Naval Ravikant x Eric Jorgenson: Full Transcript — The Almanack 5th Anniversary Megasode

Guest: Naval Ravikant — Founder of AngelList, angel investor in 100+ companies including Twitter and Uber Host: Eric Jorgenson — Author of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, host of Smart Friends podcast Show: Smart Friends — The Almanack 5th Anniversary Megasode Duration: 3 hours 35 minutes Source: YouTube Analysis: Key Insights and Analysis

1. It’s been five years since the Almanac of Naval first came out

Time: 00:00:00 - 00:00:43

Summary: It’s been five years since the Almanac of Naval first came out. Updating and expanding the key ideas in the book. This version is being made available for free. In addition to the audiobook available on your favorite platform.

Eric Jorgenson: Hello and welcome. It’s been five years since the Almanac of Naval first came out and to honor that, Naval and I wanted to do a special edition for you. We spent the day together and recorded over four hours of our conversation. Now we’re sharing that here with you. Updating and expanding the key ideas in the book. Like everything else in the Almanac of Naval, this version is being made available for free. In addition to the audiobook available on your favorite platform. This book has grown as a word of mouth phenomenon, being gifted and recommended, ultimately reaching millions of people all over the world in 40 languages. I hope you will help these good ideas continue to spread. Thank you for joining us. Let’s dive in. Over the last few years, seeing you go deeper and deeper into David Deutsch’s ideas and at least from my seat, see the explanations that he puts forth and the connecting threads that you draw into your sort of existing theories about building wealth and how the definition of wealth evolves and expands and becomes universal and applies, you know, at the civilization level. And the same rules all the way down to like the decisions that you make as an individual.

2. Elon Musk: David Deutsch had a better definition of wealth than I did

Time: 00:00:43 - 00:05:56

Summary: David Frum: My definition of wealth was very focused by my desire to make money. But David Deutsch’s definition is deeper and more philosophical. He says wealth is the set of physical transformations that you can affect. Frum says knowledge is the big multiplier of capital.

Naval Ravikant: Deutsch had a better definition of wealth than I did. My definition of wealth was very focused by my desire to make money. And so my definition of wealth was assets that earn while you sleep. And so I wanted to break out of the 9 to 5 trap of the input tied to output trap. And I didn’t want to have to work hard. You know, I always used to say I want to be the most successful guy for doing the least work in every aspect of my life, not just in business, but you know, even my personal relationships, even my day to day happiness, even my exercise and work. Like all smart people, I’m lazy, right?

Eric Jorgenson: What’s the highest leverage solution?

Naval Ravikant: That’s right. Laziness is a form of leverage efficiency, what have you. And it’s not lazy in the sense that I want to sit around and do nothing. It’s just that then I have time to do other things. I can focus on my health, I can spend time with my children, I can educate myself. I don’t just have to be a drone working away. And so my definition of wealth was around, okay, let’s break out of the 9 to 5 trap. Let’s have my assets work while I sleep. And what are those assets that can work while I sleep? Well, capital is an obvious one. You know, you invest money, but what is that capital actually doing when you quote, unquote, quote, invest capital? What you’re doing is you’re giving up the right to future assets that society owed you for having done work in the past, assuming it was all properly earned. And then you’re giving that up so that businesses can employ people and use capital machinery to build new things. Well, another asset that could earn while you sleep is just a piece of a business. It could be literally a machine, a 3D printer working while you’re sleeping. It could be a computer doing computation. It could be a GPU cluster computing, the next AI model. It could be a organization, a process of people who are operating a certain way. And you kind of check in and make sure the assembly and the goals and all of those pieces are correct. And some of them are working in different time zones in different hours.

Eric Jorgenson: Could be intellectual property.

Naval Ravikant: It could be intellectual property. It could be a piece of media that’s out there that just continues to circulate, and people either pay for, or it gets you access or notoriety or something else. So. Exactly. So that was my definition of wealth, and I think it’s a good practical definition of wealth if you’re just trying to make money. But David Deutsch’s definition of wealth is deeper and more philosophical, and it extends and scales really nicely all the way from a society or civilization down to a single individual. And his definition of wealth is the set of physical transformations that you can affect, effect, as in bring into existence. So an example of that would be, okay, well, if I have a lot of money stored up, then I have wealth because I can go buy a machine. And the machine could be as simple as a backhoe that’s digging trenches or building houses. Or it could be, you know, I can hire people to go do something or, you know, et cetera. So there’s definitely a huge stored capital component to it. But the bigger part of wealth is, again, it’s a set of physical transformations that you can affect. And the vast majority of the capability to create physical transformations comes from technology, and it comes from leveraged technology. Like 10 cavemen or 10 Paleolithic people wouldn’t have the same ability to change things as ten modern humans do. And that’s because of knowledge. If you pay careful attention, you realize that knowledge is the big multiplier. It’s not the capital. So this is one thing where Marx was completely wrong. One of the many reasons why Marxism completely fails, leave aside the obvious that it, you know, wrong incentives, is that the value is not in the capital. It’s not in the factories. It’s in the knowledge. If you removed Elon Musk from SpaceX, you can’t capture his wealth. It disappears because the knowledge just disappears. SpaceX is less valuable. It is not a pie to be divided up. It is a. A group of very intelligent people held together by a common mission, who are continually affecting change. And you’re funding them and betting on that. It’s not a piece of gold that you can slice off a chunk and take it and then melt it down. Even that, by the way, doesn’t have much value. Gold doesn’t have much value. Gold is a pointer to actual value and it’s just a scarce metal you can use to trade value. But the actual value is not in the gold. The value is in the people doing things. So as a society gains new knowledge, it becomes wealthier. As an individual gains new knowledge, they become wealthier. Um, you know, yes, for example, I am wealthy by conventional standards, but my earning power is also the highest it’s ever been. Why? Because I have tremendous knowledge and people have knowledge that I have knowledge. And so because of that, I can affect change at a very big level. What do I get famous for? For doing my startups? No, not really. What am I proudest of? Startups? I don’t know. Startups come and go, you know, I’m proud of it in the sense that I got to be a man in the arena and I got to actually do something. You know, What I seem to have gotten popular for is just for thinking through and then articulating things in a certain way. And that’s knowledge. Right. And this brings me back to earlier. We were talking about, you know, timeless knowledge and wisdom and kind of modern knowledge. Modern knowledge, like knowledge about things, knowledge how to build cars and computers and robots and all that. That knowledge is transmissible. One person can discover it, they can convey it to the next person, the next person can then, you know, take it on and duplicate and copy it. Makes everybody wealthier. Knowledge about human nature, knowledge about what is a good life, what is the purpose of life. You know, as Aristotle said, eudaimania, or I’m saying that wrong, I’m not. I don’t speak Latin or Greek.

3. We were talking about timeless knowledge and wisdom and kind of modern knowledge

Time: 00:05:57 - 00:12:04

Summary: What am I proudest of? Startups? I’m proud of it in the sense that I got to be a man in the arena. What I seem to have gotten popular for is just for thinking through and then articulating things in a certain way. Wisdom is very simple. But it always has to be stitched in with personal experience.

Eric Jorgenson: It’s a lot of vowels.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, it’s a lot of vowels. But it’s basically like, you know, how do you live a happy life? Like that. That’s a very practical philosophy, that knowledge, that wisdom is very hard to convey. Wisdom is very simple. If wisdom could be communicated, we’d all be wise and we’d all be dumb. But it always has to be stitched in with personal experience and it has be recreated inside the listener. You cannot just copy. It’s not a process that you can copy. So wisdom is something that you need to hear over and over and over again, and you need to hear it in a thousand different ways in a thousand different contexts until you’re going through your own life and then you do something and then it clicks and you’re like, oh, this guy said that in this particular way. And that resonates with me in this moment. And then you think it through and you stitch it into your worldview. It becomes part of your value system. And the problem is, if you’ve already heard it said a certain way, either too early or too many times, it’s a cliche and everyone’s gonna roll their eyes, right? So, like, one of the things, I think some of the greatest wisdom in the world is in nursery rhymes, right? Like, row, row, row your boat. Like, find me a greater piece of wisdom than that. It’s very hard. Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, right? Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream. There’s a lot of wisdom in that. Life is like a river, right? It is kind of flowing. It’s flowing at a certain pace. You do want to row. You don’t want to just sit there. You want to be gentle about it. You don’t want to splash around too hard. You want to keep a good attitude. Merrily of life is a dream because the whole thing disappears and you’re gone, right? So there’s a lot of wisdom in there, and it’s packaged in a clever way that it persists across time with rhyming. And you can make children in simple words. But at the same time, if I gave that to you as wisdom in a book, you would just laugh because it’s too cliche. It’s too simple. You heard it too early. In some ways, yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: I feel like the naval detractors quote unquote, the most common criticism is like, oh, it’s fortune cookie, or it’s a cliche, or everybody knows that. And my response is like, that’s lindy. Like, cliche is lindy.

Naval Ravikant: All I’m trying to do there is, and I’m saying it mostly for myself, so even when I edit my tweets, because I think I’m more likely to remember it in a different way than I originally phrased it, is I’m trying to say something true in an interesting way. That’s literally it. And even if the truth has been said before, and any truth about human nature has been said before. It is a repetition by definition. I don’t mind repeating it because it’s in an interesting way and I just figured it out in such a way that it’s going to stick with me. And maybe someone else there will figure it out in a way that’ll stick with them when I say it this way and more interestingly, maybe they’ll say something back which will cause me to reevaluate and expand what I just said thought and maybe I’ll meet someone interesting. That’s why I tweet. And so anything having to do with any topic that is not brand, brand new is going to be cliched. So if you want to only stick to brand new topics, what are you left with? Well, you’re left with contemporary storytelling like what did Kim Kardashian have for breakfast? Or what policy is Donald Trump fighting with the Supreme Court justice or whatever over today? To me, that stuff is. It’s entertaining. But if that’s all we’re going to talk about, then please leave. Like I don’t find that added to my life in any way. Or we can talk about things that are new. We can talk about the latest breakthrough in an AI model, we can talk about the latest way to do image generation, or we can talk about the latest way that people are building drones or what have you, but only a very, very small number of people are qualified to talk about that. They’re not necessarily putting all those breakthroughs on Twitter, nor are you there to absorb deep technical information each time. Nor can most of us tell apart what’s real from what’s not and what’s hyping and what’s fake. So I feel like if you’re going to discuss anything important and timeless, you are absolutely going to run into cliches.

Eric Jorgenson: David Deutsch the definition of wealth connected with the ethics of wealth creation. I think that was one. Seeing the connections between knowledge wealth and ethical wealth creation was a huge unlock because I think that’s maybe the biggest precursor that gets people stuck before even internalizing the rest of the ideas in the thread is like if you don’t believe ethical wealth creation is possible, you will reject the whole gain.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right. Yes. You will get bitter too early. And you know, it kind of sucks when people do that. Like the common critiques of capitalism are all around cronyism or sort of, you know, the Federal Reserve money printing or handing out favors to bankers and so on. There’s no question when, when money is involved, when wealth is involved, not Just a portion of the efforts, but the majority of efforts will go into siphoning, controlling, defending, fighting over slicing up wealth. The majority, if you look in nature, there are six times as many species that are parasites as are sort of standalone, right? So most things are eating each other and trying to live off of something else. And there’s a few that are like reaching for the sun in the sky and you know, trying to survive. And so it’s just always seems easier to people to grab something than to create something. And when society ends up with too many people focused on slicing up the pie, then baking it, then those societies collapse. And it’s easy to be cynical. I mean you watch the bank bailouts, you kind of watch. But I would argue none of that is free market capitalism. That is government intervention through and through, you know, picking winners, picking losers. Which is not to say that capitalism means everybody plays fair. What capitalism is, you come up with a minimum structured set of rules, the minimum viable that allows people to play the fair game, where a lot of the energy that would get directed into stealing property or fighting each other gets channeled into creating property. So that’s why the basis of capitalism is respect for private property. If I improve a piece of land or if I create something, I can keep that improvement. And yes, you have to figure out how to deal with the externalities of pollution and with public goods and so on and so forth. But you know, basic free market capitalism figured that out to a pretty large extent and has been responsible for the greatest increase in wealth and you know, human flourishing in history. And people forget that, you know, they, they don’t spend enough time looking at places where people are living on a dollar A or don’t have the ability to protect private property. Like those societies just melt down into full on just warfare.

4. Free market capitalism has been responsible for the greatest increase in wealth in history

Time: 00:12:05 - 00:15:30

Summary: The basis of capitalism is respect for private property. The US is what, like 1, 1/3 or 40% now socialist. If you’re moderately intelligent and you’re not afraid of working hard, you can do extremely well. It starts with believing that it’s possible.

Eric Jorgenson: We don’t think about like a capitalism quality score.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right, that’s what it should be like. The US is what, like 1, 1/3 or 40% now socialist? Because that’s how much is just GDP controlled by the government. And then there’s by state, federal and local governments and then you’ve got another 20 or 30%. This is drawn by regulation or it’s in sectors like education and healthcare which are basically quasi government run. So even here the private sector is quite small, shrinking and it’s just like how much of a load can that carry before people give up or they flee or actually the failure case for the US is the best and brightest no longer integrate here. So I do think you can focus on all that, you can focus on the unfairness of that all and you can melt down and break down right there. But at the same time, this is the greatest period for wealth creation in human history. There’s more knowledge being created, there’s more capital being created, there’s more leverage being created than any other time. So if you’re moderately intelligent and you’re not afraid of working hard and you’re flexible, you can do extremely well. And you kind of have to get it outside of your mind that the whole game is rigged. Yeah, it’s just like, look, in life there is a lot of luck. The fact that you even exist is luck. You know, there’s a lot of factors out of your control. But life is long, people are very consistent. Compounding does work. And you can rise past the luck, that is through sheer force of will and hard work. And if you don’t believe in that, then yes, you’re a cynic. And cynics, their beliefs are self fulfilling. You will be stuck in the mud. However, people who are optimistic, willing to work hard and willing to look past the unethical or luck based nature at all, they’re the only ones who have a chance. And at least my experience has been is that those people do well on long timescales. So it might be 10 to 30 years, it’s not going to be two years. There’s no get rich quick schemes, you know, that’s just someone selling you something. So on a long enough timescale you can rise out of the muck. But it starts with believing that it’s possible. If you don’t think it’s possible, then yes, it’s impossible for you. And I think this is a common theme. You will notice across the great entrepreneurs that Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, they take on what they consider to be impossible tasks because they kind of look around, they say, well, if other people can do it, why can’t I? So I think that mindset is super important. What I like about Deutsch also is that he has a very optimistic view on this. It’s not just a belief. He really does structure it in good explanations as to why human progress happens. And he says we should be optimistic because we discovered this model in the British Enlightenment, which was their philosophical movement where we basically figured out that we can advance science and society through the quest for good explanations, which means that we are truth seeking, we’re making conjectures. Those conjectures are open to criticism. Every conjecture can be criticized. And then we hold them up to experiment. We Test theories against each other, we find out what works and whatever works, we circulate and promulgate to other people and then we advance society forward. And he’s shown that that is how we’ve been operating for the last few hundred years. And time periods like this have existed in the past, maybe during the Italian Renaissance, maybe during the Greek sort of Enlightenment age, maybe during the Industrial Revolution onwards. And we would be foolish to lose that or extinguish that, you know, by, by being anti rational or saying there’s no such thing as truth, or by giving up the quest for good explanations, by banning criticism, that’s, you know, what censorship does. Or by believing that certain people, like, you know, big science, always has the answers. So there is reason to be optimistic as long as we don’t let go of this method of advancing. And this method of conjecture and criticism leading to good explanations is the real scientific method. You know, we get taught the scientific method when we’re kids. That’s not really how it works. That’s like a very idealized fiction test tube laboratory version. But the reality is that under the right circumstances, given the right freedoms, we’re constantly scientific about everything in our lives. Every person is trying to improve their life. So everyone who cares about being healthy and fit is a little scientist running all the different experiments of which kind of diet works for me, which kind of exercise works for me. And you know, they’re constantly making new hypotheses, they’re hearing new hypotheses, they’re trying new things, they’re seeing what worked and what didn’t. So they’re doing the same thing in their own way. And all truth seeking systems work this way. So in science you can call it conjecture and criticism. In technology and business you can call it, you know, innovation. And just the companies going out of business, right? Companies create things and the ones that fail go out of business. In evolution you can call it, you know, mutation. The genes mutate and then the ones that didn’t, you know, didn’t cut it, are literally removed from the gene pool. But all truth seeking systems work this way, which is we, we make conjectures, either random conjectures like in mutation, or deliberate conjectures like in science or through technology innovation or business innovation. And then there is a filtering process. And even Taleb talks about this in a completely different way. He has this whole skin in the game thing. And skin in the game isn’t just merely, oh, I have my own money at stake. Skin in the game is I get cut out over time if I don’t succeed if I take risk. I should bear the risk. That’s what he considers bad capitalism. When other people bear your risk, that’s what banksters do. Good capitalism is when I take a risk and then I bear the consequences or the rewards of that risk. Which is why, to Taleb, the most ethical thing you can do is be a risk taker. You be an entrepreneur, you go and you bear risk. Don’t pass it off to other people or to society. And then the skin in the game arises not from the fact that you had some skin in the game, but that over time, the people who were bad risk takers got weeded out. They either lost capital, they lost their lives, or lost their reputations. And the people who were good risk takers ended up benefiting and then spreading the benefits that they gained to the rest of society. So even his skin of the game phrasing is somewhat isomorphic to Deutsch’s conjecture and criticism.

5. Deutsch says we can advance science and society through conjecture and criticism

Time: 00:15:31 - 00:21:16

Summary: We can advance science and society through the quest for good explanations. Those conjectures are open to criticism. And then we hold them up to experiment. This method of conjecture and criticism leading to good explanations is the real scientific method. To Taleb, the most ethical thing you can do is be a risk taker.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think that’s a. That’s why accountability was such an important reframe from Entrepreneurs take risk because accountability bakes in this. You personally bear the upside and the downside. You don’t want to. You don’t want risk for risk’s sake. You want to conspicuously, directly and publicly take a risk.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. This is why I think Buffett and Munger were a little opposed to investment banks going public. Because investment banks used to be partnerships, LLCs where the individual partners would take on risk. LLCs only protect you so much. If the partners do something bad, you can have risk flow through to them. On the flip side, once you go public as a big faceless corporation, you can hide behind the CEO, you can be on the board, and they can take risks that can bankrupt society. Society has to bail them out because they kind of levered up and they put the whole financial system at risk, but somehow they themselves still get paid and walk scot free and get to keep their assets, their personal assets. They’re fine. So it’s this pushing risk off into society through a corporate liability shield. I think, you know, Buffett, Munger pointed out that that was not a good thing.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, Munger is a great. You know, the people who make unethical behavior impossible are some of the effective saints of the civilization.

Naval Ravikant: Right. So he talks about double entry, bookkeeping, a cash register, and so on. Yeah. I mean, the problem is unethical is it’s a fuzzy line. Right. Different people have different morality. It’s easier to be moral when you’re not in the ring. Yourself doing anything or fighting anything or building anything, because then you can just get on your moral high horse. So academics and journalists can pretend to be the most moral people when they don’t actually do anything. Right. So on the flip side, you have like for example, in the AI race, you know, people are swallowing up all the copyrighted content and then later saying, oops, you know, sorry I ate your homework and spit it back out. So this is a difficult conversation. It’s not like a one size fits all glib answer.

6. Is there a sense where ethics and morals around how we conduct capitalism is bottleneck

Time: 00:21:17 - 00:28:07

Summary: Is there a sense where ethics and morals around how we conduct capitalism is the bottleneck of progress? The biggest impediment to progress is size of institutions, size of countries and size of groups. The most flourishing systems are the ones where you have small countries.

Eric Jorgenson: Is there a sense where ethics and morals around how we conduct capitalism is the bottleneck of progress?

Naval Ravikant: You’re saying are ethics or morals a bottleneck to progress?

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, as we think about how effective capitalism is in relation to how many people are makers versus takers. And there’s culture and there’s regulation and there’s, there’s so many inputs to that.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, there are. I mean, I, I think the, actually the biggest impediment to progress, I think, is believe it or not, I think it’s size. Right.

Eric Jorgenson: Size of what?

Naval Ravikant: Size of institutions, size of countries, size of groups. Because the larger the group you have, the more group think you have. And groups don’t admit mistakes. Groups don’t seek for search for truth. Groups, groups search for consensus. Only individuals are very small teams of people can search for truth. Large groups have to have consensus or they fall apart. They fight with each other and they degenerate. So groups don’t change their minds, groups don’t apologize. You know, it’s mobs. And so I think the best situation comes from when you have small groups of people who are each responsible for both the benefits and the losses. They have skin in the game that are able to take risks. So for example, in religion, you want to see back in Europe and it was hundreds of religions and they were each trying their own thing and they came to the new world. And then you kind of got to see which worked and which didn’t. In technology and in business, you want to see lots of city states with different policies. You want to see lots of companies competing with each other. So humans do best when we’re small groups competing. But the problem with this is that competition breaks into warfare. So religions, you know, responsible for a lot of bloodshed when they’re next to these little city states always end up fighting and being consolidated. These little businesses, you know, they end up being swallowed up by larger ones or there’s monopoly effects when one of them ends up in charge. So an ideal society really understands how to federalize, how to create lots and lots of small competing, but not in a physical kinetic competition, but in a virtual competition, figures out how to get harness all of that energy, that competitive energy to create great things. And so the US benefited from being federalist, from having 50 states with 50 different regulatory systems and 50 different experiments being run on the governance level. And it benefits from capitalism, which is lots of small companies competing. But where it breaks down is when you have a small number of big monopolies or you have big banks that have taken over the government, or the government running education, healthcare, or when you end up with all 50 states only being allowed to compete in small things, but you have three letter agencies and giant federal taxes running everything from dc. So that’s when the system starts breaking down. So I think that the most flourishing systems are the ones where you have small countries, you have small tribes and you have small companies competing against each other in a non violent way. And the whole trick is how do you keep them each sovereign and from not making it kinetic and overrunning each other physically? To me that would be the most moral system. Because you can’t get us all to agree on what’s moral and what’s ethical. Right. That’s an impossible thing. That’s why the whole AI alignment thing is a joke. We can’t even align humans. How are we going to align AIs? All AI alignment really boils down to his practice is the owner or inventor or creator of that AI wants to put on a leash and tell it what to do.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it’s very easy to be sort of aligned with people when we have a focus only on what we ourselves and what we control and decisions that we make for ourselves. But as soon as I start to, I think it’s morally and ethically necessary to control what you do. Now all of a sudden we have a real disagreement about morals and ethics.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right. There’s incentive alignment which is, you know, I can give you equity in the same business. And then where incentive align, although you may still choose to ignore that incentive and do something different. But really all other forms of alignment tend to boil down to coercion. Right. Maybe we’re aligned because we’re part of the same religion, we’re part of the same tribe, we live in the same household, we’re doing the same business together. But the moment you’re talking about aligning strangers who don’t live next to each other that don’t have kinship, I think the only way you can align them is by clubbing one of them until they pay. You know, listen, that’s just authoritarianism. That’s just force. That’s violence, that’s warfare, which undergirds everything. Like society runs on this thin veneer of civilization. But ultimately underneath, the people with the guns are always in charge. And sometimes they forget it for a decade or two decades at a time. But either they take back over or someone from the outside comes in and takes over. Which is why I think as a society we have too many frivolous laws being passed where people pretend like the law is not being enforced by people with guns. Every law, down to your parking ticket is enforced by somebody with a gun. Because if you don’t pay that parking ticket, then they’re going to summon you to court. And then if you don’t go to court, then they’re going to send somebody to your house. And if you don’t answer that, they’ll put out a warrant for your arrest. And if you don’t turn yourself in, then people with guns will come after you. So at the end of the day, if you just follow that down, it’s amazing how few people seem to realize this, but everything is enforced by people with guns. And then those people with guns, you’re giving them guns and telling them to enforce laws. And of course, it’s human nature, especially as that organization becomes larger, they will start enforcing it preferentially. You know, they’ll enforce it a little bit harder against their enemies and a little bit softer against their friends. It’s like that South American dictator who famously said, you know, for my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law. Right. Because the law is just whatever the biggest gang agrees upon. And as a society, we’ve become very disconnected for that. Especially in modern democracies where people who don’t have any physical power, any stake in the system, are voting to control people who do have physical power. It creates an unstable situation. And we might end up in a situation where, well, I don’t know. This is actually a very interesting question. Do we end up with more city states in the future? Do we end up with more small dictatorships or small kinships of organized people with weapons carving out little fiefdoms? Or do we ossify into a small number of very large states? In my mind, there’s nothing worse than a global government, like a single government running everything because it’s a one size fits all. It’s a panopticon. And it’s much more likely to end up like, you know, China or Russia, kind of control them. Democratic. The truly Democratic republic and even because democracies have a habit of electing dictators, and that’s a one way street.

Eric Jorgenson: I want to see if we can play with some of the David Deutsch ideas in a business and judgment context. Right. If good explanations are hard to vary, are good products hard to vary?

7. Good products are hard to vary, according to complexity theory

Time: 00:28:07 - 00:33:30

Summary: Good products are hard to vary. They have a very unique set of interlocking parts that then allows them to be greater than the whole. To be able to create things, you actually have to constrain things. Once the things are locked together, they’re hard to varied.

Naval Ravikant: Absolutely. Good products are hard to vary. So hard to vary means that you can’t change the details without the thing breaking or falling apart or no being a good explanation. So one of the ways you recognize them is you look back at the explanation and you say, well, how could it have been otherwise? There’s no other thing which would have fit all the facts. It’s like when you put a puzzle piece in the right spot in a puzzle, like, oh, of course it had to be that one, because no other piece will fit if it doesn’t have this piece and this part and this part jutting out in this hole over here. So the same way good products are hard to vary. So if you look at an iPhone, for example, it’s hard to change the characters of the iPhone without breaking what makes it great. And in fact, their original form factor, when they launched, I think it was in 2007, is still quite similar to the form factor today. It hasn’t really changed. Right. They nailed the basic form factor same way with the laptop form factor. Right. It still hasn’t changed back from the original day. So good products are very hard to vary. They do have a very unique set of interlocking parts that then allows them to be greater than the whole. There’s this concept in complexity theory called emergence. And emergence is when you take a whole bunch of different parts and you put them together and something new emerges that you did not expect, a new capability emerges. But one of the interesting parts is that the parts that you put together below, you didn’t give them more freedom, you gave them constraints. You actually locked them together in certain ways. And by constraining the way in which they could operate, some new capability emerged above. So it was the constraints that created the capability above. And so that’s a little counterintuitive, right? Because you would think more freedom leads to more freedom. No, in this case it was constraints. Same way like if you look at a corporation or a contract, a contract is a voluntary constraints that we enter into. To go create something in the future, like a marriage contract is to go create children in a household or like a company is a contract. To go create an equity bearing entity where we agree in advance how we’re going to split up the proceeds and who’s going to do the work and how are you going to get the capital? So. So to be able to create things, you actually have to be able to constrain things. Once the things are locked together, they’re hard to vary. You can’t remove a component, nor can you change a component without the thing falling apart. And that’s why, like, a good product is simple. It actually removes. By simple, it doesn’t mean like inordinately simple. It doesn’t mean like Eli 5 simple necessarily, but it means that you remove the parts that are unnecessary. Elegant. Elegant. It’s elegant, yes. So there was a Antoine de Saint Exupery quote where he says, the airplane wing is perfectly designed, not because there’s nothing left to add, but because there’s nothing left to take away. Right. You can’t take it away. It is platonic. It is a platonic ideal of an airplane wing. It is hard to vary. So a good product is similarly hard to vary. One of the conundrums that people come up with these days is why are all things converging on the same design? Why do all cars look the same? Because we’re doing wind tunnel testing now, and so we know that that’s the most efficient mod. We want efficient. So all the cars now look windswept. It’s hard to vary out of that design unless you’re doing it to be ironic or to stand out, like maybe Elon with a cybertruck where it’s like, I got so much power, I don’t care. But I’ll bet you that thing is wind tunnel tested too. It’s angular and wind tunnel tested as opposed to streamlined and wind tunnel tested. But good products are hard to vary because they also encapsulate knowledge. And as you gain knowledge, you put that into the product. And what technology does is it’s the automation of knowledge. You figure something out and then you figure out how to automate it. And then you figure out how to scale that automation. You figure out how to distribute that scale automation. And that embedded knowledge is hard to vary because underneath that is a good explanation. Once you figure out that, oh yeah, we can. Once you figure out how to make electric cars, once you have the knowledge for batteries, it’s kind of inevitable that most cars will go electric. You may need some off road vehicles or military vehicles around gasoline for survivability reasons and disaster relief reasons. But for the average everyday consumer, they don’t want to drive to the gas station and get smelly oil. That can blow up on them and put it into this Rube Goldberg machine of parts and then have controlled explosions driving pistons while they go down the sea. It’s going to look in 50 years like when you see those images of guys riding steam engines, like the early cars are literally steam engines with boilers and coal. It’s going to look like that. And once you figure out electric cars, then you realize actually we want electric cars. Not only so I have to go to the gas station, they’re less moving parts, it’s easier to repair, repair, it’s less messy, it’s less polluting, but also because if you want to have self driving cars and electric cars, do better. Because it’s much easier for a car to recharge itself than it is for it to refuel itself. And if you have swappable batteries, maybe you can operate 24, seven and very little downtime and it can capitalize better. You can bring the cost down. So because what it says, once you see electric cars working, you realize that that is a hard to vary product for the next generation. And so I think all good products have this characteristic. In a sense, if you’re selling multiple versions of your product, you better have a really good reason for that. Like a really good reason for that.

8. Good products have a surprising reach, right? Good ideas have network effects

Time: 00:33:30 - 00:41:33

Summary: Good products have a surprising reach. There’s no amount of money you can spend to buy a better phone than the latest iPhone. Technology has deeply winner take all network effects. Best product gets to amortize its development over the largest user base.

Eric Jorgenson: Well, that gets to the other one, which is good products have a surprising reach.

Naval Ravikant: Absolutely. The great products, just by good explanations, they can reach to lots of applications that you never thought of. You know, Steve Jobs and crude never sat around with the iPhone or the iPad saying oh, this will be great for Exxon companies doing oil work because there’s a cool app for them for like figuring out their logistics and workflow and tracking. No, they don’t go to that level. Or a more relevant example might be when the iPhone came along. You know, the BlackBerry was entrenched in enterprise and Steve Ballmer, God bless him, you know, made fun of the iPhone for not having a keyboard. Steve Ballmer did lots of things right. So I hate to pick him out. I mean he did very well for Microsoft and for himself. So maybe I won’t call him out as much, but there were people who basically said, well, the BlackBerry is a keyboard and the enterprise will never tolerate a phone without a keyboard. And what they didn’t account for is that there’s so many things solved by not having a keyboard, by having the multi touch and by having a great screen and a software keyboard. And nowadays voice, like nowadays the last thing you want to do is add a keyboard to a phone. It’s all going voice Based thanks to AI that once you’ve built that product, it has reach. And once it reaches into every consumer’s pocket, well, those consumers bring those products to work and they’re like, why am I using a BlackBerry at work and I’m using an iPhone at home? And the iPhone is so much better. And the knowledge is the deutsche definition. Knowledge is the thing that stays persistent in the environment, it replicates itself in the environment. Genes that encode proper knowledge on how to adapt into the environment, they replicate. Those genes get passed down. Genes that are incorrect, that are false, they do not replicate in the environment, they get weeded out of the gene pool. The same is true of ideas. If I give you an idea for how to make money, or if I give you even a general principle, or I give you a specific thing to go out and do and it fails, you are not going to keep that knowledge, you’re not going to spread that knowledge. So knowledge is persistent in the environment. And once you’ve created knowledge, and once the knowledge of multi touch screens was created, then the knowledge of keyboards was obsolete, at least in that context. And the blackberries got replaced by iPhones when people who brought their iPhones in from home and would use them at work instead of using blackberries and the IT guys got outvoted because ultimately they’re there to provide a service to the rest of the company and not to run the company. And then also technology has deeply winner take all network effects. All technology does, it just is more obvious in some cases than others, like something like a Facebook or a WhatsApp has an extremely visible network effect. Apple does too, because they’re developer platforms. But even things like Amazon, which you would have thought would not have a network effect. Back in the day we thought there’d be zillions of e commerce stores involved in a death struggle to the bottom. Turns out it’s not the case. Turns out there’s one huge winner. And just like the Internet does, which is it has one huge winner for everything and then it has a long tail of very small players, but it destroys the middle, it destroys the mediocre middle which was relying on geography or regulations to survive. They get blown away by the mega aggregator and then by a long tail. But all of technology and network effects and has scale economies. So the best product gets to amortize its development over the largest user base. And so it has the most things thought through, it has the most support, it has the most latest bleeding edge technology. Doesn’t matter how rich you are, you can’t buy a better phone. There’s no amount of money you can spend to buy a better phone than the latest iPhone, the latest Android phone. Like that’s it, right? We all have access to the same phone because there is an R and D budget of hundreds of billions of dollars that has gone into the smartphone supply chain and into the current smartphone designs. So if you’re rich, all you can do is you can encrust it with diamonds in a kind of a sad attempt to look special, but you really just look like an idiot. It or it’s like cars, like really expensive cars are not better, they’re just weirder. I don’t think there’s a better car on the planet today than probably the Tesla model Y that’s you know, 2025. Like objectively speaking, if you look at all the things that it does that other cars don’t do, it’s kind of the all around best car. You can’t spend a million dollars to buy a better car. You can just spend a million dollars to buy a goofier car or a weirder car.

Eric Jorgenson: More extreme variables, more extreme.

Naval Ravikant: And you’re just showing yourself as someone who’s goofy and weird and trying to signal for status. And there’s no worse way to signal status than to be shown as trying to buy status. I had this theory that as humans we’re always searching for something perfect and permanent because that’s the opposite of the life that we have, which is an imperfect and impermanent life. And we can search for it in spirituality, the quest for God. We can search for it in science, which is the quest for the grand unified perfect theory of everything. There is analogs in art and beauty in the Sistine Chapel, trying to encapsulate something perfect for a long, long period of time. And so I feel like I personally want to focus on that. And there’s a struggle because you also want to look at new things. The world is always moving and advancing, especially in the domain of things and objects and learning and technology and science. You want to look at the most recent things. You don’t want to learn the science from 30 years ago. You want to learn the science best we know today. And the same about and that has practical value, knowing about AI or self driving cars or robotics or what have you. So it’s always good to know about what’s moving quickly and is on the forefront of knowledge. But at the same time you also want to study the timeless. And that’s human nature. Human nature doesn’t change. So there you want to rely upon the olden people. You know, you want to read Schopenhauer and you want to read the Tao Te Ching and so on, or the Bible, because people don’t change. And so with my tweets, I kind of struggle with, or even with writing as podcasting, thinking time that I spend. What I struggle with is I want to spend a lot of time on the timeless, because that knowledge carries through the rest of my life. But I also want to spend time on the Tang Lee, which is the most modern stuff. Now there I have to look for the modern stuff that’s actually useful. It’s actually the modern stuff about things like I want to know about AI, I want to know about self driving cars, I want to know about robotics, I want to know about. About space travel and space exploration, I want to know about drones, but I don’t want to know what Kim Kardashian’s doing today. That’s useless knowledge. In fact, I don’t even need to know any lessons in human nature from her and her interactions with other people because those lessons have been written down better by Schopenhauer or Kant or someone like that in the past. Right, Plato. So when it comes to philosophy and human nature, that’s timeless material. It’s worth learning. It’s somewhat cliched in the sense that we can get into what cliche is, but it’s somewhat cliched. But at the same time, it’s very important to absorb because these are the deepest guiding principles. Philosophy is kind of the study of how to live a good life. I think Aristotle called that eudaimania or something like that. Probably saying the word wrong, but that’s worth studying. But at the same time, it’s worth studying the ultra modern, most recent stuff. When it comes to the world of science and technology and things, at least for our book, our work, for our writing, I don’t like putting timely things in there. And the trap is timely things that have nothing to do with knowledge of how things work, but rather knowledge of people or just gossip or news. I think a lot of people have said this, Taleb, most recently that to see how worthless the news is, just read yesterday’s newspaper.

Eric Jorgenson: What’s the half life of the information that you’re consuming? How long will it be relevant in the future? Is predominantly based on how long has it been relevant to the past.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, this ties into a little bit with Deutsch’s work, which is, he’ll say, a good explanation. One of the ways you know it’s A good explanation that is reach and reach across space and time. So it applies to lots of things that you didn’t expect. It explains things which you would think were out of its domain or it was. Originally that theory was postulated to explain a local thing, but it almost always ends up explaining a global thing. So for example, in the axial tilt theory of the Earth you might have come up with that to explain why there are seasons. But then the seasons flip when you go to the southern hemisphere and you can’t change that. You can’t take the part of the theory that explains the seasons in the hemisphere, in the northern hemisphere and then throw it out when you get to the southern hemisphere that that theory has deep reach or wide reach. So the best theories are deep and wide. And you know, another, another completely different angle on the same thing is Jed McKenna, he has this. I don’t know if you ever read Jed McKenna but he’s kind of this crazy anonymous enlightened dude, right? And he writes these really funny books starting with Spiritual Enlightenment as the Damnedest thing. And I highly recommend them for people who are not mystical, not spiritual at all, but yet they know something is off, something is missing, something is wrong. It’s not like, you know, I think it was Morpheus. The way he describes the Matrix, he goes, it’s a splinter in your mind, right? Do you feel that Neo? It’s like a splinter in your mind. Yeah. So if, if you feel like there’s a splinter in your mind, Jed McKenna is a good starting point. And he has this proof, quote unquote of the existence of truth or God or what, what have you. And it’s actually, it’s a rework of a very old proof by a monk named Anselm. I don’t know if he realized that, but it’s a rework of an existing proof anyway. It’s not really a proof, it’s not a mathematical proof, but it does rely on this idea that hey, do you believe that truth exists? And if you believe that truth exists then that’s a different universe than one where you believe that there is no truth, right? And if you believe that if truth exists then do you believe that truth can be, be non existent in a certain place or a certain time or it could be temporal and the answer is no. And so if you kind of follow that chain of reasoning, you realize that truth would have to have the widest and deepest reach. Again it would have to be this all encompassing theory. So whether in science, whether in spirituality, whether in technology, I think we’re all just looking for something perfect and permanent. And as humans, we’re always going to be dissatisfied. The human mind will always be dissatisfied until it finds that. And that’s kind of the drive for achievement. And the more accomplished somebody becomes, the more they get to level up and go for something even broader, even deeper, even further. So, you know, Deutsch, for example, isn’t just content with being a mere physicist. He’s also studying what he calls the four deepest theory is computation, theory of evolution by natural selection, and epistemology. Because he’s trying to explain everything in kind of a grand unified theory. And. And every philosophy at its core has to have some appeal to universality, to explaining everything. It’s just kind of human nature. Even the whole current AGI craze, it’s about like, oh, we’re going to invent God. It’s going to explain everything. This is the last technology. I don’t know what it is about humans, but it keeps driving us towards that. Everybody wants a theory of everything. We’re absolutists. Yeah, Marxism is kind of that, you know, it’s kind of like we’re all equal, we’re all the same same, you know, we’re all consciousness, we’re all just one where obviously Marxism has lots of problems. I’m not going to sit here and critique Marxism all day long, although I’d be happy to. But it is also that there’s that universalist intent in there. So in a deep way, this quest for the answer to everything keeps seeping back into every endeavor of our lives. And whether you realize it or not, it’s always like lurking underneath.

9. Every philosophy at its core has to have some appeal to universality

Time: 00:41:34 - 00:45:01

Summary: Every philosophy at its core has to have some appeal to universality, to explaining everything. The best theories are deep and wide. We’re always looking for something perfect and permanent. The human mind will always be dissatisfied until it finds that.

10. You say your earning power has been on a steady increase over time

Time: 00:45:02 - 00:51:10

Summary: The right way to learn is from the specific to the general and not from the general to the specific. Experience is the recipe for building judgment. The process of becoming a king will turn you into a philosopher.

Eric Jorgenson: You said that your sort of earning power is higher than it’s ever been and been on a steady increase over time. I’m curious to sort of break down the components of that. Like, how has that changed? What are the inflection points been, even as you’ve sort of gotten more retired, I guess you would say, like less deliberate.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. To be fair, right now I’m like minimally retired. I’m working hard, I got a new company. Right. In a way, I’m probably putting in as much work as I ever have, but the vast majority of it goes into my new company, which I really care about. Still in stealth mode. But some of it goes into making a few investments here or there, helping out some people that I know in the ecosystem, plus my old companies. But in terms of earning power, some of that comes from stored capital so I can fund my own projects. Some of that comes from reputation. So people will kind of trust me and fund me and so on. But a lot of it just comes through knowledge of knowing what to go after, how to structure a new company, how to get it going, how to recruit good people, recognizing early on like, oh, don’t bother recruiting that person even though they’re good because they’re too high ego, they won’t fit in, or don’t sell too hard because it’ll just come unstuck later. Or go after these kinds of people, you know, you need more technical builders at the beginning and less of the marketers and so on, because otherwise they’re just going to create too many requirements too early, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s just a lot of practical know how, which has been folded into principles. You know, there’s kind of a. There are learning curves to everything. I think it was, it was either Schopenhauer or Seneca. It was one of the two. I think this was Seneca where he basically said. It’s in one of his letters to Lucilius, he said something along the lines of that the right way to learn is from the specific to the general and not from the general to the specific. And what that means is you do things in reality, you encounter reality, you test it, you learn from it, and then you generalize. And then that lets you know when that maxim or that aphorism or that principle or that value system, when it applies and when it does not. Because one of the problems, problems with picking up other people’s values and aphorisms, you don’t know when they apply, when they don’t. So when people say on Twitter, well, you contradicted yourself, it’s like, well, using that word a different way, it doesn’t apply in this case. It’s not. Even though I don’t use a lot of adjectives, what I mean is, in most cases, in the way that I’m thinking about it, this applies. And in other cases, the way I’m thinking about it, this other thing applies. And I’m just giving myself a heuristic which is not to be blindly followed. And these people are looking for math proofs. Yeah, right.

Eric Jorgenson: You came in with the frame of the specific when you created the job general.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right. I created the general to help me navigate future specifics. But each situation is specific, you know, so it has. It may have multiple general things applied to it that compete and one of them overrides or multiple of them override. So that’s how you go from the specific to the general. But the opposite is when you go to academia, you know, you study too many things in school, you learn all these grand theories and then out in the field you’re spouting theories, but you don’t know which one applies where and when, or you’ve just learned the wrong theory for the current thing. And that’s when you kind of end up as what Nassim Taleb says, an iyi, an intellectual, yet idiot. And it’s basically someone who’s over educated and under practiced.

Eric Jorgenson: So is the recipe for building judgment then the combination of these heuristics, these maxims, these ideas and the experience to plug in, that sort of lights them up.

Naval Ravikant: Experience first you gotta do first. Another televism is if you want to be a philosopher king, first be a king, right? First become a king. That’s the harder one. And that’s the one that’ll make you. The process of becoming a king will turn you into a philosopher automatically. The process of becoming a philosopher will take you further from being a king. And you won’t be a very useful philosopher either, by the way. No hard and fast rules. There are people who didn’t do a lot, practically speaking, that were incredible philosophers, but they’re very, very, very rare. But yeah, I mean, you want to be in the arena. Like you know, for example, Elon, I know you’re working a book about him and he has general principles, but those principles come from doing things. He knows the value, for example, of speed, right? Elon is famous for how fast he does things and he gets to cycle time and things down. And that is the core principle for him. And he has a lot of detailed implementations of what that means practically about, okay, engineers get to set their own requirements. You always unblock everything. You don’t hide behind email. He has all kinds of, I’m sure many, many heuristics in his head that derive from that big principle. But if I just sat around academia and somebody told me, yes, speed is everything, go at speed. I’d just be kind of idiotic about it. I’d just be running around hyperventilating all the time. I wouldn’t know how to apply it it. So again, life is lived in the arena. You have to do the things to learn the things. It’s a mistake to just learn and not do. When I was a kid, I was a big fan of reading and I used to read a lot. I mean, I read hundreds, maybe thousands of books. I’ve lost count. And most books, like, I pick the books and I’LL read them and I’ll be like, oh, shit, I read this book 10 years ago. I just forgot about it. And I’m like, two thirds of the way the book. Because the foreigner. Because I have a terrible memory for things that are. That don’t really stick with me or things that are. Are incredibly useful. And I used to be proud of that fact. And now I realize actually most of my reading was worthless. You know, it was all academic book knowledge. A lot of it was just fiction. And these days I read less, but I read very deliberately. I read because I’m really interested in something and I’m trying to learn something or I’m trying to figure something out. And I’ll read small amounts and then I’ll think a lot. So I’ll use that reading as more of a way to spark my own thinking rather than. And just kind of taking in things from other people and then regurgitating them back later. Like, a lot of Taleb doesn’t stick with me. Like, for example, his antifragile thing doesn’t really stick with me because I can’t find that many actual examples in my life where I can apply true antifragility. Because true antifragility is not just resilience. It’s that you actually get stronger through adversity. And yes, I can see some cases of that, like hermetic effects when you’re weightlifting. But there are a lot of cases where I don’t find a practical application of antifragility. But I get why Taleb does it. His entire investing strategy is antifragile. As the system collapses, he makes more. Or it’s just volatility in the system, he makes more. But I don’t find as many examples. So the concept of antifragility doesn’t stick with me. And even though I know that’s the book that most people think has had the biggest impact on them and he values it the most, it doesn’t work for me. So I don’t read that book. But I’m always rereading Skin of the Game because that one has a lot of nuggets that I can apply that I can say, oh, that’s the generalization of something that I had noticed in my specific life. So the minority rule is a good example that keeps seeing the minority rules show up everywhere. So you do need the practical applications in your life. You have to do so. Even to the extent today that I want to become smarter and wiser, that means I have to work.

11. Judgment comes through experience and reflection, right? So taste improves your judgment

Time: 00:51:11 - 00:55:17

Summary: In this age of infinite leverage, judgment is the most important thing. Judgment comes through experience and reflection. There comes a point when your judgment is so good that you can’t even articulate it. And that’s when it’s called taste.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I was going to Say you’re continuously injecting experience and principle, correct?

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. You start with experience, you start with specific knowledge, then that specific knowledge turns into more generalized knowledge. Then you can take that and turn it into values which are, you know, do, or you tie it into your existing values. It improves your judgment. And I think ultimately, in this age of infinite leverage, judgment is the most important thing. Like if you knew where to navigate, you know, people will pay you for that. The captain of a ship is chosen based on his ability to get the team together and tell them where we’re going, inspire them to go there. So, but where to go is the most important part. If you have two candidates for CEO of Apple, right? Most valuable company in the world currently, maybe it’s Nvidia, but whatever. You have two candidates for the CEO of the company and one is right 80% of the time and one is right 85% of the time. And the company’s worth trillions of dollars. Who are you going to put in charge? You’ll pay that guy 85% of the time a lot more. Like you’ll pay him billions of dollars more per year because he’s steering a multi trillion dollar ship and the direction matters more than any other single thing. And then finally, I would say that judgment, judgment is really important. Judgment comes through experience and reflection. So you experience things, you have honest reflection about those things, and you build your judgment and then at some point your judgment becomes so good that you cannot even explain it or artic. So there’s a point early on where you don’t know what to do and you have to rationally think through what to do and you take feedback. Eventually you get so good at making the decisions that you don’t go to other people. Yes, you can get a little bit of feedback to inform your judgment, but you know that you are in the best position to make up your mind. So you exercise the judgment and you can articulate to other people, why did I do that? But there comes a point where your judgment is so good that you can’t even articulate. And that’s when it’s called taste. When you’re just like, it doesn’t feel right to me. Right. This is just the way we should do it. This is the way I want to do it. Right. But at that point it’s taste. And people who have gotten to that point, like the Rick Rubins of the world, where they have really good taste with the Steve Jobs of the world, I think those are the people who are the most creative and create the greatest works of art and business because they have really good taste. I think I would guess that Musk, for example, on SpaceX, he has taste and there are a few key engineers around him who have taste. If you look at the leading AI labs and you kind of see the tweet threads from some of the researchers there, when they care to talk about how they’re choosing which experiments to run and which ones not to run, it boils down to taste. They have taste about like, I’m going to throw thousands of GPUs at this for hundreds of hours and spend lots of money and probably wind up in nothing. But my intuition, my taste tells me. My developed intuition, which is my taste tells me me whether to try it out or not.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you had a tweet. It takes time to develop your gut, but once it’s developed, don’t listen to anything else.

Naval Ravikant: Exactly. Yeah. And this is just another way of saying taste. It’s your gut feel and it can be around people. You know, older people have very good judgment about other people because the one thing that we are always all gaining experience is in human interaction. No matter what we’re doing, we’re interacting with other people. So we’re building up experience about who to work with and who to trust and who not to trust and who not to work with. And that ends up your gut feeling feel. And so as you get older, you gotta trust your gut feel.

12. Is your investing now primarily feel like taste? Yes. Almost entirely. It’s not just taste on the company

Time: 00:55:17 - 00:57:00

Summary: Is your investing now primarily feel like taste? Yes. It’s not just taste on the company, it’s an understanding of my own tastes. Do I want to be associated with this way of making money? Probably not. There are other ways to make money.

Eric Jorgenson: Is your investing now primarily feel like taste?

Naval Ravikant: Yes. Yeah, almost entirely. I hate articulating it and a lot of times, you know, I’ll pass on things now. It’s not just taste on the company, it’s an understanding of my own tastes in the sense of what I like and what I don’t. So there’s a lot of companies now that I don’t invest in where I will pass up on the investment because was I don’t want to take a walk with the founder, I didn’t learn anything, or I am just genuinely not interested in the category. I’m not curious about it. I’m not going to stay up late reading about it or thinking about it. So it’s going to feel like a chore. Or it could just be like, you know, I’ve got one short life on this earth. Do I want to be associated with this way of making money? Probably not. There are other ways to make money. So obviously that’s a post wealth problem or post wealth taste. So it’s not just taste about the business, it’s also an understanding of what it is That I value, how I want to spend my time, what I want my legacy to look like, what am I going to be proud of? What am I going to learn from? And again, this is back to an effort to being lazy. And lazy means not working, and not working means not doing things you don’t want to do. If you want to do it, it’s not work. So an ideal life would be where everything I am doing and everything that I am associated, everyone that I’m associated with is something that I would do anyway, almost for free, and being with people that I really enjoy being around and learning from them. So for me, that’s people who are very capable, they do things, they’re very low ego, so you have to deal with all the nonsense that comes with that. They’re very intelligent, and so you’re always learning from, from them.

13. A lot of breakthroughs happen when you’re deeply into a problem

Time: 00:57:02 - 01:03:40

Summary: What you do and who you do with are more important than how hard you work. When you’re working super hard, when you’re really intensely into something, that’s when you actually make the biggest breakthroughs.

Eric Jorgenson: Is it actually ideal to be paid purely for your judgment? That’s a thing you’ve talked about. But as we’re like, talking through this, it’s like it’s very hard to extricate your labor from your judgment, at least at some ratio, right?

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, that’s right. You know, this is why another tweet I had, they do contradict each other. If you want to talk math, where it’s like, you know, what you do and who you do it with is more important than how hard you work. Right, Sorry. It started work as hard as you can. But you know, what you do and who you do with are more important than how hard you work. But you still have to work as hard as you can. So it shouldn’t feel like work. You know, this goes back to like, it should feel like play to you, but look like work to others. That’s really what you want to be doing, and that’s idealized. You’re not going to be able to do that, you know, the full time. You know, it’s obviously not just hard work. Like, how many companies is Elon running? Right, the corner. The guy running the corner grocery store puts more hours in the grocery store than Elon puts into any one of his companies. So it’s not just purely about hard work. That said, you don’t get to be someone with great judgment and great connections and great capabilities without working hard. And you will not build up your knowledge fast enough. When you’re working super hard, when you’re really intensely into something, that’s when you actually make the biggest breakthroughs. So I remember back in college, I had this computer science project where we had to write a compiler and a Compiler is a difficult thing to write. A compiler takes a high level programming language and breaks it down to lower and lower level programming languages until finally it goes into a set of instructions that the computer can understand. And writing compilers up there in cs, it’s like, you know, other things in that level might be like writing an operating system, right? A simple operating system. So it’s no joke. And I just remember when I would go in the computer lab, it would take me hours and hours and hours just to load the problem into my head, to go through my own code from the previous few days, to kind of come back to speed. Like, okay, this is what I meant over here and this is the part where I’m stuck on, and this part over here is janky and this is a patch and this thing works over here and it’s beautiful, but it would just literally take me hours just to get back into it if I’d been out of it for a little while. And so then I found that the most productive sessions that I had in front of that computer writing that compiler were 24 to 36 hour sessions where I wouldn’t sleep. So I would just be up for 36 hours drinking coca Colas and just kind of coding or just thinking and walking and coding and thinking and walking. And then when I finally fell asleep, the problem would fall out of my head, head. And then it would take me a few days to recover and then I would have to reload the whole problem back into my head. Now that’s an exaggerated kind of example. But I think in general, a lot of times, a lot of breakthroughs happen when you’re deeply into a problem. It just takes hard work and time. Like even with my co founder of my new company, who is just an amazing guy, he’s brilliant, just one of the smartest human beings I’ve ever met. Super low ego, very pleasant and very hardworking. If he’s awake, he’s working. He’s probably working right now while I’m goofing off recording this with you. You know, I’ve even noticed with him, like we talk every day, we have deep conversations, we catch up a lot. And it’ll be an hour into the conversation when I’m already ready to hang up and give up. And we’ve already covered all the topics and we’re just circling and shooting the shit, that the big breakthrough will come, the big insight will come. We’re like, ah, but also this. Oh yes, and now it all connects together. It just takes time for your brain to percolate through a problem. And so the more time you devote to a given problem, you know, the more likely you are to have a break through. It’s like if you’re trying to solve a really hard problem. One technique that I have is I want to load it into my background subconscious. I want my intuition working on it so I can have that shower breakthrough 48 hours later. And you can’t put that on a schedule, you can’t time that. So what you have to do is you have to so intensely focus on the problem that your whole mind absorbs it. And even your subconscious figures out, okay, this is important, you’re dreaming about it. And then on some unknown timescale, you’ll have some insight or some creativity, but you’re not going to have that unless you did the hard work of working through all of it manually with your foreground, with your neocortex early on. So I do think hard work is important. You can’t give it up. But if it feels like work, if you’re forcing yourself to go through the motions, then you’re going to lose because somebody who doesn’t feel like it’s work is competing with you and for them it’s entertaining or fun or at least fulfilling.

Eric Jorgenson: So that good judgment comes from a combination of like spending so much time on the explicit knowledge that it becomes sort of implicit.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right, yeah. You spend time on the explicit and then it becomes implicit. And then there’s a phase where it’s still, it’s implicit, but you can still articulate it. And, you know, this is an analogy, this is not strictly correct, but I would say there’s a point where you have to reason through it every time using logic. And that’s basic decision making, making. And there’s a part where your subconscious can kind of enter into it. And then I would say, like now you judgment and developing taste. And then I think there’s a point where your whole body reacts to it. Right. Because there is wisdom in the body, there’s knowledge in the body, and at that point it’s just taste. And then you’re done with that thing. I mean, you’re not done, obviously, it’s always going to improve. But now you’re, you’re top of the craft.

Eric Jorgenson: John Cleese, the guy from Monty Python, had a great quote about this that stuck with me, which is you simply have to let your mind rest against the problem in a friendly, persistent way.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right. That’s actually really well put. Yeah, he’s right. Your Mind has to be involved and you have to focus on it, but it has to rest against the problem because you’re pushing on it, but in a way you’re not going to give up and. Yeah. Was it in a friendly, friendly, persistent way? Friendly and persistent, yeah. You can’t give up and friendly, so you don’t give up. Exactly. He’s right.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Him and Ogilvy have these really interesting ways of sort of activating their subconscious around. Around problem solving.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. Everyone who I think is deeply creative, both works really, really hard, but yet knows that it has to be enjoyable, otherwise you’ll never get there. There was a line by a painter, I think, Pablo, something like that. I don’t remember the name, but the line was good. And he said, you know, for 10 years I’ve painted seven days a week, 16 hours a day, and now they call me a genius. Yes.

Eric Jorgenson: Does AI have judgment?

Naval Ravikant: No, I don’t think so. I wouldn’t count on AI to exercise judgment. What AI has is AI has incredible information retrieval capability. So it can cross correlate all human knowledge, and if humans have figured out before, it can give you the conventional correct answer, which is going to be correct in most cases for solved problems. Problems. So if you’re trying to figure out what is the law on a specific point, it can read all the legal texts and tell you what the current interpretation of the law is according to all the conventional wisdom. But if you’re looking to do something creative or something brand new that no one has yet figured out, or you’re dealing with a highly complex problem with a very specific situation, have the AI make that judgment call for you. So I don’t think of the AI necessarily as having judgment, but I think of it as like the ultimate leverage information retrieval tool. Also, humans have values. They have points of view, they have binding principles, they have things that undergird the foundation of what they believe to be true and what they believe to not be true. And this is idiosyncratic to the person. It’s adapted to the environment they’re in. The AI is taking a one size fits all approach, according to what’s either in textbooks or conventional literature or what the data labelers who are labeling the data into. AI thought of it. I think AI just looks like magic to people because it’s very hard to wrap into your mind what these incredibly huge data sets operating in all these highly mathematical dimensions are capable of. I mean, the amount of information they can retrieve and cross correlate is just astounding. It’s like if you ran a Google search every time and you read all top thousand results very carefully and then you cross correlated them and you really stitched them together and you would make a few mistakes along the way, just like the AI does. But that level of research combined with, I do think it has some tremendous calculation abilities because it can write programs and it figures out some algorithms below the level of human creativity, but above a mere calculation. That or. So I think the AIs are incredible shortcuts, but they’re shortcuts to giving you answers to solve problems where you don’t need a perfect answer. So one quip I heard was AI is great when wrong answers are okay, you’re not going to die because the answer is wrong. You’re not going to lose a lot of money because the answer is wrong. But for anything creative or requiring judgment at the edge, which is what you can really get paid for, you get paid for creativity. So the AI lifts the boat for everybody. If you have an AI, everybody’s an AI AI, you get the AI answer, everybody gets the AI answer. There’s no alpha, there’s no edge anymore. So in that sense, the AI raises the tide. And right now you get an edge because most people aren’t using AI or aren’t using it for a lot or they don’t know how to use it well enough for bleeding edge problems. So again, like any piece of technology, if you’re early adopter, if you leverage it well, you’re going to do extremely well. So this was my quip on Twitter, that, that it’s not that AI is going to replace software engineers, that AI is going to let software engineers replace everybody else. And I stand by that. Because software engineers, not because they’re writing software, because software engineers are always using the latest tools. They’re just structured, logical systems thinkers who are trying to build a system to solve a specific problem. And now thanks to AI, they can solve more and more problems. They can make cars drive themselves, they can make robots walk around, they can make expert systems or AI systems that will make certain levels of decisions without humans having to be in the loop. And that just gives software engineers amazing leverage. So all the people saying that programming is dead, go learn art or the trades, they’re idiots. They’re just completely wrong. And software engineers are getting richer and more powerful than ever. And the most recent proof that just popped up with mark Zuckerberg paying $100 million packages to recruit individual machine learning engineers, because the most leveraged engineers are the ones who are Building these AI systems. And then the ones below them are the ones who are using these AI systems. And then even below them is everybody’s affected by these engineers using these AI systems.

14. I think AI is the ultimate leverage information retrieval tool

Time: 01:03:41 - 01:10:44

Summary: I think of the AI as like the ultimate leverage information retrieval tool. For anything creative or requiring judgment at the edge, you get paid for creativity. If you’re early adopter, if you leverage it well, you’re going to do extremely well.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you had talked before about like the, the robot revolution is already here. It’s just packed into data centers. And that was 10 years ago.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right, yeah. The robot revolution has been here for a long time. There’s trillions of robots on the planet, but they’re just packed into data centers. They don’t need legs and arms, they’re just computing.

Eric Jorgenson: But now there’s AI and AI agents and I imagine, you know, the leverage that somebody who’s fluent with those tools can get is orders of magnitude.

Naval Ravikant: It’s massive. I mean, now you can program them speaking natural languages, now they can access natural langu databases. Now you can program them just by pouring in huge amounts of data, not even having to program them. They program themselves that they program for you. But it still helps to be a structured thinker. Like my most useful classes when I was doing computer science and physics were actually things on. I love my courses on computer hardware, on computer networking, on statistics, on a lot of the deeper physics. And not because I got to use those directly, but because it just helped me with concepts, it just helped me think in certain ways. So even if you aren’t writing networking code, knowing how the computer is doing, networking underneath is incredibly useful because then, you know, it’s possible. Steve Jobs and his team, their genius that allowed them to assemble things like the iPhone was because they understood at a very deep level what was possible, what was technologically possible, what was in the bleeding edge, what was barely possible, what was almost impossible and what was actually impossible. So they knew the lines between those different things. And they knew it in terms of the material science, they knew it in terms of manufacturing, they knew it in supply chains and deliverability, they knew it in costing, they knew it in computer programming, they knew it in hardware, they knew it in the electrical engineering, they knew it in battery requirements, they knew it in space requirements, they knew it in bandwidth requirements. They had people who understood all these different pieces and could make the trade offs to assemble this perfect jewel like little smartphone that all of a sudden was a true personal computer in your pocket. And that’s what made the IPH great. I would argue the greatest product of the modern age is still the iPhone. I mean all what they mentioned doing AI, but if you just look at like the one device that every human craves and would not give up right now at Least this moment in time, in 2025, if you went to people and said, you can have one of anything you want, but if you don’t take that thing, you can’t have it at all, they would all take the iPhone. And the last product before that, that I think inspired that same level of desire was probably the macro book and before that it was a Macintosh. So kudos to Apple. But they were the best product builders on the planet because they understood all the hard trade offs deep down at the detailed technical levels. Even if you’d given Jobs and his team in AI to do all the vibe coding, you know, and all the vibe design, they could not have built that good of a product without knowing deep down what is the abstraction that the AI was hiding. Where was it making mistakes? What did it not understand? And how do all the pieces fit together because they were truly creating something new. And if you’re creating something new, you still need to understand everything down to the deep, deep detail levels. It’s just the AI, at least as currently structured in 2025, these modern AIs, they will take the drudgery out of it for you. If it’s been done before then with a small hallucination rate, they can probably do it for you today. And they’re getting better and better. So eventually all the stuff that’s been done before, you can have them do. But that’s okay. Hey, you can’t get paid in any meaningful way for things that have already been done before, nor should you want to be. It’s incredibly boring. One of the things that, you know, a good entrepreneur will tell you is they hate it when they’re doing the same thing day in, day out. That shows that there’s a failure of automation, a failure of imagination. So good entrepreneurs automate things. And that’s why, by the way, there’s no entrepreneur I’ve met who says, oh, AI is a bad thing to an entrepreneur. It’s a tool, it’s an opportunity. Entrepreneurs are not scared of AIs replacing them, right? No entrepreneur is going to be replaced by an AI. They might be replaced by another entrepreneur who uses AI better. And they need to get good with AI, just like they need to get good with any tool. Entrepreneurs are not afraid of AI replacing them any more than they were afraid of MacBooks replacing them, or AirPods replacing them, or self driving cars replacing them. It’s just another opportunity. So I mean, my vision and belief and hope is that every human being wants to be creative, every human being wants to control their own destiny. Every human being wants to make new things. Every human being wants to be engaged and challenged. And maybe it’s too late for some people because they’ve given up cynically, but I think certainly every child does. Every child starts out super creative. Every child starts out just wanting to alter their reality around them and to do new and delightful things. No child wants drudgery. No child has given up hope on day one. So I do think that newer generations will take advantage of these things.

15. No entrepreneur is going to be replaced by an AI, right?

Time: 01:10:44 - 01:12:42

Summary: There’s no entrepreneur I’ve met who says, oh, AI is a bad thing to an entrepreneur. It’s a tool, it’s an opportunity. Entrepreneurs are not afraid of AI replacing them any more than they were afraid of MacBooks replacing them. I hope one day there are 7 billion companies.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think, you know, it’s tempting for some people to see entrepreneur as a fixed class of people rather than something that everyone could aspire to be. And you said before, I, you know, there are 7 billion people on the planet. I hope one day there are 7 billion companies. And I feel like a lot of the tools and structure were moving in that direction. It’s a good thing, happiness. I really like the frame of it being a highly personal skill that can be learned, like fitness or nutrition or as you. We talked about wealth, and that really seems like a very common thread of your ideas, like the combination of. Of foundational principles and personal application.

16. Happiness is a construct of the mind, and unhappiness is just a thought

Time: 01:12:42 - 01:17:57

Summary: Happiness is a construct of the mind. The self is itself, is just a thought. There’s no happiness outside in the world. And that outside world can’t make you more unhappy than you let it.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, I mean, happiness is. It’s one of those words that just means different things to different people. Some people say, I don’t want to be happy. Other people will say, what do you mean? I’m naturally unhappy? Or I’m naturally not happy. Everyone has an excuse or a reason or interpretation. It’s such a personal topic. It’s very hard for me to talk about. I mean, my latest thinking on it is like, there’s no such thing as happiness. Right. And so I can give you 20 contradictory statements on it. Each one of them, you know, either you’ll disagree misses a cliche or absurdity, or it’ll make you think. Hopefully it’ll make you think. But my latest thinking on it is like, I don’t really care about happiness, and I’m not even sure it really exists. You know, happiness is a construct of the mind. It’s an idea, and it’s a. You have thoughts that say, oh, I’m happy now. And then when those thoughts are gone, what’s going on? Are you unhappy or are you happy? There’s. There’s nothing there. Right. This is the old Buddhist thing of, like, no self. Right. When you have a thought, that thought comes in. That thought claims to be the self. That thought emerges from somewhere from an entity that we call the self that is very, very poorly defined. And when you look for it carefully, it’s very hard to make out what the Heck, that thing is. So in that sense, happiness is just like the self. The self is itself, is just a thought. So happiness is just a thought, and unhappiness is just a thought. And so you can have happy thoughts or you can have unhappy thoughts. And there’s certain behaviors and mindsets that will lead towards more happy thought thoughts. And there are certain behaviors and mindsets that will lead to more unhappy thoughts. However, if you identify with the thought, if you’re like, I am that thought, it’s me having that thought, then at that moment, you’ve created a me that is happy while you’re having that thought. And then when that thought disappears, there’s no me there anymore, and there’s no thought, and there’s no happy. And then when the unhappy thought is there and you identify with it, then you’ve created a thought that I’m unhappy, and I’m having unhappy thought, and that’s me, me, and I’m happy. And then when that thought disappears, there’s no one there, and there’s no thought, and there’s no unhappiness. And then that whole construct is created through thoughts that are kind of coming and going in your mind. And I even hesitate to say mind, because, like, where is this mind when you’re not having a thought of the mind? Right? It’s like everything that we talk about here. This topic exists at the level of thought. But if you are not strongly into those thoughts or identify with those thoughts, then you’re not gonna have a concept of happy or unhappy. And there’s certainly no happiness outside in the world. Both in very different meanings. One meaning is there’s no happiness outside in the world. Because this is a mental construct you have internally. And so you can reinterpret your past, you can reinterpret your situation to often change those things or your habits. But the second is that there’s no happiness in the outside world. And that the outside world is incredibly impermanent and it’s out of your control. So there are all these reasons to be unhappy for the outside, outside world. The same way there’s no unhappiness in the outside world, too. You’re making that up in your mind because it’s not going the way you want it to. And the world itself doesn’t care. And that outside world can’t make you any more unhappy than you let it. Now, there are obvious exceptions to this. Like if you’re in physical pain, your body’s unhappy, that will make your mind unhappy. That will make you strongly Identify with the pain and you will be unhappy. Right? That’s why, in fact, you could argue that the whole mind construct exists, exists. It’s to feel that thing, to respond to pain. One definition of love, of pain, is that pain demands a response. Pain is the thing. It’s like, pay attention to me right now, Drop what you’re doing, stop daydreaming, pay attention to me right now. And emotional pain is a variation on that. But so happiness and unhappiness, these are very personal concepts, I would say. My new thinking on this, my latest thinking, subject to change. I am not an enlightened being. I’m not a perpetually happy person. So it’s literally just one person’s personal exploration. My latest thinking on this is that I don’t necessarily want happiness. I kind of want just, you know, the Zen thing of being okay with things the way they are. And I think it helps to be in that state when my desires are few and consciously change. Chosen when I am doing things for non selfish reasons. And that is selfish in a way. Like if I do things that are larger than myself, then I will be more okay with whatever the ultimate outcome is. Like for example, if I’m genuinely trying to make the world a better place, I’m not saying I am, but say I was Mother Teresa or some equivalent and I was genuinely trying to make the world a better place. I wouldn’t take it personally if the world wouldn’t let me make it a better place. Right? Because it’s not a personal mission. The same way when, like someone’s doing it for God or someone’s doing it for their children in a selfless way, it actually hurts less when, you know, things don’t work out exactly the way that you want them to. So having higher motives is helpful that way. You know, depressed people are ruminating upon themselves. They’re really thinking about themselves. So not thinking about yourself is, you know, is helpful. You know, my simple tweet on this was, the more you think about yourself, the less happy you’re going to be. It’s that simple. So I’m more interested in peace now. Do I want peace all the time? I don’t know. It seems kind of boring. There’s one argument that boredom, this is a Schopenhauer argument, that boredom reveals the emptiness of existence. Because when you’re not doing anything, when you’re satisfied for one brief moment, all your desires are fulfilled, you’re kind of just sitting around. What happens? Boredom shows up immediately. Why? Because existence itself is somewhat empty and so then you want to go and do something else. This is the pessimistic viewpoint. The optimistic viewpoint is actually that’s the mind. Your mind is addicted to pleasure and so it wants to jump up and go do something pleasurable because that’s what it’s used to. What may help to realize that all problems are mind created for good reason. I’m not saying the mind is a bad thing. It’s there to protect your, your body. But we have a way of taking on problems that don’t affect us. Politics is a good example, you know, wars halfway around the world, or political parties or so on. And your, your mind just picks up problems and desires that are just not important. And so yeah, if you’re Buddha, you can live in no mind, but if you’re a normal person, you can, at least a rational person can find some level of peace by cultivating strategic indifference to things that are outside of their immediate control. Right. I’ve said this better in the past, but I’m, I’m caveating it a little bit now because I’m, I’m actually reconstructing on the fly rather than quoting because I think you just have to catch yourself, right? The, the purpose of meditation is not to get you enlightened. It’s not going to do that. It’s not even necessarily to make you happier immediately or to solve a problem or to calm you down. The purpose of meditation is just to become self observed. And when you’re self observant and more self aware, you catch your mind doing things that are not in your long term best interests. And then you can reset it or you can stop and say, is this true? Is this something I really want to go through? Is this really important desire? Is this something that I need to suffer over? What’s easier? Reinterpreting this or actually dealing with the underlying problem? Because we’re always just picking up things to do. So anyway, you know, if I just wanted to be quote, unquote happy, right? Again, I’m not sure there’s such a thing. Like if I wanted to be peaceful, then I would just do nothing, but I would get bored now. Is that a problem? Yeah, I think that’s a problem. I don’t want to be bored now. Could I rise above the level of the mind and be like a Zen monk? Maybe. But I also kind of like life, you know, I like having certain gifts, I like self actualizing, I like doing things. But um, you know, let’s say that the Buddhists are right, you know, and I am Brahman, then why don’t I just stay Brahman? Why’d I come here? Right. It’s the age old question, why am I here? Right. And I think the only practical answer to why am I here is to do what I do. And so if I just do what I do without overthinking it, then it’s naturally gonna lead me to a place of happiness. This is back to row, row, row your boat, right? It’s gently down the stream. As long as I keep rowing and I’m going gently, I’m kind of playing the game I’m into play. Yeah.

17. Boredom reveals the emptiness of existence, according to Schopenhauer

Time: 01:17:57 - 01:18:47

Summary: The more you think about yourself, the less happy you’re going to be. Boredom shows up immediately. Why? Because existence itself is somewhat empty and so then you want to go and do something else. The optimistic viewpoint is actually that’s the mind.

18. All problems are mind created for good reason, right?

Time: 01:18:47 - 01:21:14

Summary: What may help to realize that all problems are mind created for good reason. The purpose of meditation is not to get you enlightened. It’s not even necessarily to make you happier immediately. The only practical answer to why am I here is to do what I do.

19. Brian Johnson’s book explores the tension between wealth and happiness

Time: 01:21:14 - 01:25:16

Summary: I think one of the things that is really seemed to resonate with people about this book is the combination of principles about wealth and happiness. I think I got more peaceful before I’d made a bunch of money. It depends whether you’re having fun wrestling with those questions or whether you find them torturous.

Eric Jorgenson: I think one of the things that is really seemed to resonate with people about this book is the combination of principles about wealth and happiness. Like so many people talk about one or the other, but never the tension, the contrast between the two. And I think what a lot of people sort of look to you for and whether you consider yourself a good example of this or not, I’ll be curious to hear is someone who’s engaged but peacefully.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, I’m not sure I’m completely peaceful, but definitely more peaceful than I used to be. I’m not as peaceful as a Zen monk, but I’m probably way more peaceful than your average nervous founder. Some of it is a. It helps to have money, I’m not going to lie about it, right. But I think I got more peaceful before I’d made a bunch of money and it was because I was actually in a very high stress period and I just had to figure out how to deal with it. And I read some books, you know, Christian, Morty and Osho and you know, yeah, I did some psychedelics, you know, like everybody else in the Bay Area, but not in a way where, you know, I think some people, they do, they go to Burning man, they do their psychedelics and they live for psychedelics. No, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a message. You get the message, you hang up the phone and then I did a lot of meditation, I did a lot of reading, I did a lot of thinking, I did a lot of introspection and I can’t point to any single silver bullet, but all of it helped. It helps me be Zen and peaceful while I go about the thing, you know, not be miserable again. I kind of want the lazy man solution to everything. So I want the lazy man solution to enlightenment. I want the lazy man solution to wealth. I want the lazy man solution to art and creativity. And by lazy, I mean working on something that doesn’t feel like work to me, right? So thinking doesn’t feel like work to me. Thinking on the big questions, like, it would be more work to not think about them than to think about them. Right. If I’m pacing around late at night and it’s midnight, I’m by myself, I will naturally start just pondering, wondering, like, what is this all about? You know, how could you not be curious about your existence? Right? And I think we all just gave up. We’re just like, oh, yeah, okay. There was a point where I was curious about my existence. I got over that when I was a certain age. And now I’m just a monkey that’s gonna do a bunch of things and then die.

Eric Jorgenson: I suppose it has fun. It depends whether you’re having fun wrestling with those questions or whether you find them torturous.

Naval Ravikant: I think they’re inevitable. I think everybody wrestles with them. It’s just not popular to acknowledge it. I think by the contribution that I made to Twitt was not by doing something unique, but by being one of the first to do it. You know? Now there’s a lot of accounts that frankly say the same things or different things in very interesting ways. I was just early in doing that. And I think people, we draw boundaries in life, right? One of the reasons why Steve Jobs was, to me, the apotheosis of entrepreneurship was because he was not just a business person, but he was also an artist. And, you know, he did LSD and talked about it, and he did his meditation. He almost became a monk, and he was a Zen Buddhist. So he also tried to solve everything in life, all the big questions. And, you know, I thought it through and kind of what I came back to is I had a recent tweet on this. I actually forget the exact wording of this tweet, but I know the principles, which is what’s important. The principles are, first, you have to stay healthy. You’re born healthy, you don’t finish healthy. And so the longer you can drag that out, the better. Right? So that’s why we’re inspired by people like Brian Johnson or, you know, whoever’s your fitness guru is or health guru is. You gotta stay healthy. That’s the baseline. Then you want to get wealthy. You’d be lying if you said you don’t want to be wealthy. Everyone wants at least some level of wealth, right? Maybe not. Okay, yeah. If you’re virtue signaling, socialism, maybe you don’t want it. Or if you’re, you know, don’t want to be too high above your peers, you don’t want it, but you want some level of comfort and wealth. Yeah. You don’t have to worry about money.

Eric Jorgenson: Nobody wants less wealth. They don’t want to go backward.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right. And, you know, what’s the old line? You know, money doesn’t solve all your problems, but it solves all your money problems. So you want to solve all your money problems, and then what remains? Right. Well, every time I go around in circles on it, I’ve come back to just three things that I’m interested in. And that is. And it’s gonna sound cliche, but I’ll dive into them. It’s truth, love and beauty. And truth is just. I want to know all the things that are true, and I want to eliminate all the things that are false, and I want to know all the things that are true on a spiritual level, on a philosophical level, on a scientific level, on a technological level, on a human nature level. Truth is permanent. Truth is, you know, the closest thing to perfect truth has wide reach. Truth will make my life better, even if it makes my life worse. I want to know the truth. It’s very unique in that way. Truth and love are two things where even if it makes your life worse, you would still take them. Like being in, you know, love, loving your kids, even if it makes your life worse but makes them better off. You want to love your kids because it feels good to be in love. It feels fulfilling. And truth, even if the truth makes your life work, if it turns out that, yeah, we are all Matrix brains in a vat, you know, you still want to know that. It’s like, in fact, in the movie the Matrix, you know, Keanu Reeves character, Neo, he breaks out of the Matrix, and Zion is worse than the Matrix. It’s a shitty existence, a real city. And there’s another guy. I forget the name.

20. Truth and love are two things where even if it makes your life worse

Time: 01:25:16 - 01:26:52

Summary: “Truth is permanent. Truth will make my life better, even if it makes my life worse. In everything that I do, in little things and big things, I want to know the truth, " he says.

Eric Jorgenson: Cypher.

Naval Ravikant: What’s that?

Eric Jorgenson: Cipher.

Naval Ravikant: Cipher? Yeah, Cipher. Cipher wants to go back in the Matrix because he’d rather eat the fake steak and drink the fake wine. But Cypher is a pathetic character. Cypher’s a warning. Nobody says, oh, yeah, I’m Cypher, right? Everybody wants to be Neo because they know that you can’t live a lie. So truth is super important. And in everything that I do, in little things and big things, I want to know the truth.

21. The closer you get to truth, the more silent you become inside

Time: 01:26:52 - 01:32:55

Summary: When you know what is true, you suffer less and you spend less time ruminating about falsehoods. If your mind is chattering less, that is a sign that you’re heading the right direction. There’s truth and there’s love and beauty, right?

Eric Jorgenson: You did say that the closer you get to truth, the closer you get to peace.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, I think the way I said it is the closer you get to truth, the more silent you become inside. And that’s deliberately chosen because when you know what is true, you suffer less and you spend less time ruminating about falsehoods. And most of the thoughts that are going through your mind are concerned with falsehoods. And the Buddhists would argue that the ultimate falsehood is a notion of the self, which is this very poorly defined partial physical, partial mental construct that somehow persists across the thoughts. And just the more things you resolve as being true or false, the less mental chatter you should have all the way to the point that like the super wise, enlightened people are completely silent inside because they’ve seen through the illusion of self and they have no, they have no separate self, no separate persistent self experience. So if your mind is chattering less, that is a sign that you’re heading the right direction. That’s said in my experience, your mind doesn’t really chatter much less, but hopefully it, it, hopefully there’s less anxiety. And this, this happens in meditation. If you’re doing meditation, you’ll find that at least I find the first 20 minutes your mind goes berserk all over the place. And then at some point it calms down and you’re for about 30, 40, 50 minutes in, it’s just blank. And it’s actually a very blissful state. Or it can be different depending on how you meditate. But it’s certainly not going to be chattering as much. And a lot of that’s because you’re resolving problems, problems. And a lot of your problems don’t need real world resolutions, they just need to be acknowledged. One of the classic practices is when you have an emotion, when you have a strong feeling, you just pay attention to it and you deconstruct it and you’re like, okay, there’s a little feeling associated within the body. Is that bodily sensation actually unpleasant? Not really. It’s just like a hollowness in the chest, for example, and doesn’t feel that bad and there’s a thought associated associated with it. Well, is that thought unpleasant? Well, the thought itself can’t feel pain. It’s just a, you know. So who’s classifying as unpleasant? Well, you are. Well, what is you. In that case it’s just another thought. So it’s, you know, one thought of your saying, I don’t want this other thought here and then associated with a bodily sensation. But really when you deconstruct it, you, you realize that unless there’s an actual emergency, there’s not a whole lot there. And when you get good at doing that or when you sort of start seeing that game, it will help you get through unpleasant situations. So I had very unpleasant situation a few years ago where I was extremely unhappy. But I won’t forget this. There was also a part of me that was just watching that very unhappy part and just being like, haha. You know, it’s a little act you’re putting on to feel important. But there’s nothing actually here. There’s like, there’s nothing is being attacked, nothing is being hurt. You’re not in physical pain, you know, it’s just a situation that you’re thinking through and you’re conjuring up this deep unhappiness and you’re creating a drama, you’re creating, creating a stage in a drama to feel important. And I think a lot of times when we are unhappy, we’re just, we’re obsessed with this idea of feeling important. And it’s back to this desire for permanence. We want to feel important, we want to feel permanence. We don’t want to feel our own mortality. There’s truth and there’s love and beauty, right? So those are the other two things where. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And on love, I would say that, you know, once, once your health is taken care of, once your material needs are taken care of, you pursue truth. Love and beauty. We talked about truth. Love, I think is important because people want to be loved, because that helps them get over their mortality. It makes them feel a little safer. You know, monkeys huddling in the dark around the campfire, scared of, scared of what’s out in there in the woods. But one thing I’ve realized for myself is that it’s better to be in love than to be loved. If somebody loves you too much, like your mom’s coming up and hugging you all the time, or you know, some girl or some guy is obsessed with you, like, it can get a little cloying, right? It feels like it’s a burden. You almost don’t want that. But when you feel in love with somebody, that’s when you, you’re high, that’s when you’re elated. And so that’s counterintuitive. But falling in love with someone or something is actually very beneficial to you. It does involve sacrifice, it involves risk. But I think that people who give up on love in their lives, you know, it’s kind of a sad life, right? You get too jaded too fast. And you don’t have to love people necessarily. You can love, you know, universe, God, animals, what have you. But everybody needs to find something in their life that they Love more than they themselves, their mission, their. Their family, their children, their religion. Otherwise, it’s going to be a miserable life. And then lastly, you know, we are active creatures. So this is where I really diverge from all the Buddhas and all the Zen monks and so on. Yeah, the chat would carry water, but that’s not human flourishing. Right. This is where Deutsch comes in. Really helpful. We’re universal explainers. We’re meant to solve problems. We’re meant to reverse entropy. We’re meant to advance civilization in the universe and knowledge, and so we can create. Creativity is our highest art form, so we should be creating. And you can be passive in the face of death and say, well, none of it matters, or you can be active and say, nothing matters. I’m just going to create the best thing. I’m going to live the best life by your own definition. So I want to create things, and what do you want to create? Well, how do you know something is worth creating? Well, it’s beautiful. It’s hard to vary. It has deep explanations and knowledge embedded inside of it. People want to use beautiful things. So you want to create beautiful things that convey emotion that people want to use. And to me, that’s why something like an iPhone is among the greatest works of art ever created, because it is a beautiful object. It’s like a piece of jewelry, but it’s also incredibly useful. It embodies a lot of knowledge. It’s very hard to vary. And it did change the world for the better.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, the exact tweet was, stay healthy, get wealthy, see, speak truth, give love, and create beauty.

Naval Ravikant: That’s it. That’s what I want to do.

Eric Jorgenson: The one I want to tattoo on my eyelids is any moment where you’re not having a great time, when you’re not really happy. You’re not doing anyone any favors. It’s not like your unhappiness is making anyone else better off. And I don’t know why. I don’t know where it was modeled to me, or, you know, if it’s just me trying to take myself seriously. But, like, there’s something about cultivating unhappiness that brings, like, seriousness to a situation. Like, especially as a leader or a, you know, trying to take something seriously, you sort of bring an unhappy version of yourself. I find. And I know. I know that’s a mistake.

22. There’s something about cultivating unhappiness that brings seriousness to a situation

Time: 01:32:55 - 01:38:10

Summary: There’s something about cultivating unhappiness that brings seriousness to a situation. The thinner your identity, the more you can see reality. Depression is really a choice or is a series of choices that was made.

Naval Ravikant: Certainly, I should tweet this afterward. I’m gonna write this down.

Eric Jorgenson: Tweet break.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, tweet break. Acute unhappiness is real or is useful, but chronic Unhappiness is an ego trip, right? Because chronic unhappiness is. You just want to feel more. You, you want to feel separate, you want to feel important. You know, you have an identity wrapped up in it. Like the thinner your identity, the more you can see reality. Because identity is what often stands between you and seeing reality the way it is. It’s the ultimate emotional motivated reasoning. When something contradicts your identity, you’re going to fight it. You’re going to fight it with your life. You know, if, if you’re white and I say white people suck, like that’s your identity right now, you’re going to fight that or black people suck, whatever, right? So it’s, that’s, that’s the problem with racism. Like people can’t change their identity. And so when you’re racist, you make enemies out of them immediately and it creates warfare. So you got to keep your identity thin. You don’t want to choose your identity, right? Identity is like what you can’t get away from. But any chosen identity is a straitjacket. It’s lock you in. And that’s true for happiness, but it’s true for truth. And here I would say people who are unhappy, there was a time when it served them. I think I mentioned him earlier, William Glasser, who was kind of my favorite psychologist typewriter and he wrote a series of really good books around something he calls choice theory. But one of his most controversial observations is that depression is really a choice or is a series of choices that was made. It’s a result of a series of choices that were made when you were a child child that then became an unconscious habit and it’s self perpetuating. So when you were young, you know, as a baby, you start out, you’re crying to get your parents attention. And every time you cry, they come and they respond. And then eventually you figure out actually with strangers, crying doesn’t work, it just forces them away. So you start smiling or you start communicating. But eventually you run into situations where you’re trying to get someone’s attention, whether it’s your parents or your teachers or your peers. And they won’t give you the attention. So you cry internally. You signal that you, you are so unhappy that you’re willing to hur. Hurt yourself. And that’s what depression is. It’s hurting yourself through your own unhappiness. And you start ruminating on it. And it may be effective for a little period of time. It pulls some people closer together and it can lead to a situation where you are now unconsciously or subconsciously ending up depressed, not realizing that this is a learned behavior. Now I’m not saying that there couldn’t be a chemical component. There obviously always is. There chemical components to hunger, there’s chemical components to athleticism, to intelligence, genetic components, components. But you can make it worse. And saying that it’s all chemical imbalances doesn’t explain anything. That’s like saying like, why are we here? Well, it’s because of particle collisions from the Big bang, right? It’s too reductive. So the explanation has to be offered at the same level as the question. So when we say like, why am I unhappy? Forget the chemical imbalance. You’re going to change your brain, right? And doing drugs will just mess you up in other ways. Every person who takes like these long term drugs on these things, they, they end up giving up something else fundamental about themselves. And hey, a lot of the best artists were crazy in other ways, right? So you don’t want to average out your mindset. So the depression may be the result of a series of bad choices that then became bad habits. And they do create an ego because they create a separate identity of me. And then you start identifying with that me so much like, well, who else would I be? Well, I’m just an unhappy person. But that’s also what makes me brilliant, makes me special and makes me interesting. It makes me undiscovered and all that. So you can wrap a whole identity around it. And it’s hard to undo that identity because then you’re like, well what, what makes me unique, but it’s worth doing. By the way, this is like if you read Jed McKenna, right, spiritual autolysis. What is he doing? He’s going through his whole identity and stripping it away. I think he over dramatizes how painful that was. But it’s kind of an interesting, interesting method.

Eric Jorgenson: That’s a process that you went through.

Naval Ravikant: No, no.

Eric Jorgenson: Deconstructing your identity?

Naval Ravikant: No. Yeah, maybe a little bit. Not consciously. I mean, I, I just, I, I don’t think any of the techniques that anybody lays out will work for you. I don’t think mental techniques work because the mind is infinitely complicated and capable of any thought and it’s capable of reaching any point in mental space to any other point in mental space in one jump, right. And because of that there’s no pathway through another person’s mind. Mind. So you can be inspired by other people, but the right idea can change you in an instant. Whereas the wrong practice done 30 years every day will not make a difference.

23. The most important thing with getting wealthy and being happy is just realize you can do it

Time: 01:38:10 - 01:38:32

Summary: The most important thing with getting wealthy and being happy is just realize you can do it. You can do both and you can be both. There’s no limit to how fast you can change or how positive that change could be.

Eric Jorgenson: I mean, through that frame. It’s a very optimistic way to look at someone who’s unhappy, someone who’s chronically unhappy. There’s no limit to how fast you can change or how positive that change could be.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right. The most important thing with getting wealthy and being happy is just realize you can do it. It’s your choice. You can do both and you can be both. And there’s nothing wrong with trying to do both.

24. The three big ones in life are wealth, health and happiness

Time: 01:38:33 - 01:43:48

Summary: The three big ones in life are wealth, health and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reversed. The optimal path is to find balance and pursue them all in parallel.

Eric Jorgenson: The opening tweet of this whole section is the three big ones in life are wealth, health and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reversed. And I was curious whether the order should be pursued backwards or you think they’re all like the optimal path is to sort of find balance and pursue them all in parallel.

Naval Ravikant: I don’t feel strongly about the order. I feel more strongly about the components. Right. You could pursue them in different orders. Like some people are just born happy and naturally happy. Nothing destroys it and they’re just always happy. And that’s the greatest gift. Right. So that’s why I think it is the most important. Like even there are some people who will be unhealthy and they’ll still be happy. They do exist and you know, they’re blessed. So if you can get that one, you’re pretty much set because the others are just attempted routes towards those two things or prerequisites for those two things. But if you don’t need the other two as to opposed prerequisite, if you’re one of these magical people, then by all means, just go get happiness right away. Be happy in terms of the wealth and health. Yeah, I think the health is more important than the wealth. As any old unhealthy guy, they’ll trade you a lot of money for getting their health back. Or it’s the old Confucius line which I’ve quoted before. But you know, a healthy man wants 10,000 things. A sick man only wants one thing. And it’s very true, when you’re sick you’ll, you know, you just to want, want to get back up. So health is very important. And then wealth, you know, it solves all your material problems. It’s also really important. I wouldn’t give up any of the three, to be honest. That said, if you could only choose one, you know, happiness would be the number one. But you shouldn’t have to choose one. It’s three legs of a stool. Most people, I think, will want all three. And wealth is best pursued when you’re younger. Just because you’re higher energy, you’re more flexible, you have less obligations, you’re more malleable in terms of where you live and what you do and all that. You’re just more, more optimistic. You can pursue it later. It’s just harder. You know, what does that old song go like? For everything there is a season. And you know, if you’re in your teens, you should be learning and doing. If you’re in your 20s, you probably want to be working very hard and in the arena, so to speak, in your 30s, you want to start harvesting. That’s when you have your contacts and you still have a lot of energy. In your 40s, you definitely want to be harvesting. And this is where you really want to be watching your health. And you better be getting happy by now because there’s not enough time left. And then when you’re in your 50s, then you can do your political give backs and your, you know, contribution to society and be philanthropic and charitable. And when you’re 60s, you can be a philosopher because enough experiences happen, you’ve thought through enough things. So there is kind of a natural season to all these things. I think back in the Roman days, I don’t read much about the history of Rome, but my sense is in olden times, when you were in your teens, you would study. When you were in your 20s is when you would go to war. When you were in your 30s, you would do your business. When you were 40s, you would serve in politics. And in your 50s you’d do your philosophy, something along those lines, maybe a few years here and there in each bucket. So there is a season for everything. So you want to get wealth first, health for granted when you’re young, hopefully, then you want to preserve your health as you get older. And then you better figure out how to get happy when you’re at a certain point. Because you don’t want to be that grumpy old person who’s just getting angrier and bitter, more bitter and more cynical at the world as you get older. We’ve all seen that in very old people. There’s only two extremes that I see in old people that I don’t want to. Ones who are fine with everything, you know, they’ve made their peace with the world. The ones who are bitter about everything, right? Because we’ve become more of ourselves in whatever direction we’re in as we get older. CS Lewis talks about this where, you know, to him, morality is, you know, and free will mean that every little action you make, they compound and you are the product of 30, 50, 100 years of these compounding actions. And you should take responsibility for each little action because it leads you closer to heaven or closer to hell. And if you just keep making small bad decisions, they lead to medium sized bad decisions, they lead to large bad decisions. Very hard to come back, and you end up having a failed life. So, yeah, I think if you follow the season’s philosophy, for everything there’s a season. You start with wealth, you preserve your health, and then you get happy. But the importance kind of is the reverse, where the people who are just naturally happy, they have the greatest gift, they don’t need the others. And the people who don’t have their health, they don’t really care about their wealth. So that’s why I kind of stand by the ordering, but I don’t feel super strongly about it.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, a failure mode that a lot of people fall into is they spend so much time pursuing wealth, they sacrifice happiness, they sacrifice health, and then they find out way too late that they’ve way overshot, you know, their, their wealth bar. They’ve earned way more money than they need, or they’ve just become. The identity’s become too enshrined for them to change. Change. And you know, yeah, I feel like

Naval Ravikant: the health part everybody figures out as they get older. Nobody wants to be less healthy, Everybody wants to be healthier because the feedback loop and not being healthy is very tight. Pain demands a response and eventually the pain will show up. So everybody wants to be healthier. And so I feel like people figure that out, especially once they get wealthy, then, you know, they have more control of their time, they can devote time to health. And these days, frankly, you know, you have GLP1s so people can lose weight. And obesity was probably the biggest mass market driver of unhealthiness. So that is being solved. But the happiness one is a tough one. A lot of people don’t even believe it’s possible. I would say most of my contemporaries who have made a lot of money, they are not happy people and not even just not happy. They don’t have an imagination that they can build their life on their own terms. They live very structured lives that, that are modeled after what they had in their youth and not necessarily in a good way. I would say they’re in straight jackets, like, in terms of like, you know, kids are in school, so I can’t travel. You know, I don’t, I didn’t hire help because, you know, we’re supposed to do our own dishes. These Are like billionaires who act like this, right. Or they just, they just don’t think out of the box. Right. They go to obligation obligatory meetings or functions or festivals or ceremonies that are just tedious, you know, it’s like tedious meetings with tedious people. Right. So I just find too many of them are not able to hack their life the same way they hack their career or hack their business. I mean, hack in a good way, right? But agency, yeah, agency, yeah. They’re low agency about the rest of their life, they’re very high agency about their work. And then their mindsets and temperaments, they’re just not naturally happy. They’re not able to enjoy themselves, they’re not able to have a good time, they’re not genuinely enjoying what they’re doing or they have tough family lives or tough relationships. Relationships, all of which kind of is downstream of your own mental well being.

25. Most of my contemporaries who have made a lot of money are not happy

Time: 01:43:49 - 01:48:55

Summary: Most of my contemporaries who have made a lot of money, they are not happy people. They don’t have an imagination that they can build their life on their own terms. I have an amazing life. If people knew how big my life was, I’d be run out of town.

Eric Jorgenson: That’s one of the things that sort of drew me towards. Everything that you’d shared over, you know, in decades now is a sense of high agency over everything in life.

Naval Ravikant: I have an amazing life. If people knew how big my life was, I’d be run out of town. My life is really good. I mean, basically at any given time during the day, I’m doing what I want to be doing. It’s, it’s, it’s well thought through. It’s considered, it’s not obligatory. It’s designed such a way that it does keep very good authentic relationships with my family and the people that I care about. But I’m not doing anything I don’t want to do and I’m enjoying what I want to do. And if I’m not enjoying it, I’m changing it very, very quickly. And yes, it is not living by anybody’s rules. Like everything is built for me.

Eric Jorgenson: You’ve called yourself lazy, but I think it’s actually probably a focus on the effort to output ratio.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, I want the 80, 20 and everything I want, I want to actually, I want the 95, 99 1, the fractal 80, 20. Yeah, exactly. I want to get the most that I can while doing the least, but in every aspect of my life. And then, you know, open up more business. And actually even among the philosophers, like I love Schopenhauer because he’s so truth oriented, but he did not look like he was enjoying his life. Right. Whereas someone like an osho, even though he’s a bit of a whack job and I don’t agree with everything he says, at least he was enjoying his life.

Eric Jorgenson: Osho was objectively enjoying his life. These are the orgies and 17 Rolls Royces or whatever is in the documentary.

Naval Ravikant: You know, I don’t agree with any of that, but he was definitely having a good time. And it’s more interesting to me to listen to an Osho or a Steve Jobs rather than somebody who was, you know, very successful or even enlightened but just seems dour or down or miserable.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, well, I think one of the sort of load bearing pillars of the, the happiness, you know, work, the happiness chapters, happiness ideas is agency over perception or perception, agency over perception of understanding that like they’re, I mean your tweet. There are no external forces affecting your emotions. Like no matter what it feels like.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: You can control how you interpret the things that are happening.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. Changing your interpretation of the past, you don’t store memories of your past, you store interactions, interpretations of memories of your past. And so changing those interpretations or revisiting those interpretations can be painful but useful. It requires a certain level of humility. You know, the ego is a thing that stands in the way. The ego doesn’t really exist, it’s just a concept. But the ego is just like you don’t want to go through the painful thoughts of reevaluating who you think you are and what you think makes you important. So you’re not willing to reexamine your past. Like, let’s say like for whatever reason, reason, you know, you had conflict with your parents. Right. And so now you have an identity and interpretation of your past where your parents were bad people and you didn’t get along with them and therefore you’re in the situation that you’re in, it’s their fault. Well, that’s probably not true. It’s probably keeping you away from your parents. It’s probably making your life miserable. It’s probably making them miserable. And then when you have kids, your kids don’t have access to their grandparents. And the reality is if you just went back and tried to be very objective, you know, neutral and give them the benefit of the doubt and realize they’re genetically very similar to you, they just had different circumstances and they made the hard choices they had to make that perhaps it wasn’t entirely their fault and perhaps you could be more charitable about it and if you reinterpret that, then you could have an objectively better life with them. But it would require you to take the ego hit of no, actually you weren’t wrong. So that means some of the things that went wrong in your life were your own bad choices. Now, seeing that truth might allow you to make better choices, but it does mean that you take a ego hit. You have to have painful thoughts. And this is where things like meditation or understanding the, the nature of the self help. Because you guys, those thoughts aren’t you. There’s gonna be a bunch of pleasant thoughts and be a bunch of unpleasant thoughts and there’ll be a bunch of pleasant thoughts. Again, these are just thoughts. Thoughts don’t actually have feelings. Thoughts don’t get hurt. Thoughts don’t do anything. Thoughts don’t mean anything. And it helps to disconnect from them a little bit to be objective about it. So that’s part of the process of meditation. By the way. It also happens in psychedelics where people will reinterpret their past and they’ll come out happier not knowing why. But the real reason is because they’ve worked through problems in the past and they’ve reinterpreted them. I think I did some of that not, not as a conscious deliberate exercise or like, oh, I’m going to go through my past and reinterpret it. But it’s just that when I was open minded about it and I was like, I just want to know the truth or, you know, or even like you’re mentally suffering. You just want to get over it, you just want to get through it. You’re sick of it, you’re done with it. Right. You’re done with the suffering. Then it helps to objectively reevaluate those

26. Forgiveness is you forgive someone because you reinterpret what happened

Time: 01:48:55 - 01:51:05

Summary: You have to have painful thoughts. And it helps to disconnect from them a little bit to be objective about it. Forgiveness is you forgive them because you reinterpret what happened. Even if it’s a, like you can’t let go of it being a correct or incorrect interpretation.

Eric Jorgenson: thoughts or even just to let go of them if they were, you know, the useful. Yeah, useful beliefs. Even if it’s a, like you can’t let go of it being a correct or incorrect interpretation. Like if it’s useful to you for your future, to reframe it.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, that’s what forgiveness is. Forgiveness is you forgive them because you reinterpret what happened. You’re like, okay, maybe it wasn’t entirely their fault, but another one is just like, it was their fault. But I still have to genuinely forgive them. This is hard, but I’m going to do it so that I can move on. So it’s not occupying my mind and my brain. I’m not sitting here spitting venom and blood and just feeling angry about the whole thing, just feeling terrible because anger makes you miserable. Anger spikes your cortisol, gets your adrenal glands going, ages you, makes you feel bad. A lot of the vices and sins, the traditional ones, they make you feel bad. The punishment is directly on you. You feel the Burden of it immediately. And so you get over it. Not because of them, not to forgive them, but to forgive your. But to just get it out of your own mind, to clear your own mind. Yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: If you can’t get yourself to forgive out of selflessness, you might be able to out of selfishness. A thought experiment I like to play with with is which human being, if we can measure everyone’s sort of neurochemical levels over a month or a year, like which human on earth is experiencing the most subjective happiness? And who is that person and where are they and how are they living? What do they believe and you know, what are their habits? I think it’s highly likely that it’s, you know, a religious plumber with a family of four or something. Volunteers.

27. There are actual enlightened people out there thanks to the Internet

Time: 01:51:06 - 01:55:16

Summary: There are actual enlightened people out there. They’re not happy in a conventional dopamine pleasure sense, but they’re at peace at all times. You can even hire some of them as your personal coach. These are not fans.

Naval Ravikant: Well, I mean one of the, one of the things that’s amazing, amazing about the Internet is that there are actual enlightened people out there. And in the past they were inaccessible. You know, there was. You go to remote mountaintop and you meet the Buddha.

Eric Jorgenson: They were a myth. You know what it seems like?

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, they’re mythologically. You would encounter a thousand people total in your life. What are the odds you’re going to find the current living Buddha? Well now thanks to the Internet, there’s dozens of them on YouTube, on Twitter, there were a couple in air chat. I’ve met probably close to a dozen of them. I’ve interacted with, with them. I verified to my own satisfaction that they’re enlightened after spending enough time around them. And you know, I learned from them. So these people exist. This is all available. Like you can go find people who are. They’re not happy in a conventional dopamine pleasure sense, but they’re at peace at all times. Nothing bothers them like, you know, getting. Being told that they have catching get getting diagnosed with cancer to them is. Will invite the same level of fear and happiness again. If they parking ticket would like. They’re funny with it, you know. And so these people exist. They’re completely approachable. You can even hire some of them as your personal coach or you can watch infinite YouTube videos with them. I mean I can name you 15 of them right now.

Eric Jorgenson: It’d be great if you name a couple.

Naval Ravikant: Oh, I mean they’re better known ones like Rupert, Spira and muji are on YouTube. You know, they’re. They’re not famous. There’s a guy, Nardanan who I spent a lot of time with. He’s now semi famous. He does Siddhar Maya yoga. He’s kind of More the classic guru type. There’s personal friends. I have Stephen Belcher, who was on air chat with me. He’s on Twitter, too. James Pierce, he’s tweeted a lot. Effortless stoicism. Kapil Gupta, who I worked with in the past. There’s ascendor, who’s on YouTube. I tweeted him out recently. There’s another guy who works as a waiter at some restaurant in the Midwest. I forget his name. I tweeted him out. There’s Saja. There’s so many of them. I mean, my YouTube is filled with them. And I’ve watched enough of their videos and listened enough of their times that I know that these are the real deal. These are not fans.

Eric Jorgenson: Is it a palpable difference when you’re in their. In their physical presence?

Naval Ravikant: No. There’s no, like, fancy aura where you’re going to be floating on cloud nine. I mean, a lot of that is hyperbole. But I think what you find is that they have the persistent experience of no self. They. They see through the fact that the self is just a thought. It’s a constructed identity, and there’s no one there to actually really get happy or unhappy. So because of that, they. They now live basically as pure awareness or consciousness. And so they are essentially melded with their environment. They feel a sense of peace because your awareness is the one thing that’s never changed about your entire life. It is the one thing that is perfect and permanent in your life from birth to death. And they are no longer confused or think of themselves as a separate body, mind, construct. And so thing. So nothing bothers them. That’s kind of the common thing. And the way I usually figure them out is I just spend enough time. Time around them that I see something genuinely bad happen to them. You have to hang around long enough for something genuinely bad to happen to them, and then you see their reaction and there’s not even a perturbation. And that’s how, you know, interesting.

Eric Jorgenson: And enlightened makes it seem.

Naval Ravikant: Enlightened is a super fancy word. I’m not sure there’s such a thing.

Eric Jorgenson: Well, it makes it seem binary. Is that. But I can’t imagine that’s how you see it.

Naval Ravikant: It is binary. It is binary because. And this is a little counterintuitive. It’s. This is not a path. It’s not like a sad guru’s. Another one, by the way, I met a bunch of them. I should keep a list. I have a seekers list on Twitter, which is open, which tracks not necessarily enlightened people. That has a couple of those on there, but also people who are working towards it, they care about it. They’re genuine seekers. That said, I’m not sure there’s any such thing as progress, because it’s either you believe that you are a separate self or not. It’s that simple. Not even believe. Believe is the wrong word. You know, belief is not strong enough. Belief will not suffice. So either you know that you’re a separate self or you know that you. You are not. The reality is everyone’s agnostic. There are very few actual atheists and there are very few actual religious people. If you were actually religious, you’d just be like, well, everything’s in God’s hands, so everything’s fine. And if you were actually an atheist, you’d be like, well, none of this matters, so everything’s fine. Right, but we’re all agnostic.

28. There’s a great old philosophical puzzle called the philosophical zombie problem

Time: 01:55:16 - 01:59:17

Summary: The reality is everyone’s agnostic. What is consciousness for? There’s a great old philosophical puzzle called the philosophical zombie problem. The way enlightened people get there is they have a persistent experience of no self. Find me this Eric who thrives.

Eric Jorgenson: Do these people have, like, relationships and kids and.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, it’s actually. That’s a great question, right, because you think of. First of all, the word enlightenment is horrible. It implies that there’s like some state that you end up in where everything is perfect and you’re always happy. It’s not the case at all. It’s just that you disappear and all that’s like. There’s a great old philosophical puzzle called the philosophical zombie problem. And I saw it referred to. Not it necessarily, but he starts off with like, what are consciousness? And all that, right? What is consciousness for? It’s exactly, exactly that question. And the philosophical zombie problem basically says, you know, let’s say you have to go through life, you have to solve problems, you. You have to, like, react to the environment, you have to think through things. What do you need consciousness for? Why can’t, like, there just be a robot doing all of that? Why do you need to have this conscious awareness? Because a robot could be reacting to stimuli, could be solving problems, could be doing all of those things. Consciousness is completely unnecessary. And so the question is, why consciousness? And this is a very western concept, why consciousness? And all the enlightene people would tell you, actually, consciousness is the only thing there is. Everything appears in consciousness, it’s made of consciousness, and it disappears in consciousness and is seen by consciousness. There’s nothing other than consciousness. You don’t experience anything in the outside world. You just experience consciousness as consciousness. So that’s all there actually is. And the actual consciousness observes everything, including your body and your mind. So it’s not your body, it’s not your mind, it’s its own thing and everything is made of it. So that’s all that exists and that’s all you are. So they would reverse the answer and say, why zombie? You know, you’re asking why consciousness? No, the answer is, why zombie? There’s no zombie. The zombie doesn’t exist. There is no separate self. There’s nothing else out there. And so this is a completely different frame on it. So in that sense, there is no enlightenment, there’s no separate being to be enlightened. There’s just life. There’s just stuff happening. You know, there’s just stuff happening. There are thoughts appearing, their thoughts disappearing. They connect to each other. They talk to each other. They’re valid. They exist. There are bodies, there are minds walking around, and there is an awareness of, of those things. And you’re basically a localized awareness. What you think you are is localized awareness. And this goes back to the oldest question that I think, you know, Robin and Marshy used to talk about is just who am I? The one thing that I think the, the way the enlightened people, again, bad word, get there, is they have a persistent experience of no self. And that becomes their new default. It is binary. It’s not a. It’s not a pathway to it. And one of the ways that some of them get there, some of them are just naturals, almost born that way. Some of them, they have a mystical experience. Some of them, they have a psychotic break. That’s literally what a Krishna Modi had, right? He had this thing called the process, which kept coming back to him. And it was just seems like a psychotic break. Plus his brother died and he went through a bad time. Some people get there through meditation, decades of meditation. Some people get there through just kind of devoting their life service to others. Like their self disappears. They see through it. But the one that I found the most interesting interesting was they just do what’s called self examination. And self examination is just looking for the self, looking for this separate self. You’re convinced you’re Eric? I’m convinced I’m the ball. What do we mean by that? What is that? It was a very fuzzy definition. What is that exactly? Find me this Eric that’s constantly talking about himself, referring to himself. Find me this Eric who suffers. Find me this Eric who feels pride. Find me this Eric who thrives. Find me this Eric who feels good. Find me this Eric who feels bad. Where is this guy hiding? Who is this? Look for that. And what you find is if you look, look, look, look, look. You can never Pin it down. It’s always like. It’s always on the edge of your vision. It’s what Alan Watts described as like you take a burning stick and you whirl it around and it looks like you have a flaming wheel. You don’t have a flaming wheel. What you have is you have a lot of thoughts going around that convince you that there’s this character in there called Eric. But there’s no actual Eric. The self is just a thought. These are just thoughts that are happening that are convincing you that someone there. So even when I’m speaking to you, there’s words coming out and there’s thoughts coming out. That’s not me. They’re just flying out. I’m not controlling them. There’s no separate me sitting there that’s controlling them. And then for a moment, I felt sort of proud of how I’d said this and articulated to you. What is that feeling of pride? It’s just a feeling. Who is that feeling referring to? It’s not referring to anyone. There’s no one that’s referring to. It’s just another thought. That pride was just another thought without a target. Well, if I keep looking for that target long enough, then maybe I’ll finally realize actually the target doesn’t exist. And then when I realize that target doesn’t exist, I realize that target has never existed. And if that target has never existed, then eventually those thoughts that were going towards a fake target will start dying down because they’re false, they’re useless. That knowledge will no longer be replicated in my mind in the Deutschean sense. And then I will be at peace because I will no longer have these egotistical emotions and ups and downs, and I’ll realize there was never anybody here and it was all just consciousness all along. And some people call that God.

29. The self is just a thought. It’s always on the edge of your vision

Time: 01:59:17 - 02:03:15

Summary: The self is just a thought. These are just thoughts that are happening that are convincing you that someone there. The truly enlightened people, if you ask them, can still go about their lives and have girlfriends and businesses and jobs. Because the truth doesn’t change if you know it or not.

Eric Jorgenson: It’s gonna take me a while to grok all that, but that’s the point.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. I mean, maybe. I mean, some people are very lucky. It happens for them right away. And most people never want it, so it’s fine.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Do you?

Naval Ravikant: The truly enlightened people, if you ask them, like, you know, like, I’ve gone through this with all of them in different ways, but, you know, I’ve tested them. I’m kind of a smartass about this, but I’ve tested them to see if they feel emotional pain in any way. Right. And my favorite way to test them, like. Well, you know, the best tests are subtle, where they don’t, you know, it’s not obvious. But the one I Like to ask them is, well, what if you weren’t enlightened? What if you lost your enlightenment? Or what if, like you had never been enlightened? They’re completely okay with that. Right. Because the truth doesn’t change if you know it or not. And if you are not around to know the truth, if you don’t exist in any separate sense, it doesn’t matter if you know it or not.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And if it breaks under that question, then it was, it was false. It was part of your identity to be enlightened.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right, yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: Interesting.

Naval Ravikant: But going back to your question about like, can they still go about their lives and, you know, have girlfriends and, and businesses and jobs? Yeah, absolutely. They can. They, they do. Actually, some of the people that I mentioned, they have jobs. One of them is running a company. You know, um, one of them’s like really good at dating dates a lot. All right. They, they just absolutely have full clarity of mind. They have fully functional bodies. They even have desires and they even have wants and needs. But they’re not egoic, that they’re not wrapped up in a small sense of self that gets easily threatened and gets angry or gets like depressed or any of that. They’ll take the actions that you and I would take, but they’ll take them much more calmly and they won’t take anything personally. So they’re still getting feedback from the environment, they’re still reacting. And if anything, I would argue they’re more capable than they ever were and their desires are more genuine, they’re less mimetic, they’re less status oriented. Now, are they less motivated than say, someone like me? Yeah. I haven’t met enlightened person who’s as motivated as me. On the other hand, I haven’t met many people who are as motivated as me. Right. Maybe I’ve. I think I may have met like five people in my life who are more motivated. Right. So it’s hard to intersect that set. And would I take that trade, you know, being slightly less motivated for being a lot. Sure.

30. The enlightened and unmotivated are potentially more, more effective

Time: 02:03:16 - 02:06:41

Summary: The enlightened and unmotivated are potentially more, more effective. You’ve gotten more effective as you’ve become happier. No one chooses to go back to being strictly dominant strategy. These are unalloyed goods.

Eric Jorgenson: I was going to ask if you, having been so close, if you’re seeking that or if you feel like, you

Naval Ravikant: know, it’s impossible not to seek it, even though I know that’s a trap. It’s like the shiniest of the shiny objects. Like, you know, why would you want to start the next great company when you could be the Buddha, you know, when you could be God himself? Like, who are the greatest people in human history that everyone knows? It’s Jesus, my Muhammad Buddha, it’s that bunch. It’s not even the Caesars of the world, maybe the Einsteins, right? But essentially truth seekers. Truth seekers are the most revered and artists, history remembers artists and truth seekers and the truth seeking artists are the highest of them all right? The Tao Te Ching and so on. That said, it’s another chase, it’s another chase for something permanent. It’s another chase for a shiny object. It’s a chase for things being different than they are. And the key thing about enlightened people is that they are fine with everything the way it is, and which includes not being fine with the way things are. They self actualize. They may self actualize in more authentic ways that are different than how they would have self actualized pre enlightenment, but they still self actualize.

Eric Jorgenson: I’m really interested in the ways in which you’ve broken these false dichotomies. Right. And you mentioned one just there, which is, you know, the enlightened and unmotivated are potentially more, more effective. You know, you’ve gotten more effective as you’ve become happier. Even though everyone has this fear of like, oh, if I become happy or if I accept what is, I’ll be less productive.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. What, what would you rather battle? A Terminator that is enlightened or a Terminator that is wrapped in an ego? Terminator wrapped in ego is much easier to manipulate. Might have guilt, might have self doubt, might have anger, will be less efficient. A terminator is enlightened, is a true Terminator. You need to get away from God right away. It’s interesting there is a place for emotions. Modern society is very safe. So a lot of the anger that we feel is derived from times when anger was there for physical violence or physical reasons, but we now take it on as mental. A lot of the modern suffering comes from we feel things chronically that were meant to be felt acutely for brief periods of time. So I just, I don’t think you are less effective because you’re happier. You will choose to do different things. So it may look like, oh, you’re changing for the worse because you may look less motivated or motivated for a different thing, but you’re motivated for something that is going to make you more effective while you’re being happy. By the way, no one chooses to go back to being less happy, right?

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah.

Naval Ravikant: No, it’s just like money. No one chooses to go back to

Eric Jorgenson: being strictly dominant strategy.

Naval Ravikant: Correct.

Eric Jorgenson: To become happier.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right. These are strictly dominant, dominant strategies. These are unalloyed goods. So when people say I don’t value happiness. That’s, that’s just not true. That’s not true through your own actions because every time you’ve been happy, you don’t want to give that up. And every time you do something that makes you a little bit happier, you’re not going to give that up. You know like one of the things as you kind of go through the progression of life, there’s a point where you have roommates and then you get to like not having roommates. Right. You don’t want to go back to like the pre roommate life.

Eric Jorgenson: But then you have kids and you have the worst roommate and the best.

Naval Ravikant: It kind of sucks when the kids grow up and leave achieve too. Right. You don’t want to go back to commutes. If you’ve had long commutes and then you get start walking to work or having a short commute. It kind of sucks to go back to commute retirement or working for yourself. These are one way doors. It’s very hard to come back through those doors.

31. I asked about the enlightened people in their relationships because a lot of people ask me

Time: 02:06:42 - 02:12:31

Summary: Every relationship is transactional. It does have an expectation of give and take. It’s the neediness that destroys a relationship or creates a fake relationship. The secret to a happy relationship is two happy people.

Eric Jorgenson: I asked about the enlightened people in their relationships because a lot of people ask me what’s something I disagree with you on? I think as a test to see if I’m just a complete involved sycophant. And actually one of the things that I wrestle with the most is this like you know, only the individual ascends. All of your experiences are individual. And like objectively I understand the correctness of the, you know, your perception as individual. But I also know that so much of happiness in my lived experience in research comes from our relationships with the people around us. I have to imagine there’s a lot of nuance there. You can’t control them, but you are a participant in these relationships and they do affect your day to day habits.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, we, we will disagree because I think that it’s very difficult to be happy if you’re bound up in needy relationships and just needing the relationship is needy. Now obviously I have my family and I love them very much and they’re very important to me. But I’m not going to stay in any relationship that makes me unhappy. I will do my duty, I’ll fulfill my obligations, I’ll take care of them even if they don’t like like me. But I’m not going to create a stay sustain in a false relationship. And this is truth. Every relationship you’re in, you’re in because that person provides some value for you or because in, in your identity you’re tied up and you have some obligation towards Them, and that’s fine. But like, if. If literally your wife changed tomorrow, if she was inhabited by a demon who just did everything horrible to you, would leave, right? So every relationship other than pure blood relationships, which are different, they’re on a genetic level, you know, you see your. And you just go nuts in a good way. Every relationship is transactional. It does have a value exchange component. It does have an expectation of give and take. And it’s kind of. It sound good, but not true, but false. And this is where truth is hard. If truth was easy, everyone would do it, right? But this is where these false relationships and these false obligations are tough. So I don’t go to my friend’s birthdays unless I think the party’s going to be fun. I don’t go to weddings, for example, because I think largely there’s just like enormous amounts of time taken out of your day, you know, of your week destination, when it’s, oh, my God, right? I don’t go to like obligatory things like, oh, so and so is having an anniversary. So and so is having this thing you have to go, you know, or these people need you there for this F. No, that’s like where I draw the hard line. No. Obligations and relationships drive you into obligations, and then the obligations drive you into. Into pain. Now you’re not having the pleasant part of the relationships. Now I’m left with in my life people who are similarly free, similarly low ego. We hang out all the time, but it’s voluntarily. We all want to see each other and we’re all being at our best to each other because we want to attract the other person. We don’t take each other for granted, which is like the worst thing that can happen in a relationship. You have to invest into all your relationships because you want to keep them alive. You value them, you invest in them. But there’s no false attachment. You know, it’s the neediness that destroys a relationship or creates a fake relationship. Obviously, to have family, you have obligations and you fulfill them. And I actually have. I don’t have a single estranged family member. Everyone, everyone is in my life, everyone in family. So, you know, it’s not one of those, your family’s broken, you’re going to fix the world situations. The family’s functioning really well, but at the same time, you have to be happy on your own. You know, the secret to a happy relationship is two happy people, okay? Because you can’t be happier than your spouse. They’ll drag you down or you’ll drag them down. So it’s important that each person find happiness. And happiness is personal. They each have to work on it. The worst thing you can do in a relationship is go to somebody else and say, cheer up, Bing. Ha, bing. You know, what’s wrong with you? Why are you depressed? It doesn’t work. Right. So it has to be tackled at an individual, individual level. And then once your own house is in order, then you can form genuine relationships with other people. But putting relationships ahead of your own work and your own happiness, I think is a mistake. You will get neither.

Eric Jorgenson: I think that’s a good formulation of, like, they are valuable and important. You want to pursue them in that order. And if I’m describing correctly your approach, you want them to be maximally truthful. Like, you don’t want to go into a relationship trying to make someone, Someone else happy.

Naval Ravikant: And I don’t want them to do things to make me happy that are dishonest. I don’t want them to, you know, feel like I’m a burden or an obligation. You know, like, one of the issues I have is, like, as a parent, like, I do things, you know, for my kids because I love them. And people around me are always trying to train them to say thank you. They’ll say, oh, you know, your dad gave you something, would you say thank you? I’m like, don’t, don’t do that. Don’t train them. They’re not an animal. Like, if they genuinely feel, feel gratitude, they’ll come out in some way. I don’t need it. I’m not doing it for the gratitude. Right. And I don’t want to train them like an animal. If they’re genuinely thankful, it’ll come out, you know, and if they’re not, it won’t. But don’t, don’t. Don’t force it. I don’t. I don’t want to be forced obligations in a relationship in either direction.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah.

Naval Ravikant: The only relationships I believe in are peer relationships. Like, obviously people work for you, but even then, you always want to treat them as much like a peer as you can, given the surprise circumstances, because otherwise it ends up formalized, it ends up ritualistic, it ends up false, it ends up unhappy. You know, where, where do you find. It’s funny if you go to an event like a wedding or you go to, like a big party, a lot of times you’ll find a lot of show about happiness, you know, people cheering. Yeah. You know, but, like, they’re not. The genuine article is rarely there. You know, the genuine happiness comes in smaller Interactions that are more genuine and less for. Like if you’re forced to wear a tux and you’re forced to show up a certain time, then you’re forced to listen to a speech, then you’re forced to do a toast, then you’re forced to go around, it’s like, that’s not what actually makes you happy. If it was genuinely how it makes you, what makes you happy, then you would be doing that every day. You’d be going to every party and every wedding and every bar mitzvah and everything you get invited to. But at some level those things are tedious. You’re doing them for other people and they’re doing them for you. Like who’s doing it for themselves, right? So I think like true self celebration is a beautiful thing, but it has been ritualized so much. Like Valentine’s Day, having to send flowers, you know, Hallmark cards. All this stuff is ritualistic bullshit. Real happiness is when you’re genuinely grateful with somebody else and you know, you do something kind for them because you just want to. And you have to create space for that in your life and you have to create situations where you feel it authentically for people that, who are genuinely, you know, inspire that in you. And I don’t want anything ritualistic. I never want a card, I never want a, you know, a ritualistic gift. I don’t want a medal, I don’t want an award. You know, all these things are useless.

32. Real happiness is when you’re genuinely grateful with somebody else

Time: 02:12:32 - 02:13:42

Summary: True self celebration is a beautiful thing, but it has been ritualized so much. Real happiness is when you’re genuinely grateful with somebody else. And I don’t want anything ritualistic.

33. A lot of the great virtues are selfish, right?

Time: 02:13:43 - 02:17:50

Summary: A lot of the great virtues are selfish. I can reinterpret almost every virtue as something you do for long term selfishness. The modern devil is cheap dopamine. If everybody in society followed even the classic biblical virtues, all society would level up and each individual would be better off.

Eric Jorgenson: I was going to ask you about, you know, helping people sort of find the courage to be that truthful in their lives. But you know, I think it just goes back to the long term view. Like you, you know, that the truth, even if it causes short term pain of like, hey, I’m not, I’m not going to do this to make you happy. I don’t want you to do this just to make me happy is the best way to create this long term.

Naval Ravikant: That’s absolutely true, but I think it’s even deeper than that. It’s that truth is non negotiable. Like find me a single person who says I don’t want the truth. That’s a rare person, right?

Eric Jorgenson: Well, the expressed preference, I think there’s probably plenty of people living, choosing to live lives.

Naval Ravikant: I think they don’t want to disappoint point other people. And I think so we’re all caught in this collective trap, right? Like one of the things Covid did that was good was it broke the collective trap of commuting it legitimized work from home now, some people might take it too far and they just checked out completely. But overall, it broke society of its addiction of commuting to unnecessary commuting to unnecessary meetings. And that was good. So I think the same way, like it would be good if we can break society of its addiction to pomp and circumstance, right? Like that Valentine’s Day, like that should be happening all the time with the person you love spontaneously and naturally. Instead of February 14th, everybody tries to get in the same overpriced restaurant and buys the same overpriced flowers and give the same overpriced checks the same box, right? And if you don’t feel like doing it naturally, then that means there’s something wrong with your relationship that you should fix or you should move on to another relationship. But what’s not? The correct answer is to do this falsehood of checking the box every year and kicking the can down the road, just wasting everybody’s time. Oh, I had this whole thread on how a lot of the great virtues are selfish. I can reinterpret almost every virtue as something you do for long term selfishness. That’s the trick, right? The modern devil is cheap dopamine. So I tweeted that, and this was actually one of the reasons why I tweeted, because sometimes I get a great response. So I tweeted, the modern devil is cheap dopamine. And someone responded, it always has been. It’s true. The devil has always been cheap dopamine. You go back to the seven deadly sins, it’s all cheap dopamine. It’s basically saying, don’t do something that makes you feel good right now because it’s going to screw you over later. So on the flip side, you know, one of the tweets that I sent out, which I think Elon liked, he commented on it, was that virtues are the set of values that if we were to all take them on individually, would lead to a win win outcome for society. So the virtues are things that are long term good for you as an individual and then which is selfish. Long term selfish. And they’re long term good for the collective because they allow us to play iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma or to play iterated stag hunt kind of games in a positive equilibrium. From a game theory perspective, they lead to good game theoretic outcomes. If everybody in society followed even the classic biblical virtues, all society would level up and each individual would be better off. So that’s true. But I also think that all the virtues, if you were to follow them as an individual on a long enough timeframe, they would make you individually better off. So it’s the ultimate marshmallow test, by the way. That experiment doesn’t replicate, so sorry to bring it up, but it’s one of those behavioral psych experiments everybody knows. But it is the. In some sense, a lot of a good life is the martial arts a test. And there are a lot of things that people think that you have to do it the standard way. Like philanthropy is a good example, right? You have to go, like, go volunteer for charity and help out people who are far away. Well, how about helping out people who are right next to you, right? People who live down the street, people who work for you, people who work with you. Generally, helping out those people is selfishly very rewarding. You could get some benefit back from it. So it’s a good place to start with charity. It’s very local, very actionable, so you know your money’s not being wasted, you’re not being tricked, it’s not being redirected, and it’s just a way to do something practical. Another tweet I had was, your family is broken, but you’re going to fix the world. This is the whole modern activism disease where you’re agitating about causes that are thousands of miles away, that you’ve never laid eyes on based on what you hear because it’s socially popular. But the reality is you could just go walk down the street and help the homeless person or the vet or the poor person looking for a job or what have you. You. Or literally go make amends with your uncle or your parents. What right do you have to say, I know what’s right to fix the world when you can’t even get your local family going? It’s okay to help people on the other side of the world, but don’t agitate for saying, I know what’s correct when you can’t even solve your own local problems. You get the right to solve global problems after you solve local problems. That’s true in environmentalism, too. Everybody’s worried about CO2, but what about rivers and forests and so on?

34. You get the right to solve global problems after you solve local problems, right

Time: 02:17:50 - 02:25:09

Summary: When you have aspirations that are larger than yourself, then other people will align with you. The more universal the mission, the more people it’s going to pull together. A civilization that adopts a bad idea because of its good spread characteristics wipes itself off the map.

Eric Jorgenson: This goes back to. To your. I think it was your tweet. The greater your ability, the greater your tribe. And the sort of iterative loop of, like, resource allocation where society gives more trust and more leverage and more influence to people who are doing a good job of taking care of the people around them.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, somebody asked me about Elon long time ago on Twitter. This is years and years, years ago, before he was the richest man in the world and all that. And somebody said, what do you think of Elon? And I said, well, you know, when, when someone devotes their entire life to like giving society what it needs, then society has no choice but to give them everything they want. Right? But you can’t rely on that. You can’t do it that selfishly or count that closely. But ultimately, because his desire was pure, regardless of what people say about Elon today, forget even Elon. But when you have aspirations that are larger than yourself, then other people will align with you. Because there are other people who feel that, okay, your motives are pure, I want that thing too. So let’s line up and you become a shutting point in game theory sense, you become a rallying cry for other people who want to see that thing to mass around. In that sense, if you say I want to go to Mars, I want to make humans a space faring species, well, there is a large percentage of our technical builder population that shares that same vision that, that are brilliant, that felt stymied, that now see a vehicle to do that. So they will literally go and build a vehicle under SpaceX to go do that. So by having that mission be larger than about yourself, you assemble people. Same with Martin Luther King when he says I have a dream speech. It’s very inclusive, it’s very high level, it’s very unifying, it’s universal. And so it pulls people together. It’s also the reason why Marxism has such a seductive appeal. Because Marx says, no, it’s a blank slate. We’re all equal, we’re all the same Holy Spirit, it’s all consciousness. Everybody get together. A, it’s, it’s a, it’s a religious pull towards universality. So the more universal the mission, the more people it’s going to pull together regardless of whether it’s effective or not. That’s sort of the irony here.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, well, this gets to the, you know, the mimetics of an idea will, will spread relative to its spreadability, not relative to its correctness.

Naval Ravikant: It will spread according to spreadability, but then it’ll survive according to its correctness. So a civilization that adopts a bad idea because of its good spread characteristics wipes itself off the map, kind of like the Soviet Union did. And so you’re left with Russia now, but it’s not the Soviet Union. It’s completely different structure. And for example, the Chinese Communist Party when it was under Mao and they made the great leap forward and there was all that suffering and starvation, more Chinese people died during that event than all the casualties. Casualties in World War II for all people put together, not the Chinese, just Chinese debts greatly forward versus all casualties in all causes in World War II. So that just shows you what a bad idea can do. But then how did they survive? Well, they switched to capitalism. They started having local farms that could. It’s a government controlled capitalism, but essentially they create a capitalist section to their economy with private farming and eventually with private enterprises that are still backed by state money. But the more privatized they became, the faster they came up. So eventually you have to adopt good ideas or good explanations because you just get wiped out. You. The skin of the game will eliminate you. So you’re right, bad ideas can spread. And unfortunately the way those bad ideas get taken out is not that we necessarily learn our lessons so much, but it’s that the entities, the people, the institutions that had those bad ideas don’t survive the get eliminated.

Eric Jorgenson: So you really want to be an entity with a bunch of correct ideas so you don’t get eliminated.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. My pseudo spiritual take on Deutsch’s definition of knowledge, which he always laughs about when he mentions because he knows like I’m into it and it has a pseudo spiritual context to it, which he’s not into, is that truth is a crystal in the multiverse. So if you go with the multiverse theory of quantum physics, which is the most direct interpretation, like if you basically believe there’s nothing special about an observer that causes a collapse and that observers unobserved and the observed are all the same, then the most straight or systems operating in those conditions are exactly the same, which is the most straightforward interpretation. Then the multiverse theory naturally emerges from that and it says no. Just because I look at something, just because I look at the cat doesn’t mean that the cat is alive or dead. In short, cat, it’s that the cat was dead in some parts of the multiverse and it was alive in other parts of the multiverse. And I just didn’t know which universe I was in until I opened the box. And if you take that interpretation, then there is a multiverse of outcomes. There’s an basically infinite number of universes that are always differentiating into subsections based on did the particle go left or did it go right? Did this happen or did that happen? And there are various things that can cause this universe to, to diverge. But if you were to look at the content of those universes, knowledge is a thing that tends to spread because it’s correct. Truth survives because it matches up, you can do things with truth. You avoid falsehoods. So there are more universes in which the true thing is true than the falsehood, because falsehoods are infinitely variable. For every truth I have have, there’s unlimited false explanations, whereas there is a finite number of truth explanations. Relatively speaking, you can have mostly true explanations. You never get the absolute truth. But the set of truth true explanations is much smaller than the set of falsehoods. However, once the truth is found, because it is hard to vary and because it spreads, the falsehood gets eliminated. So if there is a multiverse and there are infinite versions of you, again, I think there’s a pretty straightforward interpretation of quantum physics. If there’s a multiverse and there’s infinite versions of you, then the ones that are flourishing the most and the ones that are most alike are actually the most true versions of you. The ones that have found the most truth, the false ones are differentiated in all kinds of ways, but the true ones are more similar to each other. And the truth that each of them have realized that cuts through is more similar than all the variations of falseness. So what you want to be is you want to be the most truth oriented version of yourself, that is the most true version of itself. And now we can segue into Rick and Morty, because in Rick and Morty, there’s infinite Ricks, right? There’s infinite universes, there’s infinite Ricks, and Rick is a hero scientist. And there’s this council of Ricks where like the infinite Ricks, because they can cross across the multiverse, they meet up. And one of the funny things you notice is that Rick C137, which is the hero of the story, he’s like the most. He’s Rick, he’s weird, but he’s the most normal of the Ricks. The rest of them are all weird in some way. They’re all false in some way. And they even call him. They say he’s the Rickiest of the Ricks, right? So I don’t know if they thought this through or if they stumbled upon it, or if it’s just another principle that gets him here. But I view that as like a funny example of the version of yourself that you want to be. You want to be the Rickiest of the Ricks. I want to be the most naval that evolves. You want to be the most erratic Eric or the Erics. And that’s the most truth oriented version of yourself. And to find truth, it means the least motivated reasoning, which means the lowest ego, which means the least self, which means the one who’s operating at the highest level for the greatest, most universal principles. It’s the one who is the most knowledgeable about science and about philosophy and is probably the one who’s most likely to be creating works of beauty and. And is just probably the happiest.

35. In Rick and Morty, there’s infinite Ricks, right

Time: 02:25:09 - 02:26:32

Summary: In Rick and Morty, there’s infinite Ricks, and Rick is a hero scientist. One of the funny things you notice is that Rick C137 is the most normal of the Ricks. That’s the most truth oriented version of yourself.

36. How does the you think about the interaction between lowering of ego and finding authenticity

Time: 02:26:32 - 02:33:13

Summary: I view authenticity as not pretending to be someone or something other than you are. It removes you from situations where you’re having to pretend or force or struggle or work hard to stay in. How do you decide where to focus that energy, those standards?

Eric Jorgenson: How does the you think about the interaction between lowering of ego and finding authenticity? Like, I think some people think of their identity as like the things that make them the unique and authenticity also as like leaning into the things that make you unique.

Naval Ravikant: I think of authenticity as just not putting on a fake Persona, not having. Having a mask. And why do we put on fake Personas and masks? It’s because we want to be seen a certain way. We care what other people think. We want to fit in. We have an image and identity that we’re trying to project. So when you’re trying to project a self image that doesn’t match up to who you actually are, that’s when you are inauthentic. So you need to take that mask off. And if you take that mask off, then you face the risk of, of embarrassment, which is people say, oh, you know, you’re not supposed to do that. Like, when I was first tweeting, I got, you know, messages from VCs like saying, oh, that’s weird. My partner say, you’re not backable. You’re a weirdo. You’ve gone off the rails. I view authenticity as an output of not pretending to be someone or something other than you are. So that’s wearing masks, that’s trying too hard, that’s signaling status, that’s using jargon to sound smart, that’s claiming to know something that you don’t know or claiming not to know something you do know. Like humility is also a trap. Like false humility, people call it. I know, humble bragging. But humility is also an ego trip. If you’re actually a low ego, there’s no such thing as humility anymore than there’s such a thing as pride. They kind of go together. And authenticity leads to a better life again in the long term, like all the virtues. So it removes the people who are around that you know are only there because they think you’re someone that you’re not. So you can drop the pretense, you have to walk on eggshells around them. It removes you from situations where you’re having to pretend or force or struggle or work hard to stay in. And so it helps you navigate to the right answers in relationships and in Situations, but there’s pain involved because there’s change. You know, part, part of the thing is like, yes, I’m lazy, but I will not accept bad outcomes. You know, I have an ability to walk away from suboptimal relationships or situations. Even if it’s painful, I just won’t stay in them.

Eric Jorgenson: Is that only for a very specific subset of things that you choose to desire?

Naval Ravikant: It’s for everything.

Eric Jorgenson: How do you decide, like where to focus that energy, those standards? Like,

Naval Ravikant: that’s a hard one. I mean, we’re always falling into traps more inside is a lot of traps. Dopamine traps. Right. You can get sucked into politics, you can get sucked into drug use, you can get sucked into screen addiction, scrolling porn, alcohol. There’s just so many traps in modern society. They’ve legalized weed, which the libertarian me wants to say, okay, consenting adult, do whatever you want. But in reality, I think it just sucks the energy out of young men. You can’t be ambitious if you’re stoned all the time. It’ll literally destroy your ability and desire to it do go and do anything. And it’s a band aid. It’s a band aid that’s covering things up, which may be fine for society. It’s the modern bread and circuses, but not so good for the individual. And I don’t care about society, I care about the individual. Yes, society has to be functional, but I feel like modern society has given up on that. We’re taking the wrong part of libertarianism, which is we basically said not only are you free to do anything you want, but as long as it doesn’t immediately hurt somebody else, you know, it should be celebrated. But then society as a whole kind of falls apart because everyone’s a hedonist. No one has a long term stake in the system. There’s no shared ethos, there’s no shared rules, there’s no understanding of the basics. And then you end up with high crime, you end up with dirt, you end up with wasteful government. And the state becomes a substitute for religion. The religious instinct is so strong in people. You know, religion is a cooperating system for people that if you don’t have a religious system, then the state will take over and create one. And I don’t think the state’s sense of virtue and ethics is much better than the older religions. You know, the older religions had a better grasp on virtue and ethics. Now they were, they didn’t modernize fast enough. So they were poorly adapted towards things like contraception and women entering the workforce and, you know, lesbian and gay rights and so on. But I think we threw the baby out with the bathwater. And I don’t think the religious instinct is gone. People are going to search for it no matter what.

Eric Jorgenson: A great tweet that made me laugh is, the problem with modern society is that atheism has reached the masses.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. I mean, atheism reaching the masses is really bad because people need an operating system and most people are not going to figure it out for themselves. And it has to be a relatively common operating system. So if you don’t have one, you either end up with anarchy or end up with the state dictating it, which either means you’re in an oligarchy or you’re in a communist authority authoritarian hellhole. And related to that is like, I think a fool believes religious beliefs completely and another fool just believes it has no value. Right. Religion does have tremendous value. It’s just that religion was meant as an organizing principle for people to cooperate and trust each other and to work towards common causes. But it was also meant to have a strong, strong personal exploration and virtue component and absolutely did not modernize enough and it was used for control. So again, like, my problem is always big stuff masses. Right. So I think big religion causes a lot of problems, but I think little religion is good. Yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: Village churches.

Naval Ravikant: Village churches, maybe some higher level, broad unifying principles. And finally, the deeper the principle, the more personally it has to be explored and held. And I think if people were to explore religious teachings. Pick your favorite religion. If you were to explore religious teachings, everybody would find components of it that really resonate and will make their lives better, and then you can sort of absorb them. But I’m not going to have the argument about which religion is better. There was a great far side cartoon where there’s like St. Peter at the pearly gates, you know, this one, and there’s like hundreds of people standing there and like he yells out Mormon. The correct answer or is Mormon. It’s like the rest of you are screwed. I think, by the way, that’s one of the. One of the many flaws in Pascal’s

Eric Jorgenson: wager that it’s not a coin flip,

Naval Ravikant: it’s a. Yeah, which God? Right. That’s the next question.

37. Your goal in life is to find the people, business project that needs you

Time: 02:33:13 - 02:34:21

Summary: In the past you were in a tribe of a small number of people in a small society. Now it’s the exact opposite. It’s a search function. You can fly anywhere in the world. There’s infinite opportunity and that’s daunting.

Eric Jorgenson: One of your most iconic is your goal in life is to find the people, business project, or art that needs you the most.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, I really think that the. This is one place where we diverge from our evolutionary past in a big way. And so it’s Important to update your priors. And in the past you were in a tribe of a small number of people in a small society, in a small civilization and it was just people you could meet on foot. So the consequences to making a bad choice, sort of getting rejected, were really high. So you got married early. You, you know, if you were rejected by your suitor or the woman, then it was terrible for you. Your reputation, you know, was all entirely local. You had to fit in. And now it’s the exact opposite. It’s a search function. You can fly anywhere in the world. You can enter any career if you’re young enough and motivated enough, you can hang out with almost any set of people. There’s infinite opportunity and that’s daunting. It’s scary. It’s actually really scary because then if you don’t make it, you get depressed and you feel like it was your fault. But the good news is you don’t have to stay in any bad situation. Okay, now that argument where you want to find the thing that fits you the best, there’s two parts of it. The first part is you have infinite choice. That’s not necessarily good, it’s nerve wracking and it’s kind of bad for society. If there’s no loyalty, if everyone’s always job hopping, if everyone’s always location hopping, then you have no loyalty to your kinship or your tribe or your neighborhood. Or if you’re always relationship hopping, you don’t build any permanent, you have no children. But I think what it is is this. The exploration range is wide. So if you get rejected by someone, don’t cry. It’s like a bad Google search result. Hit back and just search again or click on the next link. There’s infinite variety. I mean you’re going to meet 10, 20,000 people in your life and there’s 8 billion. And you know you can click, click, click and find new ones to date all the time. Like there’s, there’s so much optionality so you should explore widely until you find a fit. But then all the benefits in life come from compound interest. So you have to invest in something. You have to invest in a place, you have to invest in people, you have to invest in business, you have to invest in knowledge, you have to invest in a career. So you have to invest in your physical health and your body. So you find the work that feels like play to you and looks like work to others. You find the person who you uniquely they make you happy by being who they are and you make them happy. By being who you are, you find the location where you can, like, compound. You can build a house, you can build a household. You have people around you that you like and trust. The weather matters a lot, believe it or not. I mean, it’s pretty prosaic, but it matters. That’s why people talk about it so much. You have to find the thing into which you can just invest. And then you get compound interest. So there’s an exploration phase and there’s the exploitation phase. Exploitation in the military sense, not in the, you know, slavery sense. Execution. Execution phase or exploration phase and execution phase and. Or investment phase. Exploration and then investment. So you explore, explore, explore until you find out what is the right fit for you. And then it’s almost effortless to invest in it. And then once you start investing, then you get the compound interest returns. You can’t skip either phase. So in some situations, we explore too little. Usually in, like, job hunting, we explore too little. You know, we’ll spend like. And I get it, sometimes you’re driven by financial constraints. But, you know, people will spend three weeks looking for a job and they’ll be in the job for five years. That’s too little exploration and too much investment. But then on the other side, like, people will stay single until they’re 50 and then be like, oh, now I need to settle down. Well, too much exploration and not enough investment. Right. Or decide, like, it’s too late to have kids for whatever reason, too set in their ways or past the biological age. So there’s a balance to these. But I think I would say the modern society has made exploration a lot easier. And so you should just realize that the benefits are still all an investment. If you never invest in anything, it’s an empty life. It’s a soulless life. You know, you’ll exit badly.

38. There’s an exploration phase and then investment. You can’t skip either phase

Time: 02:34:22 - 02:37:46

Summary: You should explore widely until you find a fit. But then all the benefits in life come from compound interest. In some situations, we explore too little. Modern society has made exploration a lot easier. But the benefits are still all an investment.

Eric Jorgenson: The transition between the two feels like where the rubber roller meets the road. You know, it’s avoiding kind of a local maxima or understanding whether you’re actually in the right place to really root down and invest.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, I think this is where the experience comes in handy. Right. So how do, how do we learn? We don’t learn through time. That, that. So that’s where I think Malcolm Gladwell was wrong. It’s not 10,000 hours, okay? He’s completely wrong about that. I mean, I get where he’s coming from. I’m not criticizing Gladwell, but it’s become a meme, right? This 10,000 hours, what it really is, is 10,000 iterations. And what are iterations? It’s not 10,000, obviously, but it’s a repeated iterations is how we learn. And iterations are when it’s not repetitions. It’s very deliberate. Do not use the word repetitions. Iteration means you do something, then you honestly reflect upon the outcome, you make a change and you try again. And then you honestly reflect upon the outcome, you make a change and you try again. Try again. You do this enough times in any endeavor, it will develop your judgment. And then once your judgment is well developed enough, you will start not trying a whole bunch of things. You will reject a whole bunch of things until finally you say, well, actually, I just want to be with this kind of person, or I just want to live in this kind of place, or I just want to do this kind of thing. And that’s it. Now you’re done. Now you can start investing love. By the way, all this stuff is ex post facto reasoning. I never really thought this through while I was doing it. It’s like really easy to look back and see the pattern. It’s very hard to see it when you’re moving forward. Yeah. Anything that we talk about, my guess is it will only resonate with somebody. Resonate if they went through the experience themselves and they’re like, ah, now I have a word for it. And then they can attach a word for it and that helps them remember it more later. But you can’t teach someone purely in the abstract because they don’t know when it applies to their situation. A lot of times people ask me advice on Twitter or on Reddit and it’s like way too broad. It’s like, I’m not in your situation. I can’t give you the answer. I just don’t know. All I can give you is a general principle which may or may not apply. Right. So this is pretty unsatisfying, but it’s the truth. But this is where I like platforms like Air Chat and Clubhouse back in the day where someone could ask you a question, you could get into it with them, you could ask them the next level question. The next level question. The next level question until you’re fine. Like, okay, well, if I was in a situation, given what you’ve told me, here’s how I would would handle it.

39. Malcolm Gladwell says you can learn through 10,000 iterations

Time: 02:37:46 - 02:40:59

Summary: Don’t get attached to a specific relationship. Choose your environment consciously. Anything that we talk about, my guess is it will only resonate with somebody. You can’t teach someone purely in the abstract because they don’t know when it applies to their situation.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, there’s kind of two levels you can engage on it, which is the, the general or the specific. But anything in the middle is really difficult to.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, the, the general requires people to apply it themselves. So these are just mental hooks and, you know, may resonate, may not.

Eric Jorgenson: One thing we talked about Is the, the environment being sort of upstream of your thoughts and environment determining so much of what you think, how you think, but that the enlightened mind sort of can choose it own environment and so taking agency over that.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, it’s, there’s a feedback loop. Right. We are meant to adapt as living creatures. We adapt to our environment and we locally reverse entropy to make our environment more controllable. But the first step of that is choosing your environment consciously. And so that’s why on relationships I was kind of saying don’t get attached to a specific relationship. Even if it’s not working for you, you don’t have some obligation to struggle through unless you have kids or something, then it’s different. Right? Right. You can change your relationship, you can curate your relationship, and then once you’re in the right relationship, it’s a lot easier because you’re a better fit for each other. So I think this kind of also goes into my tweet a little bit. Like the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. Right. And that one’s one of my favorites for myself because it’s a two part test. One is choosing what to want and then getting it. It’s not just like, oh, I want to be a 6 foot 8 tall basketball player. It’s not going to happen. So you have to want the right things, things that are even achievable, but kind of at the edge of your range of achievability and where the process of achieving them won’t make you miserable. And so you choose what to want and then you go and get what you want. And then if you chose the right things and you got it, then that’s the only external valid signal that can determine are you intelligent or not. Right. So I think related, you choose your environment and then you adapt your environment. But don’t just get stuck in your environment, don’t adapt it. Like one of the greatest gifts in modern society is that, you know, the first IQ test you have is do you stay where you were born? Right. Like, a lot of people end up stuck where they’re born and maybe it was the optimal place for them, but usually I would guess not. Usually I would guess there was someplace out there that was better than them. It might be the next town over, it might be another country, it could be anything. But people want better lives and the first step is where do you go for that better life? So that is part of choosing your environment. But even then I feel like you have to do something I don’t think you can go through life as just an advice giver. It feels fake to me. It feels false to me. An ideal life is one where you write for yourself and your children and you do things that are useful and beautiful and true. You learn for yourself. And to the extent that you’re giving people advice, it’s because they asked you and they asked you something specific and it can be helpful. You’re not giving advice to become an advice giver. My least favorite VC is the type who, like, says, we’re company builders. We’re the team behind the team. It’s like, no, you’re not. The founder built the company. They took all the risk. You’re taking a little bit of credit. You risk somebody else’s cash, capital, LP capital. And yes, you were a good picker. There are a few VCs out there who really do get involved and who really do roll up their sleeves and who really do take it personally. But they’re few. They’re very, very few. And they’re not. Not the more famous ones that you would think about.

40. The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want

Time: 02:41:00 - 02:43:27

Summary: Only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. You choose what to want and then you go and get it. Don’t just get stuck in your environment, don’t adapt it. You can’t go through life as just an advice giver.

41. Walter Cronkite says you should choose inspiration over envy

Time: 02:43:27 - 02:47:46

Summary: The real test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life. I have to remind myself to choose inspiration over envy. I was super inspired by Steve Jobs even when he was alive. There’s lots of inspiration where you can get your inspiration.

Eric Jorgenson: Well, this was unique about your, Your Twitter is that you’ve exerted zero effort to actually accrue a following. You just share notes to self and people, I think, see the authenticity of that and the value of it. I saw a connection between some of your thoughts on envy, which has been particularly, I think, useful, and what you said about the real game of intelligence, or the real test of intelligence, is whether you get what you want out of life. I find if you pass that test, if you get what you want that you uniquely wanted, what is there to be jealous of? Why would you be envious of anybody else?

Naval Ravikant: That’s, that’s a very good point. They do coalesce together. That said, like, it’s very hard to pass that test. Our desires usually outstrip our capabilities and we have a way of manufacturing new ones as soon as we get what we want. But, yeah, I have to remind myself to choose inspiration over envy. You know, when you see somebody, somebody doing something successfully, what I try not to be is I try not to be envious in the sense that there’s no one on planet Earth that I would swap my life with. No one, not even these enlightened beings. There’s nobody that I would do a full wholesale substitute. Right. So in that sense, envy is not real. But when you look at someone being successful, you can say, well, I mean, there’s the common. You can be like, well, they don’t deserve it. They got lucky. Okay, sure, there’s an element of that, and with some people, there’s much more that in others or they’re being unethical about it, which is unfortunate. So those are true, but it’s not good to fixate on those. Just like we discussed at the beginning, if you fixate on all the unfairness in life, you’ll never get it anything done. So just on a very practical basis, you want to find the part that’s inspirational. So, for example, one of the reasons why I’m doing a company is, you know, I’m inspired by guys like Elon and Peter Thiel. And Elon inspired by. Because he does these companies and, you know, he charges hard and he takes on huge projects and he does difficult things. Peter Thiel is a little different. Like, Thiel is talking about, you should do important things, you know, create the definite future that you want to live in. But I don’t see himself doing it. Right. He’s an investor and philosopher. So I could just be that guy. I could just be investor, philosopher. But I choose to be inspired by kind of the best part of what he’s saying and doing, and I sort of ignore the rest, which is not. Nothing wrong with it, but I. I’m just. I like the inspiration part. But if I had to look for, like the pure inspiration, the guy that I never envied, I never swapped with him. But I was super inspired by Steve Jobs even when he was alive. It’s easy to be inspired and not envious when people are dead, I swear. Right. But even when he was alive, like, I think somebody said this the other day. They said, you know, since Steve Jobs passed, Silicon Valley is missing its cultural leader. Right. It’s like all these entrepreneurs, like, who do you look up to? I know Elon’s pretty reviled now because of the whole thing with the administration and politics. People always pick sides on that. But I think the honest people still like Elon and I inspired by him. But there is no single cultural leader where somebody looks at that person and says, yeah, I want my life to be that. Right. This person’s building something incredible. They’re not just doing it for the money. They seem relatively happy. They have a good family life. They have some ethics and morals. Although, yes, Steve has negative stories about him too. But you can’t be an extreme character without breaking some eggs. It’s just going to happen. You’re going to have some negative sides to your personal personality, and people will want to elevate themselves by bringing those stories out. Right. So they’ll want to unearth those stories and pull this person down so they can be higher up on the status ladder. But, yeah, since Jobs passed, there isn’t that single inspiration. But maybe we’re not living in that kind of world anymore. Right. Everyone doesn’t tune into Walter Cronkite for the evening news anymore either. Right. So get your inspiration where you can. There’s lots of minions. Inspiration.

Eric Jorgenson: Knowing that we are sort of inevitably mimetic creatures and we’re going to be inspired by and pick up and follow people, you know, deliberately selecting heroes or deliberately selecting traits of those heroes rather than sort of doing it on accident feels like maybe as good as most of us can do.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, and that’s. That’s fine. I mean, it’s. Again, it’s going to be resonance. It is the something in that other person will remind you of something within yourself, and then you can get some validation by saying, well, okay, if that person can do it, I can, too. Like, I’ll say, like Steve Jobs, like his having done calligraphy and art and, you know, having been a Zen Buddhist for a while and having done LSD and, you know, believing in Pixar and believing in Next and kind of falling out of favor and then coming back in, like, all of those things gave me license to just mix the spiritual and the scientific. I wasn’t as afraid because I was like, you know, and I don’t think I thought about it consciously, but there was existence proof through Jobs, even if he wasn’t running around, like, publicly lecturing people, which I appreciate about him, actually, that he wasn’t out there trying to position himself as a philosopher or guru or anything like that. Rather, he was embodying it in his products. And so I think that’s. That’s deeply inspirational. And definitely there’s resonance with parts of me. I think. I think every human is whole. Every person is capable of everything. You’re. You’re capable of being the biggest angel or the biggest demon. You’re capable of being, you know, having the next breakthrough or just kind of spending your whole life smoking dope and playing video games. Right? You’re capable of anything. And this is part of Deutsch’s I don’t want to say philosophy. Let’s say it’s part of Deutsch’s science because he has shown that humans are Turing complete. Turing complete means you’re a universal explainer. Universal explainer means you can simulate all the laws of physics in your head. Anything that can be thought can be thought by you. You can have any thought, you can have any breakthrough, you can have any amount of creativity. Everyone’s capable of everything. And I think deep down we know that. And it’s just we get limited in society by like, oh, you’re a lawyer, you have to think this way. You went to this school, you have to behave that way. You know, you’re, you didn’t go to college, therefore you can only think or talk about these things. You can’t talk about this in public with that person. You can’t forge your life uniquely that way. Or on the other side. Like there are people who are weirdos. This San Francisco, we’re full of weirdos here. But you know, they’re weirdos who are told you must hate money, you’re not allowed to make money, or you’re not allowed to, you know, look normal. You have to be ironic. You gotta be a hipster, right? You can kind of do whatever you want. And the important thing is just figuring out what is going to get you what you want and wanting the right things in the first place. And I guess I would just argue that all of us eventually figure out that you want the long term things and the things that make you personally better off. And then after that you can do the things that make all of society better off. Because if you just obsess on yourself, you’re not going to be happy.

42. Steve Jobs gave me license to mix spiritual and the scientific

Time: 02:47:46 - 02:51:23

Summary: I think every human is whole. Every person is capable of everything. The important thing is figuring out what is going to get you what you want and wanting the right things in the first place. After that you can do the things that make all of society better off.

Eric Jorgenson: Well, it’s probably a grandiose association, but it feels like you’re writing your meditations. They’re notes to self that are published that you’re iterating on.

Naval Ravikant: Well, meditations was more authentic because he didn’t mean for his journal to be published.

Eric Jorgenson: Yes. So, yeah, you have the observer effect.

Naval Ravikant: Yes. Mine is less authentic for sure. I try to keep it as authentic as I can while being public. Right. Just being public has some level of inauthenticity baked into it. The guy I really admire, Schopenhauer, because he wrote so much harsh truth while he was alive and nobody liked him, but, but he knew he was telling the truth, so he didn’t care. And now he’s posthumously incredibly famous, or should be anyway. I think he’s the greatest of the Western philosophers that I’ve encountered. Maybe I’ll write my real book and it gets published posthumously because I do live in this world and now the world is super connected and I have kids and all that, but that’s what I’ll tell all that harsh truths.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. One of the pieces of advice you gave somebody who was presently unhappy about finding purpose, finding meaning, Was God, kids are mission.

43. One of the pieces of advice you gave somebody who was unhappy about finding purpose

Time: 02:51:23 - 02:52:37

Summary: Was God, kids are mission. Gotta find one of the three at least. Got all three. But my God is personal, you know, I can’t even articulate. Part of the reason why I haven’t written a book is because I feel like it might be fraudulent.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, God, kids are mission. Gotta find one of the three at least.

Eric Jorgenson: I was curious how those broke down for you personally.

Naval Ravikant: Got all three. But my God is personal, you know, I can’t even articulate. I’m not even sure I use the word God, but it’s there. I have my own relationship with whatever this is. Kids definitely have them. Love them broader met just family. Family’s great. Be close to family, love your family. Family, take care of them, there’s no substitutes. And expand your definition of family as you get older. And mission? Yeah, I mean I have a product that I’m working on. I’m recording this thing with you. I’m trying to self actualizing as to what I do best.

Eric Jorgenson: So the mission is very. Is narrow to what you’re working on now. It’s not a grander human level, civilization level.

Naval Ravikant: I’d like to be enlightened. I don’t feel like I have a right to like lecture people on these esoteric topics without myself having explored them all the way through. So in some level, part of the reason why I haven’t written a book is because I feel like it might be fraudulent. Part of it is I’m just lazy. So that’s a good excuse, but it might be fraudulent.

44. Can you overdose on introspection? I don’t think you can

Time: 02:52:38 - 02:57:21

Summary: Can you overdose on introspection? I think it would be a different thing, if you’re trying to find truth. Why are there so many forces like working against truth? Because society has to stay together. To have consensus, you have to have a shared set of beliefs.

Eric Jorgenson: Can you overdose on introspection?

Naval Ravikant: I think it would be a different thing, introspection, if you’re trying to find truth, if you’re thinking, watching yourself and increasing your self awareness, I don’t think you can. I think you get bored of it or distracted before you overdose on it. But if you’re ruminating, if you’re basically like, oh, this shouldn’t have happened and this was wrong and you know, you’re caught in that mind loop that depressed people have, then you can absolutely overdo it. So it depends what you’re thinking about. If you’re observing yourself, that’s different than if you’re obsessing over yourself or you’re obsessing over some problems, some of which can be real, but most of which are imagined. Like one the of one of the controversial takes I have, people don’t like this, but if I’m reading a philosopher right, one tweet I did put was like, the more it matters who said it, the less it actually matters. I think that is true. Like truth is truth regardless of where it comes from. But at the same time there are philosophies of how to live your life. And these aren’t just like simple statements. These are like this person’s entire philosophy, right? And I don’t read books these days is I read authors and I don’t read authors. I read philosophers, right? So I’ll read Deutsch, I’ll read Osho, I’ll read Krishnamurti, I’ll read Schopenhauer. And because I like them, I’ll read everything by them. And until I’m done reading everything by them, why would I read anybody else? I’ll read everything by Taleb. But I do judge these philosophers on the outcomes they got in their lives. So if somebody has a deep philosophy, but they seemed like a really. They were unhappy and they didn’t get what they want, they were miserable about it, then, you know, it’s like that line from no country, from all men, like, what good are your rules if they led you here? The killer says that when the protagonist shows up in the wrong place, right? So it should lead you to a good place. So there are some modern writers of recent times and celebrities who I won’t name, but they basically kill themselves. So I’m like, how great was that philosophy? Like, I’m sorry you killed yourself, but clearly whatever you did as your philosophy did not work. Now, there might be individual truths in there that can pluck out, but I’m not going to invest deeply in your philosophy or reify your life because it ended badly.

Eric Jorgenson: You’ve got a great tweet. The real truths are heresies. They cannot be spoken, only discovered, whispered, and perhaps read.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right. So it’s my most humus book.

Eric Jorgenson: Why is that, though? Like, why? Why are there so many?

Naval Ravikant: Society will lynch you. Why?

Eric Jorgenson: Why are there so many forces like working against truth?

Naval Ravikant: Because society has to stay together. Groups have to have consensus. And to have consensus, you have to have a shared set of beliefs that are false but make it easier to get along. And like, one of those is everyone’s equal, right? Everyone’s equal in the Holy Ghost sense, Everyone’s equal in this consciousness sense. Everyone’s equal in the universal explainer sense. Everyone is not. Not equal in almost any other sense, right? In terms of, like, how hard you work, how good are you doing for society or for yourself? How good is your product? How high can you jump? How hard can you hit? Are you qualified for this job or that job? Not equal, right? But that is a shared fiction that we have to. Have to get along. If we don’t have that shared fiction, we don’t get along. We start fighting each other. So some of these falsehoods are there for good. Reasons, they prevent warfare, they allow the group to coexist, but they’re not true. So I mean, that’s a simple example. There are many like you see this a lot in male female relationships, right? Like what is the whole pickup artist thing? The pickup artist society, that’s all guys sharing truths about women that they’re not allowed to say in public that seem to work on some number of women that allow them to go get dates. You know, like one of the truths in that domain is that women are attracted to signs of social status. In men. It’s not they’re attracted to necessarily wealth, although wealth can be a sign of social status. They’re not necessarily attracted to physicality or even character. Although I would argue for marriage, women are attracted to character, but you know, for dating they’re attracted to signs of social status. In men, it’s not even social status, it’s signs of social status. Right. So then men have to learn how to hack signs of social status that creates this game phenomenon, which is his own falsehood going back at women. You know, equivalently, like women are taught to believe that like, you know, men are attracted to you for your character and your personality. Yeah, they might stay with you for that later, but the initial attraction is all physical. Right. And so that’s another truth you’re not supposed to talk about too much. These are, these are on the edge so I can talk about them a little bit. There are truths I just cannot talk about just way further down. But I would tell you that some of the greatest philosophers of all time, they establish their truth telling capabilities by telling you the harsh truth. And because of that, they’ll be read long after most of the rest of them are forgotten.

45. Some things are spreadable and some things are not. And then there’s the truths that don’t spread

Time: 02:57:21 - 03:03:41

Summary: There’s a two by two matrix of truth versus spreadability versus spread. And basically you have conventional wisdom, fake news, heresies and non existence. If you want to be non consensus correct, you need to bet on a heresy.

Eric Jorgenson: And that’s part of the value of reading those permanent perfect books from dead people who are willing to tell the truth.

Naval Ravikant: They’re dead and either the truth was told, they publish posthumously, or they publish anonymously, or they just didn’t care.

Eric Jorgenson: It’s interesting that some truths need to be. Some truths are self perpetuating or self converging.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: Like they are making themselves more evident and others are need to be actively obscured.

Naval Ravikant: Well, it actually goes back to what you said earlier, which is some things are spreadable and some things are not. So when you get a truth that spreads, it’s cliche, it’s conventional wisdom. If you get a lie that spreads, you know, that’s fake news, that’s all over. That’s politics. It’s a lot of the combat that goes on. A lie that doesn’t spread just disappears very quickly. And then there’s the truths that don’t spread. And those are actually the most interesting. And the reason they don’t spread is because spread is a function of groups to spread. There needs to be a group to spread within. So any truth that lowers group cohesion will not spread.

Eric Jorgenson: And then there’s kind of like a two by two matrix, right?

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, it’s a two by two mature truth versus spreadability versus spread. And basically you have conventional wisdom, fake news, heresies and non existence. Those are the four or nonsense, I would say. Yeah. So I mean the problem is everyone knows the conventional wisdom. The heresies don’t spread. So most of the news is fake news by definition. Conventional wisdom doesn’t need to be spread is already out there. And heresies don’t spread because they’re not spreadable and nonsense doesn’t go anywhere. So the only thing that makes it through the environment is fake news.

Eric Jorgenson: Well, it’s actually, it’s Peter Thiel’s question is digging for heresies.

Naval Ravikant: Right? That’s right.

Eric Jorgenson: If you want to be non consensus correct, you need to bet on a heresy.

Naval Ravikant: Right now Peter only talks about business contexts. But the real heresy heresies are everywhere. Like they’re out there in business, they’re out there in science, they’re out there in the field of Genetics is full of heresies.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, demographics.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, Demographics full of heresies. Social science are full of heresies. Economics is full of heresies.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that’s very interesting. I’ll read a clip and see if this is updated at all. In particular via through Deutsch. My philosophy falls down to this. On one pole, evolution as a binding principle because it explains so much about humans. On the other is Buddhism, which is the oldest, most time tested spiritual philosophy regarding our internal state.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, I mean I still stand by that. I think those are both still true. I would just add to it that I think. Yeah. 3 Deutsch Quantum physics is our best explanation for the world that we live in. The material world. His epistemology and his replacement of good explanations that are hard to vary. And I think add on to that a little bit. Like it helps me to think of it as also they often make risky and narrow predictions. That’s kind of how you determine what’s true from what’s false. Epistemology. So that is an incredibly useful addition. And then computation and then the linkages between all of these. So linkage between quantum computation and quantum physics and epistemology and evolution by natural selection and then also with Buddhist spirituality, which I know Deutsch has zero interest in and does not factor into his worldview at all.

Eric Jorgenson: But that’s where you’re sort of the practicality of your philosophy comes in of just like managing the humanness of our minds. Buddhism is the best expression of that.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, it’s practical, but I also think it’s true truth. I don’t necessarily live my life 100% this way, but intellectually I’m pretty convinced that the Buddhist interpretation is correct. That consciousness is everything and everything arises within consciousness, that the self is a fiction. Do I live my actual life that way day to day? No. But I do believe it to be true tentatively. And I think it is a better model than saying that consciousness arises within matter. I think matter arises within than consciousness.

Eric Jorgenson: Is that compatible with Deutsch? I mean his thing about the human exceptionalism and we are the only known conscious beings.

Naval Ravikant: It’s completely compatible. The one thing you can’t determine is like, is everything taking place in my consciousness or is my consciousness taking place in everything like it is? There is no experiment we know of. Yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: Will that ever be knowable?

Naval Ravikant: I don’t want to say never, but. Because someone might get very creative. But I can’t think of a way offhand to distinguish between the to. Deutsch has an experiment for the quantum multiverse, which is actually how he came up with quantum computing. People don’t realize this, but he came up with the theory of quantum computation because he was trying to create a falsifiability experiment for the quantum multiverse. And so to do that he had to create an AGI and treat that as an observer and get inside its brain and then see if wave function collapse happened inside the observer rather than from the observer. And to do that he was like, well then I need a copy quantum AGI and for quantum AGI I need a quantum computer. So then he worked at the equations for quantum computing and that’s how quantum computing was born.

Eric Jorgenson: That’s crazy.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, from quantum physics, from the multiverse theory. So I don’t want to say never because he figured out he literally invented the field of quantum computing while trying to figure out a falsifiability experiment for the quantum multiverse. So there may be a falsifiable experiment to distinguish whether materiality exists inside consciousness or consciousness exists inside side materiality.

Eric Jorgenson: That’s a pretty all time side quest.

Naval Ravikant: Exactly. But even his experiment is not runnable yet. You would need an AGI first and you need quantum computers first.

46. You mentioned before that you Want to map the tenets of Buddhism directly onto a virtual reality simulation

Time: 03:03:43 - 03:08:06

Summary: You can map the tenets of Buddhism directly onto a virtual reality simulation. Breaking out of the simulation does you no favors. It puts you in an infinite trap. There are too many ways it could go wrong. The sim is always going to always control reality.

Eric Jorgenson: You mentioned before that you Want to write a blog post at some point about how you can map the tenets of Buddhism directly onto a virtual reality simulation?

Naval Ravikant: Oh, shoot, I’d forgotten that one. Yeah, I think the way it kind of goes is roughly. Roughly something like if you were living in a sim, right? Let’s say you found out tomorrow you’re living in a Matrix, there’s a splinter in your mind. Like, shit, I’m in the Matrix, I need to get out. Right? So that would basically be like the quest for enlightenment. You’d be looking for truth. You didn’t know what it was. This is what the Matrix is all about, right? And then you would find out, let’s say you break out of it, right? And now you land in another Matrix, you land in Zion. How do you know that’s not another Matrix, right? Do you have Inception problem? How do you know which dream you’re in, which dream level you’re in? Because the moment you’re out, it means you can get out, which means that you can’t trust this is real either, right? This could just be a sim as well. So breaking out of the simulation does you no favors. It puts you in an infinite trap. And so then you’re always trying to break out of the Matrix, no matter where you are. You never know if you’re in base reality or not. So there’s only one way you could be convinced. You’re at base reality, reality right now, you could be dead. But if you’re dead, there’s no one to convince. You can’t have experience of being dead. So that’s not valid. But there’s only one way to truly break out of the Matrix, which is the white room. In the Matrix, they go into the white room. It’s just blank. What is that? It’s just consciousness. There’s nothing there other than just like pure awareness, right? If you’re in pure awareness, that means you’re not simulating anything other than just you’re there. That’s it. The only thing you’re simulating is I. So the equivalent to that in Buddhism is when you realize you’re just pure consciousness and everything else is just forms that come and go. Everything else is Matrix, right? It’s all simulation. Now, if you’re at that model, you’re enlightened and you’re in the white room. In the Matrix, they’re functionally equivalent. You’re. All you are is pure consciousness. It’s really boring. And so what do you do before enlightenment or after enlightenment? Well, there’s a Zen saying like before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. So now you realize you’re bored. And now you realize why the matrix or the white rune generates the entire matrix. Or why God creates infinite forms, or why you know, you as God, forget yourself and then go back into the game. It’s because it’s boring out there. So you go be cipher. So Buddhism in the sim theory kind of lead you the same way. So if we manage to create simulations and we put ourselves inside the simulation at first it would be really fun. You’d be like, I’m in the sim, I can do anything. Then you’re like, wait, I control the sim. This is really boring, right? And so then you’d have to forget that you’re in the sim. You’d have to wipe your own memory in the sim so that you can actually enjoy the sim. But then you’d also feel fear. And at some point you get this nervous feeling like, I need to get out of the sim. And then when you try to get out of the sim, you’re like, how do I know I’m out of the sim? And then eventually get to the white room. You’re like, now I’m out of the sim, but now this is really boring. And you create a sim, wipe your memory and dive back in. And that’s your rebirths. That’s your infinite cycle rebirth. So that’s how I’d map Buddhism to simulation theory. They use the same outcome. But simulation theory to me is a lousy theory. It’s unfalsifiable. It just kicks the can up the road. All it makes is it makes a probabilistic argument. It says like, hey, we’re likely to develop this and then do that, and then do this and then do that. But there are too many ways it could go wrong. In between. The sim is always going to be lower resolution than reality. The people on the outside can always control the people on the inside. So there are all kinds of, of problems with it. Plus, I think we inherently have a craving for truth. So I don’t think anybody wants to live a lie. Even I myself, like, even if I were, you know, living in some other reality, I would not create a fake reality where I would forget everything. Or if I did, I’d leave myself an out, an eject button which I’d have to look really hard to find. Maybe that’s called enlightenment.

Eric Jorgenson: But I like the, the simulation theory, I find is a useful belief because you see the people.

Naval Ravikant: If.

Eric Jorgenson: If what you need out of life is to not take yourself too seriously, to be high agency, to be active, but not stress too much about what you’re being active about. Like, it’s actually pretty useful frame for most of life.

Naval Ravikant: It’s just religion. Religion would do the exact same thing for. Exactly. Yeah. With less steps, less computation involved, less programmers. Who’s the. Instead of calling it God, you’re just calling it the great programmer. Yeah.

47. There’s a tendency in society to layer latest scientific worldview onto religion

Time: 03:08:06 - 03:12:53

Summary: There’s a tendency in society that whatever the latest scientific worldview is, we layer that onto religion. But understanding things like relativity and quantum physics is more satisfying than saying the universe is a computer. Live for something larger than yourself, but only on your own terms.

Eric Jorgenson: And more friends, probably. Yeah.

Naval Ravikant: So there’s also a tendency in society that whatever the latest scientific worldview is, we layer that onto religion. Right. So when it was, you know, the sun, you lived and died by the sun. Then the sun God, Ra was a sun God. Right. And then when the king was in charge, then it was a God king. And when Newton came along, we got the mechanics, mechanical universe. Then it was like, oh, the universe. Like a big watch. It’s a mechanistic universe. God is dead. And now, because computers are ascendant, the universe is a big computer.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. We have a way of taking the permanent problems and making them contemporary.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, we always view it through the contemporary lens of our greatest knowledge at that time. But I would argue that understanding things like relativity and quantum physics and studying cosmology and just sort of physics is more satisfying than saying the universe is a computer. Saying the universe is a computer is almost too reductive. It’s trying too hard. As a very simple example, a computer is a state machine. State machine has steps. Steps means everything is discrete. This happens and this happens and that happens. If this happens, then take that branch. Take that branch. But everything is in a different discrete sequence. And that is kind of what quantum physics says. So quantum computation. Quantum physics says the universe is discrete, but that is not what relativity says. Relativity says the universe is continuous. And so right there you run into a contradiction. Like any SIM theory that says the universe is a computer relies upon a kind of computation that does not exist. Not even quantum computation. It violates relativity. And this is why all the compute based theories of the world, like Stephen Wolfram’s compute based physics, they run into this issue issue, which is that reality is continuous. So then he’s got this whole other thing, this hypergraph thing, which I don’t fully understand, but I just feel like it’s conveniently mapping the dominant paradigm of our times onto religion and then removing and then hiding God behind the curtain.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Which is we should be suspicious of.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, I think it’s easier just to. This is the kind of thing you have to have your own viewpoint on because no one else will satisfy You. Nothing else will satisfy you. And I think if you can put a name to it, it’s kind of. Of problematic. Or if you can put a structure to it, it’s problematic.

Eric Jorgenson: I really love this tweet as a capstone for a lot of what you’ve shared, because I feel like it ties together a lot of threads that might seem to have an apparent contradiction, which is live for something larger than yourself, but only on your own terms.

Naval Ravikant: Oh, I like that one. I’d forgotten about that one. I like that one. Live for something larger than yourself, but only. You know what? I’m going to go do exactly that.

Eric Jorgenson: That.

Naval Ravikant: I like that one.

Eric Jorgenson: It’s. It’s a really good way to disentangle everything.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. Because society doesn’t want to tell you to live on your own terms because they’re afraid you’re going to screw over society. You’re just going to be a criminal and a thug and a hedonist. But that’s the path for unintelligent people. You know, the. The person who doesn’t know what they’re doing is the one doing too many drugs or breaking too many laws or doing horrible things. Like, you don’t need to do that. You know, it’s not going to make you happy. It’s just a trap. It’s a trap that you’re caught in. You know, when we look at a drug addict, that’s a trap that they’re caught in. The same way you see someone committing crimes, like, there are better ways to get what you want. You will actually have a better life if you don’t do that. And that’s where, like, a lot of progressivism comes from. You know, you still gotta have punishments for dissuade people. But at the same time, I feel like you do have to live life on your own terms or you’re not going to do it. But you have to live for something larger than yourself or it’s going to lead to a very bad outcome and you’re not going to be happy. So, yeah, I’m going to follow that advice. Thank you for that.

Eric Jorgenson: I mean, if you weren’t getting high on your own supply, that wouldn’t be. Then it wouldn’t be good substance.

Naval Ravikant: I love finding my own tweet and be like, wow, that’s really good.

Eric Jorgenson: You know, that’s how I know. That’s how I know a book is almost ready when I pick it up again, and it’s better than I remembered it.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, the great books are fractal too. They like you learn something new every time. Like, one of the things I like doing now is I found some, you know, I show up in Howard Seneca, for example. They have good, they’re good audiobooks and recordings of their stuff, but they’re very high density speakers and authors. So if you listen to their stuff, you miss a lot because it was written so it’s meant to be read. Which is why I had this tweet about like, you know, listening to books instead of reading them is like drinking your vegetables instead of eating them. Right. Like it’s more efficient, but it’s. You’re getting kind of a sugar high. You’re not taking the way it was meant to be. You’re not getting all the benefits. But it’s better than nothing, right? It’s better to do that than to like not consume it. And so I’ve been listening to a bunch of authors who are normally written down. And one of the things I had to come to peace with was just like, you know what? I’m only going to get like 20% of the throughput, like Schopenhauer especially. Every sentence is crafted, every thought is crafted. That guy is a genius. And so when you listen to him at spoken speed, I’m like, whoa, whoa, stop. Oh, I missed that. Oh, shit. What was that? What was he referring to? Oh, I got lost in a daydream. So I’m constantly pausing it. But then I finally had to give up on it. I was just like, you know, I’m just going to listen to what I’m going to listen to. I’m going to absorb what I’m going to absorb and I’ll just go back and listen to it again later, like if it was that good. And what I’ve realized is, even when reading, you have the same issue. You read a paragraph, you’ll be lucky if you pick up a sentence and it might be a different sentence every time. But the good books have the property that there’s not much wasted space. All the sentences are useful at some point to somebody. And so I really value that in an author. And Schopenhauer has it in spades. I can go back and read the same essay ten times over five years and I’ll get something different out of it every time.

48. The only books I would want to read are timeless ones about human nature

Time: 03:12:53 - 03:16:05

Summary: The only books I would want to read are the timeless ones about human nature. I can’t do contemporary history or sociology. The lessons of Genghis Khan have to be distilled down much more at this point. Imagine your opportunity cost of book selection.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you’ve got that. Read the best hundred books over and over and over.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, there’s no point in reading the rest. Yeah. The only books I would want to read are the timeless ones about human nature with people who are incredible, incredibly intelligent, or very modern, recent stuff where there’s a fast moving field where I want to know what’s on the cutting edge. And I know that knowledge will be obsolete shortly. But the thing I can’t do is read contemporary history or sociology or there are these very smart people who seem to get a lot of value out of reading a lot of history. And I’ve read some history, but I don’t need to read the details of the Roman Empire.

Eric Jorgenson: I love Will Durant.

Naval Ravikant: I love Lessons of History. I’m not going to read the whole story of Episode. Yeah. Story of civilization, all 12 volumes. It’s like too much detail.

Eric Jorgenson: His other books like Fallen Leaves and Heroes of History and stuff, the really condensed stuff.

Naval Ravikant: Fallen Leaves was kind of sad. I couldn’t make it through it. I started it and it was just like. He was like, oh, shit, I’m getting old and this sucks. And what was the point of all this? That’s what the book is basically saying. They cast him in a light that I didn’t want to see him and maybe it gets better later, but I couldn’t finish it. And by the way, even the lessons of history, if all you read was the lessons of history, that would not work. You need to have read enough specific history that you can see. Oh, yeah, I’ve seen this pattern before. So I’ve read plenty of history in my youth. So when I read the lessons of history, I’d be like, I know what he’s referring to and I have a rough sense. But I’m not going to, you know, I don’t have time to read 18 volumes on Genghis Khan now. Like, it’s too late for that. I’ll read one volume on Elon because it’s highly relevant to my current world as well. But the lessons of Genghis Khan have to be distilled down much more at this point. We live in the TikTok generation.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Imagine your opportunity cost of book selection. Like just paying very careful attention to what you’re feeding yourself.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. And I think it’s actually pretty easy. I think you just pick up a book and you just glance through it and you’ll know there’s no obligation to finish a book or turn a page or even read it in sequence or in order or, or any of the sort. Buffett has a good line. It’s like, it’s like, you know, like you can. You can read the book, but you can’t tell anyone about it. You can’t tell anyone you read it. Yeah, that’s a sign of a good book.

49. Everything is best pursued indirectly, but the things that seem elusive are indirect

Time: 03:16:05 - 03:21:20

Summary: Is everything best pursued indirectly? Even status is best best pursued by serving others. Happiness is elusive if it’s pursued too directly. The things that seem very elusive are that way because they’re best pursued indirect.

Eric Jorgenson: Something I found myself wondering a couple times as I, you know, refresh on all these ideas. Is everything best pursued indirectly? I’ve seen, you know, wealth is best pursued by exploring your genuine curiosity. Learning is best done by, you know, reading whatever you’re interested in. Even status is best best pursued by serving others. Happiness is elusive if it’s pursued too directly.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, it may not be that everything is best pursued indirectly, but the things that seem very elusive are that way because they’re best pursued indirectly. Right. The stuff we have figured out, we don’t talk about because we can pursue it directly. But the stuff that seems elusive is because it’s best pursued indirectly. And there are different reasons for different things. In the case of wealth, it’s because it’s a competitive game. So someone who’s really into what they’re doing will always outcompete someone who’s not into it. So that’s where part of the indirectness comes from. And then if you’re doing something purely selfish, you won’t get the best people on your side. Like, for example, if you look at like porn or gambling or crypto, like, especially the casino is part of crypto. You don’t get the best team, you don’t get good teams because the best people don’t want to do that stuff. They don’t want to work with you. So now you’re in an industry where you just have like, sorry if I call them out, but low quality people working alongside you. And then you’re just gonna have a lower quality of life and you’re gonna have people who are less ethical and kind of like, you know, more hedonistic. In the case of happiness, you can’t pursue it directly because the direct pursuit of pleasure causes addiction. And that leads to unhappiness, that causes dopamine burnout. So the, the direct pursuit of that simply doesn’t work. It burns out the receptor. You know, that’s, that’s supposed that you’ trying to modulate in a good way over the others.

Eric Jorgenson: Status is best pursued by serving and supporting others.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. Status can’t be pursued directly because status is hierarchy and it’s a hidden hierarchy. It’s very hard to tell what status someone is. You have to glean it out. And saying that you’re high status is low status. Because if you’re high status, you don’t have to say it. Everyone knows it. And so directly pursuing status is a low status is a status status lowering activity. So that’s why people try to be ironic or clever when they Put people down. You know, they try to bring people down by saying, oh, he, oh, Elon’s a Nazi. He’s evil. You know, he did the salute. I’m like, no, you’re a midwit. You’re an idiot. You should watch the video and see how many so called salutes people do all day long when they’re waving their arms around. So all you’ve proven is you’re an idiot. But what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to bring him down to status. And so they’re trying to elevate their own status. They’re trying to pursue indirectly. So a lot of what we see as bad behavior from journalists or on Twitter or in modern society with fake news is just the pursuit of status in a covert way.

Eric Jorgenson: And love, you don’t want to pursue directly receiving love because love is needy

Naval Ravikant: and it’s actually not the thing you want. It’s giving love is the thing that you want. You can manufacture love anytime you want. I actually envy. Envy, you know, quotes, not really envy, but I. There’s a class of person who’s just very loving, you know, and can give genuine love without talking about it. The people who are, you know, saying, oh, love, love, love, they use the word a lot. They’re pursuing status, right? It’s just another way to purs. Pursue status. But the people who are genuinely capable of feeling and giving love to large quantities of people like that, that’s a, that’s a form of an enlightened person. And they themselves always seem pretty happy. When’s the last time you saw a person who’s extremely loving but miserable?

Eric Jorgenson: Is this related to the Deutsch’s fun criterion? It’s not a good brand, but it’s.

Naval Ravikant: Oh yeah, no, Deutsch has an independent version of the same principle, the fun criterion, which is like, you’re not having fun, don’t do it. Now his is a little more extreme. Like, his is like, no, don’t teach. You know, this is part of taking children seriously. Thing like don’t teach kids math if they don’t enjoy it. I’m like, God damn it. My kids are going to be mathematically enumerate and they’re too old to, you know, pick it up later. So I’m not sure I follow it the whole way, but I get what he’s saying and I believe there’s huge merit to it. Yeah, he calls it the fun criterion. If you’re not having fun, don’t do it. And I think he’s Right. Like, the older I get, the more I do things that are more fun, the more gentlemen genuine it is. I’m not learning any less. If anything, I’m learning more. It’s just I don’t beat myself up anymore about not knowing what things that I should know about, and instead what ends up happening is I end up learning the things that I’m genuinely interested in, and then I learn more. I learn faster. Actually, this is related to, you know, I’ve started doing startups again, and I’m doing a very difficult company right now. The name of the company is the Impossible Computer Company. Okay. It’s really hard. What we’re trying to do is really hard. It’s might be impossible. And literally the name of the company is Impossible, Inc. But, you know, we have impossible computer dot com. So what we’re doing is basically impossible. I talked to four people last week, technical experts, each in their domain, a little bit about what we’re doing. All four of them told me it was impossible. All four told me it was impossible for four completely different reasons. Right? So it’s not an easy task. But I’ll tell you, I’ve never learned faster in my life because I’m so curious about it. Like, every time something comes up, I’m like, all right, let me pull up the paper. All right, ChatGPT, fire up the O3 Pro engines. Fire up Gemini 2.5 Pro. Let’s go. Teach me this, teach me this. No, no, explain. Like, I’m fine. No, no, back up. What about this? I call up my co founder. I’m like, we’re doing a whiteboard session. I feel like an idiot. What is this? What do you mean? You didn’t tell me this. Oh, you take it for granted. No, this is the hardest part. So I’m learning so much, but because I’m motivated, I’m motivated to go out and learn, I am a little motivated. I want the answer to be a good answer, but I’m not truly motivating the answer. I want to navigate my way through the idea maze, you know, the biologism of the idea maze, and figure out the right answer. But the concrete act of trying to do something and trying to build something is driving the learning curve. If I didn’t have that very concrete activity, then I would not be learning it anywhere near the same rate. And that motivation has been really important. It’s really accelerated my learning curve. Actually, I’m not drinking caffeine partially, and I’m kind of back on more of a health kick. Is Because I want to be alert and awake all the time so I can just stay up with a company. I can keep up with it. Well.

50. Motivation is driving the learning curve at SpaceX, says Elon Musk

Time: 03:21:20 - 03:25:20

Summary: The concrete act of trying to do something and trying to build something is driving the learning curve. Motivation has been really important. We’re burning a million and a half dollars a month of my money. To make that leap requires everything. It’s not to say you have to risk the money to make it.

Eric Jorgenson: And you’re additionally motivated, I’m sure, by building something that has never been built before.

Naval Ravikant: Exactly. And I’m pouring right now. We’re burning a million and a half dollars a month of my money.

Eric Jorgenson: So that’s an additional layer of motivation.

Naval Ravikant: Motivation too.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, yeah, you’re learning very fast.

Naval Ravikant: What are we spending money on? What is that half a million dollar check you just wrote? Oh, okay. Damn it.

Eric Jorgenson: So you got a big. A big carrot and a big stick. And that’s a good recipe for learning. Learning.

Naval Ravikant: Highly motivating. Well, I was very inspired by Elon on this. I think you know the story where he said he made 200 million from the sale of PayPal and he put 100 million into SpaceX and 80 million to Tesla and 20 million to solar St. He had to borrow money for rent. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s a great line, very inspirational. So I’m like, well, if Elon can do that, I can make a bet too.

Eric Jorgenson: Well. And that story even oversimplifies it a little because it happened iteratively, which for anybody who’s on burning a platform knows, like that’s way more painful.

Naval Ravikant: Yes. Than a one time.

Eric Jorgenson: So he’s sitting there with $200 million and he puts a hundred down and says that should be plenty to start these companies and get them there. And then they’re going to die. They’re both look like they’re on the verge of death. And he has to write checks for all of his remaining money, including his house, at the same time, functionally, to keep them both alive. By a shoestring, by a thread. And they both lived.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, I don’t know how real these stories are, but they’re good, man. Fred Smith has one. The founder of FedEx of to go gamble the last money in Vegas to make payroll. And he did. Or Steve Jobs, you know, he poured a lot of his wealth post Apple. He didn’t, he didn’t have that much because the original Apple wasn’t worth that much. But he sank it into Pixar, into Next because those were all self financed. Ross Perot, interestingly, was a big backer of Next after Jobs. But you know, he almost lost it there. So it’s not that. It’s not to say you have to risk the money to make it. It. It’s more just that you have to have the courage of Your convictions when nobody else does. You have to make it from 0 to 1. The space between 0 and 1 is infinite. To make that leap requires everything.

Eric Jorgenson: Well, it’s a good use of capital. What else are you going to do with the earnings then? Put them into a mission that you believe in. That’s doing something that’s unprecedented.

Naval Ravikant: I could buy a really big house and look down on everybody.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think this is. I. That’s part of why Elon, I think, gets so much respect, is he put everything on the line and the guy

Naval Ravikant: will sleep in a tent on the log cabin, you know, for the starship launch. And whatever motives people are going to ascribe to Elon, it’s. You can describe, if you want to be negative, you can describe an ego motive, but you can’t describe a selfishness motive. Like, he’s not trying to like, hoard it.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. He took too much risk.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. World’s richest man was a byproduct, not a goal for him.

Eric Jorgenson: But because in similar to what you’re doing, he is easily overlooked that he did the precede and the seed and the A and the B for both Tesla and SpaceX, basically himself. So not only founder, but biggest funder. I got two capstone tweets here. Either create wealth or passive income or become a monk or do what you love more than money. What remains is taming the mind and the body, seeking truth, creating love and art. The world has nothing to offer you and you are free.

51. What remains is taming the mind and the body, seeking truth

Time: 03:25:20 - 03:29:09

Summary: Either create wealth or passive income or become a monk or do what you love more than money. What remains is taming the mind and the body, seeking truth, creating love and art. The world has nothing to offer you and you are free.

Naval Ravikant: That’s a big checklist goals.

Eric Jorgenson: The next one’s even longer.

Naval Ravikant: I’ll go through that one again.

Eric Jorgenson: Either create wealth or a passive income or become a monk or do something you love more than money.

Naval Ravikant: Okay, so that first line is my definition of retirement. Like, if you’re doing something you love or if you’re a monk, or if you have a passive income or if you’re doing some, you know, or if you have wealth now, you can retire like you basically done.

Eric Jorgenson: So retire. And then what remains is taming the mind and the body, seeking truth, creating love and art.

Naval Ravikant: Yep. So that goes back to truth, love and beauty. Right. Or my favorite tweet of mine is, you know, a fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. Like those, These things cannot be bought. They must be earned. And that’s again, puts the same themes back in. Well, happiness, health, and love.

Eric Jorgenson: In a calm mind.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: So knowing that, you know, anything that you do to achieve any of those has to leave you in position to get those things that can’t be Bought.

Naval Ravikant: Right, right. And then, yeah, then there’s the long one.

Eric Jorgenson: Well, the world has nothing to offer you.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And now, you know, an enlightened person would say, well, I just find out I don’t exist, that the world has nothing to offer me because the world doesn’t exist. Like, it’s all just one big consensual conscious hallucination. Right. So that’s an easier path, I guess. I want to find happiness and spiritual enlightenment and all those things, but I’m not willing to give up my world for it. I’m a greedy one, right. I might be the greediest person alive because I want to be, you know, I want to be Elon. I want to be a successful entrepreneur. I want to be Teal. I want to be successful investor. I want a great household life. I want to be healthy as long as I can. I don’t mind being famous, you know, but I also want a light. I’m not willing to give that up. So to me, you know, the people who are aspiring to just be wealthy and successful but not happy or enlightened, they’re not greedy enough. You know, maybe they need to be a little more selfish, a little more

Eric Jorgenson: greedy and, you know, it’d be amazing, an amazing life. Life is 70, 80% in each of those categories without going 150 on one and zero in any other.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, you. You get above the threshold on. On each of them. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Buddha story, you know, Buddha was a prince, or if you read all the old enlightenment stories and Vasistha’s yoga, the Ashtavakra Gita, it’s always the king or the prince who’s becoming enlightened. It’s rarely like the peasant because they were smart enough to realize the poor man has to, you know, dig the fields. He has to figure out how to feed himself. He doesn’t have the luxury of sitting around and contemplating and saying, who am I? So that’s why in the tradition, either you’re someone who gives up everything right at the beginning, you go become an ascetic, or, and then you can, like, focus on mental freedom, or you start as a prince and you realize it’s all worthless. The hard one, I guess, would be having the energy and drive and motivation to become a prince and then be willing to give it all up.

Eric Jorgenson: I mean, that’s a big hero’s journey. As you list all those things that, you know, you want to be Elon Musk, you want to be Teal. Or you want to be a great founder, a great investor.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, I have to temper my expectations here because I’m, you know, I’m old, so I’m not. I don’t have the energy level of the 20 year olds. So I do have to bound my desires accordingly.

52. Most of the great companies are either self financed or they break out early

Time: 03:29:09 - 03:34:12

Summary: Can you hold those desires in a gentle way where they don’t harm you? Most of the great companies are either self financed or they break out very early before they really need venture capital. Do you think wanting some things are mutually incompatible?

Eric Jorgenson: Well, you’ve achieved a lot of them already. And I guess I’m curious, you know, can you hold those desires in like a very gentle way where they don’t harm you? Have you found a balance with, you know, still striving, still hoping, but not.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, no, I think, I think you can. I think it’s. You can. It can definitely be easier than all the people who are like in therapy or doing drugs or mental wrecks or feel attacked, but I was that person too. I think some of it is just aging, but a lot of it is just introspection, self reflection, reflection and just realizing that this all goes to zero. Anyway. What is the line in Christianity? Shrouds have no pockets, so you don’t take anything with you. It is all just a grand adventure. A friend of mine has a good phrase that he uses where he says endgame content. It’s like, I don’t know if you played the Mario games like Mario Odyssey or Mario 3D or Mario 64, any of those. And in those, you play the game, you run through all the levels, you chase Peach and Bowser the whole game and then at the end you’re done. And then they give you a level where it’s just all gold and toads and mushrooms and you just run around, you jump and you play and you’re having. It’s fun, but the stakes are very low. Right. This is all entertaining. It’s endgame content and you can play it for a little while. So I kind of feel like I’m in endgame content where it’s like I got nothing to lose at this point. Okay, I might lose some money, little reputation. I don’t care about that. I’m fine falling on my face in public. Public. But I get to play without fear. And that means that I can go for the highest goals. So the downside to that is a VC might be like, what do you mean you’re playing without fear? I want you up all night, I want you fearful, I want you working hard. But I’m not sure that’s the only way to build something. I don’t think Steve Jobs was coming from a place of fear. I don’t even think Elon was coming from a place of fear. So I think it’s better to, to operate out of inspiration. And this means that I can try to do something that’s really difficult and it’s really worthwhile.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, there may be that some of those really aspirational projects can only be done from a place like that.

Naval Ravikant: I think so. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that like Apple and Tesla and SpaceX, I mean these are self financed companies. Most of the great companies are either self financed or they break out very early before they really need venture capital. So Google broke out, they raised VC just to get John Doerr and Mike Mertzen their board, but they were already at escape velocity. Microsoft, they were done. Microsoft as well. They took a tiny check from one investor but they were already off to the races. Same way with, you know, I think Amazon was profitable very quickly. They did take a small investment, but it’s not, none of the, none of these giant companies did like round after round after round grinding it out through the standard path. The truly largest companies, companies did not do that. They either or Facebook got profitable very, very fast. Right. Because of the network effect. So either they got profitable very quickly and they almost didn’t need the venture capital or they were self financed by a visionary entrepreneur. But it’s very rare that one of the huge iconic great companies was built by round after round after round of venture capital.

Eric Jorgenson: That’s a heresy.

Naval Ravikant: There you go. Yeah, I don’t have a lot of respect for investors. I don’t disrespect them. I think they’re important part of the ecosystem and you know, I’m a capitalist, but I don’t think they need to pat themselves on the back.

Eric Jorgenson: Do you think wanting some things are mutually incompatible?

Naval Ravikant: I mean they have to be, right?

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well back to the, you know, the only true test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life.

Naval Ravikant: Like, I mean the biblical phrase like easier for rich man to pass through the, for camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for rich men to get into heaven. What I interpret that as is like if you’re pursuing material things, you can’t pursue spiritual things. Right. You can’t both be successful in this material life and striving for it and living the life of a merchant and then also be a Buddha. So they might be mutually contradictory. I think I was up late one night and I was stretching and I was like, man, I should just make sure stretching is always part of my routine. I was like, what is my routine? What am I trying to do here? So then I just Typed that out, and then I tweeted that out, and I got one of the highest compliments ever, got a tweet, which is this guy, I think, M. Mayer. He said. Oh, you wrote the book. Yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: You put a book, a tweet with this one. And I’ve seen so many people replicate this, so it’s clearly kind of resonant.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. There was a mistake in there, though, which kind of sucks. There was a one thing that I would swap out at the end.

Eric Jorgenson: All right, Correct me when I get here. Fast, lift, sprint, stretch, and meditate, build.

Naval Ravikant: So hold on. Fast lift, sprint, stretch, meditate. So that’s all the physical stuff. Yep. Yeah. Kind of the morning routines. Yeah. Daily workout thing.

Eric Jorgenson: And I like that it’s first because you’re starting with health as your first priority.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right.

Eric Jorgenson: Build, sell, write, create, invest, and own.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah. So this is the making money, the wealth part. Yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: Productize yourself, builder. Buy equity in a business. Read, reflect love, seek truth and ignore society.

Naval Ravikant: Truth and love, along with a healthy dose of selfishness.

53. Make these habits say no to everything else. Cause that’s the only way you stick with them

Time: 03:34:14 - 03:35:01

Summary: Make these habits say no to everything else. Avoid debt, jail, addiction, disgrace, shortcuts, and media. My favorite part is actually the coda here, which is relax. Do it merrily and go gently.

Eric Jorgenson: Make these habits say no to everything else.

Naval Ravikant: Yeah, habits. Cause that’s the only way you stick with them.

Eric Jorgenson: Avoid debt, jail, addiction, disgrace, shortcuts, and media.

Naval Ravikant: Right. So I replace one part in here, which is. I think I replaced shortcuts with sugar or something else. It’s actually in the. It’s in the tweet. I have a follow up on that tweet saying, oh, I wish I replaced. I have to look it up, but I think that’s what I wanted to replace.

Eric Jorgenson: And my favorite part is actually the coda here, which is relax. Victory is assured.

Naval Ravikant: That’s right. Relax. That’s the gently downstream part, I’d say.

Eric Jorgenson: Exactly what I was thinking. Do it merrily and go gently.

Naval Ravikant: Exactly.

Eric Jorgenson: Thank you.

Naval Ravikant: Thank you. That’s great.

Transcribed by AssemblyAI with speaker diarization. Formatted by Claude Code youtube-transcribe skill.

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Table of Contents

1. It’s been five years since the Almanac of Naval first came out

2. Elon Musk: David Deutsch had a better definition of wealth than I did

3. We were talking about timeless knowledge and wisdom and kind of modern knowledge

4. Free market capitalism has been responsible for the greatest increase in wealth in history

5. Deutsch says we can advance science and society through conjecture and criticism

6. Is there a sense where ethics and morals around how we conduct capitalism is bottleneck

7. Good products are hard to vary, according to complexity theory

8. Good products have a surprising reach, right? Good ideas have network effects

9. Every philosophy at its core has to have some appeal to universality

10. You say your earning power has been on a steady increase over time

11. Judgment comes through experience and reflection, right? So taste improves your judgment

12. Is your investing now primarily feel like taste? Yes. Almost entirely. It’s not just taste on the company

13. A lot of breakthroughs happen when you’re deeply into a problem

14. I think AI is the ultimate leverage information retrieval tool

15. No entrepreneur is going to be replaced by an AI, right?

16. Happiness is a construct of the mind, and unhappiness is just a thought

17. Boredom reveals the emptiness of existence, according to Schopenhauer

18. All problems are mind created for good reason, right?

19. Brian Johnson’s book explores the tension between wealth and happiness

20. Truth and love are two things where even if it makes your life worse

21. The closer you get to truth, the more silent you become inside

22. There’s something about cultivating unhappiness that brings seriousness to a situation

23. The most important thing with getting wealthy and being happy is just realize you can do it

24. The three big ones in life are wealth, health and happiness

25. Most of my contemporaries who have made a lot of money are not happy

26. Forgiveness is you forgive someone because you reinterpret what happened

27. There are actual enlightened people out there thanks to the Internet

28. There’s a great old philosophical puzzle called the philosophical zombie problem

29. The self is just a thought. It’s always on the edge of your vision

30. The enlightened and unmotivated are potentially more, more effective

31. I asked about the enlightened people in their relationships because a lot of people ask me

32. Real happiness is when you’re genuinely grateful with somebody else

33. A lot of the great virtues are selfish, right?

34. You get the right to solve global problems after you solve local problems, right

35. In Rick and Morty, there’s infinite Ricks, right

36. How does the you think about the interaction between lowering of ego and finding authenticity

37. Your goal in life is to find the people, business project that needs you

38. There’s an exploration phase and then investment. You can’t skip either phase

39. Malcolm Gladwell says you can learn through 10,000 iterations

40. The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want

41. Walter Cronkite says you should choose inspiration over envy

42. Steve Jobs gave me license to mix spiritual and the scientific

43. One of the pieces of advice you gave somebody who was unhappy about finding purpose

44. Can you overdose on introspection? I don’t think you can

45. Some things are spreadable and some things are not. And then there’s the truths that don’t spread

46. You mentioned before that you Want to map the tenets of Buddhism directly onto a virtual reality simulation

47. There’s a tendency in society to layer latest scientific worldview onto religion

48. The only books I would want to read are timeless ones about human nature

49. Everything is best pursued indirectly, but the things that seem elusive are indirect

50. Motivation is driving the learning curve at SpaceX, says Elon Musk

51. What remains is taming the mind and the body, seeking truth

52. Most of the great companies are either self financed or they break out early

53. Make these habits say no to everything else. Cause that’s the only way you stick with them