纳瓦尔最新访谈文本

纳瓦尔最新访谈文本 纳瓦尔最新访谈文本 Modified November 26, 2025 (2:43:55) " Uh and then, you know, you can talk about how if you look at humans, like our real enemy are pathogens. I think a lot of aging and disease are actually downstream of our competition with pathogens over time. uh to a point that people still don't fully appreciate. Um there's a red queen hypothesis which is that we undergo sexual selection to mix up our genes. (2:44:15) And so every 20 years, every generation, mix up your genes. But if you look at how bacteria and viruses mutate through just random mutations, their mixup rate on their genes and evolution rate is roughly the same as ours. Even though they go through thousands of generations, those 20 years, because they're not doing sexual selection, they're doing asexual replication, mutation, their their evolutionary rate is roughly equivalent to ours. (2:44:38) So, we're in a red queen race where we're both running at roughly the same speed using very different strategies. But a lot of how we're involved is around pathogens. Like our immune system is one of the most expensive things to run in the body is so much as about immune system optimization. That's about pathogens. junk DNA in bacteria and crisper was discovered because in bacteria their DNA is evolved to fight viruses and the way it does that is by taking viral DNA and snipping it up every time there's a viral attack and storing it in their own (2:45:05) DNA so they have a copy so they can recognize it next time it attacks and you know and so on. Um a lot of the population structure of species uh determines how long their lifespans are. So very uh so if if in a given species there's a very high rate of infection then you'll have these older members of the population are carrying diseases that will then infect the young. (2:45:30) So it's important for that species to get rid of the old faster. So the higher the disease rate in a given population, the less long live the entire population. So the older ones don't infect the younger ones. That's a hypothesis and I think it's true. It's an interesting hypothesis. um uh homeostasis within the human body, how we're always returning to a given level of things like that's a that's a fundamental part of our makeup, our temperature, pH, blood pressure, and so on under homeostasis. (2:45:56) But if you if you engage in any kind of signaling like you take a peptide for example, that's a signaling molecule. You take a hormone externally, the body will counteract it. You take testosterone, the body will counteract will downregulate its own production very fast. Uh and the body releases its own hormones in pulses rather than steady state. (2:46:12) Why is that? Well, that's because uh bacteria and viruses can infect your body and trick your body. They can take it over. Like toxoplasmosis does this, rabies does this. They take over macroscopic structure, structural bodies. And small bacteria and viruses would hack our bodies and literally take them over if we didn't have defense mechanisms. (2:46:29) And one of those defense mechanisms is homeostasis. Anytime you see something getting out of whack, you immediately push back really hard on it because like, did I just get infected? Is something trying to take me over? It's also why hormones get released in pulses at night rather than in steady state low levels because uh enemy bacteria can release toxins or the same signaling molecules in small quantities but they can't pulse. (2:46:53) They can't coordinate to pulse. So your body can coordinate to pulse as a macroscopic object but microscopic objects can't coordinate to create the same pulses. Oh that's cool. Yeah. So there's all I mean so you know that it's coming from you. Is that why? Correct. It's endogenous rather than exogenous. So I never knew that. And that's why we resist a lot of exogenous treatments. (2:47:10) A lot of our medical treatments don't work. Um anyway, so this these are there's there's a bunch more I could go on, but I think that a lot of uh you know, you see this in cancers where uh a lot of uh bacteria show up like the Epstein bar virus shows up in a lot of cancers and um you know, now it seems like the gut microbiome influences so many things. (2:47:31) Basically uh bacteria and viruses are at the top of the food chain compared to us. Like we are top of the well known food chain, but bacteria and viruses eat us. Fungus eats us. So these microscopic predators are our natural predators. And so a lot of aging, societal structure, hygiene, religious strictctures against pork, you know, circumcision, all of these things. (2:47:53) These are all designed to resist bacteria and viruses. So if you can teach children this philosophy at an early age, you shortcut all the debates. How effective have you been at teaching that philosophy to children? That one, I think I've been pretty effective. I've drilled that one at home. The one I haven't quite gotten around to yet is evolution. (2:48:10) Like I'm starting to do little bits of that, you know, like we came from monkeys. What does that mean? Um already got them thinking about some of the deeper questions. I did ask my you know young son like uh you know, can nothing exist? I thought that was a fun question. So I like to throw a fun like four, three. No, no, he's he's eight. (2:48:26) Oh, right. An 8 year old and a six year old. So I asked them both like, "Can nothing exist?" And they had pretty good answers, right? Um, another one we played with the other day was like, "What is the matrix?" Okay. Uh, you know, what is what is this? What is all this? Um, I just find it and it's entertaining. (2:48:42) It's just fun to talk about, right? To talk about these questions with your kids. I'm not saying that one is a good way of child raising. It's not leading to any deeper learning other than maybe just have them start uh or continue to question the basic structure of reality and not move past it so quickly. also to take joy. You know what's the meta lesson that's being taught there? Dad dad spends time asking questions to which there are not necessarily an answer because there is something enjoyable in the process of learning and trying to decipher what's happening (2:49:11) possibly. Also, dad tries not too hard to teach people things. I don't want to be I don't want to be didactic. He helps them to arrive at it. Yeah. Correct. Correct. Dad Dad is here to help you solve problems when you have problems and you constantly have problems. So if you come to dad, dad can help explain to you how he would solve the problem. (2:49:28) But most of the time they don't want that. Most of the time they just want most of the time they just want me to solve the problem, right? So sometimes they have to play it dumb. It's like why is my Wi Fi not working on my computer? I'm like I don't know. Did you click on that thing? Look, you've got like a rebellious sovereign child. (2:49:41) Sovereign as they may be, but sometimes they still need the dad to step in. So in addition to feeling loved and having high self esteem, I think the most important trait that would be nice to not rob them of is agency. I want them to preserve their agency. They're born naturally agentic and willful, but a lot of child raising can beat that out of them by essentially domesticating them. (2:50:03) That's right. And I would rather have wild animals and wolves than have well trained dogs because I'm not going to be around to take care of them. Yeah. So, they're going to have to be able to look after themselves. Exactly. Yeah. A friend of mine, uh, Parsa on, uh, on Air Chat, uh, he had a great saying. He said, uh, he wants his, uh, children to be quick to learn and hard to kill. (2:50:22) [Laughter] thought that was pretty good. Yeah, that was cool. I remember you saying just thinking about sort of future and culture and stuff like that. I remember you saying that the left had won the culture war and now they're just driving around shooting the survivors. Right. After the last 6 months of change that we've seen and sort of where we're at at the moment, what do you think the future of the culture war looks like? It's not over yet. (2:50:48) Um they definitely won earlier rounds. They took over institutions. I think now it's much more of a fair fight um where you have people like Elon, you know, kind of supporting uh so so there there's these different forces through history, right? Historians will argue about this. Uh but there's a theory of the great man of history thing where it's like oh you have the Einsteins, you have the Teslas, you have the um the Jangaskhans and the Caesars, right? They determine the flow of history. (2:51:14) And then there's the other uh point of view that no there are these massive forces at play you know demographics and geography and so on and then the particular great man doesn't matter they just come and go Napoleon doesn't matter they would have been somebody else uh the specific names are not important and because of kind of the leftist turn that our institutions took in the last few uh decades they now only subscribe to the great forces theory of history not the great man theory of history but I think now we're seeing the two play out where you're (2:51:40) seeing you know Trump and Elon and other individuals is rising up and saying no, we resist. Yeah, that's interesting. And um I think that unfortunately and so the battle between kind of these these these collectivists and great forces versus individuals, it's as old as humanity itself. And and it is fundamental to the species. (2:52:00) We are not a completely individualistic species. You know, no man is an island. A single person can't do anything by themselves. But we're also not a Borg. We're not a beehive. We're not an ant colony. We're not all just drones marching along. So, which is it? We we're somewhere in the middle. And the human race is always kind of bouncing between the two. We like strong leaders. (2:52:20) We like to be led. Um we like to coordinate our forces and and and mass and and do things. Uh but at the same time, we're also all individuals and willing to break away and willing to do our own thing and everyone's always fighting to be a leader and there's always status games going on. So, u we're there's a pendulum that's always swinging back and forth. (2:52:38) And in modern economics, the way that manifests is between sort of Marxism and capitalism, right? Marxism is like from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. We're all equal. There's a millennial project. We're all going to be equal in the end. And and you know, don't try and stand out, but do what's good for everybody. (2:52:54) Um, and there's a religious aspect to it. And then the the capitalist individualist is like libertarian. Every man for himself. You just each do what you want and it'll work out for the greater good. That's Adam Smith. You know, the invisible hand of the market will feed you. the baker should bake and the butcher should butcher and the candlestick maker should make candlesticks and it'll all work out. (2:53:11) Each person does their best and they trade and so which is it which which which theory is correct and I think there's always going to be a battle between the two and I think the interesting thing is what's going on there's a modern flavor to it which changes it. The modern flavor is that the individual is getting more powerful because they're becoming more leverage. (2:53:36) So someone like an Elon Musk can have the leverage of tens of thousands of brilliant engineers and producers working for him. He can have factories of robots manufacturing things. He can have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital behind him and he can project himself through media to hundreds of millions of people. That is more power than any individual could have had historically. (2:53:54) So the great men of history are becoming greater. That said, that