Episode 51 - Scott Talks with Naval Ravikant, No Politics

Date: 2018-06-19 | Duration: 56:07

Topics

Are we a computer simulation? Do we have free will? Strategies for success Blockchain and decentralization Reproduction, biological and via the simulation Awareness is consciousness What would a Naval/Scott school teach? Working with opponents Cooperation is the human advantage - Naval Are we in the Golden Age? Korean peace possibility

Transcript

[0:03]

Boom-boom-boom-boom. Join me everybody, sing along. Hey everybody, come on in. This is better than simply “Coffee with Scott Adams.” This is new, this is upgraded, it’s the best you’ve ever seen featuring Naval Ravikant. Naval, say hi. Hello everybody. We are here to talk about everything interesting. Maybe not our usual topics, but everything interesting. We’re gonna go places. I would like to start with this question: are we a computer simulation?

[1:05]

Thanks for starting with the easy one. Do you know this is my number one question people ask? Because that’s my view. Statistically likely that we’re in a simulation just because of how these things develop. Simulations develop simulations. But I would say, wait—for the people who are new to this, just give them the view. On a long enough period of time, a sufficiently advanced civilization will invent a simulation, go into it, and since the universe has been around for a really, really long period of time, it has probably already happened many, many times over. It’s statistically likely given how long it takes to do it, which is how long the universe has been around. That’s why a lot of people think, mathematically speaking, we are in a simulation. But I would say on top of that, what’s interesting is if you look at Buddhism as sort of a philosophy and if you look at the simulation hypothesis, a lot of things that are true in Buddhism are true in the simulation hypothesis. They call it Maya—the great game, the illusion of the world. That’s the reference. There’s already simulation-type references.

[2:07]

Is illusion a simulation? Because there’s a different intention behind those two things. The intentionality is a really good question. For example, in the case of what the Buddhists would basically say, we’re all one thing—which you could argue, like in The Matrix. We’re all made of the same code, so we’re all basically one program that’s running. When they talk about the multiple lives hypothesis, which there’s no proof of, by the way, but it’s just like their religion—that’s like someone playing the game over and over until… and then what does enlightenment in Buddhism mean? It’s realizing the whole thing is a game. You can map the simulation hypothesis and Buddhism onto each other very nicely.

[3:10]

I’ve often had this upgrade to the simulation hypothesis that plays off of that. If there were something called reincarnation and we’re a simulation, could it be that the creator of the simulation—we are working from software—every kid could make his own universe now. In the future, they say, “I’m gonna put myself as the character and I’ll play different lives.” There’ll be something about me I take to each of these lives. Maybe it’s a central characteristic of me, but not all of them. It’s a fun hypothesis. There’s no evidence for that, of course. One thing that doesn’t get discussed in simulation hypothesis is if we create a simulation, the simulation is never going to be as good as the real thing because the compute power that we have to simulate another complex system… you just use up all the atoms and molecules and energy in your simulation unless you’re creating a world where people are hallucinating the reality, which is exactly our world.

[4:11]

Some of the strongest arguments that we’re in a simulation is that the way you would conserve resources is exactly what we see. If you were the maker, you wouldn’t say the universe is infinitely large because you can’t program it. You would say, “Well, let’s say it started as a small thing and it’s getting bigger, but it’s got an edge and you can’t get there.” How convenient that nobody can go the speed of light because you can’t get to the outside and find out you’re in the simulation. And quantum mechanics—the smallest forces and particles are actually discrete. You can’t go below that. There’s a level below which you’re just not allowed to peek. The universe isn’t analog and continuous; it’s actually discrete. The quantum does lend itself more to its being programmed in a simulation. Even weirder, also slightly compatible with weird science, the fact that we are being observed in this conversation might be the only thing that makes it real. If you and I had this conversation and nobody saw it, you would have the option of going home and saying, “We talked about agriculture. It was a good time.” And I could have a memory of, “We talked about science and we had a fight.” It wouldn’t matter. It would never have to be resolved.

[5:11]

This is the same thing in quantum mechanics: the Copenhagen interpretation, where Niels Bohr and other scientists working with him caused this little revolution because they basically said reality doesn’t exist unless there’s an observer. That’s what the quantum differential experiment was showing. The observer is as critical as the observed. Plus, the wave-particle duality doesn’t collapse unless there’s an observer there to see it. I don’t have enough conversations about the wave-particle duality of reality. That’s why I love talking to Naval. I’m not a physicist, I’m just an amateur; I just read this stuff. We’re only doing the hard questions today, so: free will. Free will is a good one. Do we have free will? I say no, not in any way that isn’t just mechanical. The laws of physics do not end at your skull and then on the inside there’s something called magic and free will and spirits and souls.

[6:12]

I think there’s just a little moist computer happening in there, and it does what it has to do given the inputs. I agree with you. I think that we don’t have free will because it’s an unbroken chain of particle collisions from the Big Bang until now. But I will make one tweak, which is that doesn’t mean it’s predetermined. We are living in a complex system and the only way to model the next move in a complex system is by having a computer of equivalent complexity to step forward. You can’t model what happens next in our universe without a computer that is the universe. Our inability to predict it doesn’t change its nature. I agree. It’s still not free will, but it’s still indeterminate. We still have to move forward to find out what’s gonna happen. It’s a surprise.

[7:17]

It’s a surprise, and there’s no entity out there, computationally speaking, that knows the surprise and is watching. You’re saying that nobody can predict the future. Simultaneous sip! Are you ready?

[8:19]

One of the things that we’ve talked about before that I always like your points of view on is strategies for success. There are lots of variables you need to get right. I’m gonna list them and I want your quick opinion, a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 means this is a really important thing for success and 1 is, no, you don’t even need that. Number 1: Hard work. Three or four, maybe. Early on, like seven or eight at some point, but really three or four. In Silicon Valley, there might be exceptions because you’re playing winner-take-all games, trying to build the next 50-billion-dollar company where only one can win. So the number one, by definition, is also gonna hit 10 on everything. But for general people going through general life, just going to be successful, hard work really doesn’t matter that much because we live in an age of infinite leverage. Technology, capital, media make it so easy to multiply your work that what you do and how well you do it is so much more important than how hard you do it. Who you know—your network. Scale of one to ten, how important is your network?

[9:20]

It wasn’t that important for me early on, but now as I look back, I realize there were some networks that really mattered. Moving to Silicon Valley—that’s a network you kind of go into just by moving there. That was a critical decision. My college network, I don’t think mattered that much for me. I tried to create work that people would see and recognize and the network sort of emerges. How about that first job? I advise that’s like an eight or nine. It’s really important because what path you start out on makes it a lot easier—fewer hops to where you end up. I just didn’t start there. Network-wise, I started closer to zero. I think that’s why I have a little reaction to it. It shouldn’t matter, but I think it does matter.

[10:22]

What’s the quick story of how you got traction for a phenomenally successful career starting with literally nothing? I was a total unknown kid in New York City from a nothing family, single-parent household, immigrants trying to survive. I just passed the test to get into Stuyvesant High School. That was it. That saved my life because once I had the Stuyvesant brand, then I got into an Ivy League college. Once you’re in an Ivy League college, then I was in tech. So, that network mattered, but it started with no network. Stuyvesant is like one of those intelligence lottery situations where you can break into an instant validation network. You go from being blue-collar to white-collar in one move. You had a singular advantage—your academics were spectacular. This is what I love about Stuyvesant. It wasn’t academics; some academics were initially not that great. I wasn’t a good student. But it was about a test. It was like an SAT that you took in the eighth grade, and if you were among the highest scorers in all of the New York City public school system, you got to go to this magnet math and science school. If you were number two, you had to go to Bronx Science—which they’ll never live down—if you were number three, you got to go to Brooklyn Tech. Stuyvesant was the hardest to get into school in all of New York—brilliant teachers and great students. They would take anybody as long as they passed that exam.

[11:22]

Importance for success: intelligence. Scale of one to ten. This is where I’m really biased. How do you define intelligence? The G-factor, the standard accepted one they look for with genetic tests and IQ trackers? No, I usually think of it more as IQ smarts or emotional intelligence. Let’s do what we both want to do, which is skip that because it’s really a subset of the Skill Stack. How important is it to have the right combination of skills? I don’t know—of course, after your books and reading your whole theory on this, I think it’s absolutely right. To me, the number one thing you can have is general intelligence because general intelligence allows you to get pretty good at everything else. I would add one more thing: general intelligence, and you just have to be open-minded. You can be intellectually curious, open-minded. If you’re smart and you question everything, you’ll eventually figure everything else out at a good enough level.

[12:24]

You’ll figure out how to hack your nutrition and your workout so that you do them and you eat relatively well for yourself. You hack your habits so you’re not smoking or drinking. You’ll hack your work so that you know how to make money. You hack even your sales skills—you’ll figure out the minimum amount of persuasion. You’ll have your development skills. I think intelligence and an open mind going together are the meta things that make you pretty good at everything, and that’s the way you win. You’ve probably seen more entrepreneurs before and after success than just about anybody. From your vantage point, of all the people who made it, how many could you tell five minutes after you met them, “Oh, this one’s gonna make it,” and it doesn’t even matter what the idea was?

[13:26]

It’s hard to tell which business is gonna work because a lot of businesses fail, and a lot of good entrepreneurs chasing not-good businesses fail. But the entrepreneurs themselves don’t fail over a long enough period of time. When you meet the right entrepreneur, you know they’re gonna be a winner. It’s a question of how many times—you just have to back them a few times. So the stock market is broken because we’re betting on the bad thing? We’re betting on businesses instead of people? Definitely at the early stage, it’s much more about the people. As the business gets larger and more mature, it can become like a fortress. Then it becomes more about the business. Warren Buffett always says, “Invest in the business that any idiot could run, because at some point, one will.” I’m paraphrasing him, but the kinds of businesses he invests in, irregardless of who’s running it, they’re basically… Buffett plays the wise old nice man on TV, but there’s a lot of shady stuff there, too. One of those is that Warren invests in basically natural monopolies. He calls them moats, but they’re basically natural monopolies.

[14:27]

For example, the reason Coca-Cola is such a massive business is obviously that you’re psychologically and physiologically addicted. When you’re used to that kind of drink in your mouth, you consume it. The sugar, caffeine—all that is obvious. But people don’t realize about cola in particular: cola has one characteristic that other soft drinks don’t, which is zero taste build-up, zero taste memory. You don’t get sick of drinking Coke over and over. Literally, Coca-Cola, for an addicted drinker, can take over your entire life. You can substitute water 100% with Coca-Cola, and people do that. Buffett was basically saying this is why Coke is a great business. Now, he mentioned this offhand in an MBA lecture like a decade ago. If he were out there saying this right now on Twitter, people would be like, “My god, this whole company is a predatory company that is basically hacking people’s genes and tastebuds to essentially get them addicted to this horrible substance that can replace drinking water with sugar water.”

[15:28]

Making them diabetic—how did he get away with this? I’m not calling Buffett out; I’m just saying he’s invested in natural monopolies that are basically addictive drugs. You might as well be investing in weed companies that basically control distribution. The other things he sells are like junk food and candy. They’re all legal businesses, and I think it should all be legal. I support Warren, god bless him, he should go do all this. But he talks about investing in businesses that are in moats, but those are natural monopolies. Until your business is a natural monopoly, it’s all about the people. They’re really legal drugs—it’s even better than being a natural monopoly because you can make money selling cocaine even if other people are selling cocaine. It’s the nature of things that are physiological or psychological to us that we form deeper bonds with them, like Gillette for example, or like a toothpaste. When you’re putting something in your mouth, you’re used to a flavor, you can just get addicted at a physiological level.

[16:28]

Could you hold up your water bottle like that? This will make sense. This water bottle came with several of their frozen water bottles in Amazon’s food delivery. They’re doing food delivery to your house, and they used to have these cold packs that would make you sort of angry as a consumer. You’d be like, “Cold packs? What do I do with these? I don’t want to throw them away, I don’t want to store them until you come back for them.” You’ve just made me a little angry, and I just got your product. Now they replace these with water bottles that you were probably gonna use anyway. You know how to recycle these and you feel like you’ve got something extra. “Oh my god, this is the smartest, most awesome thing, I got a bottle of water.”

[17:29]

In that way, they’re making a little bit of dopamine or whatever the reaction is, so every time you get a package from them, you’re getting a little “oh.” It’s what Apple does when they do their packaging—you fall in love with it before you actually touch the actual product. Amazon is not only providing me with water today, but back when I was doing my first tech startup—Epinions, back in the dot-com boom—we would make a big heroic thing out of hard work because we were young kids and didn’t know any better. We thought it was all about how hard you worked, so everyone would compete to spend time at the office. We would sleep underneath our desks and we made a big deal out of it. We used to get books and CDs and computers delivered from Amazon, and they would pack everything in this rice- and corn-based packing foam. We would eat it! Do you think it’s new that I’m drinking Amazon’s packing material? Delicious.

[18:30]

My next question: Decentralization. The big buzzword. Unless you’re working in the area, you hear it—decentralization, blockchain—and it’s going to change civilization. Can you give me the human-being explanation of what the future might look like? What blockchains do is basically… humans are just groups of co-operators. We’re networkers. We build networks. English is a network, the United States is a network, the US dollar is a network, Uber is a network. We just have all these networks that cooperate. That’s what makes us special as a species. That’s what allows us to beat up all the other species—because we can cooperate across genetic boundaries, unlike ants or bees who have to come from the same hive or the same nest. Humans are network co-operators.

[19:32]

We’re like super bees or ants, but our networks have to be controlled because there’s always cheaters in every system. In a network, the people who are contributing more resources need to get more, and the people who are consuming more need to pay more. You need somehow to run a network to control who gets in, who gets paid, who pays out, who does what work, who is cheating, who’s not doing their job. Historically, these networks have been run by individuals who eventually become kings and tyrants and emperors, or they’ve been run by elites or aristocracies, or they’ve been run by democracies—which are like mobs—or they’ve been run by companies like Uber or Facebook. We organized networks through these different governance systems. What I would argue blockchains do is they bring a fifth form of governance, today purely digital but eventually including physical networks, and that form of government is like a market. In a blockchain system, it’s basically a piece of code running in the cloud that says, “Hey, we need a certain resource.”

[20:33]

Let’s call it storage. Anyone who contributes storage into this network will get paid, and anyone who needs storage will have to pay. We’re going to track this all online; we’re gonna keep track of the debits and credits in a ledger. That’s a blockchain. A blockchain is a piece of code in the cloud that nobody owns doing that. It’s punishing cheaters who use too much storage or break the rules, and it’s rewarding people who bring lots of storage reliably. What blockchains will do is build these giant permissionlessly programmable, uncensorable networks. Permissionlessly programmable means that, unlike our current money system where if I want to write code and I want to send or receive money I have to work with Visa, MasterCard, or PayPal and pay huge fees—I can’t do micro-transactions or macro-transactions, I can only operate within a very tight band because I need their permission—so people just don’t code that stuff.

[21:33]

The financial world has been immune from programmers; it has been shielded from technologists. But now we’re gonna make finance programmable, which means that the engineers and the technologists are going to take over the privilege of seigniorage—printing money—from bankers. That is a big thing; that’s the money craze around crypto. So it’s eliminating the banking gatekeepers with their rules and replacing them with code. Imagine if your bank was actually a decent website where you could actually go in and it would behave like Amazon. What if your bank treated you the way Amazon treats you? What if they had all those features and functionality online? The fact they don’t shows it’s an antiquated, permission-based system. It’s not just banking, it’s the entire finance industry. The other piece that’s really important is uncensorable. Now you can actually start building things where you don’t have a gatekeeper in the middle taking 30%, or you don’t have things being shut down by people somewhere in the world, like when Twitter is not available or Facebook is censored like how the Chinese social media companies are run.

[22:34]

But will it make a big difference in that way? People like to self-censor. Somebody gave an example recently of a homeowners association saying, “Hey, does that restrict your rights?” And I’m thinking, well yeah it does, but people move there because of that. At some level all laws are contractual social self-censorship. It’s basically 300 million Americans saying, “We’re gonna live on this piece of land, and these are the rules and controls we have to prevent us from going insane and killing each other.” How likely is some big institution going to insert itself into the decentralized world as insurance or a guarantor? Which is really all banks do. There will be big centralized actors who will try and do things, but fundamentally, as long as blockchains are sufficiently decentralized, they’re bigger than any country. They still haven’t been able to shut down BitTorrent. How would they shut down Bitcoin?

[23:35]

There are hundreds of companies and thousands of independent nodes and miners, and the code hasn’t really been changed. It’s kind of impossible to stop at this point. If there are ten thousand rich people in the world who believe in Bitcoin and will take it as legal tender and as a store of value, then it is a new independent form of store of value alongside gold or oil. I love this question because it’s so naive, but it’s hard for me to believe that a government such as ours couldn’t say, “You can’t use Bitcoin, it’s illegal now.” Couldn’t they detect that? I don’t think so, because first of all, it’s just code. Code is just speech. On your device, it’s a First Amendment issue. You can’t make code illegal anymore; they can’t make speech illegal. This battle was fought by Bill Clinton back when the Clipper Chip stuff was going down and he wanted to basically ban PGP exports.

[24:35]

But there are examples of apps that are illegal. Child porn is illegal; that’s content that’s illegal. As far as I know, that’s the only one that’s illegal. For example, even having plans to make a bomb, like the Anarchist Cookbook—I don’t think that’s illegal. In fact, that’s political speech because that’s how you would revolt against your government; you need to know how to build a bomb or a gun. Cody Wilson, when he’s putting Defense Distributed together and publishing 3D-printed gun schematics, that’s not illegal. Freedom of speech is a big deal, the First Amendment. But if we were a dictatorship, the government could, at the device level… but then again, there are hacks. Perhaps what they would do is start to filter Internet traffic. If a dictatorship wants to block all cryptocurrencies, they’ll start filtering.

[25:36]

That is problematic for many reasons. One, you can hide crypto traffic in other traffic. Second, I think other traffic will be hiding inside crypto traffic eventually. Thirdly, you can sync cryptocurrency blockchains just by broadcast on satellite. I could have one computer hidden inside Inner Mongolia receiving the signals; it can sync the Bitcoin blockchain and then I can serve as a validator for electronic gold for people in my community. If tomorrow the government says, “We’ve got our own cryptocurrency and Bitcoin is illegal,” and you say, “Ha-ha, we’ll get away with this so easily, you can’t make it illegal,” then I say, “Well, we can catch 10% of you.” If a government is doing that, the shit has hit the fan. That’s a terrible government. We’re in a Venezuela-like slide. Today in Venezuela, they’re arresting people for Bitcoin mining and they’re shaking them down, but yet people are doing it.

[26:37]

What if the government simply did it through persuasion? They said, “Look, our crypto has more security; we don’t want old people getting ripped off with the fluctuations of Bitcoin.” It would be easy to imagine the government making a legitimate case. Well, they already have that; it’s called the US dollar. It doesn’t offer anything new. Bitcoin is basically insurance against politicians. It only has value because it’s not politically controlled. The moment you have a cryptocurrency that is controlled by a dictator, or a democracy, or a mob, or an elite, or a company, it’s nonsense. It’s an oxymoron. It has no value.

[27:37]

All the value is there because it is an extra-sovereign currency. If Bitcoin can be stopped by governments, then Bitcoin will be worth zero. By the way, that’s why today the total value of all the Bitcoin in the world is still like one-twentieth of the value of gold—because it hasn’t been around that long. The market is putting a very low probability that it will survive. They think it’ll get stamped out by the government or the code will end up being weak. But it’s gonna go 20x from here. When I say “the world,” I mean the markets. Bitcoin trades in a very efficient, liquid market. Let’s see what kind of comments we’re getting. There are still 4,000 people watching this. I think it’s time for a simultaneous sip.

[28:37]

I remember when you were just starting out on Periscope, you were trying to get to 800 viewers. Now some of these are over a hundred thousand. Somebody asked for a prediction about the future of Bitcoin—do you do that sort of quasi-investment advice? I stay away from that. I don’t do investment advice; do your own homework. That’s my policy as well. What’s something that you and I philosophically disagree on? I’ll bet it’s family. You don’t have your own biological kids. Why does it matter to have a biological kid as opposed to adopted or step-kids? Hold on, now you’re turning us into a virtue-signaling debate.

[30:38]

Adopted and step-kids are great, but I think you get a couple of things with biological children. One is you get this amazing hormonal release where your genes are finally relaxed again. “Thank God.” Exactly. Because you are here because of an unbroken chain of your ancestors from tide pools, and you’re the first one who’s gonna miss that branch. You’re basically missing it because you’re too lazy, because you can’t be bothered. At some point, your genes will punish you. We all have this natural evolutionary need to reproduce. It’s a basic thing because we are creatures. But I have this unique situation where I am reproducing as you look right now. My ideas—at a very deep level, my ideas are now being captured forever.

[31:40]

I’ve got books on all kinds of topics. I’ve been doing this somewhat intentionally. But I can be reproduced in software. These days, a lot of times you want to have an impact more than you want to have kids because you know that memetic replication is more effective than pure genetic replication. That said, you’re a biologic creature; you’re mostly body with a little bit of mind. A big part of my not wanting to have kids is that I didn’t want to pass my genes along. You have fantastic genes! Well, at the moment, I had a very unhealthy childhood. Without getting into the detail, a big part of it was… well, that’s great for you, but what about me? I did not enjoy my childhood.

[32:40]

Within the next decade, we’re gonna have the technology to do genetic sequencing of frozen embryos at scale. At that point, you could have a ton of frozen embryos through IVF and then sequence each of them to see which are the least likely to have genetic issues you’re concerned about. You can select one. Or I could build a software simulation in which I give birth to virtual children. Virtual reality is just not gonna be good enough for a long time for that. Although, here’s one theory based on the hallucination hypothesis: we’re gonna invent a VR at some point that’s not anywhere near as good as our real world, but it’s gonna have the huge advantage that it’s good enough because you can control it. It’s a holodeck instead of this world where you have to sort of go with what reality is.

[33:42]

It’ll be the porn to dating. It’ll be good enough. At that point, the only way to make the sacrifice is to wipe your memory, because otherwise, you’re always comparing it to your real reality. What you’ll do is, when you go into that VR sim, you will temporarily erase your memory that you’re in a sim. We might be living in some larger reality, but this one we like better because it’s better for whatever we want. You programmed your own life. But to not think about your old life, you have to wipe your memory and suspend disbelief. You pretend this matters; you think it’s real. That’s very much the Matrix model, but it’s not some other person who’s in control—it’s you. You put yourself in; it’s your movie, you wrote it, you’re starring in it. You just wipe your memory so that you can accept the fact it’s a low-res sim and you can believe it.

[34:45]

Basically, in your model, you’re using an organic human being as a really shitty data storage unit. You mean the physical player? Once the person has built the little feedback loop that gives consciousness to a new world, it can delete its organic body; it doesn’t need it anymore. I was just seeing this great video on the internet explaining Hofstadter’s book about consciousness: Gödel, Escher, Bach or Metamagical Themas or I Am a Strange Loop. It was the smart way of saying things that I was feeling but didn’t have the words to put on it. This is my bastardization of him, so don’t blame Hofstadter for anything I say.

[36:48]

Consciousness is just the ability to broadcast what’s going to happen next—your expectations—and then judge the delta. That friction between what you think is going to happen and what actually does is all you’re really experiencing. Consciousness is the friction between expectations and observation. If you had no expectations, you would have no feeling of stress. All feelings, good or bad—the heightened feelings are when you are most conscious. You’re most conscious when you’re in pain or really happy. When things are going just the way you expect, you go to your lowest level of consciousness; it’s the least friction. The Buddhist view says consciousness is the base property of the universe. It’s just the experience of what it’s like. The definition of consciousness you used implies expectation and future, which implies some “doing.” It’s not just pure awareness. But who’s doing the awareness? There’s a subject that is aware.

[37:50]

Descartes said, “Cogito, ergo sum”—I think, therefore I am. Even that’s a jump, but I think what he means is, “I’m aware.” It’s the one constant you’ve had your entire life: you will be aware. Everything else changes. When Descartes says, “I think, therefore I am,” he’s taking it to the mind—a layer above where I can also plan for the future or regret the past. That’s very close to what I said. I just gave a little extra description of it predicting. By your definition, something that is not actively a predictions machine is unconscious. It implies that when you’re not doing memory prediction, your level of consciousness goes down. Are you substituting consciousness for soul? I avoid “soul.” There’s no good language for metaphysics; the words are overloaded. Let’s do one more quick topic: what would the Naval/Scott University teach?

[40:52]

First class: persuasive writing. I’m going to send them to my article “The Day You Became a Better Writer” and then to Dale Carnegie. Nutrition: you’re gonna make them log themselves and see what makes them feel good. You learn a system for figuring out optimal nutrition for ourselves. Mathematics, but it’s got to come through application—build instruments in physics or play in the chemistry lab. Reading and writing, fitness. History: I would just drop it. Introduce them to Google and say, “Here are some nice books you can read in your spare time.” You have finite time, so things like history, geography, and literature—you can read that on your own. I’d make everyone comfortable with technology: basic computer programming and understanding how hardware and chips work. I would add to that: strategy. Strategy for your own life and strategy for other things. I’m continually amazed that there are strategies obvious to anybody in the business world that others don’t recognize.

[43:57]

People always ask me to recommend books on game theory. I grew up playing strategy war games as a kid, so everything I see in business or politics, I can easily map into it. Which is the better strategy: becoming better friends with your friends or finding a way to work with your opponents? If you can work with your opponents, you’ve got it made. Cooperation is the human advantage. Anytime you can cooperate with more other humans, you win. That’s why you move to Silicon Valley or Hollywood—you connect with like-minded people. This is why people brag about their Facebook graphs, because the more people you can work with, the richer you will be. This is built into the human species.

[45:59]

I’ve been saying the definition of the Golden Age is when we realize our remaining problems are psychological and not physical resource problems. I think we’re in the Golden Age in the sense that technology and capitalism have created such abundance that all humans can now slide into a world of low infant mortality and low poverty. The world is becoming a much better place; it’s just unevenly distributed. In a weird way, it’s creating a perception that things are getting worse. There’s a perception gap; it is a persuasion problem.

[48:01]

North Korea and the United States thought they had this problem only solved by nuclear war, but we didn’t want to attack them and they didn’t want to die. The North Koreans have done this before; they’re good at playing us. But even Pompeo said they know we’re watching. This time, the U.S. started cracking down on Chinese companies evading sanctions, and the Chinese didn’t stop it. Everybody realized there wasn’t a reason to be at each other. Peace in the Koreas would be massive. Removing that is a huge relief for everybody. I’ve been writing for over a year that there was a way to get to a solution. When reunification became part of the question, everything changed. Why do you nuke your own country? Reunification creates a lot more spoils to be carved up.

[51:03]

South Korea presented North Korea specific plans for modernizing zones and industrializing them. It’s nuclear annihilation or this good stuff over here. As the Chinese Communist Party slowly took the country to be more capitalist, the people in charge got rich. The elites in charge of North Korea—they don’t get punished; they get bribed. But it’s better than virtual slavery and nuclear threat. We’re going to pay you a massive bribe to go away, but the bribe is increased prosperity from the transition to freedom while letting you keep the spoils. But it has to come with a stick attached. Everything looks like it’s going well.

[53:05]

Kanye and Trump don’t run as a ticket. They’re both alpha egos; neither could be Vice President. Pence is the perfect Vice President—the black-and-white version of Technicolor Trump. Who does the left run in 2020? My theory is it’s all going to be fringe candidates from here on out. No mainstream elitist candidates. It could be someone whose name I don’t even know. If they’re smart, they’ll run a younger celebrity version of Bernie Sanders. It looks like Eric Swalwell is trying to emerge. He’s always on CNN and Fox, which makes him unique. He’s gone into crossfire. He’s picking up skills pretty quickly.

[55:06]

New York personalities are very different. There’s a frankness and a rudeness that seems normal if everybody’s that way, but you move that to California and people get worried that you’re a little crazy. I had to learn to act not-New Yorker. New Yorkers are more fun to talk to; Californians are more relaxed. New Yorkers are more provocative. Whatever the boundary is, we’re gonna go. Let’s sign off. Thank you so much. This will probably be our best Periscope ever. Thanks for joining. Bye.