are not highly motivated, but I suspect those people wouldn't have been highly motivated to make money regardless.

I find that clear thinking is incredibly rewarding. Not that I'm saying I'm a clear thinker, but on the occasions where I do have clarity of thought, it pays off. So I wouldn't pass up clarity of thought for anything. Look, intelligence is a cheat code, right? If we're playing Dungeons and Dragons and you had high intelligence, it's probably the thing you would want because you can swap it for almost anything else in the modern world, because the modern world is full of so much leverage that smart people can employ that leverage, whether through code or media or labor or capital to kind of magnifying what they want.

They can make good decisions, and then the impact of the good decisions is magnified by leverage. That's really what my whole "how to get rich" tweet storm is about. So I think clarity of thought is incredibly valuable, and I would say as I've gotten older in business, it has become even more valuable.

So I do think it has helped me a great deal in business. One huge way in that clarity of thought helps you is that I believe that 99% of effort in life is, quote unquote, wasted. It's not wasted in the sense that you don't learn something; you do learn something. But if you look back at all the term papers you wrote and all the classes you took and all the people you dated and all the thoughts you had and all the things you stressed about and all the decisions you made, 99% of them didn't matter.

If they were inconsequential, there were a few 1% decisions that did matter. Now, could you have gotten to those 1% without the 99? No, you have to do the work to get set up for the right decision. But could you have gotten there with maybe wasting 90% or 85% or 80%? What if you've gone from a ratio of 99:1—and obviously it's a made-up ratio—but you've gone from 99:1 to 95.5? Now instead of 100:1 against, you're 20:1 against.

So I do think clear thinking allows you to make better decisions and have better judgment, and better judgment is everything. If you have good judgment in this life, you're going to thrive in the modern world because you will be applying judgment everywhere.

Example is what news do I consume? How personally do I take it? Do I get a Covid shot or not? Do I walk into this environment or not? Russians are coming into Kiev, when do I leave? What profession am I going into? Who am I going to marry? What city am I going to live in? What workout do I adopt? What diet do I adopt? These are all judgment calls; every single one of them is a judgment call.

And if you make the right judgments, you will have a healthier, happier, and wealthier life. So judgment is everything; it is the foundation of a high-quality life, and clarity of thought leads to good judgment.

Examples of how much I value clarity of thought now compared to how much I used to is I don't keep a cluttered mind anymore because it makes bad decisions. So if I have to make a decision I will clear my calendar, which actually is already clear, but in the old days, I used to clear my calendar and make sure that I spent time on the important things.

A clear calendar lets you focus on the most important thing rather than on just the most urgent thing that happens to be staring at you back from your calendar. People will send me explanations or emails or they'll say, "Hey, read my blog post," and I'll go in, and it's 11 pages of gobbledygook, and there's maybe like two or three clear points in there. If you cannot communicate clearly, then it is a sign that you cannot think clearly.

It's like when you walk up to someone whose desk is a complete mess. Yes, at some level it reflects that they're busy, but at some level, it also reflects an underlying clutter that they're tolerating in their lives. And so is this person going to be organized in other ways? These are signals; these are indicators.

They're not dispositive; it doesn't mean that a messy desk is automatically a cluttered mind, but it's an indicator. So I think that having a clear mind and clear judgment and clear thinking is a cheat code to life, and I tend to find that there is a correlation between people who are clear communicators, clear thinkers, and have good judgment.

And you want to surround yourself with people with good judgment because that's how you're going to win in life in general.

Don't forget to unmute.

Hi, in the world! Thanks! I wanted to get your perspective on pseudonymity and accountability. I think there's a compelling rationale for it in the sociopolitical space, but when you're talking about financial implications, financial models, especially in Web 3, how do pseudonymity and accountability really come together? Is it a model that's really sustainable going forward? Thanks.

Yeah, so the question is about accountability and pseudonymity in Web 3 and how they intersect. I do think you generally have to have a high level of accountability to get properly, quote unquote, paid because if it's not associated with you, then people will steal credit; you'll have a hard time having good branding; you'll have a hard time getting leverage. But things are changing.

In the olden days, being 20, 30 years ago, if you want a personal brand, you were talking about spending a lot of money in marketing; you were talking about having t-shirts maybe like your name on a tower, maybe going on TV, maybe going on radio, maybe showing up in the media.

So there was no concept of pseudonymity, and pseudonymity is this halfway ground between anonymity and nomity, which is being named. It's a new phenomenon that only really exists on the internet where you can build up a reputation and a track record, but you can put it behind a dot if, a domain name, or you can put it behind a bored ape or a crypto punk profile picture avatar, and you can do your work completely online.

So I think this is a very interesting model. It's a good defense against cancel culture; it's a good defense against all kinds of things. It puts people on even footing, whether you're male or female or black or brown or white or what have you, or old or young. So I do think it is very powerful, but I think it's emergent, and I think that pseudonymity only applies within the narrow Web 3 domain.

So if you're in Web 3 and you have a reason for pseudonymity, then I think it's a very powerful weapon, and by all means, you should use it. I think it's as good as accountability; it's just that accountability is accruing to your avatar instead of to you personally. I think it's a fantastic new model. If I were starting out today, I would probably have a pseudonymous avatar, maybe not because I like talking too, and it's hard to make a voice pseudonymous or to be voice anonymous.

But I would probably have less of a revealed identity out there. That said, I think outside of Web 3, it doesn't really apply and it may never apply. But then again, I think Web 3 is going to be a very big part of society and the economy going forward, so more and more people will be pseudonymous.

One other point is there is a place where pseudonymity is quite prevalent outside of Web 3, and that's on Twitter. On Twitter, you have all these anon accounts, and there are occasionally people who call for banning anon accounts, and I think that's a big problem. Of course, the worst accounts are anon, the trolls and like the real haters and the automated accounts and the spam accounts are largely anonymous.

But I think the best accounts are also anonymous because they can speak truth at a level where named accounts can't because there is a collective set of lies that we have to believe as a society to get along. And that set of lies will always be shifting within the Overton, and there's a small Overton window that's always moving around, and if you say the wrong thing, you can get canceled, you can get attacked, you can get ostracized, or you can get just shamed or humiliated for saying true things.

And what's even worse now is that cancel culture will reach back to your tweets 10 years ago and cancel you over that. So I just think it constrains the discourse if we only have named accounts. It constrains it unacceptably because now those people can be punished.

So for the same reason, the secret ballot is very important, and the gnome de plume with the pen name writing, I think Ben Franklin used this with pseudonyms. The founding fathers of the United States did. I think it's a very powerful thing, and I encourage it. I do think there should be more anon accounts, not less.

It's very easy to block or mute annoying anon accounts. In exchange, you get incredible truth speaking from some very high-quality accounts. I think if Twitter were to do away with anon accounts, it would essentially be a much less interesting platform, even to the point where it might get displaced by a platform that embraced anons.

I'm not 100% sure about Facebook; that deleted my Facebook account a long time ago—not out of any prejudice, but just because I found it more annoying than anything else. I believe Facebook does not allow anon accounts, and that right there makes Facebook way less interesting as a medium where you're going to learn anything or encounter anything truly interesting or off the beaten path.

Aniket, the reading habits guy.

All right, kid, you're on the air. So we have heard you talk so much about reading and reading books, and with us moving into this entirely digital generation where people are not reading books, how do you see people reading in the generation or years to come? Where do you see books going and the authors going from here onwards?

Yeah, I obviously grew up reading a lot of books, and I love books. It doesn't mean books are the only medium of learning. Some people learn from YouTube videos, some people like audiobooks, some people like tweets, some people like blog posts. At the end of the day, it's about where you can find the highest signal-to-noise ratio.

Books are uniquely interesting for a number of reasons. One is, unlike the synchronous media of YouTube and audiobooks, you can consume books asynchronously, which means that on one sentence you can spend an hour, and then the next paragraph you can spend a minute, and the next chapter you can spend a second as you slip through it.

So for anyone who's serious about absorbing knowledge, books are a much better medium; they're much more efficient. And the point of reading isn't to stack up a giant stockpile of books that you then tweet out and say, "Current reading this week." Look at how many books I read, dumping your chest! And the point of reading is not even to necessarily absorb knowledge. In an age of Google, the knowledge is always a fingertip away.

But the point of reading is to spark your own creativity and to spark your own thoughts. So it's almost like you're starting a fire in your brain. A really good book has to be read slowly. If you're reading books quickly and you're proud of the speed at which you're reading them, you're reading the wrong books. It's like lifting weights that are way too light; you're just cranking through the exercise. On the other hand, if you read a book that's way too difficult for you and you're just stuck and can't make any progress, then that's like trying to lift a weight that's too heavy. You can't even get a single rep off.

But what you want is you want to lift a weight or read a book that is kind of at the edge of your ability where you're learning more but it's a struggle; it's a little painful, it's a little confusing, but at the same time, it's sparking ideas and thoughts that then you have to add your own creativity in your own interpretations and apply to your own experiences to learn something.

The books that excite me the most are the ones that make me smarter. They don't necessarily give me more knowledge or information. I'm not going to necessarily read a book on why water is the most important molecule in the world or a biography of a famous general, but those books are always a fingertip away. I can pull them up and read them very quickly and easily if I need to or want to, but I'm not going to just absorb useless knowledge that I can just Google on demand.

Rather, the books that I read are the ones that make me smarter. In fact, Brett Hall just joined the chat, and Brett is a teacher of physics and epistemology and runs this great podcast called the Theory of Knowledge podcast, which I've shielded before on my Twitter. It's actually probably the only podcast that I listen to religiously because it makes me smarter and because Brett is exploring this book called "The Beginning of Infinity," which also is probably the best book I've read in the last decade and also made me a lot smarter. I wish I encountered it earlier, but that's not to say that reading that book is the end-all and be-all; there's nothing magical about the book format.

In fact, I don't think Deutsch, you know, no offense to him; he's a brilliant thinker; I don't think he's the best writer because I think he's writing for other physicists, and so he's not writing for you and me, or maybe if he tries, but it's hard for him to operate down at our lowly levels. So people like Brett and myself and others can help interpret it as we chew on it; we can digest it and pass it down.

There are a few chapters in "The Beginning of Infinity" that are the most interesting and applicable for normal people, and I encourage everyone to go and digest those. It took me to really get through "The Beginning of Infinity" and "The Fabric of Reality," which is the precursor to "The Beginning of Infinity." It took me about two years to get through it, and it's not to say it took me two years to read it. I'm a very fast reader. I probably can and did at some point read both books in a weekend, but it took me two years to actually understand the concepts in the book.

There are single paragraphs in there that sent me down rabbit holes of videos and podcasts and reading and looking at papers and opening up a physics textbook and so on that consume two months at a time. There was some comment about the multiverse person showing the wave equation that had me in a tizzy for quite a while. And it's not to say that I still understand all of "The Beginning of Infinity," but I understand enough of the concepts that now I've integrated it into my core philosophy of decision-making and judgment.

So I don't think books are necessarily a sacred medium, but I think they're an important medium. Besides just asynchronous consumption, another important one is that a lot of the best work that has been written, especially if you're talking about philosophy or something that's not that modern—remember the old questions have old answers. Those were written a long time ago, and a lot of the things that they wrote down back then would be socially or politically incorrect to write today.

Many writers are only famous after their own time simply because their peers have to die out and stop condemning them for a new generation to come in and absorb whatever they wrote objectively rather than through the lens of, "This can't be right because my current society is not ready to absorb this truth." So I do recommend reading a lot of old books because I think for philosophy and wisdom, most of it has been said better before.

You can always rephrase it in a new way; maybe apply it to a brand new thing that showed up, but the timeless questions have timeless answers. Another advantage of reading through a book rather than watching it through a video is the author is a little more invisible to you, and that's good because that removes your ego from the equation. It's not like your friend next door telling you something.

There's the old line: no man is a prophet in his own land. I think there's a lot of truth to that. I see this in my own social circles where I literally sit around with 20 people who are talking, let's say, about crypto or wealth creation, and I know what they're saying is wrong, but they're not going to ask me because I'm their friend. They've already kind of stuck me into a friend bucket so we're peers. They're not going to look up to me in that regard; I may not look up to them in their areas of expertise.

So if you can remove the speaker from the spoken, if you can remove the writer from the writing, then it allows you to absorb it with less in the way. It allows you to make it your own and then regurgitate it later, but again through your own lens in such a way that it becomes a part of the fabric of your thoughts.

So I do think that absorbing knowledge from a book, I find it to be higher quality absorption than if it's coming through a speaker. Maybe that's just me. There are some extremely good blogs out there; unfortunately, due to cancel culture and just the decline of blogging in general, a lot of them have been disappearing off the internet. But I do think that some of the best content and writing that I've ever encountered was in the long-form blog post floating around the internet, but that's a hard problem to dig through now.

Google doesn't do a very good job of surfacing blog results. There was a time when they used to prioritize blog results much more highly. The search these days, if you search for anything on Google, you're just going to get a list of 100 different official sources, which just kind of shows you that the manual tweaking of Google has been taken over by the usual trust and safety teams.

So if you're going to find these good blogs, it's going to be through personal recommendations or social media, in kind of the dark corners of social media. So again, nothing magic about books, but Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett say that everybody that they know who's smart is an avid reader, and I have a hard time refuting that. I have yet to meet someone who I've considered a very high-functioning level of intelligence who doesn't read for fun.

Underlying those last two words: for fun. And which is not to say that you should go and make it a chore to start reading, but one of the tweets I'm proudest of is, "Read what you love until you love to read." So the goal here is not to go crack a physics textbook immediately but just develop a love for reading if you can, better than an early age. Like everything else, if you can develop a love for reading, then eventually you'll navigate your way to the things you're supposed to be just because you get bored of the trite stuff.

A lot of the same points, same jokes, same observations will strike you as pedestrian, and there is a certain magic to quantity, right? Once you get through enough books, you just become a better reader; it's like anything else. That said, the goal here is not to read the largest quantity of books; it is to read the highest quality of books. I will once again plug "The Beginning of Infinity," and I'll say read it and spend two years on it if you have to.

Listen to Brett's podcast because if you can get through "The Beginning of Infinity" and really understand the core principles at a deep level, it's going to improve the quality of your thinking so much that your future books and blog posts and tweets that you pick up, you will be able to determine very quickly which ones are talking truth and which ones are talking trash.

I mean, believe me, your theory of knowledge right now is not good enough; whatever you think it is, you can upgrade it. As we were talking about before, judgment is the most important thing.

Hey, Brett! Brett, you got a special dispensation, I'm not going to bounce you after your question; we can just talk for a bit, or maybe I'll let you talk for a bit.

Ah, there we go!

Yeah, people want to know stuff, don't they? And so if you have a scattergun approach, the way in which you approach books, then you might be going for breadth rather than depth. And the thing about depth is that depth has inherent breadth. It has breadth because the deeper the ideas, the more different subjects those ideas are going to touch.

And so this is why we're drawn to something like "The Beginning of Infinity" and the work of David Deutsch generally because he has devoted his life to drilling down to find the most foundational principles across physics, epistemology, mathematics, and so on.

So once you get down there to that level of depth, you really are talking about all the ways in which knowledge is created in every other subject and the limitations that physics actually places upon our ability as human beings to construct knowledge.

So once you've got those fundamental ideas, you've got a really interesting way of critiquing all the other ideas that are out there, and so that's why we're so thrilled with "The Beginning of Infinity," because it's one of the most profound books with respect to depth of ideas.

Yeah, I don't want to keep plugging "Boi" forever, but I would also say that I just think physicists are among the smartest people in the world. There was a study that came out recently where they were showing the average IQ of students who had finished their Ph.D. across different disciplines, and it says something like archaeology was in the 140s, and psychology was in the high 140s, and so on and so on. The highest was physics, I think it was like 162 or 160-something.

And I actually took umbrage with that. I was like, "No, there's not that small of a gap between psychologists and physicists." Because a lot of modern psychology to me almost borders on charlatanism; just look up the replication crisis if you want to see an example of what I mean. So I didn't trust those numbers off the bat, so I looked at the underlying paper, and the underlying paper was really interesting.

The methodology that the author used was she basically gave them all tests in various disciplines and subjects, but trying to be broad, like the SAT. So she gave them verbal and she gave them math and critical thinking and all that, and what happened was the physicist aced the math tests almost to a tee. All of them nailed it completely because any test that is challenging for a psychologist is essentially trivial for a physicist.

Or any test that we could measure the difference between two physicists would be impossible for any psychiatrist or psychologist. So she dropped the math results for the physicists; she didn't take it into account when calculating their scores. So basically, they crushed the entire field just on verbal and basic logic reasoning, and the math was so off the charts, they couldn't even include it in the results.

So that, to me, was very telling. And I think the reason why physicists are so intelligent is it's not that being a physicist makes you intelligent; it's just that the bar to being a good physicist is very high intelligence because you're dealing with the reality in its ultimate form; you're dealing with absolute truth. And so it's up to you to rise to the occasion and to develop such a rigorous way of reasoning, thinking, and calculating and all the skills that go with it, including the advanced mathematics that you can communicate with the reality in its own terms.

You're not communicating with other humans who limit you to human levels and will give you a pass. For example, if I'm trying to be a macro economist, pretty much get everything wrong. You'll never find a macro economist who can consistently predict the direction of the macro economy, nor can you run a counterfactual test.

Macro economists and macroeconomics, even though there's a lot of good rules of thumb and some explanations in the field, in practice it ends up being about pleasing and convincing other people. So your feedback loop just isn't as tight. I would argue that someone who's trading cryptocurrencies or stocks actually has a tighter feedback loop because at least they're taking feedback from a market rather than say from a publication or small group of individuals.

So in that sense, they're closer to the truth, closer to truth-seeking or feedback from what is true. But physicists have the ultimate feedback on what is true because a particle is not going to listen to a physicist because they have a Ph.D. or a high rank, and so they're forced to correspond to reality.

And obviously, the physical, chemistry, and other sciences, the hard sciences and the natural sciences, all have the same type of feedback loophole. That's probably tightest in physics and mathematics. Yeah, I guess physics isn't unique in the fact that it bridges both the abstract and the highly practical. And well, it's called physics, so it's about the physical, but it has characteristics of engineering, which is of course concerned with what is practically actually the case, not so much what's theoretically the case.

But pure mathematics, on the other hand, is interested in what might possibly be the case and need not practically ever obtain in the real world. And yet physics bridges both of these domains.

And so we can enter into the kind of theoretical dream world about what could possibly be the case, but we're also constrained by what physical reality is telling us as well. And so I think this is why a lot of people are attracted to physics. Anyway, it has aspects of both. If you like pure mathematics, then you can get a little bit of that, and if you like engineering and solving practical problems, you can get a little bit of that, and so physics occupies that real sweet space.

Yeah, it's not the only one. I would guess theoretical computer scientists are probably at the same level, but the problem is if you're a physicist, you're basically all into theory or academic, and you're dealing with the highest levels of abstraction. Whereas if you're a computer scientist, you may just go into very practical things and end up being an entrepreneur.

So the set of practicing computer science is probably far greater than the set of theoretical physicists. And so just the barrier to entry in the computer science field is lower, but probably at the very top levels, computer scientists, the top physical chemists, maybe the top molecular biologists, top material scientists, top engineers are at the same level of intellect as a top physicist.

Again, it's not to say that being one of these professions makes you smart; it's just the bar to getting into one of these professions at the top levels indicates that you are very smart. It doesn't mean you're smart in everything, if you go back to my definition of getting what you want in life, then many of them would fail in that regard.

But I'm talking about a certain kind of theoretical smart about abstractions, logic, clear thinking, reasoning, mathematical capabilities, etc. And we can split hairs on what the definition of intelligence is, but then we're falling into this Wittgensteinian trap of what is the meaning of meaning anyway. And then you can't have any conversations; everyone is equal in infinite ignorance.

We might have our own area of specialty that we know about, but we're infinitely ignorant of a whole bunch of things. So you can name the physicist, and you can name their crazy idea. Of course, we all respect Albert Einstein, but I only learned recently—and I probably shouldn't have learned this recently—but he was a real supporter of One World Government. Now, I could not think of a more dystopian view of the way in which a society could be organized than having a One World Government.

But I guess he was speaking at a time when the crisis that he was facing at that time was different from what we're facing now.

Yeah, I think that the One World Government folks, especially in the physics domain, they came from a background where you had World War II going on and they had helped in the creation of nuclear weapons, and so to them, MAD, mutually assured destruction, didn't exist yet.

MAD has been surprisingly effective in practice to date, and I don't think any of the physicists involved predicted that it would be that good. So they thought that they might have destroyed the world, and the only way they could think out of that was that there was one government; that government would not want to use nuclear weapons against themselves.

So I think that was the underlying motivator for that reasoning, although I don't think they were articulated as such. Let me see if I can pull somebody else up so it's not just me and Brett talking the whole night. I'm just looking through people's bios, but in the meantime, if you got anything to say...

Oh, I just wanted to riff off what you began with. I was actually here at the beginning listening to you talking about life as a single-player game, and it really evoked for me what Karl Popper is about, how all life is problem-solving.

And so what we're trying to do constantly is to solve our problems, and the more knowledge that you have, the greater the repertoire of different problems that you are able to solve. And we want to solve things like suffering, and we want to be able to improve our lot in life.

And so this idea of it being a single-player game, I think really gets at the heart of that idea that you're just constantly trying to avoid the next thing that is going to thwart you in finding happiness and making progress in generating wealth.

Yeah, and I think that it's interesting; David Deutsch has pointed this out, that people who converge on the truth converge together. And it's interesting how you were coming to these ideas before you encountered Deutsch, before you encountered Popper; but when you found them, it began to resonate with exactly what you'd been saying and what you've been promoting out there.

Yeah, the set of truths is depending on what truth we're talking about, but the set of truths is quite large, but it's still infinitesimal compared to the set of potential falsehoods. We can create a lot more falsehoods than we can create truth for sure, and that's why one of the things you have to do is that there's a whole class of conjectures and problems people will say to you, "Prove to me that this is false; you should consider my theory."

But most theories can be disproved without deep examination. Okay, so here's a recent one, that's getting me burned a lot, so I'll go right into it, which is somebody who I thought was very intelligent otherwise, intelligent approached me on the aliens visiting the Earth theory—that these UFOs are flying around and they can kind of hide in for us.

I have a lot of good arguments against it. There are many, ranging from the fact that the photographic evidence seems to be still grainy and sketchy, to why would they even do it in the first place, to what are the odds given the distances involved to it's more easily explained by just being a military program that's clandestine even from the kind of people in the military who are not giving access to the same level of classification.

To the fact that eyewitness accounts are incredibly unreliable, etc. I could go on and on, but at the end of the day, I had to respond with just one phrase: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." And the evidence that you're provided for the extraordinary claim just isn't good enough for it to be a theory that we're going to go through and consider.

So actually, maybe you can talk a little bit about UFO sightings while I hunt down somebody else to pull up here.

I think it was Elon Musk that he shared that graph that shows the number of cameras that are out there now on smartphones and everything have gone up exponentially, but the quality of pictures of UFOs—apparent UFO sightings—has not gone up exponentially; it remained basically the same ever since sort of the 60s kind of thing. It's always grainy, like you said.

Yeah, I don't think that we've been visited. I'd like to know that we were, but specifically for the reason that either the aliens are doing a particularly good job of remaining hidden or a particularly bad job of remaining hidden, depending upon how you look at things.

After all, they appear to keep on being spotted by people who live in the southern states of the United States more often than not. One of my arguments about this is that it seems to be the case that biology isn't necessarily friendly towards getting the project of life started here on Earth.

It appears to have happened once; life began once, and we don't know the mechanism whereby that life is actually able to arise again. It's not like we can create artificial life in the lab; at least we haven't figured it out.

Yeah, there's lightning in the Bible; experiments have been grossly exaggerated. I think when I was going to drink with a kid, we were like, "Yeah, we just put a whole bunch of inorganic compounds to a bottle, and we throw some electricity in there, and poof, we get life!" And it's just not true.

But we do have this interesting challenge. On the one hand, yeah, those are the Miller-Urey experiments, and they're still going on today, and they're trying to put ammonia and amino acids and various things into this flask and add electricity, add UV lights, see what comes out, and they haven't managed to have anything crawl out of the flask, so to speak.

They haven't created simple cells even; they haven't created anything that appears to be anywhere close to what life is. So on the one hand, it seems life is difficult to make, but on the other hand, the geological evidence says that after the so-called late heavy bombardment, this is the period in geological history where the Earth was just being inundated by comets and asteroids and being sterilized by global cratering from all of these bodies in the solar system that was crashing into the Earth, and so therefore the Earth was entirely unfriendly to any kind of biology that could have arisen.

But as soon as that ended, as soon as it stopped being unfriendly to life, life appeared on Earth. And so that would suggest life does arise as quickly as it possibly can. So do we say life is easy to produce or do we say it's hard to produce?

At the moment, we're in this really interesting place where progress is possible.

Hey, here's a problem. So if there's any young person out there interested in the physics of the origin of life, this is a real important open question.

I've added a couple of people for questions. You're up next if you've got a moment.

Sure, thanks for having me, Naval. Good to see you again. My question is around prioritization and guarding one's time. I see you as someone who is good at saying no, so I wanted to know, do you have a mental framework that helps you decide what is worth your time and what is not, and saying no to those things without feeling guilty? Thank you.

Great question. Yes, I put a lot of effort into this.

So I'm going to move you back to the audience; I've promised, yeah.

Things to aspire to move past in your life: first, you want to get out of your parent's basement; then you're living with roommates; then you want to get away from roommates; then you're driving commute to work; then you want to get up a commute; then you're waking up to an alarm clock; then you want to get away from an alarm clock; then you're basically living a highly calendared and scheduled life; you want to get away from your calendar.

Then finally, you want to get over here from email and text messages.

So I'm sort of working my way through this rabbit hole, and where I currently am, is I've gotten rid of calendars and schedules, and I’m trying to get rid of emails altogether. I now check my email once every three days, and I eventually want to get to the point where I never check my email.

And obviously, this is a luxury, but you can get there. You just have to engineer your life towards it, and you have to be uncompromising. You have to reject social obligations; you have to reject meetings that are a waste of time. You have to be okay with saying no; you have to give up your FOMO; you have to not be afraid to disappoint people, and cut people out of your life who aren't comfortable with spontaneity and lack of schedules.

The email one's going to be a little harder, but yeah, there are sacrifices involved along every step of the way. Nothing is cost-free, but what do you get on the other side? You get your time back, and if you have your time, then you have spontaneity, which I would argue helps with the flourishing of joy in your life.

You have creativity because you now have time to get bored in time to think. You have proper prioritization where now you're going to focus on what's the most important thing as opposed to just what happens to be scheduled. You're going to have productivity because you're going to work on things when you feel like them, as opposed to when you are forced to grind through something when you don't feel like it.

And you're going to say, "But wait; I can't do this; I have a job." And my answer is, "Well, change jobs. Get a job where you're in control of your own time." Or you'll say, "My extra time is worthless; I can't earn more if I'm working harder or working different hours." Then I'll say, "Change your career to where you can."

Or you'll say, "But my family won't tolerate it." And I'm like, "Retrain your family; change your friends; change your coworkers." Disappoint people. If you're not disappointing them, if you're not leaving people behind, you're not really changing; changing is also growing; growth involves change.

So if you want to operate at maximum productivity, efficiency, and creativity, you're going to work on things that you're excited about at the moment you're excited about them and accept nothing less. It's better to sit on your butt and do nothing than to work on things that you are not excited about because now you're just grinding, and you're robbing yourself of the time that you need to have the good thoughts, the proper space to find what it is that you're meant to work on and where you're meant to live and who you're meant to be with.

I have been utterly ruthless about prioritizing my time and saying no to things, and I disappoint people every single day on it—every single day—and I will continue to do so until I have complete control of my time back.

Daniel, you're up next.

Yeah, thanks for letting me come up. So I live and work in the developing world and sucked into the Web 3 rabbit hole because I saw the potential for this new potential for the developing world to access global markets in a whole new way.

And so I'm just wondering two things. Number one, what do you think about Web 3 and the potential for the developing world? And then also, second, the question of scale. What do you think it will take to scale Web 3 to lifting up those communities that have by and large been left behind? Thanks.

Yeah, I'm not an expert on developing world challenges; I would just say that the decentralized, permissionless nature of crypto means that we can build financial instruments and governance instruments that can be adopted regardless of the dysfunction of the local government.

Right? A lot of the developing world, the problem is dysfunctional local governments—not always, but it happens a lot—and crypto is self-governing; you have tokens, you can vote, you have DAOs, you have distribution of power according to proven judgment and contribution to the network.

So as long as you're dealing with an all-digital problem, like transferring money or trading stocks or investing in companies or issuing loans or repaying loans and those kinds of things, then very naturally and very easily you can adopt crypto in a way that the people can opt into what instrument to take and not have the government involved.

I do think it's a little early in the sense that the first app that I would expect to be adopted in all of crypto—not just in the developing world—is Bitcoin as a reserve asset.

So for example, you see what's happening in Russia and Ukraine. If you're a wealthy person who is in Russia right now, or even a poor person who's in Russia right now, and you're queued up at the ATM, and you're told you can't get hard currency out; you can get rubles, but you can't get dollars, and all your USD deposits in your bank account—even if you were lucky enough to have foreign bank deposits—are being forcibly converted into rubles.

And anybody who has earning power internationally is currently trying to flee Russia because they're afraid of the sanctions, the regime, and just the impoverishment of Russia as it slides back into becoming an autarkic economy where everything is locally produced and locally consumed, but which is really bad for things like semiconductors and information technology and medicine and so on.

So I think that there are a lot of people who are in Russia who they don't understand Bitcoin, but boy, would they wish that they had Bitcoin right now.

So I think in the developing world similarly, there's a lot of kleptocracies where the local government just prints money and steals money from the people. I think 100 years from now people will look back and will be considered laughably archaic that we used to pass around pieces of paper that somebody had something literally called a money printing press or that they could print as much more as they wanted in the background.

And so by doing that, they impoverished all of society in a hidden way, and so I would expect in the developing world, as you have more and more economic and social collapses because of these kleptocratic printing presses, that Bitcoin will eventually get adopted.

It started to happen in El Salvador where they declared it legal tender. I'm hearing about a few other places. I think the new South Korean president is very pro-crypto, and as we see more and more people adopting Bitcoin across from corporate treasuries to these developing country situations, I think that could be a killer app.

That said, the fact that we have not yet seen mass Bitcoin adoption in developing countries is a bit of a yellow or red flag for the industry. It means that it's still super hard to use; people don't understand the concept, and they still haven't figured out the advantages.

I do feel like a couple of several global crises have already come and gone where Bitcoin would have been a great answer to them, but we still did not see mass adoption of Bitcoin.

And make no mistake, Bitcoin isn't perfect; it does suffer from certain issues. Obtaining it is still quite hard to do, so you have to buy it through a centralized exchange, and then your track is transparent rather than being opaque. Although if it was opaque, like Zcash, it would probably be banned in a lot of countries as well if they really understood the capabilities.

But I think in the developing world, just basically protecting the assets that you have already accumulated and created, there are a huge good use of crypto. Web 3 is a little more fanciful now.

We do see in the Philippines, for example, people are playing games for money—actually, Infinity. And people like yield games have built guilds of players, and people can make a living playing these games. I don't really view that as the best use of Web 3. It's a fine intermediate use case, and it's helping people in the developing world get digital salaries that are on par with first-world countries or developed nations, but that strikes me as like an intermediate step.

It's not really making the underlying people better off; it's not training them into computer scientists; it's not helping them start new companies; it's not protecting their assets; rather, it's just giving them a new job. But it's fine as an intermediate stepping stone, but it's not really the Web 3 revolution we were promised, I'm afraid.

The Web 3 revolution in the developing world is still going to be largely limited to Bitcoin or Zcash or Monero for private transactions, and I think it's still on the horizon. It's gotten closer, but it's still not quite there yet.

Let's find someone else who's speaking. Brett, I think you did an episode on your podcast on Bitcoin, didn't you?

Yeah, I tried to take a different attack, and I was talking about Ethereum. Ethereum as being a potential universal computer of a kind, and you know it better than I do, but it's really interesting to me that here we have another case of universality. Whenever human beings create another instance of universality, another case where we can literally do everything within a certain class of projects that is possible.

You know, this first happened with a classical computer; actually, it happened with language, of course; then it happened with the classical computer; then a quantum computer, and I think Ethereum and other kinds of blockchains like that are going to allow computation, a universal style of computation, which is absolutely going to change the face of society in the same way that classical computing did.

Emmett, I think you're up next if you want to go.

Yes, thanks. Thanks for taking my question! First of all, thanks for doing this, and I love the music that Meeting Wave puts up of some of your riffs on some of your interviews, if anyone else—

Oh yeah, he's great—a DJ.

Yeah, anyone who hasn't heard of him, check it out. Spotify, Meeting Wave.

Anyway, question for you is, is there anything in particular that you've thought that you've been wrong about? We all—there's so much for us to know; we can only know so little of the universe or whatever it is in human nature, physics even, but is there anything in particular personally that you feel like you strongly believed in, but you changed your mind completely on in the last few years?

Yeah, good question. There's plenty of things I've been wrong about. I don't fixate on them. I take the lesson and move on. I basically dropped out of paying attention to crypto in 2018, 2019, and even part of 2020 because I was put off by the whole ICO craze and all the, you know, terrible get-rich-quick schemes that were being launched and scamming people.

So I kept, you know, talking about Bitcoin and Ethereum, a few others, but I sort of lost interest in the space, and I completely missed DeFi. I also completely missed NFTs—They were right under my nose. I had friends talking about them, participating in them. Literally, I was on a weekly call with a guy who turned out to be one of the biggest collectors on the planet; he would tell me every week about how he's buying this digital art, and I just rolled my eyes and didn't get it.

So I completely missed that. Going way back, like, I'm an old-school military history buff, so I grew up as a kid—I could have told you the throw weights of different nuclear missiles, and if I had giant books about military fighters on my bookshelf. So anytime a war comes on, I get obsessed and I just dive into it.

I tweeted out a war of this recently; don't ask me why. It's a child-driven testosterone thing from playing with too many military airplanes and tanks, and I used to play a lot of war games. And there was a time when I bought the whole Bush-era Saddam has WMD; I fell for that line hook, line, and sinker.

So I was wrong about that. I was wrong about COVID very early on. Very early on, when people were dropping dead in the streets and the videos coming out of China, I thought, "Wow, maybe this thing has a very high CFR—confirmed fatality rate." But I turned around that pretty quickly and came to the conclusion that, "No, it's like a novel 10x flu," which is still really bad for older people.

But my mental model then shifted to it impacts you as sort of the square of your age; so the older you are, the much worse time you're gonna have. So, I think that was wrong in my initial assessments about COVID, but I stand by some of my later assessments or my current, more refined assessments.

I would say my whole theory of knowledge was pretty shaky and quite bad before I discovered Deutsch and Popper's work. So I was infinitely wrong in many of those cases.

I never bought string theory, but I wasn't a fan of multiverse theory until I read some of the more compelling arguments from Deutsch and Sean Carroll. Look, most of us are wrong most of the time, but you don't need to be right a lot in this world, especially in the digital domain. In the physical domain, being wrong can have very large consequences, but in the digital domain, being wrong can have not much consequences.

You may lose the money you bet or you wrote a piece of code that was useless, but being correct can have huge consequences in a positive way. You can make asymmetric upside. You can make a 100x or a thousand extra money on Tesla stock or on buying Ethereum at the right time, or you can reach a million people with the right tweet or the right message or the right podcast, perfectly crafted while being wrong.

It doesn't cost you much in certain domains; it makes sense to bet much bigger. These days, I just try to have fewer opinions about things. I feel like I don't need to have an opinion on everything, and that's not for being right or wrong; it's just to have mental clarity and to have peace of mind. You don't need to have an opinion on every person walking down the street or everything you see in the news or even about every form of government.

There is an infinite set of things out there that are demanding your attention and trying to hijack your attention. This is a little tongue-in-cheek, but the goal of media at some level is to make every problem your problem. Social media does this in spades; it offers you up a new tweet or a new post and says, "Are you angry yet? No, are you angry yet? No, are you annoyed yet? No, are you angry yet?"

It just keeps going through all these different sets of them and tries all different kinds to find something to get you hooked. So the way out of that trap is you almost have to realize the mental load that happens on you when one of these loops gets stuck in your head.

It's like when you listen to a song in the background, and you don't necessarily love the song, but you just listen to it a couple of times and now it's looping in your head. Well, the news can do the same thing; anger can do the same thing. And I think to some level, a lot of the anxiety that we suffer from is because we've taken on unconsciously all these problems—and then other people are coming in and trying to get you to solve their problem that they believe is the greatest problem in the world.

So somebody will come along and say, "The greatest problem is that we're killing all the animals, and so you got to go vegan." Somebody else will say that's climate change, and you shouldn't worry about anything else—that's climate change. For many people, realistically, that's what's going on in Ukraine. For some people, it might be what's going on in politics, but everybody has a different set of problems, and you really have to learn to not take on other people's problems.

This is not to say that you take on absolutely no problems, but first, make sure that you are doing a good job of solving your own direct problems and that you have a clear mind before you then selectively choose other problems to take on, which you can actually impact.

Don't just take on problems that you can't solve.

If I could just add a little bit to that... I think that if we define a contrarian as someone who simply takes the opposite position to whatever the prevailing view is, I don't know that there's a lot of use to doing that. But if you can identify the places where the overwhelming majority of people on planet Earth are holding a particular opinion that actually is false and you have some insight into that, then that is a place for you to make progress and to make a difference in the world.

My favorite example of this is that everyone seems to know that resources on planet Earth are finite. Everyone seems to agree, and so therefore we've got to conserve our resources, our natural resources, but this is completely false. There is a YouTube video that I did about this about the fact that a resource is only a resource once we have the knowledge about why and how it is.

A simple example is uranium. Uranium exists in the rock called pitchblende, which is an otherwise useless rock until you have nuclear physics. This is true of every single resource, and the thing that makes a resource a resource is knowledge, which we can continue indefinitely to produce more of.

And if we can continue to do that, which we will, then we won't run out of resources because we'll find new resources in the future. And this is not simply to be contrarian, and a lot of people balk at this, and people get very upset when I say this, but it simply is the case that we're not going to run out of resources. Resources are infinite because our creativity is infinite, and so we can solve the problem that for any finite particular resource, any individual resource that might run out, we'll find something to replace it.

And so we don't need to be pessimistic about the future, about running out of resources, about how we're coming to rack and ruin, and that we're going to end up existing in poverty. In fact, it's quite the opposite; we're going to be more wealthy, we're going to be more happy, we're going to have more resources.

So if you're going to take the opposite perspective to what the prevailing view is, if you can find those examples like that particular one—that's just a random example, you can actually take the position that is held by only a very tiny minority of people—that's an avenue for you to certainly either make a difference in some way philosophically or perhaps to generate wealth in a way that other people or pessimists who don't think it's possible won't bother trying, but you'll try because you'll have a different perspective.

Yeah, as they've said, "Don't debate them in the media when you can debate them in the marketplace." But if truth is on your side, by all means, feel free to bet them in the media too. I do think Brett's sustainability episode is one of his best; it's a mind-bender. It will challenge many deeply held assumptions; it's worth reviewing.

I remember the peak oil debacle when everybody was saying "we're going to run out of oil," and then it turns out, no, shell and fracking came along. We actually have unlimited oil; we just choose not to use it for other reasons now, but there's no shortage of oil on this planet, at least for the foreseeable future.

Essentially it all boils down to knowledge. It all boils down to how much do we know, and the more we know, the more we can do with what we have. All the resources that we need are available to us on this Earth—in the solar system, in the asteroid belt, in the sun, in this galaxy, even in empty space, so-called empty space. There's a lot of resources.

It's just a question of how can we create a powerful enough—or discover and utilize—a powerful enough energy source to extract whatever resources we need and understand the processes required to convert one thing to another. Deutsch has a great definition of wealth. I define wealth that more practically as assets that earn while you sleep, but he defined it as a civilizational level as the set of physical transformations that you can affect.

And I think that's a very powerful one because it shows we're only limited by our knowledge. It's not to say you can't run out of things in the short term, but economic incentives are set up in such a way that as long as there isn't a lot of government interference that creativity can help you out of that trap.

Now, it does have to proceed its natural level; there are not that many shortcuts in life, but I think we can find our way out of these so-called sustainability traps, which is really just a deeply pessimistic, "the world is ending" Cassandra approach that people like to take on a regular basis because pessimism is intellectually seductive.

A lot of intellectuals tend to be pessimistic, which is not to say that being pessimistic makes you smart, but people confuse that. So they signal their intelligence by pessimism, whereas I would argue that pessimism is actually the opposite signal. The cynicism that goes with it shows a lack of imagination; it shows a lack of reading history; it shows a lack of actually looking at the arc of human progress.

And if you fall into the trap of being a pessimistic or a cynic or a victim mentality, I would say pessimism and cynicism is a societal-level version of victim mentality; it's even worse than victim mentality. Just keeps you down.

Pessimism and cynicism, especially when articulated by very eloquent people, keep society down, and that's not so good.

Very briefly, pessimism is linked very strongly to prophecy as well. There are two ways of talking about the future: either we can predict the future, or we can prophesy the future. The only way to predict the future is to have a robust scientific explanation, and that scientific explanation allows you to logically derive certain claims about the future.

So in physics, we do this routinely. We can predict when the ball is going to hit the ground trivially, but as soon as we get outside of the physical sciences, once we start getting into economics, once we start getting into sociology and global affairs, and even something like the global climate, it becomes far more difficult to make those guesses about the future, and so they cease to be predictions.

They cease to be based upon good scientific explanations, and they become prophecies. And it doesn't matter how many letters you've got after your name; it doesn't matter that you've got a PhD in meteorology. If you're claiming to know what things are going to be like a thousand years from now, or a hundred years from now, or 10 years from now, you're being a prophet; you're being the same crystal ball gazer as people in the past have been.

Yeah, one of the things that annoys me about the whole current standard line attack where people say you can't talk about