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 and 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 and these days one of the ways I survive on Twitter is by blocking frequently uh 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 red 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 web3 startups companies it's a good question as I promised even though I know you and respective 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 it 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 in for the space I owe him an apology so the core of web3 is open source the core of crypto is open source if you have a crypto application uh or a web 3 application and it's not open source and is it really even open source in fact I think it was Chris Dixon who said that web3 is the business model for open source and it's amazing to me how many people beat

up web3 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 to many of their dreams so open source to me is fundamental it's a building block of web3 and I think that's as simply as I can put it you couldn't have web3 without open source of course you can have open source without web 3 but I would argue that web3 allows you to take your open source application actually instantiate and run it in a distributed format and get paid for it and let the users own their data that's my definition of web3 the 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 web3 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 signed you're on the air hi novel thanks for taking me in so I have a pretty simple question is with

web3 since we are on the topic with web3 what do you think like just Ai and ml kind of found their way into the whole ecosystem how can web3 be more mainstream so that there's no kind of question about it later that whether it's actually legit or not I just want to get this question out from move 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 a slightly different way you left I think it was something about how can you get web3 out there like Ai and ml look these things are going to be adopted on their own schedule web3 is

going to build lots of hopefully useful apps that you couldn't have otherwise web3 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 use 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 web3 has to go mainstream the same way like I don't think Bitcoin has to go like 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 web3 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 and innovating in that whole field and partaking in D5 or 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 and 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 I 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 was just wanted your 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 for God 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 less mistakes and 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 it 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 and the moment that a person found that meaning and share it with everybody else then we would all be enslaved to that particular meeting 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 inter 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 thing 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 and 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 the part of the secret of living a good and happy life is just understanding long-term consequences of your actions and 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's 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 are going to be proudest of is when you Rose past circumstances that were difficult when you Rose past your suffering and then you accomplish 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 a challenge 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 warn 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 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 which means love and 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 um the scales of where I would say in

real person this world is right now for good so I I'm maybe I'm 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 by it and I'm very hopeful I actually think that if we didn't have with pre 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 web3 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 which is just how much attention do you pay to your own thoughts your own mannerisms your own being how much the 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 it doesn't necessarily follow from web3 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 you want cool there's a monkey on the stage actually there's 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 or if 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 that 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 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 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 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 and 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 I do believe that 99 of effort in life is quote unquote wasted and it's 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 on 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 and there were a few one percent decisions that did matter now could you have gotten to those one percent 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're gone from a ratio of 991 and obviously it's a made-up ratio but you've gone from 991 to 95.5 now instead of 100 to 1 against you're 20 to 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 judge measurements 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 pseudonymi and accountability I I think there is there's probably 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 women pseudonym your 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 web3 and how to 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 domain name or you can put it behind a board 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 cancer culture it's a good defense against all kinds of things it puts people in even footing whether you're male or female or

black or brown or white or what have you are old or young so I do think it is very powerful but I think it's emergent and I think the pseudonymity only applies within the narrow web 3 domain so if you're in web 3 and you have a reason for the 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 not the accountability is accruing to your avatar instead of to you personally I 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 web3 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 web3 and that's on Twitter on Twitter you have all these in on accounts and there are occasionally people who call for Banning a non accounts and I think that's a big problem of course the worst accounts are in on the 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 a society to get along and that set of Lies will always 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 but they're 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 isn't very important and The Gnome de plume with the pen name writing I think Ben frankly you swear to the number to Plumes for example and several of 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 in on accounts not less it's very easy to block or mute annoying in on accounts in exchange you get incredible truth speaking from some very high quality accounts I think of Twitter

or whatever to do away with you know 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 in on 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 by and 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 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 the books are uniquely interesting for a

number of reasons one is unlike the synchronous media of YouTube and audiobooks uh you can consume books asynchronously which means that on one sentence you can spend hour and then the next paragraph you can spend a minute in 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 is is not 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 so 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 the 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 it's a little painful it's a little confusing but at the same time it's sparkling 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 you know 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 Deutsche 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

and there's 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 and it took me to really get through the beginning of infinity and the fabric of reality which is the precursor to the bigger 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 you know a weekend but it took me two years to actually understand the concepts in the book and there are single paragraphs in there which 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 Multiverse person is 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 into my core philosophy of decision making and judgment so I 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 are 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 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 it 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 and 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 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 and 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 a 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 and if you can develop a love for reading then eventually you'll navigate your way to the things you're quote unquote 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 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 and listen to Brad'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 and 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're 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 a 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

inherit 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 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 the 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 uh 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 like average IQ of students who had finished their PHD across different disciplines and it says something like archeology was in the 140s and

psychology was in the high 140s and so on and so on it when the highest was physics I think it was like 162 or 160 something and I actually took Umbridge 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 are almost borders on charlatanism just look at 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 right 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 t 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 psychologists 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 he couldn't even include it in the results so that 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 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 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 macroeconomy nor can you run a counterfactual test so macroeconomist 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 PhD or a high rank and so they're forced to correspond to reality and obviously the physical chemistry and other Sciences the hard science is the Natural Sciences all have the same type 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 abstractions 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 physicists 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 doesn't mean you're smart and everything

if you go back to my definition of getting what you want in a 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 in split hairs on what the definition of intelligence is but then we're falling to this wittkinsonian trap of what is the meaning of meaning anyway and then you can't have any conversations everyone is equal in a infinite ignorance we might have our own areas a 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 you know 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 to 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 uh mad mutually assured destructions didn't exist yet and Matt 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 you began with I was actually here at the beginning listening to uh you're talking about life as a single player game and it really evoked for me what Carl poppas 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 Deutsche before you encountered copper but when you found them that 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 that 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 without deep examination okay so here's a recent one that's getting me uh 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 and I 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 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 the same level of classification to the fact that eyewitness accounts are incredibly unreliable Etc okay just go on and on but at the end of the day I had to

respond with just one phrase It's just 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 sighting spread 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 extend eventually 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 uh 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 drink with a kid we're 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 that those are the the Miller Yuri 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

kind of 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 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 at 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 uh so I'm going to move you back to the audience that promised yeah things to Aspire to move past in your life first you want to get out of your

parents 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 all together 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 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 of all 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 in your family change your friends change your co-workers 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 is better to sit on your butt and do nothing that is 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 and who you're meant to be with I have been utterly ruthless about prioritizing my time and saying no to things and I 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 like this new potential for the developing world to access uh Global markets in a whole new way and so I'm just wondering two things number one what 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 decentralizing 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 government not always but it happens a lot and crypto is self-governing you have tokens you can vote you have Dows you have distribution of power and 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 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 at regime and just the impoverishment of Russia as 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 of as they wanted in the background and so by doing that they 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 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 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 like 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 Z cash 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 the 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 a best use of web3 it's a fine intermediate use case and it's how helping people in developing world gets digital salaries that are on a 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 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 Z cash or Monero for private transactions and I think it's still on the horizon and it's gotten closer but it's still not quite there yet let's find someone else who's uh 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 a potential

Universal computer of a kind and you know they're far better than I do but it's really interesting to me that here we have a 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 quantum computer and I think ethereum and other kinds of blockchain 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 your uh the music that meeting wave puts up of some of your riffs on some of your interviews if anyone else oh yeah that's uh yeah yeah he's great a DJ yeah anyone who hasn't heard of him check it out Spotify medium wave but anyway question for you is is there anything in particular you think like in the last few years that you've thought that you've been wrong about we all there's so much for us to know we can't we only know so a little of the

universe or whatever it is and the 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 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 know talking about Bitcoin and Ethan a few others but I sort of lost interest in

the space and I completely missed defy 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 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 is child driven testosterone thing from playing with too many military airplane airplanes and tanks and I used to play a lot of War games and you know there was a time when I I bought the whole Bush era Saddam has wmd I fell for that line hook 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 know I thought wow maybe this thing has a very high CFR confirmed fatality rate but I turned around that pretty quickly and I 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 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 I would say my whole theory of knowledge was pretty shaky and quite bad before I discovered Deutsche and Popper's work so I was infinitely wrong in many of those cases I never bought a 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 bad or you wrote a piece of code that was useless but being correct can have huge consequences positive 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 less 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 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 I I this is a little tongue-in-cheek but the goal of

media at some level is to make every problem in your problem and 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 to worry about that 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 have an impact on 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 that there's 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 and a simple example is uranium uranium exists in the rock called pitch blend which is an otherwise useless rock until you have nuclear physics and 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 more happy we're going to have more resources and 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 an 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 and 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 into 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 Deutsche 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 trap 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 it shows a lack of imagination it shows a lack of reading history it shows the 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 invicted mentality I would say pessimism and cynicism is a societal level version of victim mentality it's even worse than victim entire 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 uh pessimism is leaked 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 10 years from now you're being a prophet you're being the same crystal ball Gaza 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 that stay in your lane what they mean is you don't have the expertise and if you do one level further what they mean is that you don't have the credentials and if you dig one level further what that means is you don't have the right academic stamp and so all that's doing is reducing Society to a small set of academic credentials people who are in a circle jerk issuing each other credentials and they're not going to think out of the box and they're certainly not going to think anything that goes against their profession so I would trust a physicist

on climate science much more than I would trust the climate scientist I would trust a computer scientist on AI much more than I would trust an AI researcher just because once you adopted a point of view as your identity you're unlikely to say anything that might contradict in that sense I don't like to put any labels on myself nor do I think that we should be worshiping at the altar of credentials a lot of the great advances in human history came through polymaths came through mixing disciplines Nature has no concept of disciplines Nature has no concept of different professions that's just a human-made construct sure if you're

going to get operated upon you probably want someone with a medical degree because there you're trying to minimize the chance of something going wrong and the better the entry is very high but when it comes to for example figuring out even deep Trends in things like epistemology and evolution some of the best work has been done by people outside of the field and certainly in everyday Affairs like what is the right role of government what is the right spending level what is the right taxation level should we wear masks or not which is a multivariate decision should we force people to get vaccinated or not which is more than just a pure

biological decision it also impinges on human freedom and human rights I think everybody who has done a little bit of homework as a clear thinker is entitled to have an opinion and so the stay in your lane attack is one that automatically leads to a block from me because those people are essentially just advocating for University academics to run the world flywheel I will let you talk awesome it's incredibly difficult trying a time when I was going to enter and come up with a quick whip but one I wanted to say from earlier when you were mentioning physics and whatnot I had lost a bet that you would mention uh Feynman and so I thought that was quite

funny to share and I went so close to Mission I knew it I was gonna bring up the nature always we use threads out of the longest tapestries and so there's only a few theories you need to understand I was going to follow that on to right about in deep explanations being better than broad explanations So yeah thank you very much Simplicity yes exactly yeah so that was one quick whip then the next one that I had was when you guys were a moments ago discussing when you were mentioning pessimism and I was going to say pessimism is Media needs to generate money in some Manner and if you want to have a one-sided opinion the easiest way to validate

people's emotion is to create the issue at hand and when you create the issue and you create the narrative and then you empower hour someone's thinking letting them know that it's correct because it's a part of the masses now you've compounded the initial idea which is the news that you're giving to them which is something that was not something they were concerned of prior to tuning in and it has these compounding effects which ultimately gives control of your entire mental capacity and people don't necessarily have you know time to to think for themselves that's a great point it reminds me of this uh loose idea that I

have which is probably wrong because I haven't really thought it through but that's a lot of modern society the media rails against but I don't think weed is as bad as fear because what's the worst case with greed the worst case with greed is you go off and do something for your greed but especially in a capitalist environment you're almost by definition have to create a product or sell something and it's probably a voluntary transaction the way we're designed is yes we get greedy but we only agreed to waste certain level because in evolution the rewards to being greedy were fairly low before human wealth existed if you were greedy

you might get an extra deer carcass you might get an extra meal you might find a better place to sleep fear on the other hand had huge consequences which was if you were not afraid when the tiger showed up if you didn't realize when the scream went out you were gonna get eaten or when the neighboring tribe attacked you were going to get skinned so the consequences to fear have historically been much greater the rewards to Greed which is partially why I think we're a fearful and pessimistic species now why do I bring that up I say that because I think that the people who control you through greed actually have a lot less power than the people who control you

through fear and that is why a lot of media is about fear so if you're getting angry at people being greedy I would be much more careful about the people who are inducing fear in you because it always starts out as hey I'm giving you a public service you should pay attention and so you look at them as a good guys they get the virtue signal and then they they drive you into a fearful State fear naturally leads to anger because now you're angry that you're driven into a corner you're afraid and that leads to conflict so I think a lot of the modern conflicts that are otherwise avoidable are driven through fear so always be very wary of people

who are trying to scare you usually they're up to no good they may be genuine and authentic and think they're trying to do your public service but I think that as a society we push back and greedy people too much and we don't push back enough on the people who are inciting fear I would go so far as to say that and just to elaborate on that thought in this I have I do have a question but telebrand on that thought is I think the they are fearful there's especially with the new technologies that come about there's no other way to try and quiet someone who's saying even the smallest idea that gets planted into someone's

brain to begin a sprout they wanted to cut that off at its at its root because sorry before if there was any water that would even you know water that seed and the reason being is they are incredibly fearful because the technologies that have come about from nowhere early in you know the 90s and the.com bubble where you had this significant new Underdog where you had so much wealth creation that was traditionally rooted in oil gas and real estate and other types of traditional means that now can be combated with this new opportunity to create something to fight back with which which is this wealth from uh monetizing and all of our information in

that I think there's been this decade or two decade struggle for power where you've had people knowing that we can't respect people and give them the opportunities to think for themselves and and we can treat them though with pity I think a lot of our issues in Society come from the lack of belief in somebody else's ability in order to enable a person to feel more competent for themselves put them down and not even give them an opportunity to think for themselves where if you were to start to replace that with empathy you would have a different view on people and give them capabilities but they're grasping for power I'm going to have to

thank you for those thoughts I want to balance you for a moment just to make room for others because we're running out of time it's already an hour and a half in and people are probably getting pretty tired by the way I would also say people should feel free to ask questions about a topic where I actually do have some expertise which is making money and wealth creation because studied that pretty heavily or not studied learned that where I do consider myself an actual expert and not just on philosophy or physics or politics or where I'm more of an amateur not that I need not that I'm going to stay in my Lane but just feel free to ask questions about your

business or business problems you're having all right let's try to give me hey so great talk so far one question I have and something I've seen a lot happen recently is the fervor and the excitement over web3 and This Promise of a great new future has a lot of people obviously getting into the space running in Full Tilt ahead but I think a thing that a lot of people misunderstand is that you can't simply move into a new economy a digital wonderful digital one and just a shoe the old one which is I think the pipe dream of a lot of new companies now so the question I have is how exactly does this aside sort of

fundamentally rewrite the rules and pay the piper so to speak so that the Old Guard doesn't just spend every last bit of energy they have attempting to dismantle the new because it threatens sort of the safety and the security that they're hoping to get with the systems that they've built and brought up to speed for today yeah so how do we prevent the olds from stopping web3 actually Douglas Adams the late great Douglas Adams author of The Hitchhiker's got the Galaxy said this brilliantly I'm paraphrasing him but he said something along the lines of everything that happened before I was 20 it was like natural and normal and just

the way the world is and everything that happens between the ages of 20 and 30 is new and exciting and fresh and something that I can build my worldview and my career upon and everything that happens after I'm 40 is suspicious and terrible and not to be trusted it must be suppressed and stuff and it is true it is the way the human mind works when you're young you're impressionable you're absorbing you take the world as it's given to you you're adapting to the world that you're going to live in then you go through this phase where you're looking for opportunity you're looking for Frontiers you have excitement you want to build something you want to

create something you want to change the world you want to get your message out there and so you tend to naturally hopefully view things as opportunities and then at some point you just get tired you have a family of kids you're getting a little older you want things to be calm you want them to be simple you don't want to expend too much energy and you want stability and so you tend to look with a negative eye with a jaundiced eye towards anything new coming up and so that's just human nature how do we stop it look we don't necessarily stop it not all change is good I think Brett has talked about this but change that destroys embedded

institutional knowledge too quickly it's bad there's this whole crowd now that says capitalism doesn't work we do it with capitalism and you ask them what we're going to replace it with you get crickets because we know that communism doesn't work and we know that socialism is as communism light it slides towards communism and maybe it works in some very small societies like Sweden Denmark where they're you know homogeneous race and they're protected by the United States and they're hidden behind mountains and they have huge natural resources but even there I would argue that it's not exactly the hotbed of innovation creativity but regardless so

people hate capitalism but they have nothing else to replace it with so not all change is necessarily good but something like web3 heck yeah you bet they're going to try and stop it you bet they're going to try and Outlaw you bet they're going to crack down on it if it didn't then it wouldn't actually be that valuable it's not actually that disruptive I do think that countries that try to ban or stop or slow down web 3 are going to find themselves increasingly on the wrong side of History even today for example a lot of the new crypto token offerings are only available to non-americans which is kind of sad you're cut out as an American a

lot of the new products are being forced overseas all the crypto teams that are settling with the SEC or cftc often end up relocating their products overseas or their operations team overseas or only serving overseas customers this is literally driving Innovation out and it comes from this mythology that the United States somehow creates entrepreneurs that's not true the United States attracts entrepreneurs and attracts entrepreneurs because they're from the environment for entrepreneurs or used to be anyway and now those entrepreneurs are going to be attracted elsewhere and the internet or at least the part of the internet that's high

quality and works and it's Innovative is global we're lucky that Bitcoin was probably created by an American a group of Americans are spread in the U.S first but if the next Bitcoin or the next eth is created in some other part of the world we're going to watch those other countries become rich and by the time we figure out that they're at the Forefront of knowledge creation it will be too late there's nothing that guarantees that the United States will stay at the Forefront of human history what's taken it so far has been the unprecedented freedoms that it offered in the Bill of Rights but those freedoms are being increasingly circumscribed and limited

by sort of this bureaucratic State that's taken over of Administrators and courtiers who are essentially controlling what is allowed what isn't people like the SEC the cftc and all these three little agencies these are just cops by another name who make rules put people in jail take people to court and even worse they don't necessarily even try them they basically use their influence with banks and lawyers and scare tactics to clamp down Innovation so I've always said going way back that for crypto the final boss is the state it's the governments of the world and there will be a few of them who are enlightened and who embrace the future

and usually those are strange and uncommon combination of both enlightened and desperate they're looking to gain rather than to lose or look into the future rather into the past and unfortunately I think most of Western societies now are sort of entering their decadent Empire stage which can be a great and fun place to hang out I'm sure Roma the decline was a blast but it's not necessarily the place where the frontier thrives it's not the place where Innovation happens one of the more interesting things I've seen is there's been an exodus from San Francisco during the pandemic partially due to the pandemic but partially due to their

horrible governance with just an awful D.A who won't prosecute crime and a board of education that doesn't believe in education and so on and just a huge homelessness problem that's just multiplied and multiplied and basically unparalleled single party rule which is never a good idea whether it's left or right but in this case it's harsh left and as I've seen San Francisco crumble eventually I think people will start coming back the network effector is very powerful and unfortunately this taste but it's hard to argue with reality but I have noticed that the crypto teams are gone yes the majority of crypto Innovation was outside of the San

Francisco Bay area but a large chunk of the high quality companies were coming out of the Bay Area and that range from regulatory ones like coinbase to dexes like dydx and even Solana and Phantom a lot of these things were built and operated out of the Bay Area but now I think it's very clear that very few crypto companies in their right mind are going to start in the United States let alone the San Francisco Bay Area I do think the crypto Genies out of the bottle web 3 Innovation is going more and more Global certainly going you know Cross City and that's not going to come back and I don't think the action The Regulators are going to be helpful I'm a

huge fan of divided government and gridlock honestly because I view government as being good at a few things around public goods like National Defense and Roads and that kind of stuff but mostly what we spend money on is not that and the huge number of laws that we as soon as something becomes interesting means that we restrict the frontier we restrict the opportunities and we freeze Innovation Peter Thiel famously asked like where am I flying cars and Rockets it's because the government got involved why are the prices of Health Care and real estate and education skyrocketing while everything else is deflating once the government got involved so generally

I think it should be left to the private sector and obviously the government can have some work in ensuring true competition although they're pretty incompetent there too but it would be nice for example if they got Facebook and Twitter to open up their apis or something of this sort or be nice if they broke Apple's App Store Monopoly but I'm not counting on them to figure out how to do that properly or at least not until it's way too late in the wrong way and so on I think the government that governs best is the one that governs slowly that makes very few changes and tries not to fix things because when it tries to fix something

it generally ends up breaking it look at the TSA regime that we live under now the transportation Safety Authority now that the medical industrial complex we're probably going to be wearing masks and airplanes for a really long time air travel just gets slower and slower anyway this is not meant to be a polemic against government but I like to buy the government because then it gets out of the way and it lets the private sector innovate anyway probably too much said on this topic but I think that web3 is I wouldn't say design because it's not designed by any single person but I would say it is an emergent property of the internet and it is the internet's

immune response to over regulation and so it is designed to resist regulation and the governments that try to over regulate web 3 will find that it slips away from them and it takes this massive wealth creation and Innovation elsewhere and the US is no longer the default place where Innovation is going to happen in web3 the default place for Innovation and web 3 is the internet and the internet is everywhere for the first time in human history we have this thing called a tradition of criticism which perhaps is the defining characteristic of the Enlightenment for the rest of human history any tradition was to keep things the same that's what a tradition

is you traditionally do the same thing over and over again but uniquely our society by which I'm in the United States Canada Europe Australia we have this tradition of criticism where over time things change and it's sustainable and it's stable and that's really unique and I mention it now in the context of what you've just been saying because there are so many attacks on it now there are so many attacks on the traditions of criticism people involved in cancer culture people saying that we should censor this that or the other people imposing regulations where they don't need to be regulations these all act to prevent criticism to prevent new

innovation and these are anti-enlightenment ideas and we have to guard against them and if you have a chance to stand up again into something then stand up against over regulation stand up against any impingement on Free Speech unfortunately for me as an outsider a person who's not in the United States the most disappointing thing about the United States is how anti-American so many Americans are they're really against things like free speech not all of them of course but there is this unique feature of the United States that we don't have elsewhere Australia doesn't have free speech some of us claim we do but we

don't we do not have a Bill of Rights in the same way that America does so you really need to value that and you need to understand that you are in that tradition of criticism you are following on from the early Enlightenment thinkers and of all the countries in the world still the United States is preserving the best parts of the Enlightenment where unfortunately others in that tradition aren't doing it as quite as well yeah the first amendment the Second Amendment are quite unique in that states and every now and then some people will get triggered and I mentioned and say well I'm really free

and then certain European country and the answer is no you're not you can be arrested for saying things that are against the so-called law by the way even the fire on a crowded theater thing is bad law most people will tell you that that was done in the context of draft dodging in the war it was a bad ruling and would probably not survive today free speech in the United States at least constitutionally is very protected but because of the monopolization of media by a small number of social media companies who themselves then engage in politicking because they're protected by section 230 the communications decency act which

makes them not liable as Publishers even though they censor and choose what content goes in their platform they get this weird protection from the government that was meant to stop child porn but then of course got abused and used so that now the second rate failed journalist joined trust and safety teams for all these different platforms and then they tell us what they think is right and wrong so now all discourse and creativity and and criticism is relegated to what a second-rate failed journalist on one of these platforms thinks and of course they're just going to listen to the academics you know anyone with a PhD in their name which is

a BS credential passed on by another PhD in circular reasoning so I'm not afraid to call them out because I figured I'll get canceled at some point anyway but I just feel like the attacks on Free Speech are the single most disgusting feature of modern technology in modern society and the fact that Twitter and Facebook censor so often and so freely if I could wish anyone out of existence I would wish the trust and safety teams and their jobs out of existence I think censorship is no place in these platforms we are absolutely capable of taking care of ourselves if they just let us publish And subscribe block lists we could pick our own editors we could

mute and block our own accounts on an individual basis and we can share them with people that we trusted and this whole idea that we need to be babysat is just absurd and I think history will look very unkindly upon these people I think I should probably wrap it up it's a gone on for an hour 45. it's been good catching up with everybody thanks for tuning in hope it was useful I think I recorded this if I didn't do this wrong so people should be able to replay it I'm sure somebody will put it on YouTube If you are going to Tweet out of this please be kind with the excerpts try and replicate the context and remember if