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Content

In this watery simulation of an episode, Matt and Chris uncover the true purpose of Scott Adams’ existence: not to shape reality, but to provide training data for future AIs working on plumbing-related problems. Somewhere in a cosmic server farm, Scott is endlessly confronted with blocked drains, dripping faucets, and municipal water conspiracies, while his “insights” fuel the next generation of household maintenance bots.

Against this surreal backdrop, Naval Ravikant enters the scene — investor, tweeter, self-styled philosopher, and, in practice, just another discourse surfer riding the waves of online conspiracism. The conversation opens with a familiar chorus of right-wing talking points, drifts into feverish speculation about lawfare, censorship, and “imported voters,” and finally winds down in the dim light of dorm-room metaphysics, where slogans like “happiness is a choice” are served up as if they were profound insights.

Naval presents himself as a detached sage, offering a boutique blend of political commentary and Daoist-tinged wisdom. In reality, he delivers little more than predictable polemics and recycled aphorisms. Imagining himself a great man of history dispensing lyrical truths in tweet-sized form, he produces nothing that rises above the usual culture-war debris. The posture is Buddha-with-a-smartphone; the reality is a credulous tech CEO mistaking his own Twitter feed for a philosophy seminar.

What follows is Elon-as-Ben-Franklin fanboying, Trump rebranded as a “bottom-up” leader of the people, and a level of self-congratulation so thick it could be used to terraform Mars. By the end, you may find yourself nostalgic for the leaky pipes in Scott’s simulation — at least they produce real water, unlike Naval’s pseudo-profound puddles.

Sources

Modern Wisdom (Chris Williamson): 44 Harsh Truths About The Game Of Life - Naval Ravikant (4K)

Real Coffee with Scott Adams: Conversation with Naval Ravikant

Comments

Ron McKinnon

On the topic of Mars colonization, I read this book “A City On Mars” about how incredibly difficult it would be and how it’s not likely to happen anytime soon. The writers were interviewed on the Mindscape podcast for anyone interested.

Monica B.

Good lord. These two give men a bad name.

Rakish Tilt 🎩

Are we gonna let Chris skate on confusing classic (aka Pavlovian) and operant conditioning as he is said to be teaching in a Psychology program?

jss

Adams for years always talked about making an AI clone of himself because there was so much material of him talking (presumably for us all to gain from his worldly insights). Now he’s facing possible earthy deletion I wouldn’t be surprised he’s paying someone to make this happen If so, poor person Grandiosity score 5 All these a-holes are all so annoyingly full of themselves

Nancy Hale

Naval is bland but barely less awful than Scott. Low bar, I know.

Randy

Hearing them talk about masculine men and their disappointment in modern medicine, I realized these tech guys are all just pissed that they're not living in a real life cross between Star Trek and Lord of the Rings. They want to be medieval kings with sci-fi technology and they think they totally deserve it because they're billionaires.

Randy

And the political right will deregulate tech industries and possibly bring back feudalism. That's why they like republicans

Emma

Interesting discussions on AI and creative writing. I'm currently attempting to write a novel and I've been using AI as an editor and it gives really good feedback and suggested edits. To the point it even made me worry that my contribution to the project was unnecessary! So I did try to test it a few times by giving it the previous chapters and then an outline of what I want in the next chapter and asked it to write the next chapter for me. And I was relieved to see if given full control the writing was just a string of cliches and it can't seem to remember the characters personalities (like it suddenly made my fairly wholesome journalist character a smoker). So for now it seems the AI is a super useful took for speeding up the creative writing process but can't yet replace humans. But I guess it's only a matter of time..

Noah Heck

While listening to these two meatballs discuss simulation theory, I can’t help, but think that they are both very wealthy. That fact is the most damning critique of capitalism I have yet seen.

Kevin Nyberg

If Scott is an AI meant to learn about plumbing, why wouldn’t the simulation give him a career as a plumber so he could solve hundreds of water problems a year instead of just 12?

Sarah S

It really says something that these idiots are considered profound deep thinkers on the right.

Emma

I feel like these people watched Interstellar and thought it was a documentary! And why do they keep saying Mars is 'the stars'. It sort of annoys me for some reason although this is probably splitting hairs when there are so much bigger issues at stake. Like the casual but pretty extreme sexism!!

Chomagerider

Sorry, does homie really believe he's an AI training program for plumbing?

Jonathan Cano

a fun fictional treatment of various simulation hypotheses can be found in Pantheon https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11680642/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk it is based on short stories by an author I love , Ken Liu. Fun stuff but not particularly likely to win you over to the simulation hypothesis. Naval cites good arguments against it.

Mark K

I came across Naval in one of Tim Ferriss’s books based on his podcast interviews. Tim went so far as to reprint Naval’s brain genius tweets in the book, which as Matt says resemble fortune-cookie wisdom. Sorry to say I was taken in for awhile before I realized he was putting old wine into new tweets. One thing about Naval is that he’s obsessed with the physicist David Deutsch of “Beginning of Infinity” fame and has had him on his podcast several times. I haven’t listened, but repeat appearances indicate that Deutsch might be as ok with Naval’s “science” as Naval is with Adams’ “philosophy”. The relationship there would be an interesting one to investigate. Naval did sound outright Republican talking about January 6 and racist talking about the “paleolithic” countries, damn. I think he’s gotten worse over the years. He was on Joe Rogan a few years ago and he seemed quite hopeful about the world, he (influenced by Deutsch I think) said there’s no reason everyone in the world can’t become an engineer and build nuclear power on the moon or some such. I guess his MAGA moron mates pulled his galaxy brain into their orbit.

Bas

Naval's voice pitch and tone sounds a bit like Gary's to me. Maybe I've listened to too many hours of Gary from previous episodes and it's stuck in my head

Jonathan Cano

scott adam’s simulation - saving compute time; he just reinvented “foveated rendering” (a VR technique to save compute by doing eye tracking and only rendering what is being looked at) 🤯

George

What I can't reconcile with the partisanship of this pair, and many others covered, is that it's completely at odds with the critical thinking sceptism that they spout about everything else. It seems naively childlike that if they think one political party is engaged in all these underhand, corrupt practices, that another party, their chosen one, couldn't possibly be engaged in any of that. Like the throwaway point about if presidents really are elected by democratic vote: the implication being it's some hidden hand. But where then does Trump fit into that? Wouldn't he also have been put in place by the deep state, or whoever they see as pulling the strings? Therefore, blindly supporting him would surely be playing into whatever grand conspiracy they're alluding to. It just doesn't make sense. It's all so contradictory. Yet they think they're so very above it all.

Ema

I like the image of Chris as a caterpillar pretending to be a snake. On twitter, wearing bright colours and hissing at people.

Philip Grant

Dilbert remake, but this time the hero is the Pointy Headed Founder (formerly Boss), a Great Man who is making the future.

Nat J

“when what’s her name died…” 😭

Nat J

This philosopher has never even heard of existentialism.

Linda Sears

“This murky swamp that we too often paddle around in” C. Kavanagh. 🤣

Hristina Bareva

I feel strongly that a psychiatrist should have ended this interview at least half way through to talk to their guardians about possible and safe treatment options. Oh, wait, the "safe" part reaaaally is holding medicine back, so no need for that. 🙄

Mike Nelson

If we really lived in a simulation, I'd delete these two characters from the Holodeck. They're too dumb to be realistic NPCs.

Andreas Singer

I want to thank Scott Adams for training plumbing AI on his water problems. We will all benefit greatly from it. Strong take: I must disagree with our DTG hosts. Chris and Matt are not average but very special. They are intellectual powerhouses, surpassing even the likes of Scott Addams and Chris Langan :-O

MJ

These guys are proof of social media brain rot. Naval was always a blowhard but I swear he didn’t used to be this stupid. The low IQ conspiracism and MAGA talking point regurgitation is hard to believe as genuine, but I think it must be.

Max

Recreational Belief is such a thinly veiled attempt at hiding one's true convictions 🫠

Sam Stephenson

Naval sucks but it is remarkably entertaining to see him outsmart Scott Adams for like an hour

Ethan Rimelman

Nice to see I am important enough to get a double shoutout in two tiers. And even with the right pronunciation, thanks guys!

Bernt

I am thinking more that wealth and fame is more likely to distort people's thinking than it is to make them more insightful. All these guys start believing every dipshit thought that pops into their head because they can now afford to surround themselves with yes men who are attracted to their wealth and influence. Maybe there are some brilliant tech billionaires out there, but you sure wouldn't know by listening to them

Andrew Metcalf

I first encountered Naval on twitter and I thought for sure this was a bot account of random “wisdom”. And hearing this I see why, although I didn’t realize how stupid he is.

Melinda

I'm only at 1.08, but the past 6 or 7 minutes rate amongst the most absurd 6 or 7 minutes of my life. And I'm a police prosecutor having come from uniformed policing so I have heard some absurd 💩!

Melinda

And further, where does this intellectual giant think developed countries get their resources from. Oh yeah, thin air. No, is it NPC places?

Ben Brooker

This may be the most maddeningly stupid conversation I’ve heard dissected on DTG - and that’s saying something.

Linda Sears

Hate to say it, but we have a water related issue at our house. The curse of Scott Adams is upon us.

Dial-1-2-enter-in-2-diaLOGOS

My god — “water-related problems”! I weirdly enjoyed that segment where Scott Adams interpreted his plumbing issues as proof of a simulation. It struck me as such a jackass thing to believe — oddly harmless compared to his political takes, but probably connected in some dark and conspiratorial way. Either way, you guys knocked it out of the park again. Really appreciate the sharp commentary and humor. Keep it coming!

chuckboy

Bog standard decoding

mr beeswax

Got all excited near the end of this one, but still no shout out/ what the hell do I need to do to get one 🫤 (galaxy brain)

Roland Weber

Giving up after 71 minutes, the Pretorian Guard snippet. This guy isn't worth my time. Thanks anyway for the decoding!

Melinda

I have just had a shower-thought (to be completely honest a hanging-out-the-washing-thought). Is solipsism an inherent guru characteristic? Is it axiomatic? Does it vary from guru to guru?

Joe Euro

A couple of years back I had two incidents of wasps getting stuck in my helmet while I was cycling and stinging the shit out of my head - both in the space of a month or so. Really great to learn that this was actually training an AI model to help robots in the real universe cope better in similar situations. And here I was thinking it was just really bad luck 🙄

Curtis Kofoed

These two together are even more insufferable than the All In guys. Genuinely the dumbest bullshit I’ve heard in years.

Martijn Faassen

Great podcast! So I finally joined your patreon just to go "well actually Navan has a point about poetry and AI". This because I've been looking into this stuff lately so I got opinions. I didn't know who Naval was before this podcast, and I'm not interested in defending Naval at all as I am not particularly impressed by his reasoning. But since it's a lot easier to write a poem than to get feedback on a poem, I've experimented with giving AI my poems for feedback to see how it does: * LLMs are pretty good at teasing out subtle meaning and references, sometimes even bits many humans miss. That's not too surprising for a giant associative language thing. * LLMs are not that great at picking up the rhyming scheme. Google Gemini 2.5 Pro for instance regularly mistakes an ABAB scheme for an AABB scheme. (Claude tends to do better here) * LLMs will typically be enthusiastic about any poem and find ways to compliment it, no matter how bad. If you ask it to give more honest feedback, it will definitely find fault, real or not. Give it two versions of a poem, and it will pick the second version as the better one, and find reasons for it, no matter what the order. * LLMs are terrible at counting the syllables of lines in poetry (which is important in the context of meter). LLMs are famously not that great at counting and I suspect how they tokenize might hurt their counting skills. They mistake 10 syllables for 9 or 11 or whatever extremely frequently. * Scancion/detecting meter (stress patterns in English) is tricky and LLMs are pretty bad at it. It will snootily explain the detalis of meter to you and then get it completely wrong in a range of ways. I looked into research of scancion detection and this is a thorny problem to automate especially for the English language, even with dictionaries of which syllables are typically stressed, as there's a lot of flexibility that's also related to the content. (consider "I do not know" and where you can place the stresses to change the meaning) Some tools do exist, though, but their accuracy rate is relatively low (for English). This is distinct from *writing* poetry; I haven't experimented with that a lot, but LLMs can do a pretty decent job. So I'm afraid to say that Naval is currently right that asking about meter is a decent way to trip up an LLM. I don't think that means a lot though. I've been thinking about equipping an LLM with a tool that can generate a syllable breakdown and possible scancions to see what happens! Thanks again for your many hours of analysis and entertainment, but I couldn't let this one slide as I've been playing with this for a while now. And you got a new patreon as a result.

Idan Ca

apropos nothing at all, the word 'Naval' in Hebrew literally means 'Villain'.

Paul Bowman

One part stuck out for me in Naval's criticism of why evidence-based medicine and modern health care is so bad - in his laundry list of bodily organs (spleen, etc) that surgeons will casually whip out of you without knowing whether you need them or not, he included the appendix. Immediately followed by "you need all these things". It's symptomatic of the general "crunchy health" idea that evolution means that every single thing in your body has been designed by evolution for a specific purpose and is needed - a secularised creationism that Gould and Lewontin castigated as "adaptationism" back in their famous 1979 paper on spandrels. Today, people like Dawkins, etc, may claim that adaptationism is a straw man, because no one serious in evolutionary biology really defends such a position (evopsych is another matter). But these crunchy health-sceptics are almost always the cartoon version of what Gould and Lewontin were talking about

Evan Strippelhoff

The universe is a video game and Scott Adams is the obnoxious NPC that ruins the immersion by reminding you endlessly that you’re just playing a video game