I listened to Naval on Rogan. This is a disorganized list of things he said, filtered and paraphrased through my memory, followed by a bit of commentary

“The answer to the question ‘what is the meaning of life?’ is that there is no answer, and that’s good, it means that we don’t all have to do the same thing and pursue the same goal in lockstep”

“Everyone wants the same three things—to be happy, to be rich, and to be healthy/fit, so why not? We should try to make everyone rich, which empowers them to be happy and healthy”

"Happiness is a choice you make, like diet. It's not that chemical depression doesn't exist, but much like with fitness, there are choices you make that will make you less healthy, like eating lots of processed food, and there are choices you will make that make you less happy"

“Your real resume is a catalog of all the suffering you have endured in your life”

"leviathan slouches left" - as far as I can tell, this is a paraphrase of Moldbug's Cthluhu Swims Left, perhaps coined by Naval himself

"every non-right-wing organization eventually becomes left wing" - Conquest's #2 is a great shot/chaser to "leviathan slouches left".

"UBI is a bad solution to a problem that doesn't exist"

"If you ever have a computer program that can program, that's it, that's general intelligence, that's the singularity, game over. But we aren't even close to that, not in 100 years"

"If you go to someone's timeline and all you see is screeching about politics, that means they are totally controlled, they're mindkilled by all these things"

"social justice is white on white violence"

"The slippery slope fallacy isn't a fallacy, slippery slopes are clearly real"

He had plenty of other takes in the 2 hour segment but these were the bits that stood out to me. Before I quibble with them I am going to discuss the status dynamics here because I sort of hate what I am about to do, just not enough to not do it, I just want to be open about it

There is this dynamic you see, especially on twitter, wherein a man says something that is broadly good and right and then a bunch of relatively smaller people find ways to nitpick what he said by interpreting it uncharitably

People do this because any philosophical or factual assertion is implicitly an expression of power, and when you contradict someone who is higher status than you, it's a way of trying to claim and assert some of your own power back, and most twitter ankle-biting is this

Most people do this naively, i.e., with no awareness that this is the base and simple motive underlying their seemingly more complex behavior. No no, I'm just here to learn, I'm just honestly asking questions. That's all bullshit and if you think this about yourself, I hate you

So yes, contradicting a big man is a way for a small man to try to make himself bigger. Some people do this very graciously, and some people do it very abrasively, and if you do a really good job of it, the big man will often hear you out

But if you do it too obsequiously then you also look like an asshole who is trying to use flattery and insincerity to ingratiate himself to the big man, and that's only slightly less obnoxious than the abrasive mode...

And there's a real art to talking to your superiors that is unfortunately never taught in the USA, and in fact if you try to talk to Americans who are of higher class than you in a courtly way you somehow look even worse than either of the other two failure cases

And all this neurotic throat-clearing is me trying to be brutally honest about the fact that these motivations/considerations are inescapably part of the human condition and I think the only thing that can redeem them is to get them as out in the open as possible...

To at least prove that while the thing I'm about to do is in one sense absolutely petty and just case 12348701935815 in monkeys doing monkey business, I am not like all the other monkeys, you see, because I know I'm a monkey &c &c, he said with tongue placed firmly in cheek

"there's no answer to the meaning of life" - true, but, and this goes beyond mimetic desire, even, as naval notes, everyone wants to be rich, happy, and fit, so in a sense there is a meaning of life, and it's that, though pursuing those goals directly doesn't work very well

In fact people only seem to find happiness, by which Naval means, I think, a sense of enduring fulfillment, not transient pleasure, if they have some goal other than to be happy, because happiness is not static, and comes from repeatedly achieving goals that match your abilities

"Why can't everyone be rich?" There's a sense of rich which is "has material abundance", and most people can have that, relative to, say, their base biological needs or the material standards of the past. But being "rich" is relative;

In a room full of billionaires, no one is "rich", and the thing that we really want is superiority, and as dubious as social science is it seems that people feel happier when they are poor but richer than their peers than when they are rich but poorer than their peers

So everyone being happy and being rich are maybe at odds with each other because a big part of happiness is feeling like you are better than other people, cue the hippy dippy love gurus explaining that this is some kind of moral mal-development as opposed to an inalienable fact

And this is actually bolstered by one more topic in the podcast that struck me, which is that social media makes everyone into a celebrity, and this makes you really psychologically vulnerable, because one person insulting you feels worse than ten people complimenting you

Naval and Rogan talk a bit about how this decentralization or mass-availability of the state of being a celebrity causes us a lot of pain, but also that for example it's clearly advantageous to them personally, despite its drawbacks, because they both keep doing it

In terms of self-awareness, one of the most critical realizations you can have is that if you think you hate a certain activity or behavior but you notice that you keep engaging in it, you have revealed to yourself that you don't really hate it at all

In other words you don't actually know yourself out of the box, so one way to know yourself is to talk about yourself and to other people, but at the same time you have to gut check yourself and notice that when your actions contradict your words, your ACTIONS are the truth