Naval Ravikant & Niklas Anzinger: AI & Technological Progress Conference @ Vitalia City, 2024

The most interesting people are doing the most interesting things, right? So cherish your time here as the first ones and early adopters of Vitalia.

Well, I think smart people are very good at imagining downside scenarios. They're very good at imagining all the ways that things can go wrong. And that's not just smart people. That's everybody. We're hardwired that way as humans because if you don't imagine the downside scenarios, the outcome could be catastrophic. But we are living in a time when there's an enormous amount of innovation going on. That's because we went through an era called the Enlightenment era. And since then, we've discovered science. We've discovered how to correct errors and how to get smarter. And it just takes one person to make a breakthrough for all of humanity. One person who discovers an anti-aging solution, one person who discovers relativity, one person who invents the steam engine, and that then goes out to everybody. And human creativity is fundamentally unlimited. And so I think that the future is bright. We should be optimistic because now that we have discovered how to, through free thinking and free speech, correct errors and make new discoveries and spread them to other people and then automate them through technology, that life should be getting better and better. And it's easy to imagine downside risks, but it's impossible by definition to imagine what the good stuff is that's going to happen next. Yes, you can make general predictions like singularity or whatever, but those aren't really that helpful other than spreading the optimism meme. Because if we could predict what the next thing was and if we could predict it completely accurately, then we would have already invented it. And that's just not how it works. These things take time. They take ingenuity. They take free thinking. They take freedom. Freedom to create, to earn, and to distribute. And so I think people are here because it's free. Prospera is free. That's why you are here. If Prospera was incredibly restrictive in what you could say and what you could do, then you wouldn't be here. This would be the wrong place to be. So it is that freedom, as Matt Ridley says something like, 'Freedom is the parent of innovation.' What is it? No, 'Prosperity is the child of freedom and the parent of innovation.' I think that's what he said. And I think that's absolutely accurate. So I think we should be optimistic as long as we are free to create and free to discuss and free to distribute these learnings.

Yeah, unfortunately the regulators do a lot more harm these days because they can't tolerate any downside risk. So they're completely binary. You're not allowed to hurt anybody or kill anybody under any circumstances. But yet, billions of people die of old age and hundreds of millions of people die of cancer and all these missing therapies that don't get to exist. The FAA essentially drove the drone business out of the United States by not letting drones fly. So now all the drones are made in China. Congratulations. That'll probably cost us Taiwan longer term. The SEC basically limits all investment. So people can't earn. So they have to put into T-bills and stocks and they can't go into private investments and the private sector gets starved for venture capital. As a proportion, venture capital, innovation capital is still just a minuscule percentage of the economy. And the same way the FDA basically says, 'No, you can't do any harm whatsoever so you can't take any risk, you can't experiment with nuclear power plants because god forbid something goes wrong,' etc. So because these regulators can't do any cost-benefit trade-off, they always only restrict. And it is easier to restrict people, it is easier to stop people than to let them create things. So it's just very unfortunate the whole system that's been set up. Now, how do we kind of break past that especially in the medical domain? Well, I think you can obviously try to work through the system and that requires a billion dollars in pharmaceutical trials and people are doing it. And it requires kind of going after politically protected things like, 'Okay, here's a cancer gene therapy for a certain protected class and it makes us all look good if it works out,' or you try it on dogs. But the reality is the rest of the world is not going to just sit around and die just because a few regulators and a few developed world economies are intent on protecting the retirement home that they've built for everybody. Because that's sometimes what it feels like, right? It's like a giant retirement home. We're all just going to party and eat and drink until we die. And that's just not how the young people want to live. So you're seeing places coming up around the world. It's not just Prospera, but there are other places people are looking towards the future and they say, 'Well, look, we do want to live longer and we do want to live healthier.' We've increased lifespan, but not necessarily in the best way. A lot of it just came from getting rid of infant mortality. And then the remaining few decades that we've added are tacked on to the end. It's a shitty part, right? It's like, okay, I'm in an old folks home for 20 years longer. That's not how you want to live. You want to live with vitality. And so the promise of that is so strong that now if we can start having breakthrough therapies, like I know Myniscle is doing some interesting things down here. There are new things happening with peptides. There are new things happening with anti-aging. And the GLP-1 agonist, for example, I think will end obesity in western countries. That's going to be a huge game-changer. People are going to wake up and say, 'Wait a minute, you mean I could have taken a magic pill all along and dialed in my exact weight or my muscular structure or perhaps even other kinds of therapies that people are talking about that might make me smarter or extend my lifespan by 30%?' I think those kinds of things are going to be incredible eye-openers. And medical tourism is making a little bit of this viable where people are now traveling around and getting things done. But I just see that the genie's bursting out of the lamp, right? People are just going to say, 'You know, if you want to die, go ahead, but I'm not going to. I'm not making that choice.'

AI to me is an incredibly useful tool. It's not going to replace us anytime soon because these AIs are not AGIs. They're not universal explainers. There's some hypothesis and scaremongering that they're going to automatically turn into AGIs just if we add more compute. I don't think that's the case. I don't think we have a theory for AGI yet. We don't understand how it would work. We don't yet understand how creativity and true intelligence works. But there's a level of creativity that these AIs can help us with, which is recombining facts. And what they really are is they're natural language computers. So for the first time, instead of us having to learn the language of the computer and program in C or Python or assembly and structure everything very, very carefully, the computers learn our language. They learn English, they learn Spanish, they talk to us and we can converse back and forth with them. That right there is a massive breakthrough. They're also fundamentally translation engines, but what they can translate is a lot. Not just languages, not just putting speech to text, but also things like translating from what the road looks like to how a car should drive it, to translating from coding from one language to another. So I consider AI to be, you know, it's like what calculation and computers did for calculation for mathematicians and for people, for engineers and for people writing code and building structures and building machines. AI will now allow us to do that for the natural language. So it will allow us to do that for all the other domains that were sort of left out. And computers now become much less esoteric, something that only programmers can access and everybody else has to consume their output, to everybody else can now communicate with computers directly and more naturally. Even such simple things as the keyboard, the typing, right? That's an anachronism. That's an invention that came after the printing press, then we had typewriters, then we had keyboards. But once you have perfect speech-to-text, keyboards are going to go away. It's like Star Trek. Star Trek, they don't sit there, you know, typing everything into the keyboard. No, they talk to the computer. The computer talks back to them, except for Uhura, who's there pressing some random buttons just to remind people that it's a computer. So I think we're headed towards an age of ubiquitous natural language computing, where the entire internet and all of its recombinations are at your fingertips. AIs are helping you with driving, with coding, with translation, with transcription, breaking down barriers. And there's more things that they will do. It'll be really interesting when it enters the field of robotics. You can now see that robots are making huge jumps instead of having to be programmed for very specific actions. I think it's like Moravec's paradox that simple things like a toddler walking around are really hard to do with robots, but complex things like manipulating drugs is really easy. Well, now that's changing thanks to AI. I think transformers will bring self-driving everywhere. Waymo is already working really well in California. You're going to see Tesla with its camera solutions within the next few years combined with transformers figure it out. So self-driving, you know, 99% self-driving will come and it's going to change our lives in incredible ways. Imagine, you know, if you walk into a modern city, one-third to one-fifth of the space is taken up in parking garages and parking spots. That disappears in a self-driving world. Self-driving cars can packet-switch on the road. They can just occupy one lane and then cities suddenly become walking paradises. How does that change our world? What if you wake up in the morning, you get into your living room and it's actually an RV and the door closes and it undocks from your house and it drives to the next RV docks and there's your meeting. It's just driving around. You don't even know where you're going next. It's just connecting to your friends. Real estate and cars become one thing, right? So, there's just that, that alone, just that unlock alone will change society as we know it. So, I think we're starting to go through another wave of innovation and change and I hope to see the same thing in biotech. Where biotech really suffers is it's not an explanatory science. It's a rule-of-thumb-based science. We just try lots and lots of things and you kind of don't really know underneath how they work. There's a few explanatory theories in biology like evolution and the germ theory of disease. But mostly it's just like, 'Well, this works, it's the mTOR pathway.' 'Well, why the mTOR?' 'Because there's a FOXO gene.' 'Well, why the FOXO gene?' 'Oh, there's like this other thing.' And it's just like complex names being explained in terms of complex names being explained in terms of complex names, right? And then maybe there's a cycle underneath that we sort of understand. But when you go to a doctor, a doctor just has a whole bunch of rules of thumb that they memorized from 20 years ago and their thinking has not been updated. So I think we need to develop much better explanatory theories in biology. That requires innovation, that requires risk-taking, that requires experimentation both in AI models as well as in real life. We need to have the right to try, the right to take informed risk with consent. Especially for desperate populations that are dying. They shouldn't have to go beg the FDA. And by the way, we're all dying. Every single one of us, every single day, we get a little older. And you know, it gets a little worse. Let me tell you, I'm on the other side of that hill. And it's not pleasant. It's all downhill from here. So let's turn that around.

I am literally preaching to the choir.

Yeah, AI is really interesting that way because these computers, one of the things that makes them sort of fascinating and I think gives people nightmare scenarios is that we don't quite know exactly how a given one works. We do know how to build them. You dump a lot of data in and you have machine learning algorithms. So it's not some completely mysterious thing like people would have you make it out to be. But we don't know the exact workings on the inside. That's okay. There are systems we understand where we don't understand the exact workings inside. Evolution is one of them. Evolution is an explanatory theory. Yet you cannot predict what the next random mutation is going to be and what the next organism is going to be. But you still do have a good explanation for how evolution works. And we're sort of at the same level with AI. But we're starting to evolve them almost deliberately and so we can see some innovation that's going to come there that is much more reflective of how biology works. And so there's no reason to think that we can't figure out how biology works. We just need better explanations. Just like before Einstein came along we couldn't explain, you know, why during an eclipse the light would bend a certain way and that star was out of place. Now we can. Before Einstein came along, we couldn't build GPS tracking because we weren't accurate enough because there would be error. Newtonian mechanics were an approximation but an incorrect one ultimately. So the same way we need better explanatory theories in biology and I hope that the search for life extension will attract good people. One of the things that Elon Musk really did well and which is why he's done so well for all of us is he just set audacious goals and he meant it. He wants to die on Mars. He doesn't want to die on Earth or he wants to live forever but hopefully, you know, he wants to get to Mars. The same way with Tesla, he didn't say, 'I want to build electric cars with better batteries.' He said, 'I want self-driving cars.' Right? So, he put an audacious goal out. The same way I think Sam Altman says, 'I want AGI.' He's not content with just the narrow AI that we have today. So the same way I hope that people will say, 'Well, I want to live forever.' And, you know, that may seem extreme to some people, to some scared people, and to them I say, 'Look, you always have the option to die. You can always go die in the corner. Nobody cares. No offense. But if you're keeping us all hitched to you, that's the problem, right? That's a problem.' So, I think the people who want to live forever should go ahead and spread that meme.

Yeah. I mean, it's sort of ludicrous that some people say, 'Well, you know, trying to live forever is unnatural.' Really? Well, your actual lifespan a few hundred years ago would have been 30 years old before all the diseases hit you. You don't have a problem with antibiotics. You don't seem to have a problem with anything, you know, aspirin. You don't seem to have a problem with organ transplants. You don't seem to have a problem with blood transfusions. You don't seem to have a problem with COVID vaccines. But all of a sudden, you have a problem with life extension. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's a contradiction in terms.

Tell more.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't have a strong viewpoint on this. There are examples of both, right? You do need theoreticians and thinkers who can expand, for example, physics. But at the same time a lot of the invention actually seems to come in friction with the real world, in contact with the real world. So if you go back and you look at the Industrial Revolution, there was an enormous amount of invention that came out of the Edisons and the Teslas and the Marconis and the James Watts and those kinds of people because they were in contact with the real world and you need that feedback for the iteration. And a lot of invention happens through a specific problem, a specific need that you need to solve. But at the same time, we have celebrated examples of pure theoreticians like an Albert Einstein or a David Deutsch who are kind of sitting around and thinking the big thoughts and then come up with something. So I think there's room for both. But generally speaking, if you just look at the broad arc of history, most of innovation and invention, even scientific innovation, has been driven by, I would argue, the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the ones who are actually building things. But it's not to say that there isn't space for the pure theoreticians and the mathematicians and the physicists. There's room for both.

It's not either-or. And look, smart people, capable people don't let themselves be pigeonholed into one definition. That is a disease of credentialism because we created this university and now you got to go to university and you got to get a degree in something. Then people say, 'Well, what is your expertise? What is your credential?' That's a question dumb people ask. Smart people don't ask that. Smart people don't need to know your credentials. They just talk to you for five minutes and they figure out if you know what you're talking about or not. And a really good person, a so-called natural philosopher, can be good in any branch of anything. Nature has no boundaries. Nature has no concept of mathematics versus physics versus chemistry. It is all one thing. And you know, to anyone who's either meditated or done psychedelics or read enough books, they figured that out. It's all one thing. When you find one thing, it connects to the next thing, connects to the next thing, connects to the next thing. And true creativity jumps boundaries. It can go from anywhere to anywhere. It doesn't have to follow a path of interconnections in between.

David Deutsch has a great criterion which he calls the fun criterion. He says just do whatever is fun and you'll kind of find your way to it. And there's a lot to that because that's what you'll be most interested in. That's what you'll stick with. That's what you'll go deepest in. If you're interested in it now, then you'll be interesting about it later. And so I think Deutsch has really a good criteria. I would expand on that for myself. What do I have the most fun doing? Because fun is a little too broad, right? You could have fun partying and drinking. And that's fine too. You know, live your life. But I would say that for me the fun criteria is really the learning criterion. I live for that aha moment when two things that I didn't realize were connected connect together and you get that feeling of oneness and you get closer to source, if you will. And so anything that connects two things in my mind that were disconnected forms a tighter, deeper explanation and shows me a deeper theory is fun. And that's what motivates me. So I would say it's for fun, it's for learning, it's for connecting things together.

Yeah. Just follow the thing that's most fun. Everything deep is interesting. Deep down, everything connects to everything. And you can see this in everything from like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to how you have physicists going into fields that are completely orthogonal to physics and they'll make huge breakthroughs in those fields. So I think you do want to follow your own learning and fun and all the innovation comes from tinkerers at the edge and you only recognize later looking back that you can connect the dots. But the thing that I think is important is to be rigorous, is to actually stay as truth-oriented as possible. So you want to be optimistic in the general. You want to be optimistic that yes, I can find something interesting here, but you want to be skeptical about the specific. You don't want to just believe every claim that comes along. And I find that a lot of times when people are entering new fields, they just believe everything. For example, 10 people will approach you. They'll tell you 10 different therapies. They'll only tell you the upsides. Well, it's like if you believe all of them, you're going to die because you're going to take all 10 of those shots and one of them will kill you or at least hurt you. So, you do have to be skeptical about the specifics, but you can be optimistic in the general. What's really bad is to be pessimistic in the general because then you're just going to lose no matter what. And then be optimistic in the specific because then you're trying lots of things and you have risk of ruin on the downside.

Yeah, the truth is a very difficult thing to come by. The universe is mostly random and mostly full of false beliefs. And so truth requires a lot of rigor and the gold standards for truth are you have to test it against a larger system that will give you objective feedback without remorse. Other humans are the worst thing to test against because we are socially driven to collaborate. Groups need consensus or they fall apart. Only the individual can really search for truth. And the individual gets feedback through two systems that are objective and remorseless. And one of those is nature. Nature, you know, physics doesn't care. You run a physics experiment, it doesn't care who you are, what you think, how badly you want it to work. It's going to tell you the truth. Chemistry is going to tell you the truth. A microscope is going to tell you the truth. You just have to be able to see it. And the other one are free markets. When you get enough people together voting in their own self-interest with money and anonymized, they have no desire to tell you a falsehood just to make you feel better. So nature and free markets are the gold standards and anything social, whether it's another scientist, whether it's a journal, whether it's a group of people, whether it's someone patting you on the back, whether it's a restaurant reviewer, they're all going to tell you lies to make you feel better. It's for a good reason, it's fine. So you have to expose yourself to that strong feedback by the market and you have to keep a very open mind. So one of the... you have to be willing to change your mind very, very quickly. As Marc Andreessen famously said, 'Strong opinions loosely held.' So you do want to have strong opinions so you can make progress. But you have to be willing to reverse them. You should enjoy the process of reversing them. You should get used to saying the phrase, 'I was wrong,' in public because that's how you're going to get over that fear of it. And in fact, one of the problems with speaking in public is you make a proclamation and then two years later someone comes back and says, 'Hey Naval, I thought you said AI is never going to work.' It's like, 'That's not what I said. It's taken out of context.' But you know what? You just got to ignore those haters. But you have to be willing to correct yourself all the time. Otherwise, you'll never find your way out of the maze.

Yeah, that's actually the hardest thing, that the time frames in biotech are so long you get very little pieces of data that are anecdotal. I'm hoping that a couple of things are going to change that. AI will help a little bit. I don't think it's like the big breakthrough there. But other things that will help are just we have better tools now for people to experiment. We have the ability to experiment on smaller populations and travel outside. Distribution is actually quite different now because you have the internet, right? So you notice all these... free speech is protected by the American constitution until you get to securities and to medical stuff and then all of a sudden free speech goes out the window. I think that's wrong by the way. I think you should be able to advertise drugs freely even if they were wrong and people should be able to error-correct you and there would be private rating agencies that would spring up and trusted sources just like happened in every other domain. The same way you should be able to advertise securities and I helped get the law changed on that to allow general solicitation back in 2012 out of self-interest and self-protection. But you can now advertise more freely in securities but you still have to be a so-called accredited investor to invest in private companies which is nonsense. And the same thing, there's restrictions on freedom of speech in drugs. And that's a huge problem. It means for super basic things like contact lenses and very basic drugs like things like needles, you sometimes have to go through a doctor for no reason. It's like a giant protection racket. And it violates the constitution and we should all be angry about that because it's literally taking life out of our year. It's taking years out of our life. So I think distribution will be helped by the internet. It won't be helped completely because countries have restrictions on it to protect the medical profession. And I think part of this is I love doctors, but we need to knock them off their pedestal. They're not priests. They don't get to speak for everybody. They don't get to be gatekeepers for everybody. And what does a doctor mean anyway? How many tens of millions of doctors are there out now? Are they all brilliant and a higher class than us? No, this is just a new priesthood. So, we should be able to think for ourselves. Now, that's not to say that everyone should run out and try every drug. You should absolutely give them advice and you should have institutions, but there should not be this one magical institution called doctors and then everybody else. It's just too artificial. It's like the Chinese Communist Party and then all the other Chinese. It's not very different.

It's too hard. Just exit. It's easier to exit. Show them it works. And the beauty of life extension and vitality is they're all going to want to say, 'Oh my god, you look really good. How did you do that?'

He's right. You know, Mark Twain had a famous saying where he said, 'There is nothing so damaging to one's sense of self-being as watching a friend get rich.' And I think that pulls people, for example, into crypto. But there's also nothing so damaging to one's sense of self-being as watching a friend get fit, right? And then you're like, 'Wait a minute. I better go work out, too. What are you doing exactly again? What's your diet? What's your workout?' Then they become interested. So our goal here should be to become rich and fit. Show the rest.

Deutsch is a very powerful thinker. For those of you who haven't encountered him, I highly recommend reading The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality. In my mind, he's the smartest human alive that I know of. And he has a very coherent theory of the world that centers around understanding the four deepest theories that we have that are rock solid. And that is epistemology, and by epistemology he means Karl Popper's epistemology as to how creativity and knowledge creation comes about. And evolution, Darwin's theory of evolution updated by Dawkins and The Selfish Gene. He talks about quantum physics, he subscribes to the multiverse theory which I think has a lot going for it even though it's not as popular as the observer collapse theory. And then the theory of quantum computation. And he combines these to come up with great definitions of knowledge and creativity and truth and why the principle of optimism arises out of those. And I highly recommend these books to everybody. And these are not your normal books so if you flip through them and you're like, 'Two weeks later I'm done,' you didn't read it. It's like a textbook, it's like a course. It should take you at least a year to get through each one.

Hate to say it, but do what you can. It will definitely make you smarter because good ideas, solid epistemology, the foundation for determining what is true from what is false, will actually make you smarter. I consider them to have upgraded my thinking. There's a lot of counterintuitive stuff in there, but once you have a solid explanatory framework, you no longer have to memorize things. You don't have to say, 'Well, so-and-so told me this and therefore that is true.' No, you can always rederive it from first principles. I've done a couple of podcasts with him, but those are just teasers. There's a guy named Brett Hall who is an incredibly good physics lecturer and teacher, and he has basically devoted his life to understanding and spreading the philosophy of David Deutsch. Again, these are not things you take on belief or on faith. These are absolute chains of deductive logic and reasoning and creativity that you can rederive for yourselves and understand at a core level. It's almost too much to ask where to start in that, but I think the core of it is epistemology. Epistemology is a really fancy word for the theory of knowledge. It's how do I know something is true? That's the core of it. How do I know something is true? And a lot of people believe it's through induction. Induction is just 1, 2, 3, 4. Sun rises today, sun rises tomorrow, sunrise day after. Therefore, the sun is going to rise every day. Not true. The sun is not going to rise every day. There's a day where the sun won't rise. Turkey gets fed by the farmer. Day 1, day 2, day 3. Turkey's getting fed. By day 300, turkey believes farmer is a benevolent godlike creature who comes and feeds turkey every day. Thanksgiving shows up, turkey gets neck cut off. Induction is not a valid philosophy. Deduction, which is okay, I see something and therefore I can extrapolate the next thing and the next thing and next thing. That's how we create knowledge. No, that's not true either. Because deduction relies on certain axioms. Where did those axioms come from? Talk to any mathematician. They can unfold all kinds of things out of deduction. Is that enough? No. It doesn't answer the question of creativity. So these are examples of things in epistemology. Another thing is can humans understand everything? Can we? A lot of people would say no. That's actually false. Everything that can be understood can be understood by a human. Why? We're universal explainers. Why? We're universal computers. We're Turing machines. The laws of physics run inside Turing machines. The universe itself is a Turing machine. Anything that can be simulated or that can be done in the real world that is done in the universe can be simulated in our brains with arbitrary fidelity and therefore anything that can be explained can be explained by us. We are capable of maximal knowledge. There is no AGI. There's no super intelligence. There is no alien that is possible even in theory that could understand something that we just could not understand. That is a deeply optimistic output. And I'm not making a claim. This is science. This is physics. If you deny this, you're denying physics. Sorry.

It's reason. But reason is way more powerful than most people think. It's actually beyond reason because reason is purely deductive. It's creative. So it's one different level. But I highly encourage you read Deutsch to figure things like these out. I mean it is a game changer. Another simple one is spaceship earth. We're on this fragile planet. We're running out of resources. Are we? What's a resource? Is uranium a resource? It wasn't until 100 years ago. Is oil a resource? It wasn't until 200 years ago. Is coal a resource? It wasn't until 500 years ago. Is wood a resource? It wasn't until humans came along and started fires. So even the definition of what a resource is changes. So these are the kinds of things that is really worth understanding Deutsch to figure out. It will rewire your brain in a good way.

Oh, like that there are other minds out there.