Yes, the guy is smart, swift-thinking and quick to act when it comes to getting projects up from the ground, connecting the right people and getting funding from nowhere (much less so when it comes to technical details and fine-grained planning). His actual decisions are effective, regardless of the stuff he has in the conscious part of his head.

(Actually quite a lot of people whose 'spoken' belief systems are suboptimal or plain weird are perfectly able to drive cars, run companies, avoid tigers and otherwise deal with the reality effectively.)

But can we call such 'hardware-accelerated' decisions rational? I don't know.

Regarding your question. We had obvious disagreements with this guy, and I spent some time thinking about how can we resolve them. As a result, I decided that trying to resolve them (on a conscious level of course) is futile unless we have an agreement about fundamental things -- what we define as truth, and which methods can we use to derive truths from other truths.

I didn't think much about this issue before I met him (a scientific, or more specifically, Popperian worldview was enough for me), and this was the first time I had to consciously think about the issue. I even doubt I knew the meaning of the term 'epistemology' back then :)