Speaker 1: Cool media. Oh my god, you guys, it could happen here,
Speaker 1: meaning our podcast, it could, it is, It's happened.
Speaker 2: Robert, shouldn't you rename the podcast? It is happening here?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Uh huh, that's that's a fun joke that I
Speaker 1: only hear forty seven times a day. And the whole
Speaker 1: point of the podcast was, well, initially I was a
Speaker 1: crazy person saying a bunch of stuff would happen, and
Speaker 1: now it's a bunch of that stuff happened, and even
Speaker 1: more of it looks very likely, and so now I
Speaker 1: just feel bad all the time.
Speaker 3: It's going to be cooled. I fucking called it. I
Speaker 3: fucking told you, bro, I said this was going to happen.
Speaker 2: Why don't you rename the podcast? I just feel bad
Speaker 2: all the time?
Speaker 1: Yeah, why don't you rename the podcast? Robert should have
Speaker 1: bought more stock and ammunition companies than he did and
Speaker 1: DGI jeez, should I have bought stock and DGI?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm gonna buy her a little DGI drone here,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there we go a lot of people are going
Speaker 1: to be buying little DGI drones here very soon.
Speaker 3: James, I should point out that I'm buying one. It's
Speaker 3: not capable of carrying a payload.
Speaker 2: It's definitely a safer investment to pull out your furrow
Speaker 2: one k Now, when the market's crashing, use that money,
Speaker 2: buy drones. Those drones will be worth a lot more
Speaker 2: in five years.
Speaker 3: Or what is that? That is? That is the sound
Speaker 3: of a sound investment, a box of bullets.
Speaker 2: It's like how boomers used to like invest in like
Speaker 2: silver or gold as like a stable current. No, we're
Speaker 2: investing in DGI, like physical dghy drones.
Speaker 1: We are investing in drones and boxes of gunpowder.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you gotta get it in a bottle, rubbit in
Speaker 3: a box, it can get light struck or get moist.
Speaker 3: You want to get it in a special black black bottle.
Speaker 1: James, I keep all of my gunpowder. And you know
Speaker 1: how like people used to cocaine by wrapping it in
Speaker 1: toilet paper and swallowing it.
Speaker 3: No, sure, okay, well if you say sobody.
Speaker 1: Speaking of toilet paper. Nate Silver has a newsletter and
Speaker 1: it would be useful as toilet paper more so than
Speaker 1: it is as a newsletter.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I just got like PTSD flashbacks from twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: Would you said that it's okay.
Speaker 1: Normally, my rule of thumb is every election, usually starting
Speaker 1: in like December, the year before election year, I begrudgingly
Speaker 1: fight down a series of panic attacks, vomit three or
Speaker 1: four times in a bucket, and then head over to
Speaker 1: Nate Silver's blog to see what he's saying about the polls.
Speaker 1: And I do this. I hate that I keep having
Speaker 1: I have regularly on election the years people were like
Speaker 1: but he was always wrong. He's like, no, he's reasonably
Speaker 1: good on polls. He's usually if you read what he's
Speaker 1: saying about presidential polls, the reality bears out pretty close
Speaker 1: to that. So I read him during elections and I
Speaker 1: hate it because he's never been right about anything else.
Speaker 1: But he's he's a gambler. He's a degenerate, filthy gambler.
Speaker 1: And so when we're talking about degenerate, filthy gambler stuff,
Speaker 1: and by god, election polls are the most degenerate type
Speaker 1: of gambling that exists, he's worth reading. And then after
Speaker 1: the election, no matter how well or badly it goes,
Speaker 1: I ignore him again for four years. And I didn't get
Speaker 1: to do that this year because on February twenty fifth,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five, Nate wrote a column called elon Musk
Speaker 1: and Spiky Intelligence.
Speaker 2: Spiky Intelligence. Am I hearing that right?
Speaker 1: Spiky intelligence?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: And it very helpfully starts with a drawing that I'm
Speaker 1: sure he used some AI, like he must have used
Speaker 1: some AI like video software to do that, just like
Speaker 1: shows you a kind of spiky star looking thing and
Speaker 1: then like a blob with rounded edges. I can't begin
Speaker 1: to imagine why Nate Silver thought that, like we needed
Speaker 1: this illustrated.
Speaker 3: I have to see this. Yeah, yeah, I would like
Speaker 3: it to be shad look at this.
Speaker 1: Why did you like, oh promise of AI we couldn't have?
Speaker 3: Yes, wow, yeah, it just it looks like.
Speaker 1: Maybe an amoeba if you, if you looks like an amoeba,
Speaker 1: and then like a poorly drawn star.
Speaker 3: Is it? This is? When is an actual thing? This
Speaker 3: gifts you? Wait, this is a thing.
Speaker 2: This is this is Boba and Kiki with a weird
Speaker 2: like digital fuzz over the.
Speaker 1: Fucker Boba and Kiki.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, Garrison, Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's a it's like a social experiment to like ask
Speaker 2: people what like the emotional correspondence of each of these
Speaker 2: shapes are like, which it's like a sure, like like
Speaker 2: which one looks, which one looks nicer, which one looks meaner?
Speaker 2: You know that sort of thing. I'm a Kiki type,
Speaker 2: like like I I am a Kiky in terms in
Speaker 2: terms of my behavior, I am Garrison.
Speaker 1: Now that you bring up Rorshak, all I can think
Speaker 1: of is how cool it would be if Rorshak from
Speaker 1: The Watchman showed up in Nate Silver's house and did
Speaker 1: his thing.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, I think Rorshak at night Silver friends.
Speaker 1: Actually yeah, no, no, Nate would. But after them getting
Speaker 1: along for like forty five minutes, Nate would take him
Speaker 1: to an illegal card game, and Rorshak would murder everybody
Speaker 1: in the room because they were gambling without a license.
Speaker 2: So I'm assuming Nate's going to try to argue that
Speaker 2: that Musk's intelligence is akin to the kiki drug here
Speaker 2: as opposed to like the emphathetic right.
Speaker 1: Now there, Actually, yes, there is a little bit of
Speaker 1: that in there. He does not mention this Kiki and
Speaker 1: Boba thing. I don't know if that's because I'm supposed
Speaker 1: to just infer it from the image or if he's Okay,
Speaker 1: we'll get your opinion on it. Is is Hee ripping these
Speaker 1: people off because this doesn't count as enough for him
Speaker 1: to be crediting them if this is the underpinning of
Speaker 1: his stupid idea, which he credits to his stupid book
Speaker 1: that he came up with later. But I'm just going
Speaker 1: to start reading the stupid column.
Speaker 3: Well, hit us with the second paragraph, because that fuck.
Speaker 1: You haven't gotten paragraph one.
Speaker 3: Jack radicalized me immediately.
Speaker 1: There's been a debate raging on Twitter. Noah Smith can
Speaker 1: run you through the parameters about the intelligence of the
Speaker 1: platform's owner, Elon Musk. My contribution was to suggest and
Speaker 1: then there's a little eye in parentheses because we need
Speaker 1: that Elon is obviously pretty bright. And then there's two
Speaker 1: eyes in parentheses. This shouldn't be conflated with moral judgment.
Speaker 1: Highly intelligent people do lots of bad things. Okay, you'd
Speaker 1: think this wouldn't be especially controversial, but since it involves
Speaker 1: Elon and intelligence, well it was. Elon has run founded
Speaker 1: or co foundeds Tesla, SpaceX, open Ai, neuralink Xai, PayPal,
Speaker 1: and more recently Twitter. He's also managed to steer himself
Speaker 1: into a position where he's now the de facto chief
Speaker 1: of staff to the President of the United States. I
Speaker 1: do not doubt that Elon has gotten lucky in various respects.
Speaker 1: Some of these were long shot bets, and Walter Isaacson's
Speaker 1: biography of Musk documents he thought he'd be ruined if
Speaker 1: there had been one more failed SpaceX launch. The success
Speaker 1: of some of these enterprises might also be debated. Twitter
Speaker 1: was a canny play for cultural and political and ones.
Speaker 1: But probably And he doesn't bring up in this whole
Speaker 1: thing where he's talking about, like all a successful company,
Speaker 1: not a word about the boring company, not a word
Speaker 1: about hyper loop right.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, yeah, any of the failure ones.
Speaker 1: His record does seem better if you ignore the two
Speaker 1: massively publicized and invested absolute failures.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, and last week, I know there was a
Speaker 2: space X lunch. I'm sure it went well. I'm sure
Speaker 2: it didn't fling debris all over lower.
Speaker 1: I'm sure he didn't nearly destroy several commercial aircraft, also
Speaker 1: crediting it like, yeah, I guess technically co founded open ai,
Speaker 1: but not in a way that mattered. He just shot
Speaker 1: down money in there and then kind of edged out.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 1: Yes, and is actively in a conflict with everybody who
Speaker 1: did make open ai as prominent as it is. Again,
Speaker 1: Nitla has to leave a lot out in order to
Speaker 1: start making this case.
Speaker 2: But so he's going to argue that, you know, we're
Speaker 2: going to see how how well this co presidency goes.
Speaker 2: But he's probably a pretty smart guy to get all
Speaker 2: of this stuff done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's also saying, well, like maybe Twitter won't
Speaker 1: be profitable, but we'll see how you know, he could
Speaker 1: probably profit from being the de facto chief of staff.
Speaker 1: Not a word from Nate about like, yeah, but he's
Speaker 1: just like, that's just breaking the law. So why are
Speaker 1: we Why aren't we including in our canny businessman guys
Speaker 1: that get rich selling like shitloads of heroin for the cartels,
Speaker 1: Because yes, if you are breaking the laws sometimes that
Speaker 1: goes well for you financially.
Speaker 2: Well, Walter White, they've done some bad things, Yeah, but.
Speaker 1: You can't deny he was a brilliant method, you know.
Speaker 1: But I don't care what Elon's SAT score is. Fourteen hundred.
Speaker 1: According to Isaacson, he's clearly some sort of outlier in
Speaker 1: many ways people would associate with intelligence, probably even a genius.
Speaker 1: And yet when my first off, it becomes clear through
Speaker 1: this that Nate does not consider a fourteen hundred to
Speaker 1: be an impressive SAT score, and would normally be judgmental
Speaker 1: of someone who had an SAT score of fourteen hundred
Speaker 1: if it weren't for all of Elon's other genius accomplishments.
Speaker 1: And yet, when my partner and I were heading to
Speaker 1: dinner the other day and we saw some tweet that
Speaker 1: Elon sent I forget which one because he tweets so much,
Speaker 1: we were both like, man, he's such a dumb ass. Yes,
Speaker 1: someone can be both a genius and a dumbass. Welcome
Speaker 1: to what I call spikey intelligence.
Speaker 2: Here we go.
Speaker 1: This gets to like the core of what's annoying about
Speaker 1: Nate is his need to He's one of these guys
Speaker 1: you know what, you know what it is. He's an
Speaker 1: intellectual enclosurist right where he's not confident to be like
Speaker 1: everyone is very aware of the fact that no one
Speaker 1: is good at everything, and that people have holes in
Speaker 1: their competence, and that there are like brilliant surgeons who
Speaker 1: are bad fathers or whatever, because there are different kinds
Speaker 1: of intelligence. This is like a broadly common understanding. Nate
Speaker 1: has to give it a name so that he can
Speaker 1: sell his books. So he gives it the names. It's
Speaker 1: like an intellectual. Now it's my idea. I'm the one
Speaker 1: who came up with the concept that smart people can
Speaker 1: be dumbasses. Stop it, Nate, it's annoying.
Speaker 3: Capital ass capital I rights to trademark spiky intelligence. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Now he acknowledges that this isn't entirely original, and
Speaker 1: then links to somebody without really like crediting them. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: many of the instances online refer to people of the
Speaker 1: on the autism spectrum. Musk has publicly stated that he
Speaker 1: has Asperger syndrome. But the concept is simple. While intelligence
Speaker 1: is a multi dimensional phenomenon, the scientific consensus is that
Speaker 1: there's also something known as a G factor sometimes also
Speaker 1: called general intelligence. As an empirical matter, most traits we'd
Speaker 1: associate with intelligence are positively correlated. For instance, math and
Speaker 1: verbal skills and the gire are correlated. The correlations are
Speaker 1: loose enough that you'll wind up with all sorts of
Speaker 1: different permutations on the spectrum of human behavior. And he's
Speaker 1: just going into like he talks about like the absent
Speaker 1: minded professor, Like it's all just these these very common
Speaker 1: ideas that like, yeah, people are usually bad at more
Speaker 1: things than they're good at, right, Like it's there's no
Speaker 1: need to explain how Elon Musk has been successful at
Speaker 1: certain things, but Nate does, and he has to keep
Speaker 1: going back to. Like he makes a comment later in
Speaker 1: here about how Musk is clearly a brilliant engineer. He
Speaker 1: doesn't back this up with evidence. He just says that, Like, well,
Speaker 1: if you read the book that Ashley Vance wrote, he
Speaker 1: obviously signed off on a lot of great engineering moves,
Speaker 1: which ignores the fact that, like he's not making any
Speaker 1: of these decisions, Like he bought a company that already
Speaker 1: had good automotive technology. He hired a bunch of rocket
Speaker 1: engineers to design rockets. Elon is arguably good at hiring
Speaker 1: in certain circumstances, and he is inarguably a great hype man, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's the actual brilliance that Elon has is he
Speaker 1: was very very good at hyping people up and getting
Speaker 1: people to believe in him until he was too big
Speaker 1: to fail. Like that's the one thing he actually did.
Speaker 1: But Nate can't accept that because I think it kind of,
Speaker 1: among other things, it kind of reveals what Nate is,
Speaker 1: who is a guy who was really good at one
Speaker 1: narrow thing and now has a career writing about everything
Speaker 1: and he can't. That's like a dangerous thing for Nate
Speaker 1: to think too hard about.
Speaker 2: Let's learn more about Nate's spiky intelligence after these very
Speaker 2: soft and soothing ads.
Speaker 4: Yeah we're back.
Speaker 1: I want to talk a little bit about the danger
Speaker 1: of being a guy who gets famous for being really
Speaker 1: good at one thing and then gets a job talking
Speaker 1: about everything, because I've had a version of that experience.
Speaker 1: And let me tell you, you're not ever going to be
Speaker 1: competent to discuss all of the things that you can
Speaker 1: make money talking about if you're a popular entertainer. No
Speaker 1: one ever has been, and no one ever will be,
Speaker 1: which is why what you ought to do is the
Speaker 1: thing Nate initially tried to do, which is bring on
Speaker 1: a bunch of people to like run a website with
Speaker 1: you right where you cover more things than one. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: it turns out five thirty was a bad business venture.
Speaker 1: It got massively overvalued, a company spent a shitload more
Speaker 1: money on it that it was capable of making, and
Speaker 1: now everyone's gotten laid off and Nate left years ago
Speaker 1: to do his sub stack. You know, it's a tragic
Speaker 1: case in the problem of like Hubris and the fact
Speaker 1: that maybe a guy who's really good at gambling shouldn't
Speaker 1: run an entire media enterprise. But Nate doesn't like thinking
Speaker 1: about that. It isn't like thinking about the fact that
Speaker 1: maybe the only thing Elon Musk was ever good at
Speaker 1: was being the guy from the Music Man, because I
Speaker 1: think Nate bought into Elon Musk for a significant period
Speaker 1: of time, Right, many people clearly does. Yes, Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: been this thing lately where a lot of folks on
Speaker 1: the left have been like the Oh, you couldn't always
Speaker 1: tell that he was a con man, You couldn't always
Speaker 1: tell that he was this bad, like he was always
Speaker 1: the worst. I was like, no, Like back in twenty
Speaker 1: fourteen fifteen, when I was writing about the billionaires and
Speaker 1: rich people that were evil, I was focusing on Jamie
Speaker 1: Diamond because he had helped create the two thousand and
Speaker 1: eight five financial collapse and he's seen it. He just
Speaker 1: seemed obviously much worse than this guy who up to
Speaker 1: that point was pretty much just making cars and rockets.
Speaker 1: You know, you have two companies doing that. Musk was
Speaker 1: not top of most people's radars for very good reason,
Speaker 1: which gets to like, there's this thing that's been created
Speaker 1: because of some of like the sinister beliefs that his
Speaker 1: grandfather had and his like family background which has a
Speaker 1: lot of white supremacy in it. To that this has
Speaker 1: been Elon's sort of like grand plan from the beginning,
Speaker 1: and that it's all come together for him, like as
Speaker 1: if he's he's, you know, a Marvel or a James
Speaker 1: bond Villa who's been executing this like thirty year plan
Speaker 1: to get where he is.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think when you look at his cognition, like
Speaker 1: he's not the same man he was ten years ago.
Speaker 1: He's not the same guy he was when he started
Speaker 1: dating Grimes. And I'm saying he was a good man
Speaker 1: before then. I don't think he particularly ever was, but
Speaker 1: he's clearly his brain has degraded, in part due to
Speaker 1: contact through Twitter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can like measure this through his posting
Speaker 2: as well, Like, yeah, like that the types of posts
Speaker 2: you would make in twenty seventeen are like completely opposite
Speaker 2: to the way that he would talk about certain social issues. Now,
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, he's not like meming about like anarcho syndicalism.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we get to a few of those things. But
Speaker 1: I want to read another quote from NAT's article because
Speaker 1: he's going to talk about his book on the Edge,
Speaker 1: which quote describes a certain community of intelligent people that
Speaker 1: I call the River. These people who occupy a range
Speaker 1: of professions from AI research to poker to venture capital,
Speaker 1: are bright, but in spiky ways. In Baron Cohen's dochotomy,
Speaker 1: they lean heavily towards the systematic side of the equation.
Speaker 1: They're good at abstract analytic reasoning, but they may lack
Speaker 1: other forms of intelligence like empathy, judgment, and self awareness.
Speaker 1: They also have some distinctive characteristics largely unrelated to intelligence.
Speaker 1: For example, they tend to be extraordinarily competitive and somewhat contrariant.
Speaker 1: And again, what you are talking about all of these
Speaker 1: people number one, when he says AI research, he's not
Speaker 1: talking about people who are doing like the gut level coating.
Speaker 1: He's talking about Sam Altman, right, poker, venture capital. This
Speaker 1: is all gambling. You're all talking about gamblers. The River
Speaker 1: is just gamblers, Nate. It's people like you who who
Speaker 1: put money on bets, and they are contrarian and competitive
Speaker 1: because that's how gamblers are. That's the intelligence, that's the river.
Speaker 1: Like he's thinking about it as like this specific chunk
Speaker 1: of intellectuals who have You know, there's some dangers, but
Speaker 1: they have great potential to make the world brilliant. You're like, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: these are just people who like wind up shooting themselves
Speaker 1: outside of a sports betting facility. Like that's the river, mate.
Speaker 2: I have been turning into a monster during our friend
Speaker 2: poker nights recently. It's tough garrison.
Speaker 1: By the way, I've been meaning to talk to you
Speaker 1: about wearing the full data makeup, because you know your
Speaker 1: skin can't breathe. If you coat your whole body, You're
Speaker 1: only supposed to put that on your face.
Speaker 2: I don't do that every time I played Get.
Speaker 1: A gold finger yourself care.
Speaker 2: I don't put on the data makeup every time I
Speaker 2: play poker, just that one time. Actually, no, I've done
Speaker 2: that twice nowt never minds Okay, okay, he's becoming I
Speaker 2: also have the little hats. I ordered a twelve pack
Speaker 2: of like of like the little like poker visors to
Speaker 2: complete the outfaced.
Speaker 1: Of course she did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it would be rude, not too for better or worse.
Speaker 1: This typology the river is associated with high achievement and
Speaker 1: certain highly lucrative professions, especially tech and finance. It is
Speaker 1: also associated with high variance bankman Free built FTX into
Speaker 1: a company that investors valued at thirty two billion before
Speaker 1: the House of cards collapsed again because he was a dambler.
Speaker 3: He's a con man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and again Nate can't just accept oh, he was
Speaker 1: never actually very smart. He just got really lucky for
Speaker 1: a while and then gave it and then gambled it
Speaker 1: all away because he wasn't actually as smart as anyone thought.
Speaker 1: Nate says, I interviewed SBF several times for the book,
Speaker 1: and I can tell you that he very much falls
Speaker 1: into the genius but dumbass category.
Speaker 3: How about just dumbassy, lucky dumbass. It's not hard.
Speaker 1: What's the genius? Where did he prove that?
Speaker 2: I mean he proved that by fooling Nate Silver, a
Speaker 2: man who probably values his own intelligence like a great deal.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's the whole thing, right, Nate Silver Khan.
Speaker 3: It would be ego death to admit that there were
Speaker 3: just some lucky, dumb white dudes.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: If a guy had won like one of the lotteries,
Speaker 1: was like a billion and a half dollars, right, got
Speaker 1: crazy rich and then lost it all in two weeks
Speaker 1: because he just kept putting half a million dollars at
Speaker 1: a time on twenty one black at a roulette table
Speaker 1: in Vegas, and I would be like, well, obviously he's
Speaker 1: a genius, but he's also kind of a dumbass. How
Speaker 1: else could he have made the money in the first place?
Speaker 1: And I was like, no, he got lucky, and then
Speaker 1: he gambled it all away because he's he doesn't have
Speaker 1: good judgment. Yeah, so it's important to avoid two pitfalls
Speaker 1: when encountering people with spiky intelligence, namely, either there are
Speaker 1: worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story.
Speaker 1: And I don't disagree with that. However, it's a meaningless
Speaker 1: statement because that's true of every human being ever born. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but clearly Nate doesn't feel that way because only I think.
Speaker 1: The undercurrent here is that only people like this in
Speaker 1: Nate's mind are worth talking about, because only gamblers bring
Speaker 1: the world forward, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No one else deserves empathy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, like you're just addicted to putting money on
Speaker 1: sports games and elections, Nate Silver. Anyway, So here's the
Speaker 1: two things he wants to warn us up or wants
Speaker 1: people to avoid. Elon is highly intelligent in several ways,
Speaker 1: but that does not mean that everything he does is brilliant.
Speaker 1: Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and
Speaker 1: we shouldn't make excuses for them. But likewise, it's absurd
Speaker 1: to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects just
Speaker 1: because he isn't in others. And if he has merely
Speaker 1: very good SAT scores, I don't care. Nobody does. It's
Speaker 1: not high school. Nobody cares about his SAT.
Speaker 2: Skills, like like like fifty, like fifty five or something
Speaker 2: like what are we doing?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you are a middle aged man.
Speaker 1: I don't even know what my SAT score was.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say, like, I never took an SAT,
Speaker 3: but I spent more than a decade in full time education,
Speaker 3: and anyone who ever told me that SAT schools I
Speaker 3: immediately hated and never took them. Seriously. I've spent almost.
Speaker 1: Twenty years asking people questions for a living, and I've
Speaker 1: never asked anyone there SAT. Sorry, Garrison.
Speaker 2: Although SAT might not be like a stable metric for
Speaker 2: evaluating intelligence, surely Nate has an alternative method.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not, Garrison, just how much well he doesn't he
Speaker 1: doesn't have an alternative method seeing what you might call
Speaker 1: an infographic, because the next section of the article is
Speaker 1: a quick inventory of Elon's intelligence. So first he admits
Speaker 1: he tried to track Elon down for his stupid book,
Speaker 1: but he couldn't get him to talk to him. Because Elon,
Speaker 1: even I have to say, Elon does have better shit
Speaker 1: to do than talk to Nate Silver, because Elon is
Speaker 1: using ketamine to a near fatal degree, and that is
Speaker 1: a better use of his time than talking to Nate Silver.
Speaker 1: So since he can't actually talk to two Musk, he's
Speaker 1: going to model and extrapolate from quote many other Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley big wigs I have met, okay helping him. And
Speaker 1: this is the fact that quote Musk maintains an extremely
Speaker 1: public profile. He's turned X into a running diary of
Speaker 1: his innermost thoughts and in addition to that, the biographies
Speaker 1: of the guy one more caveat. Here I will try
Speaker 1: to evaluate the overall trajectory of Elon's career, not just
Speaker 1: his recent antics. So we got down here, and the
Speaker 1: next segment is dimensions were Musk has exceptionally high or
Speaker 1: genius level intelligence. So finally Nate's going to prove it,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna I'm going to show you guys, how
Speaker 1: he how he chooses to do that, what the evidence
Speaker 1: he gives us here is.
Speaker 2: And I think this is something that we should reveal
Speaker 2: to the audience after these ads.
Speaker 1: Good point care, all right, we're back. So let's look
Speaker 1: at what Nate shows as is the chief dimension where
Speaker 1: Musk has shown high or genius level intelligence. Reading that
Speaker 1: first line, man, So the first words under this are
Speaker 1: cognitive load capacity in overall horsepower slash ram. He's always on,
Speaker 1: I mean literally look at how often he's tweeting, and
Speaker 1: then a huge graph that shows the density of tweets
Speaker 1: posted and win which has been used by other people
Speaker 1: to prove that since sometime in late twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: he's almost never gone more than about three hours without
Speaker 1: posting a tweet. Like it's just a solid red after
Speaker 1: he buys the site. This like graph of like when
Speaker 1: he makes his posts, he's never offline. Now he's not sleeping.
Speaker 2: So this is a graph of Elon Musk's tweets from
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen to twenty twenty four showing the time of
Speaker 2: day and when a post is posted, represented by small
Speaker 2: red dots and Yes, around twenty twenty two, the thickness
Speaker 2: of the red increases dramatically.
Speaker 1: It's almost just a straight REDPA like the.
Speaker 2: Period of where he must be sleeping in this yeah.
Speaker 1: Is very concerning. No, he sometimes sleeps from about six
Speaker 1: to nine am, as far as we can tell, but
Speaker 1: not regularly or often. It's like a streak at twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three where he just isn't sleepy, he's not sleeping.
Speaker 1: And again, he's on drugs. People, I think they're probably prescripted.
Speaker 1: I think I'm certain he's on ketamine that has been prescribed.
Speaker 1: When you're this rich, you just get whatever drugs you
Speaker 1: want to do, recreationally prescribed.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: But this is drug user behavior. I don't say that
Speaker 1: to judge drug users. I say that as someone who
Speaker 1: had a drug problem, like this is drug user behavior.
Speaker 1: And specifically Silver he's using sobriety as possible. Sorry, And
Speaker 1: specifically Silver is using this as an evidence of MUCKs intelligence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not.
Speaker 2: He's scaling his Twitter activity as a sign that he
Speaker 2: must be like a special type of person.
Speaker 1: He's railing adderall and eating ketamine lozenges all day every day.
Speaker 1: That's what this is a sign of. And no one
Speaker 1: is allowed to take his phone away anyway. Here's how
Speaker 1: Nate explains why this is smart. In NBA terms, we
Speaker 1: say this as a player with an exceptionally high motor,
Speaker 1: and this is undoubtedly a valuable trait as the world
Speaker 1: becomes more complex. Lack's fall. I was simultaneously doing an
Speaker 1: extensive book media tour, running the election model, trying to
Speaker 1: build up Silver bulletin, plus some intensive consulting work. Even
Speaker 1: if I mostly kept my wits about me, it was
Speaker 1: an incredible amount of mental and physical strain that would
Speaker 1: only have been sustainable for a short burst. But Elon
Speaker 1: is taking on I don't know, approximately a thousand times
Speaker 1: more stress than that, and has done so for years. No,
Speaker 1: he's not, He just tweets he has a massive number one.
Speaker 1: All of the businesses are being run by people who
Speaker 1: are specialists in those businesses. He gets called on to
Speaker 1: sit in meetings in and say yes or notice stuff,
Speaker 1: and occasionally tells him to do something crazy that causes issues. Right,
Speaker 1: and they're not running smoothly. Tesla's lost more value now
Speaker 1: than it gained after the election, and SpaceX just had
Speaker 1: a giant rocket explode again. The boring company has not
Speaker 1: done anything other than make a useless hole underneath Vegas
Speaker 1: and the hyper loop is nothing right like this. This
Speaker 1: is just full of shit, Nate, Like what you have
Speaker 1: just described, Running an election model that's functional, going on
Speaker 1: a book tour and consulting and writing a newsletter is
Speaker 1: more work than I credit Elon Musk with actually doing.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, more actual effort work.
Speaker 2: Risk is mostly like sitting in an occasional meeting doing
Speaker 2: drugs and injecting random women with his sperm yes, and
Speaker 2: sending tweets.
Speaker 3: He doesn't do the injecting. I think, oh, god, Garrison, that.
Speaker 1: Comes up to no, no oh, and it's crazy how
Speaker 1: it does. Right before he posts the graph of how
Speaker 1: much Elon tweets.
Speaker 3: Oh, okay, God, there it is, okay, okay.
Speaker 1: Politics and social media poison a lot of people's brains.
Speaker 1: Having that much wealth and power has to be intoxicating,
Speaker 1: especially if Muska ostracizes people who might keep him grounded
Speaker 1: more sympathetically. He's taking on an incredible array of responsibilities,
Speaker 1: doing several really hard jobs at once, each of which
Speaker 1: would be stressful on their own, while still managing to
Speaker 1: father thirteen children. I'm tweeting hundreds of times per week. Again,
Speaker 1: equivalent efforts tweeting hundreds of times a week and fathering
Speaker 1: thirteen children. He's not a father to them. No, he
Speaker 1: just he contributed by it. He didn't even have sex.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, he's usually the lowest possible effort way to
Speaker 3: have a child.
Speaker 1: Wait, Like, I'm gonna guess most of the people with
Speaker 1: penises listening to this come like, that's not a big effort.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't include that. It's like, what did I get
Speaker 1: done this week? Well, in addition to working forty hours,
Speaker 1: I jacked off.
Speaker 2: That's a little transphobic. This is this is a joke. Anyway,
Speaker 2: continue it said.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying it doesn't count as work. No, not
Speaker 1: from us, and less you're a sex worker than it does. Okay,
Speaker 1: Like especially I know a lot of male porn stars.
Speaker 1: That's that is a difficult part of the job. That's
Speaker 1: why they inject their penises directly with erection drugs that
Speaker 1: kill their hearts.
Speaker 2: I would like to get into more of Silver's like
Speaker 2: justification for why why he associates this this high tweet
Speaker 2: load with like intelligence.
Speaker 1: Well, because it shows rapid cognition in thin slicing ability okay,
Speaker 1: m hmm, right, yeah, sure sure. Indeed, in a capitalist
Speaker 1: system with a significant premium, I'm being first to market.
Speaker 1: Making decent judgments fast is often more important than making
Speaker 1: better judgments slowly. Canonically, vcs imagine themselves rapidly filtering through
Speaker 1: potential founders, as though on Shark Tank, relying on well
Speaker 1: known gut instinct. But this also gets people in trouble,
Speaker 1: as it has for Elon what is shark Tank's success rate? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I bet there's a quick answer to that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's consuering. The air has built in free
Speaker 3: television advertising for any product.
Speaker 1: Means than fifty percent of deals they're successfully closed. God, yeah,
Speaker 1: so I I it out. All This tweeting also shows
Speaker 1: abstract problem solving capability. This is related to the idea
Speaker 1: of creativity, though in Musk's case it seemingly doesn't manifest
Speaker 1: itself an artistic prowessly ceeingly, you know what, I'll give
Speaker 1: it to date.
Speaker 2: There, I'll give it to day.
Speaker 1: I don't disagree with you there. And then, of course,
Speaker 1: instrumental rationality philosophy nerds like to distinguish between two types
Speaker 1: of rationality. Instrumental rationality is aligning means with ens basically
Speaker 1: figuring out the most efficient ways to get what you want.
Speaker 1: For this category, I think you have to point towards
Speaker 1: the scoreboard, must have some unparalleled accomplishments, and isn't about
Speaker 1: to let anybody stand in his way. It's also a
Speaker 1: category often associated with manipulativeness or even being an asshole,
Speaker 1: not one for nice guys. Now, and again, if Musk's
Speaker 1: actual goal is his stated goal getting to Mars, then
Speaker 1: backing the political party that is actively doing as much
Speaker 1: damage to the biosphere as possible, ensuring that it will
Speaker 1: not have the carrying capacity necessary to make any kind
Speaker 1: of off world civilization likely, I would argue is a
Speaker 1: stupid decision. But he doesn't actually want us to get
Speaker 1: to Mars, right, He just wants to be in charge
Speaker 1: of everything.
Speaker 2: No, he wants to run his businesses with no government interference.
Speaker 2: That's really it.
Speaker 1: Yes it is, yes, yes, yes, and he has been
Speaker 1: very successful at that. But again it's the successive brute force.
Speaker 1: It's the same way as like, if you hire a
Speaker 1: thousand people who are willing to like break the kneecaps
Speaker 1: of a guy who annoys you, like you could say,
Speaker 1: like I'm very smart when it comes to hurting people
Speaker 1: who annoy me. But really, you just have a lot
Speaker 1: of dudes who can beat people up for you. Like,
Speaker 1: is that intelligence or did you just have enough money
Speaker 1: to hire?
Speaker 2: Or are you just a mob boss? Right?
Speaker 1: Are you just a mob boss? And a mob boss?
Speaker 1: No one is allowed to attack because it's going to
Speaker 1: be domestic terror to fuck up a Tesla store soon,
Speaker 1: you know. Anyway, we need ghost dog.
Speaker 2: It's pretty it's pretty upsetting because you know, a few
Speaker 2: weeks ago, I was having a little bit of a
Speaker 2: resist live moment and I actually ashed my clothes cigarette
Speaker 2: on a parked Tesla. Felt pretty cool about it. But
Speaker 2: now I guess I can't even do that. It's too dangerous.
Speaker 1: Now, No, you can't.
Speaker 2: I could face substantial charges.
Speaker 3: You might want to text resist to a certain five
Speaker 3: digit number or something. That's probably the best way to
Speaker 3: solve this garrison.
Speaker 1: I just text resist to every single person in my
Speaker 1: phone book every day. I mean, it takes about seven hours.
Speaker 1: I have fallen behind on work.
Speaker 3: You know, it's the only thing we can do to
Speaker 3: my pastus.
Speaker 2: The quickest path to intelligence is having a horrible sleep
Speaker 2: deprivation and drug problem. Apparently, or at least that is
Speaker 2: how you show for it. It's funny because I saw
Speaker 2: Allan Johnson, the billionaire who who's eating his son's blood
Speaker 2: or now plasma. Oh we had a dead guy posted
Speaker 2: his only self study on like the damaging effects of
Speaker 2: sleep deprivation, and I'm pretty sure Musk like retweeted it
Speaker 2: with like with like an emoji or something like yeah, dude, dude,
Speaker 2: your brain is completely sure.
Speaker 1: Now you you are, you are fried. You are the
Speaker 1: most cooked a man has ever been.
Speaker 3: It's an interesting study, Like there there is legitimately interesting
Speaker 3: things to look at Ela Musk's brain.
Speaker 1: Well, yes, and there's a lot of actual scientific data
Speaker 1: put together like exhaustively by researchers studying how not just
Speaker 1: sleep deprivation but like wealth and power impact the brain.
Speaker 1: And like all of it makes a strong case that
Speaker 1: Elon Musk at this point has done more damage to
Speaker 1: his brain than like a career one of those career
Speaker 1: WWE wrestlers who like kills their whole family and then
Speaker 1: shoots themselves in the chest so someone can study their
Speaker 1: brain later.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, well before before close, I do want
Speaker 2: to say, before any psychologists or sociologists or like linguists
Speaker 2: get mad at me. Yes, I know Boba and kiki
Speaker 2: is is that is this is a shape language like
Speaker 2: correlation test I myself as well as Nate here, I
Speaker 2: have kind of expanded it's it's it's usage to like
Speaker 2: projecting even more like human or like like emotional qualities
Speaker 2: onto these shapes or onto these specific words. So please, sociologists,
Speaker 2: leave me alone, do not do not do that message
Speaker 2: me your favorite French. I'm I'm afraid it's already too late.
Speaker 2: I think I already hear like twelve different reddators typing.
Speaker 2: But yes, I think Nate's just using that image there
Speaker 2: as like a metaphor to like show how, you know,
Speaker 2: aggressive or manipulative Musk's own intelligence is as symbolized by
Speaker 2: by a kiki as opposed to you know, maybe maybe
Speaker 2: like a Bill Gates, which might be more like a
Speaker 2: boba intelligence type. Okay, a little softer, a little bit
Speaker 2: more philanthropy.
Speaker 1: You know, I just got finished reading nothing but rationalist
Speaker 1: and Zizian literature for two straight weeks, about a quarter
Speaker 1: of a million words by my last count, Garrison, I
Speaker 1: don't have an enemy to do this again. I'm going
Speaker 1: to get back to my Hitler books. You know where
Speaker 1: things make sense, where the world's safe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm returning to writing about the Syrian Civil War,
Speaker 3: which is my comparative happy place.
Speaker 1: Ah, the Syrians Civil War.
Speaker 3: It's a really great world. I do wonder if he's
Speaker 3: trying to avoid some kind of intellectual property thing by
Speaker 3: using that little filter that he used over to Boo BERANKI.
Speaker 1: No, because it would be if it's actually not fair
Speaker 1: use now as opposed to if you just mentioned that
Speaker 1: thing he doesn't yah because he doesn't talk about them,
Speaker 1: then it is fair use, right, and he could use
Speaker 1: like a little clip of it is and to illustrate.
Speaker 3: Point, yeah, like I did with Manu Chow.
Speaker 1: Anyway, this is all I want to say again about
Speaker 1: Nate silver until twenty twenty eight. And if you know
Speaker 1: what the upside if democracy really does die is, we'll
Speaker 1: never have to talk about him again.
Speaker 2: If Trump and Musk really take over fully and do
Speaker 2: a full coup, we never have to talk about Nate Silvan.
Speaker 1: Nine minutes from now, I'm wearing a Curtis Yarvin T shirt.
Speaker 3: They'll be doing a SOD numbers and he will still
Speaker 3: be analyzing that data. They straight regime capture of Nate Silver.
Speaker 1: Well, it doesn't seem possible that Trump could have gotten
Speaker 1: one hundred and four percent of the vote.
Speaker 3: But there's a spikey percentages.
Speaker 1: There's a spikey percentages.
Speaker 2: Why can't Nate Silver just like run like Trump's casino
Speaker 2: or something? Right, this is just like just like put
Speaker 2: him away.
Speaker 1: I understand if Nate because Nate's rich, he doesn't need
Speaker 1: to do the other stuff. And if he was like
Speaker 1: just doing sports betting analysis forever, I'd be like, well, hey,
Speaker 1: that's what he loves. Right. If I had Nate's so money,
Speaker 1: I'd probably just write novels for the rest of my
Speaker 1: life because that's what I like to do. I don't
Speaker 1: understand why he keeps writing about politics. He's not good
Speaker 1: at it, and he can't like it. He needs to
Speaker 1: feel special.
Speaker 3: He wants to feel like a special boy who knows
Speaker 3: the answers that no one else does.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, anyway, this is us making fun of
Speaker 1: Nate Silver, so you don't well, you can still make
Speaker 1: fun of it. You don't have to read him. We
Speaker 1: did that for you.
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