Naval Ravikant
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Great job, Naval. You rocked it. Maybe I should have said this on air, but that was literally the most fun podcast I've ever recorded. Oh, that's on air. Cut that in. Yeah, put it in the show. Put it in the show. I had my theory on why you were number one, but now I have the realization.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
But I live my own home life in that arc, in that direction. And I'm a very free person. I don't have an office to go to. I try really not to maintain a calendar. If I can't remember it, I don't want to do it. I don't send my kids to school. I really try not to coerce them. And so... Obviously, that's the extreme model, but I was still very- Sorry, hold on a second.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Two nights ago, I did this. I ordered the Haagen-Dazs. It wasn't Haagen-Dazs. It was a different brand, but I ordered it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Thank you. Welcome back. Keep it fun.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
We do a dash ice cream at 9 p.m. and we all ate ice cream. Yeah, so they're like, dad, I want... And they're happy. They're happy kids.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
My oldest probably plays iPad nine hours a day.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
They don't do that because they don't like peeing their pants.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
No, no, that's not where I am. That's where Aaron is. My rules are a little different. My rules are... They got to do one hour of math or programming plus two hours of reading every single day. And the moment they've done that, they're free creatures and everything else is a negotiation where I have to persuade them. It's a persuasion, I should say, not even a negotiation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And even the hour of math and two hours of reading, really, you get 15 to 30 minutes of math, maybe an hour if you're lucky, and you get half an hour to two hours of reading.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Whatever age you're at, whatever part you're at in life, you're still always struggling with your own habits. I think all of us, for example, still eat food and feel guilty or want to eat something that we shouldn't be eating. And we're still always evolving our diets and kids are the same.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
So my oldest has already, he passed on the ice cream last time and he said, I want to eat healthier because finally I managed to get through to him and persuade him that he should be healthier. My younger kids will eat it, but they'll eat a limited amount. My middle kid will sometimes eat some and not others.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I'll try it, but you also have to be careful where you don't want to intimidate them and you don't want to be so overbearing that then they just view dad as controlling.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I try not to. They're going to be who they're going to be. This is how I grew up. I did what I wanted. I would rather they have agency than turn out exactly the way I want. Because agency is the hardest thing, right? Having control over your own life, making your own decisions. And I want them to be happy. I have a very happy household.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah, the happy lifestyle.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I don't really want anything for them. I just want them to be free and their best selves. God damn.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I would say overall, my kids are very happy. The household is very happy. Everybody gets along. Everybody loves each other. Some of them are way ahead of their peers. Nobody's behind in anything that matters. Nobody seems unhealthy in any obvious way. No one has aberrant eating habits. I haven't even found really an aberrant behavior that's out of line. So it's all good.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Well, that was interactive, right? And who probably grew up playing video games nonstop and probably spends nine hours a day on his screen just called a phone. So yeah, it's the same thing, man.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
There's a hypocrisy to picking up your phone and then saying to your kid, no, you can't use your iPad. I grew up playing games nonstop and video games when I was older. And I was an avid gamer until just a few years ago.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
We did used to control their YouTube access, although now we don't do that. The only thing I ask them is that they put on captions when they're watching YouTube so it helps their reading. They learn to read faster.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I will say that one of my kids is really into YouTube, the other two are not. Like they just got over it. And to the extent that they use YouTube, it's mostly because they're looking up videos on their favorite games. They want to know how to be better at a game.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah, what was your theory? What's the reality? My theory was that my problem with going on podcasts is usually the person I'm talking to is not that interesting. They're just asking the same questions, and they're dialing it in, and they're not that interested. It's not like we're having a peer level actual conversations.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Very surprising, very impressive. I thought he was polite, optimistic. And just very forward-looking. It's what you would expect an entrepreneur or a smart investor to say. So I was very impressed. I think the idea that America should win, great. I think that we should not regulate. I also agree with it. I'm not an AI doomer. I don't think AI is going to end the world.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
That's a separate conversation. But there's this religion that comes along in many faces, which is that, oh, climate change is going to end the world. AI is going to end the world. Asteroid is going to end the world. COVID-19 is going to end the world. It just has a way of fixating your attention. It captures everybody's attention at once. It's a very seductive thing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I think in the case of AI, it's really been overplayed by incentive bias, motivated reasoning by the companies who are ahead and they want to pull up the ladder behind them. I think they genuinely believe it. I think they genuinely believe that there are safety risks, but I think they're motivated to believe in those safety risks and then they pass that along.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
But it's kind of a weird position because they have to say, oh, it's so dangerous that you shouldn't just let open source go at it and you should let just a few of us work with you on it. But it's not so dangerous that a private company can't own the whole thing. Because if it was truly the Manhattan Project, if they were building nuclear weapons, you wouldn't want one company to own that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Sam Altman famously said that AI will capture the light cone of all future value. In other words, all value ever created at the speed of light from here will be captured by AI. So if that's true, then I think open source AI really matters and little tech AI really matters. The problem is that the nature of training these models is highly centralized.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
They benefit from supercomputer clustered compute. So it's not clear how any decentralized model can compete. So to me, the real issue boils down to is how do you push AI forward while not having just a very small number of players control the entire thing? And we thought we had that solution with the original OpenAI, which was a nonprofit and was supposed to do it for humanity.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
But now because of they want to incentivize the team and they want to raise money, they have to privatize at least a part of it. Although it's not clear to me why they need to privatize the whole thing. Like why do you need to buy out the nonprofit portion? You could leave a nonprofit portion and you could have the private portion for the incentives.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
But I think that the real challenge is how do you keep AI from naturally centralizing? Because all the economics and technology underneath are centralizing in nature. If you really think you're going to create God, do you want to put God on a leash with one entity controlling God? That to me is the real fear. I'm not scared of AI.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I'm scared of what a very small number of people who control AI do to the rest of us for our own good, because that's how it always works.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
A snack. Pre-ezympic and post-ezympic, right? Correct.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Well, let me declare my biases up front. I'm a first-generation immigrant. I moved here when I was nine years old, or rather my parents did, and then I'm a naturalized citizen. So obviously, I'm in favor of some level of immigration. That said, I'm assimilated. I consider myself an American first and foremost. I bleed red, white, and blue.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
That's why I wanted to do air chat and Clubhouse and things like that, because you can actually have a conversation. Oh, I see. Right? And what you guys have very uniquely is four people of whom at least three are intelligent. I'm kidding.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
That is the best intro I've ever gotten. I didn't think you could do that. That was amazing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I believe in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, first and second and fourth and all the proper amendments. I get up there every July 4th, and I deliberately defend the Second Amendment on Twitter, at which point half my followers go bananas. Because I'm supposed to be a good immigrant, right? And carry the usual set of coherent leftist policies, globalist policies.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
So I think that legal high-skill immigration with room and time for assimilation makes sense. You want to have a brain drain on the best and brightest coming to the freest country in the world. to build technology and to help civilization move forward. And as Chamath was saying, economic power and military power is downstream of technology. In fact, even culture is downstream of technology.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Right there. Lock it in. Quit venture capital. Just do that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Look at what the birth control pill did, for example, to culture, or what the automobile did to culture. or what radio and television did to culture, and then the internet. So technology drives everything. And if you look at wealth, wealth is a set of physical transformations that you can affect. And that's a combination of capital and knowledge. And the bigger input to that is knowledge.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And so the US has become the home of knowledge creation, thanks to bringing in the best and brightest. You could even argue deep seek. Part of the reason why we lost that is because a bunch of those kids, they studied in the US, but then we sent them back home. So I think you absolutely have to- Is that actually accurate?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
So, I think you absolutely have to split skilled, assimilated immigration, which is a small set, and it has to be both. They have to both be skilled and they have to become Americans. That oath is not meaningless, right? It has to mean something. So, skilled, assimilated immigration, you have to separate that from just open borders, whoever can wander in, just come on in.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Number one podcast in the world, like someone said.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
It was to their advantage to conflate legal and illegal immigration. So every time you'd be like, well, we can't just open the borders. You say, well, what about Elon? What about this? And they would just parade.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
This one will hit number one. This one will go viral.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I just got to do a Sieg Heil and it'll go viral. Oh, no.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
My heart goes out to you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Sax, you don't believe that millions... But hold on. Those driver jobs weren't even there 10 years ago. Uber came along and created all these driver jobs. DoorDash created all these driver jobs. So what technology does... Yes, technology destroys jobs, but it replaces them with opportunities that are even better.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And then either you can go capture that opportunity yourself or an entrepreneur will come along and create something that allows you to capture those opportunities. AI is a productivity tool. It increases the productivity of a worker. It allows them to do more creative work and less repetitive work. As such, it makes them more valuable. Yes, there is some retraining involved, but not a lot.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
These are natural language computers. You can talk to them in plain English and they talk back to you in plain English. But I think David is absolutely right. I think we will see job creation by AI that will be as fast or faster than job destruction. You saw this even with the internet. YouTube came along. Look at all these YouTube streamers and influencers. That didn't used to be a job.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
New jobs, really opportunities, because job is a wrong word. Job implies someone else has to give it to me, and it's sort of like they're handed out. It's a zero-sum game. Forget all that. It's opportunities. After COVID, look at how many people are making money by working from home in mysterious little ways on the internet that you can't even quite grasp.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And actually, as a quick side note to that, the fastest way to help somebody get a job right now, if you know somebody in the market who's looking for a job, the best thing you can do is say, hey, go download the AI tools and start talking to them. Just start using them in any way.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And then you can walk into any employer in almost any field and say, hey, I understand AI, and they'll hire you in the spot.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah, Twitter, Uber, Notion, a bunch of others, Postmates, Udemy, a lot of unicorns. It's actually a lot of deals at this point. But honestly, I'm not necessarily proud of being an investor. Investor to me is a side job. It's a hobby. So I do startups.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Definitely what you're saying in that there's leverage. But at the same time, I think the more interesting part is that new startups are enabled that could not exist otherwise. My last startup, AirChat, could not have existed without AI because we needed the transcription and translation. Even the current thing I'm working on, it's not an AI company, but it cannot exist without AI.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
It is relying on AI. Even at AngelList, we're significantly adopting AI. Like everywhere you turn, it's more opportunity, more opportunity, more opportunity. And people like to go on... Twitter or the artist formerly known as Twitter. And basically they like to exaggerate like, oh my God, we've hit AGI. Oh my God, I just replaced all my mid-level engineers. Oh my God, I've stopped hiring.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
To me, that's like moronic. The two valid ones are the one man entrepreneur shows where there's like one guy or one gal and they're like scaling up like crazy things to AI.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Or there are people who are embracing AI and being like, I need to hire. And I need to hire anyone who can even spell AI. Like anyone who's even used AI. Just come on in, come on in.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Again, I would say the easiest way to see that AI is not taking jobs or creating opportunities is go brush up on your AI, learn a little bit, watch a few videos, use the AI, tinker with it, and then go reapply for that job that rejected you and watch how they pull you in.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Another way to think about it is these are natural language computers. So everyone who was intimidated by computers before should no longer be intimidated. You don't need to program anymore in some esoteric language or learn some obscure mathematics to be able to use these. You can just talk to them and they talk back to you. That's magic.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I don't. I mean, I guess these days I would say more like building things. You know, every so-called career is an evolution, right? And all of you guys are independent and you kind of do what you're most interested in, right? That's the point of making money. So you can just do what you want. So these days I'm really into building and crafting products. So I built one recently called AirChat.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I would agree heavily with one point and I would just tweak another. The point I would agree with is that it's going to happen anyway and that's what DeepSeq proved. You can turn off the flow of chips to them and you can turn off the flow of talent. What do they do? They just get more efficient and they exported it back to us.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
It kind of didn't work. I'm still proud of what I built and got to work with an incredible team. And now I'm building a new product. This time I'm going into hardware. And I'm just building something that I really want. I'm not ready to talk about it yet.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
They sent us back the best open source model when our guys were staying closed source for safety reasons. Yeah, exactly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah, the part where I try to tweak a little bit is the idea that we are going to win. By we, when you say America, the problem is that the best way to win is to be as open, as distributed, as innovative as possible. If this all ends up in the control of one company, they're actually going to be slower to innovate than if there's a dynamic system.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And that dynamic system by its nature will be open. It will leak to China. It will leak to India. But these things have powerful network effects. We know this about technology. Almost all technology has network effects underneath. And so even if you are open, you're still going to win, and you're still going to control all the most of it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
But that's a much longer discussion. Okay, put AGI aside.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I just think it's a different thing. But what we're building are these incredible natural language computers. And actually, David, in a very pithy way, summarized the two big use cases. It's search and it's homework. It's paperwork. It's really paperwork. And a lot of the jobs that we're talking about disappearing are actually paperwork jobs. They're paperwork shuffling. These are made-up jobs.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Like the federal government, as we're finding out through Doge, a third of it is people digging holes in spoons and another third are filling them back up.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
They're burying it in a mine shaft in Iron Mountain. Yeah, so I think a lot of these made-up jobs are going to stick around.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Partially. I bring investors along. Last time they got their money back. Previous times they've made money. Next time, hopefully they'll make a lot of money. It's good to bring your friends along.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
What we found out is the DMV has been running the government for the last 70 years. There's been a compounding. That's really what's going on. The DMV's in charge.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
To keep the conversation moving, let me segue a point that came up that was really important into tariffs. And the point is, Even though the internet was open, the U.S. won a lot of the internet. A lot of U.S. companies won the internet. And they won that because we got there the firstest with the mostest, as they say in the military.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And that matters because a lot of technology businesses have scale economies and network effects underneath. even basic brand-based network effects. If you go back to the late 90s, early 2000s, very few people would have predicted that we would have ended up with Amazon basically owning all of e-commerce. You would have thought it would have been a perfect competition and very spread out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And that applies to how we ended with Uber as basically one taxi service, or we end up with Airbnb. Meta, Airbnb. It's just network effects, network effects, network effects rule the world around me. But when it comes to tariffs and when it comes to trade, we act like network effects don't exist. The classic Ricardian comparative advantage dogma says that you should produce what you're best at.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I produce what I'm best at and we trade. And then even if you want to charge me more for it, if you want to impose tariffs for me to ship to you, I should still keep tariffs down because I'm better off. You're just selling me stuff cheaply. Great. Or if you want to subsidize your guys, great, you're selling me stuff cheaply. The problem is that is not how most modern businesses work.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Most modern businesses have network effects. As a simple thought experiment, suppose that we have two countries, right? I'm China, you're the US. I start out by subsidizing all of my companies and industries that have network effects. So I'll subsidize TikTok. I'll ban your social media, but I'll push mine.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah, no, I built a product that I loved, that I was proud of, but it didn't catch fire. And it was a social product, so it had to catch fire for it to work. So I found the team Great Homes, they all got paid, the investors that I brought in got their money back. And I learned a ton, which I'm leveraging into the new thing. But the new thing is much harder. The new thing is hardware and software.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I will subsidize my semiconductors, which do tend to have winner take all in certain categories, or I'll subsidize my drones and then- BYD. Exactly. BYD, self-driving, whatever. And then when I win, I own the whole market and I can raise prices. And if you try to start up a competitor, then it's too late. I've got network effects.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Or if I've got scale economies, I can lower my price to zero, crash you out of business. No one in their right mind will invest and I'll raise prices right back up. So you have to understand that certain industries have hysteresis or they have network effects or they have economies of scale. And these are all the interesting ones. These are all the high margin businesses.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
So in those, if somebody is subsidizing or they're raising tariffs against you to protect your industries and let them develop, you do have to do something. You can't just completely back down.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
The main thing was actually just the craft, the craft of pixel by pixel designing a software product and launching it. I guess the main thing I took away that was a learning was that I really enjoyed building products and that I wanted to build something even harder and something even more real. And I think like a lot of us, I'm inspired by Elon and all the incredible work he's done.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
It does to asset holders. And obviously, they've left it in a bad place in the last administration. And we shut down the entire country for a year over COVID. And the bill for that has come due. And that's reflected in inflation. I think there are a couple other points in tariffs. First is, it's not just about money. It's also about making sure we have a functional middle class with good jobs.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Because if you have a non-tariff world, maybe all the gains go to the upper class and an underclass. And then you can't have a functioning democracy when the average person is on one of those two extremes. So I think that's one issue. Another is strategic industries. If you look at it today, probably the largest defense contractor in the world is DJI. They got all the drones.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Even in Ukraine, both sides are getting all their drone parts from DJI. Now they're getting it through different supply chains and so on, but Ukrainian drones and Russian drones, the vast majority of them are coming through China through DJI. And we don't have that industry.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
If we have a kinetic conflict right now and we don't have good drone supply chain internally in the US, we're probably going to lose because those things are autonomous bullets. That's the future of all warfare. We're buying F-35s and the Chinese are building swarms of Narcos. at scale. So we do have to re-onshore those critical supply chains. And what is a drone supply chain?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
There's not a thing called drone. It's like motors and semiconductors and optics and lasers and just everything across the board. So I think there are other good arguments for at least reshoring some of these industries. We need them. And the United States is very lucky in that it's very autarkic. We have all the resources, we have all the supplies.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
We can be upstream of everybody with all the energy. To the extent we're importing any energy, that is a choice we made. That is not because fundamentally we lack the energy. Yeah, because we and all the oil resources and the natural gas and fracking combined with all the work we've done in nuclear fission and small reactors, we should absolutely be energy independent.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
So I don't wanna build things that are easy. I wanna build things that are hard and interesting. And I wanna take on more technical risk and less market risk. This is the classic VC learning, right? Which is you wanna build something that if people
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And there is a difference between different kinds of jobs. Those kinds of jobs are better jobs, building difficult things at scale, physically that we need for both national security and for innovation. Those are better jobs than, you know, paperwork, writing essays for other people to read. Yeah. Or even driving cars.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
get it if you can deliver it you know people will want it and it's just hard to build as opposed to you build it and you don't know if they want it so that's a learning air chat was a lot of fun for those of you don't know it was kind of like a social media network where you could ask a question and then people could respond and it was like an audio based twitter would you say that was the best way to describe it audio twitter asynchronous ai transcripts and all kinds of ai to make it easier for you translation
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
These three are intelligent and all of you get along and you can have an ongoing conversation. That's a very high hit rate. Normally in a podcast, you only get one interesting person and now you've got three, maybe four, right? Okay. So that to me was why- Who invited this guy?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I'm going to go to even thinner limb and say I largely agree with you. I think it's a bit rich to crawl the open web, hoover up all the data. offer direct substitution for a lot of use cases because now you start and end with the AI model. It's not even like you link out like Google did. And then you just close off the models for safety reasons.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I think if you trained on the open web, your model should be open source.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I tend to agree with this. There's also a good old video by Ilya Sutskovor, where he was, I believe, the founding chief scientist or CTO of OpenAI. And he talks about how these large language models are basically extreme compressors. And he models them entirely as their ability to compress. And they're lossy compressors. It's a lossy compression. Exactly. Lossy extreme compression.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
It's a lossy compression. Exactly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And Google got sued for fair use back in the day, but the way they managed to get past the argument was they were always linking back to you. They showed you a tiny bit and they sent you the traffic. They sent you the traffic.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
That's why I was shaking my head when I saw those videos because I was like, oh man, Jason was right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
really good way for kind of trying to make podcasting type conversations more accessible to everybody. Because honestly, one of the reasons I don't go on podcasts, I don't like being intermediated, so to speak, right? Where you sit there and someone interviews you and then you go back and forth and you go through the same old things. I just want to talk to people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Almost. I think the New York Times content is worthless to an LLM, but that's a different story. I think the actual valuable content is different.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Wait, wait, wait, wait, David. In that case, can a Google crawler just crawl the entire site and serve it on Google? Why can't they do that?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
That is how the law is currently written. But now what I have is I have a tool that can remix it with 50 other pieces of similar content and I can change the words slightly and maybe even translate into a different language. So where does it stop?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah, but there are entire sites like Stack Overflow and WikiHow that are basically disappeared now because you can just swallow them all up and you can just spit it all back out in ChatGPT with slight changes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah. So that's the question. It actually boils down to the AGI question. Are these things actually intelligent and are they learning or are they compressing and regurgitating? That's the question.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I want peer relationships, kind of like you guys have running here.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
It's very hard to figure that out. Well, that's exactly right. That's the hard part. It's very hard to figure that out, which is why I come back to there's only one of two stable solutions to this, and it's going to happen anyway. If we don't crawl it, the Chinese will crawl it. DeepSeek proved that. There's only one of two stable solutions.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Either you pay the copyright holders, which I actually think doesn't work, and the reason is because someone in China will crawl it and they just dump the weights, so they can just crawl and dump the compressed weights. Or if you crawl, Make it open, at least contribute something back to open source, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
You crawled open data contributed back to open source and the people who don't want to be crawled, they're going to have to go to a huge lengths to protect their data. Now everybody knows to protect the data. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I think in open AS defense, they do need to raise a lot of money and they got to incent their employees. But that doesn't mean they need to take over the whole thing. The nonprofit portion can still stay the nonprofit portion and get the lion's share of the benefits and be the board. And then he can have an incentive package and employees can have an incentive package.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I don't understand why it has to be bought out right now for $40 billion and then the whole thing disappears into a closed system. That part makes no sense to me.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah, I think Sam and his team would do better to leave the nonprofit part alone, leave an actual independent nonprofit board in charge, and then have a strong incentive plan and a strong fundraising plan for the investors and the employees. So I think this is workable.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
It's just trying to grab it all just seems way off, especially when it was built on open algorithms from Google, open data from the web, and on a nonprofit funding from Elon and others.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
No, but even equity. They could give equity. to the people building it, but they could still leave it in the control of the nonprofit. I just don't understand this conversion. I mean, there was a board coup, right? The board tried to fire Sam and Sam took over the board. Now it's his handpicked board. So it also looks like self-dealing, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And yeah, they'll get an independent valuation, but we all know that game. You hire a valuation expert who's going to say what you're going to say and they'll check the box. But if you're going to capture the light code of all future value or build super intelligence, we know that's worth a lot more. That's why Elon just bid a hundred billion.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Oh, really? Oh, okay.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah, that's right. No, very insightful. Yeah. So I've been on Twitter since 2007 because I was an early investor. But I never really tweeted. I didn't get featured. I had no audience. I was just doing the usual techie guy thing, talking to each other. And then I started AngelList in 2010. The original thing about matching investors to startups didn't scale.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
So I know Brian pretty well, actually. And I joke that I'm married to the female Brian Johnson because my wife has some of his routines. But she's like the natural version, no supplements. And she's intense. And I think when Brian saw my sleep score from my Eight sleep. He was shocked. He was just like, you're going to die. He's like, you're literally going to die. What do you got, 70, 80?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
No, it's terrible. It's awful. Tell the truth.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
It was like a 30s, 40s. What? Yeah. But it's also because I don't sleep much. I only sleep a few hours a night. And I also move around a lot in the bed and so on. But it's fine. I never have trouble falling asleep. But I would say that Brian's skincare routine is amazing. His diet is incredible. He is a genuine character.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I do think a lot of what he's saying, minus the supplements, I'm not a big believer in supplements, does work. I don't know if it's necessarily gonna slow down your aging, but you'll look good and you'll feel good. Yeah, sleep is the number one thing. In terms of falling asleep, I don't think it's really about whether you look at your phone or not, believe it or not.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I think it's about what you're doing on your phone. If you're doing anything that is cognitively stressful or getting your mind to spin, then yes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Anything that's entertaining or that is like, you can read a book, right, on your Kindle or on your iPad, and I think you'd be fine falling asleep. Or you can listen to like some meditation video or some spiritual teacher or something, and that'll actually help you fall asleep. But if you're on X or if you're checking your email, then heck yeah, that's going to keep you up.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
So my hack for sleep is a little different. I normally fall asleep within minutes. And the way I do it is, you all have a meditation routine. You have a set time?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
No, no, I sleep whenever I feel like. Usually around one in the morning, two in the morning.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I'm an owl. But if you want to fall asleep, the hack I've found is everybody has tried some kind of a meditation routine. Just sit in bed and meditate. And your mind will hate meditation so much that if you force it to choose between the fork of meditation and sleeping, you will fall asleep once every time. And if you don't fall asleep, you'll end up meditating, which is great too.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I like the meditation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
It was just an email list that exploded early on, but then just didn't scale. So we didn't have a business. And I was trying to figure out the business. And at the same time, I got a letter from the Securities and Exchange Commission saying, oh, you're acting as an unlicensed broker dealer. And I'm like, what? I'm not making any money. I'm just making intros. I'm not taking anything.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I think it's Van Leeuwen or something like that. Van Leeuwen. New York and Brooklyn. That is good. The holiday cookies and cream. Oh, my God. So good. Yeah, it's so good. Van Leeuwen. Good call. After I polished that off, then I was like, oh, I probably ate too much to go to bed, so I better work out. So I did a kettlebell workout. You sound like Jamal. What did you say?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I have eight kettlebells right here, right next to my standing desk.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And then while I'm doing my kettlebell suitcase carry, I was texting with an entrepreneur friend. So you can tell how intense my workout was. And he's in Singapore. So it was in the middle of the night for me and early for him. And then it was time to go to bed. I was like, okay, now I got to get to bed. How do I get to bed? My body's all amped up. I've got food in my stomach.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
It's just a public service. But even then, they were coming after me. And I'd raised a bunch of money from investors. So I was in a very high-stress period of my life. Now, looking back, it's almost comical that I was stressed over it. But at the time, it all felt very real. The weight of everything was on my shoulders. Expectations, people, money. regulators.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
My brain is all amped up and all in podcasts is tomorrow. And what time is it? It's 1.30 in the morning. I better get to bed. So I put on like a little, one of those spiritual videos to calm me down. And then I just, and then I got in bed and I was like, there's no way I'm falling asleep. And I started meditating and five minutes later I was asleep.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah, exactly. And my lesson is, my learning is that the mind will do anything to avoid meditation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I was tracking Polymarket. There was a moment where 2C fell to like 56%. There was a moment when RFK fell to 75%, but then they bounced back and it was done. You could have bought.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Well, I saw a very insightful tweet, and I forget who wrote it, so I'm sorry I can't give credit. But the guy basically said, look, Trump has a narrow majority in the House and the Senate. And he can get everything he wants as long as the Republicans stay in line. So all the pressure and all the anger that all the mega movement is doing against the left is pointless.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
It's all about keeping the right wing in line. So it's all the people saying to the senators, hey, I'm going to primary you. It's Nicole Shanahan saying, I'm going to primary you. It's Scott Pressler saying, I'm moving to your district. That's the stuff that's moving the needle and causing the confirmations to go through. That's how you get Kash Patel. That's how you get Tulsi Gabbard at DNI.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
That's how you get RFQ.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I mean, whatever.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Honestly, it's like, I never thought I'd see it. But I think between Elon and Sachs and people like that, we actually have builders and doers and financially intelligent people and economically intelligent people in charge. And, you know, despite all the craziness, Elon's not doing this for the money. He's doing it because he thinks it's the right thing to do. Of course.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I think like many of us, I had bought into the great forces of history mindset where it's just like, okay, it's inevitable. This is what's happening. Government always gets bigger, always gets slower. Yeah, me too. And we just have to try and get stuff built before they just shut everything down and we turn into Europe. But the thing that happened then was Caesar crossed the Rubicon.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
The great man theory of history played out, and we're living in that time. And it's an inspiration to all of us, despite Sam Altman and Elon's current fighting. I know Sam was inspired by Elon at one point, and I think all of us are inspired by Elon. I mean, the guy can be the Diablo player and do Doge and run SpaceX and Tesla and Boring and Neuralink. I mean, it's incredibly impressive.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And I eventually went to DC and got the law changed to legalize what we do, which ironically enabled a whole bunch of other things like ICOs and incubator days and so on, demo days. But in that process, I was in a very high stress period of my life. And I just started tweeting whatever I was going through, whatever realizations I was happening. It's only in stress
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
That's why I'm doing a hardware company now. It makes me want to do something useful with my life. Elon always makes me question, am I doing something useful enough with my life? It's why I don't want to be an investor. You know, Peter Thiel, ironically, he's an investor, but he's inspirational in that way too, because he's like, yeah, the future just doesn't just happen. You have to go make it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
So, you know, we get to go make the future and I'm just glad that Elon and Doge and others are making the future that I'm living.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Maybe I'll reveal it on the All In podcast in a couple of months, but it's really hard. It's really difficult. I'm not sure I can pull it off. So let me try. Let me just make sure it's viable. Is it drone related? Is it self-driving related? Drones are cool, but no, it's not.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Absolutely. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
I think you'll love what I'm working on if I pull it off. I think you guys will love it. I'd love to show you a demo.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Congratulations.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
that you sort of are forced to grow. And so whatever internal growth I was going through, I just started tweeting it, not thinking much of it. And it was a mix of, there are three things that I kind of always kind of are running through. One is I love science. You know, I'm an amateur, love physics. Let's just leave it at that. I love reading a lot of philosophy and thinking deeply about it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
He's number four. We don't know. He'll remain mysterious forever. Of the four, right? The problem is if you get people together to talk, two is a good conversation. Three possibly, four is the max. That's why the dinner table at a restaurant, four top, right? You don't do five or six because then it splits into multiple conversations. So you had four people who were capable of talking, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And I like making money, right? Truth, love, and money. That's my joke on my Twitter bio. Those are the three things that I keep coming back to. And so I just started tweeting about all of them. And I think... Before that, the expectation was that someone like me should just be talking about money, stay in your lane. And people had been playing it very safe.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And so I think the combination of the three sort of caught people's attentions because every person thinks about everything. We don't just stay in our lane in real life. We're dealing with our relationships. We're dealing with our relationship with the universe. We're dealing with what we know to be true and with science and how we make decisions and how we figure things out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And we're also dealing with the practical, everyday material things. of how to deal with our spouses or girlfriends or wives or husbands and how to make money and how to deal with our children. So I'm just tweeting about everything. I just got interested in everything I'm tweeting about it. And a lot of it, my best stuff was just notes to self. It's like, hey, don't forget this. Don't forget that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah, I think that is still the most viral thread ever on Twitter. I like timeless things. I like philosophy. I like things that still apply in the future. I like compound interests, if you will, in ideas. Obviously, recently, X has become so addictive that we're all checking it every day. And Elon's built the perfect for you. He's built TikTok for nerds. And we're all in it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
But normally, I try to ignore the news. Obviously, last year, things got real. We all had to pay a lot of attention to the news. But I just like to tweet timeless things. I don't know. I mean, people pay attention. Sometimes they like what I write. Sometimes they go non-literate on me. But yeah, the how to get rich tweet storm was a big one.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah, like many of you, I've stopped drinking, but I used to like have the occasional glass of wine. And there was a moment there where I went and met with an information reporter back when I used to meet with reporters. And she said, where are we going to meet? So I said, oh, let's meet at the wine merchant and we'll get a glass of wine. She's like, what you drink?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Like it was like a big deal for her. I'm so disappointed. I was like, I'm an entrepreneur. Most of them are alcoholics or psychedelics or doing whatever it takes to manage.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
When they say I'm on therapy, you know what that's code for. Yes, it is highly discordant. Plant medicine. I'm almost reminded of that line in The Matrix where that agent is about to shoot one of the Matrix characters and says, only human. That's what I want to say to everybody, only human.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Yeah. So, I'm a big fan of David Deutsch. David Deutsch, I think, is basically the smartest living human. He's a scientist who pioneered quantum computation. And he's written a couple of great books, but it's about the intersection of the greatest theories that we have today, the theories with the most reach.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
That I thought was a secret, but there's another secret. The other secret is you guys are having fun. You're talking over each other. You're making fun of each other. You're actually having fun. So that's why I'm saying this is the most fun podcast I've ever been on. Awesome. That's why you'll be successful.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And those are epistemology, the theory of knowledge, evolution, quantum physics, and computation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
Correct. Yes. The Fabric of Reality is another book. I've spent a fair bit of time with him, done some podcasts with him. hired and worked with people around him. And I'm just really impressed because it's like the framework that's made me smarter, I feel like, because we're all fighting aging. Our brains are getting slower and we're always trying to have better ideas.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
So as you age, you should have wisdom. That's your substitute for the raw horsepower of intelligence going down. And so scientific wisdom I take from David. Not take, but I learned from David. And one of the things that he pioneered is called taking children seriously. And it's this idea that you should take your children seriously, like adults.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
You should always give them the same freedom that you would give an adult. If you wouldn't speak that way with your spouse, if you wouldn't force your spouse to do something, don't force a child to do something. And it's only through the latent threat of physical violence. Hey, I can control you. I can make you go to your room. I can...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
take your dinner away or whatever, that you intimidate children. And it resonated with me because I grew up very, very free. My father wasn't around when I was young. My mother didn't have the bandwidth to watch us all the time. She had other things to do. And so I kind of was making my own decisions from an extremely young age. From the age of five, nobody was telling me what to do.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
And from the age of nine, I was telling everybody what to do. So I'm used to that. And I've been homeschooling my own kids. So the philosophy resonated. And I found this guy, Aaron Stupel on AirChat. And he was an incredible expositor of the philosophy. He lives his life with it 99% as extreme as one can go. So his kids can eat all the ice cream they want and all the Snickers bars they want.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
They can play on the iPad all they want. They don't have to go to school if they don't feel like it. They dress how they want. They don't have to do anything they don't want to do. Everything is a discussion, negotiation, explanation, just like you would with a roommate or an adult living in your house. And it's kind of insane and extreme.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah. So you know that it's coming from you. Is that why? Correct. You know it's endogenous rather than exogenous. I never knew that. That's fascinating. You know, now it seems like the gut microbiome influences so many things. Basically, bacteria and viruses are at the top of the food chain compared to us.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Like we are top of the well-known food chain, but bacteria and viruses eat us, fungus eats us. So these microscopic predators are our natural predators. And so a lot of aging, societal structure, hygiene, religious strictures against pork, you know, circumcision, all of these things, these are all designed to resist bacteria and viruses.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So if you can teach children this philosophy at an early age, you shortcut all the debates. How effective have you been at teaching that philosophy to children? That one, I think I've been pretty effective. I've drilled that one at home. The one I haven't quite gotten around to yet is evolution. Like I'm starting to do little bits of that, you know, like we came from monkeys. What does that mean?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I already got them thinking about some of the deeper questions. I did ask my, you know, young son, like, you know, can nothing exist? I thought that was a fun question. So I had to throw a fun question. How old is he now? Like three? No, no, he's eight. Oh, right. An eight-year-old and a six-year-old. So I asked them both, like, can nothing exist? And they had pretty good answers, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Another one we played with the other day was like, what is the matrix? Yeah. You know, what is this? What is all this? And it's entertaining. It's just fun to talk about, right? To talk about these questions with your kids. I'm not saying that one is a good way of child raising. It's not leading to any deeper learning.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Other than maybe just have them start or continue to question the basic structure of reality and not move past it so quickly. Also to take joy.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And they start trying to trade the money for status. So, you know, people always want what they don't have. And we are evolutionarily hardwired for status because, as I said, wealth creation didn't really exist until the agricultural revolution when you could store grain. And then the industrial revolution took it to another level. And now the information age is taking it to yet another level.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Possibly. Also, dad tries not too hard to teach people things. I don't want to be didactic. He helps them to arrive at it. Yeah, correct. Dad is here to help you solve problems when you have problems and you constantly have problems. So if you come to dad... dad can help explain to you how he would solve the problem. But most of the time, they don't want that.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Most of the time, they just want me to solve the problem. So sometimes it's have to play dumb. It's like, why is my Wi-Fi not working on my computer? I'm like, I don't know. Did you click on that thing?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So in addition to feeling loved and having high self-esteem, I think the most important trait that would be nice to not rob them of is agency. I want them to preserve their agency. They're born naturally agentic and willful, but a lot of child raising can beat that out of them by essentially domesticating them.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I would rather have wild animals and wolves than have well-trained dogs because I'm not going to be around to take care of them. Yeah, so they're going to have to be able to look after themselves. Yeah, a friend of mine, Parsa on AirChat, he had a great saying. He said he wants his children to be quick to learn and hard to kill. So that was pretty good.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's not over yet. They definitely won earlier rounds. They took over institutions. I think now it's much more of a fair fight where you have people like Elon kind of supporting. So there's these different forces through history, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Historians will argue about this, but there's a theory of the great man of history thing where it's like, oh, you have the Einsteins, you have the Teslas, you have the Genghis Khans and the Caesars, right? They determine the flow of history. And then there's the other point of view that no, there are these massive forces at play, you know, demographics and geography and so on.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And then the particular great man doesn't matter. They just come and go. Napoleon doesn't matter. They would have been somebody else. The specific names are not important. And because of kind of the leftist turn that our institutions took in the last few decades, they now only subscribe to the great forces theory of history, not the great man theory of history.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But I think now we're seeing the two play out where you're seeing, you know, Trump and Elon and other individuals rising up and saying, no, we resist. that's interesting. And, um, I think that unfortunately, and so the battle between these collectivists and great forces versus individuals, it's as old as humanity itself. And it is fundamental to the species.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
We are not a completely individualistic species. No man is an island. A single person can't do anything by themselves. But we're also not a Borg. We're not a beehive. We're not an ant colony. We're not all just drones marching along. So which is it? We're somewhere in the middle and the human race is always kind of bouncing between the two. We like strong leaders. We like to be led.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But there's never been an easier time to make money. Yes, it's still hard, but there's never been an easier time to create wealth because there's so much leverage out there. There's so much opportunity. You still have to go find it. It's not easy. It's not going to fall on your lap and you have to learn something and know something and do something interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
We like to coordinate our forces and mass and do things. But at the same time, we're also all individuals and willing to break away and willing to do our own thing. And everyone's always fighting to be a leader and there's always status games going on. So, there's a pendulum that's always swinging back and forth.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And in modern economics, the way that manifests is between sort of Marxism and capitalism, right? Marxism is like, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs, we're all equal. There's a millennial project, we're all going to be equal in the end and, you know, don't try and stand out, but do what's good for everybody. Right? And there's a religious aspect to it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And then the capitalist individualist is like libertarian, every man for himself. You just each do what you want and it'll work out for the greater good. That's Adam Smith. The invisible hand of the market will feed you. The baker should bake and the butcher should butcher and the candlestick maker should make candlesticks and it'll all work out. Each person does their best and they trade.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And so which is it? Which theory is correct? And I think there's always going to be a battle between the two. And I think... The interesting thing is what's going on. There's a modern flavor to it, which changes it. The modern flavor is that the individual is getting more powerful because they're becoming more leverage.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So someone like an Elon Musk can have the leverage of tens of thousands of brilliant engineers and producers working for him. He can have factories of robots manufacturing things. He can have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital behind him, and he can project himself through media to hundreds of millions of people. That is more power than any individual could have had historically.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So the great men of history are becoming greater. That said, that same leverage is increasing the gap between the haves and have-nots. So in the wealth game, more people are winning overall and the average is going up. But in the status game, they're essentially more losers. They're more invisible players. men and women who are getting nothing out of life and have no leverage, relatively speaking.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Objectively speaking, they might be better off. They still have phones and they still have TVs and they still get to eat. We're not absolutist creatures, though. We're relative creatures. Correct. And so to the extent that we're relative creatures, there are more losers than winners. And in a democracy, those people will outnumber... the winners and they will vote the winners down.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But nevertheless, it's possible to many more people. A few hundred years ago, you were born a serf, you were going to die a serf. There was almost no way out of that. That's changed. And so I would argue that you're better off focusing on wealth games and status games.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And so that's the battle that kind of goes on. And the democracy has gotten very broad. And so one of my other quips is that it's not the right to vote that gives you power. It's power that gives you the right to vote. So we've confused the two. So what happened was, you know, voting started as a way for people who had power to divide up the power and not fight amongst themselves.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
The winners of the revolution, the winners of the war, the people in the House of Lords and the House of Commons, they divide up power amongst themselves. They say, hey, we have all the money, we have the power, we are the knights, we have the swords, we have the warriors, we could kill everybody, but we don't want to just fight each other all day long. We don't want to be Game of Thrones forever.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So we're going to divide up power by voting amongst ourselves. But then as society goes on and becomes more and more peaceful, that franchise for voting gets spread. It gets spread to people who don't have land, who don't have power, who may not be able to inflict physical violence. And then eventually you get to the point where everybody's voting. Everybody's voting.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And everybody's voting for candy and fairies and all the free things in life. And then eventually people start voting to oppress each other. The 51% in any domain vote to suppress the 49%. It's a tyranny of the majority. Yeah. But not all of them are willing to back that up with physical power.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And so you can end up in a situation where people who don't have physical power are using the institutions of the state to control the people who do have physical power. As a simple example, taking the United States, the people who don't have guns voting to disarm the people that do have guns, right? Well, if the people who do have guns get coordinated and care enough, you can't do that, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So I think eventually these societal structures are unstable. They break down and they break down because eventually the people who have the power and say, no, wait a minute, you don't get to vote. You only got to vote because you had power and now you don't have power and you're somehow trying to vote.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
All of nature, all of society, all of capitalism, all of human endeavors are underpinned by physical violence. And that is very hard truth to swallow and hard to get away from. Nature is red in tooth and claw. If you don't fight, you don't survive, you don't live, you die. And that's true of everything alive today. And humans are no different.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So giving up physical power and then thinking you can exercise political power fails, which is why every communist revolution, which is all about equality and kumbaya and brothers and sisters end up being run by a bunch of thugs. Because if you don't have a way to divide up the wealth based on merit, then it's always going to be based on power and influence.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
The thugs with the guns always win in the end. So the question is just, can you keep the thugs with the guns paid and happy and successful society where you're allocating based on merit? Because if you can't, then you're going to do it based on power. So I do think that this battle is not over, but that's because it never stopped. It's always been there from day one. It will continue.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
If you're trying to build up, for example, your following on a social network and get famous and then get rich off of being famous, that's a much harder path than getting rich first. And then go for your fame afterwards would be my advice.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah. I mean, as you're saying, the human brain has not evolved to handle all the world's emergencies breaking in real time. And you can't care about everything. And you'll go insane if you try. Doesn't mean you shouldn't care at all. There's no should. I mean, if you want to care, go ahead and care.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I would just say that you're probably better off only caring about things that are local or things that you can affect, right? So if you really care about something that's in the news, then by all means care about it, but make a difference. Go do something about it and make sure that it's your overwhelming desire and you don't have five other desires at the same time.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Also just realize the consequences of it. You're going to be unhappy until that thing gets fixed and that thing will often be out of your control.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That's a tough one for all the people with Trump derangement syndrome, right? He's living rent free in their heads and driving them insane. And I get it. I mean, there are politicians who have definitely driven me insane as well. But it comes at a very high cost is something that is out of your control that you cannot really influence. So it's probably good to at least be conscious of it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You're asking me that question right now? What do I think is ignored by the media but will be studied by historians? Well, I mean, the media is only focused on very timely things, right? So it depends if you wanna talk about timely or timeless, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But as a simple example, if I just look at things that maybe the next five or 10 years that are going to make a massive difference that people are not focused enough on, And I think within two years, this will be obvious. So like I'm making a prediction and predictions are tough. And you're going to have to eat it in a few years. Yeah, I'm going to have to eat this in a few years.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So I'm probably wrong. But two things that I pay attention to that I don't think a lot of people do pay attention to. Well, there's a couple. One is I think just how bad modern medicine is. I think people just put a lot more faith in modern medicine than is warranted. Like our best ideas for a lot of things are surgery, just cutting things out, right? Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
treating things that are extraneous, like, oh, you don't really need a gallbladder, you don't really need an appendix, or you don't really need tonsils. Oh, that's false. Suplice requirement. Human body is very, very efficient. All those things are needed. So I think the state of modern medicine is still pretty bad. We don't have many good explanatory theories in biology.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
We have germ theory disease. We have evolution. We have cell theory. We have DNA genetics, morphogenesis, embryogenesis, and not much else. You know, there's not much else. Everything else is rules of thumb, memorization, A affects B because it affects C, affects D, but we don't understand the underlying explanation. It's all just words pointing to words, pointing to words.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So biology is still in a very sorry state. And because we are not allowed to take risk that might kill people, Thank you. , , , , , , , ,, P, P, P, P, P, P, P,,,,,, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, ag ag ag ag ag ag ag B B B B B
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's new. Wealth is something that you have to understand more intellectually. Yeah, there's a physical component, more food, more survival. But to truly understand the effects and the powers and the abilities and limitations and the advantages and disadvantages of wealth, you have to use your neocortex a lot more.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I found for myself, as I've become happier is a big word, but more peaceful, more calm, more present, more satisfied with what I have, I still want to do things. I just want to do bigger things. I want to do things that are more pure, more aligned with what I think needs to be done and what I can uniquely do.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I hadn't thought that through, but you're right. Yeah, I think that's right. I think people always want more status, but I think you can be satisfied at a certain level of wealth.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
,,,,,,, . . . . .. the, P. P. P. P. P. P. P,實, ac, ac, ac, , ,, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a dough a ,,,,,,, But there are too many men who are able, fit, and have some money who are doing nothing with their lives. They're just sitting at home doing nothing, just indulging in themselves. Maybe they go on dates and they get doordash.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, that one's harder to climb the ladder on. But the fact that, for example, iTunes and YouTube can put you in competition against your contemporaries every single day and make you go up and down and show you likes and comments and ratings. This is how much you sell. This is how much you're up. Exactly. They keep you running on that treadmill forever.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Like, I have no respect for that. I think there's nothing worse in society than a lazy man because he's sort of He's sort of leaving it all on the table. He's leaving his potential on the table. It's bad for him. So the next thing you do is you go and you have a family and you take care of your family, take care of that tribe.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Then you take care of your extended family, take care of your cousins, brothers, uncles, grandmothers, aunts, you know, sisters, everybody that you can. And then if you have more resources beyond that, then you go take care of your local tribe. You take care of your people. You start trying to do some good for the world.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And if you have more resources than that, you go take care of an even bigger tribe. And that's how you earn both respect and self-confidence and you live up to your potential. So the more you have, the more is rightfully expected of you. And I think it's a good compact with society when highly capable people express and flex that capability by giving more and more and by doing more and more.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And society rewards them with the one thing they can't get otherwise, which is status. So society should give you status in exchange for it. They should say, okay, you did a good job. You took care of more people than just yourself and just the people immediately around you. And that's what an alpha male to me is. An alpha male is not the one who gets to eat first. The alpha male eats last.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
The alpha male feeds everybody else first and then gets to eat last. And they do that out of their own self-respect and pride. And the society rewards them by calling them an alpha and giving them status.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It is. Who is it? Zuck, who donated money to Zuckerberg General's hospital and they wanted to pull his name off of it. I didn't see that, but that's ridiculous. That kind of stuff backfires, right? You should reward people for doing what you're saying before.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Correct. I mean, like the guys who make a lot of money and go out and buy sports teams, I wouldn't do that, right? But the one who goes out and builds a hospital or builds a rocket to take people to the moon, you know, rescue some astronauts, you should be rewarding him for that.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But I do hope to deliver something.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you too. Thanks for getting in my mind and hopefully now you're out.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You've got the real memories to stick. I don't know. The reason to win the game is to be free of it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
101 in the world but last year you were number 200 versus you're number two in the world but last year you were number one there is this sense of the deceleration is very very tangible and um it's like again it goes back to evolution you know something that is bleeding eventually dies unless you stop the bleeding so you're hardwired not to lose what you have and because we evolved in conditions where we're so close to just not surviving
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You don't want to give anything up. It's hardwired into us to not give anything up. So you grip tightly. That's right.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, it's a tough one. I look at the people, and I don't want to offend anybody, but I look at the people who don't like themselves, and that's the toughest slot because they're always wrestling with themselves. And it's hard enough to face the outside world. And no one's going to like you more than you like yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So if you're struggling with yourself, then the outside world becomes an insurmountable challenge for And it's hard to say why people have low self-esteem. It might be genetic. It might just be circumstantial. A lot of times I think it's because they just weren't unconditionally loved as a child. And that sort of seeps in at a deep core level. But self-esteem issues can be the most limiting.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And one interesting thought is that, you know, to some extent, self-esteem is a reputation you have with yourself. You're watching yourself at all times. You know what you're doing and you have your own moral code. Everyone has a different moral code. But if you don't live up to your own moral code, the same code that you hold others to, it will damage your self-esteem.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So in that sense, I think that being happier can actually make you more successful, but your definition of success will likely change along the way.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So perhaps one way to build up your self-esteem is to live up to your own code, very rigorously have one and then live up to it. And another way to raise your self-esteem might be to do things for others. If I look back on my life and, you know, what are the moments that I'm actually proud of, there's very far and few between. And it's not that often. It's not the things you would expect.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's not the material success. It's not having learned this thing or that. It's when I made a sacrifice for somebody or something that I loved. And that's when I'm actually ironically most proud. Now that's through an explicit mental exercise, but I'll bet you at some level I'm recording that implicitly.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So that tells me that even if I am not being loved, then the way to create love is to give love, to express love through sacrifice and through duty. And so I think doing things like that can build up your self-esteem really fast.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Well, if being ethical were profitable, everybody would do it, right? So at some level, it does involve a sacrifice. But that sacrifice can also be thought of as you're thinking for the long term rather than the short term. For example, the virtues are the set of beliefs that if everybody in society followed them as individuals, it would lead to win-win outcomes for everybody.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So if I am honest and you are honest, then we can do business more easily. We can interact more easily because we can trust each other. So even though there might be a few liars in the system, as long as there aren't too many liars and too many cheaters, a high trust society where everybody's honest is better off. And I think a lot of the virtues work this way, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
If I don't go around sleeping with your wife and you don't sleep with mine, and if I don't take all the food that's at the table first and so on, then we all get along better and we can play win-win games. In game theory, the most famous game is Prisoner's Dilemma, but that's all about everybody cheating and the Nash equilibrium, the stable equilibrium there is everybody cheats.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
At least for me, I always wanted to take the path of material success first. I was not going to go be an ascetic and sit there and renounce everything. That just seems too unrealistic and too painful. In the story of Buddha, he starts out as a prince. And then he sees that it's all kind of meaningless because you're still going to get old and die.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And the only way you can play a win-win game is if you have long-term iterated moves. But that's not actually the most common game played in society. The most common game played is one called a stags hunt, where if we cooperate, we can bring down a big stag and both have big dinners. But if we don't cooperate, then we have to go hunt like rabbits and we each have small dinners.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And that game has two stable equilibriums. And one could be where we're both hunting the rabbit and one could be where we're hunting the stag. So the Hytra society is a more virtuous society where I can trust you to come hunt the stag with me and show up on time and do the work and divide it up properly.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So you want to live in a system where everybody has their own set of virtues and follows them and then we all win. But I would argue you don't need to do that for sacrifice. You don't need to do that for other people. You can do it just purely for yourself. You will have higher self-esteem. You will attract other high virtue people.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Correct. Exactly. Yeah, that's right. And if you're the kind of person, if you're the kind of person who long-term signals ethics and virtues, then you'll attract other people who are ethical and virtuous. Whereas if you are a shark, you will eventually find yourself swimming entirely amongst sharks, and that's an unpleasant existence.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But again, this goes back to the equivalent of the marshmallow test. And by the way, the marshmallow test does not replicate. I saw a complication crisis hard recently. Right. but it is about trading off the short term for the long term. Uh, and so I think for a lot of these so-called virtues, there are long-term selfish reasons to be virtuous.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yes and no. I think I dealt with self-doubt in the sense that, oh, I don't know what I'm doing and I need to figure it out. But I didn't doubt myself in the way of somebody else knows better than me for me. Or that, you know, I'm an idiot, or I'm not worthwhile or anything that I guess I had the benefit of I grew up with a lot of love, like the people around me love me unconditionally.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And so that just gave me a lot of confidence, not the kind of confidence that would say I have the answer, but the kind of confidence that I will figure it out. And I know what I want, or only I am a good arbiter of what I want.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
that you're doing there is some that's in the back of your mind was it the daemon is that what the ancient Greeks or something used to talk about yeah also in computer science like there's a concept of a daemon which is a a program that's always running in the background you can't see it okay but yeah it probably comes from the ancient Greek daemon but
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, what you know that you don't even know you know is far greater than what you know you know, right? You can't even articulate most of the things you know. There are feelings you have that have no words for them. There are thoughts you have that are felt within the body or subconsciously that you never articulate to yourself, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And then he goes into the woods looking for something more. I'll take the happy route that involves material success. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You can't articulate the rules of grammar, yet you exercise them effortlessly when you speak. So I would argue that your implicit knowledge and your knowledge that is unknown to yourself is far greater than the knowledge you can articulate and that you can communicate. And so at some level, you're always watching yourself. That's what your consciousness is, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's the thing that's watching everything, including your mind, including your body. So if you want to have high self-esteem, then earn your own self-respect.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
On the love thing, one of the interesting things about love is you can try to remember the feeling of being loved. So go back to when someone was in love with you or someone did love you, and really remember that feeling. Really sit with it and try to recreate it within yourself. And then go to the feeling of you loving someone.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And when you were in love, and I'm not even talking about romantic love necessarily. So be a little careful there. I'm talking more about like love for sometimes get complex if you're talking about past romantic love, right, a sibling or a child or something like that, or a parent. And think about when you felt love towards someone or something. And now which is better?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I would argue that the feeling of being in love is actually more exhilarating than the feeling of being loved. Being loved is a little cloying. It's a little too sweet. You kind of want to push the person away. It's a little embarrassing. And you know that if that person is too much into it, that you feel constrained. On the other hand, the feeling of being in love is very expansive.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's very open. It actually makes you a better version of yourself. It makes you want to be a better person. And so you can create love anytime you want. It's just that craving to receive it. That's the problem.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
and have grown the least are the ones who were the proudest because they sort of feel like they already had the answers and so they don't want to correct themselves publicly. And so this goes back to the fame conversation. You get locked into something you said, it made you famous, you're known for that, and now you want to pivot or change. So pride prevents you from saying, I'm wrong.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It could be as simple as you're trading stocks and then you don't admit you were wrong, so you hang on to a lousy trade. It could be that you made a decision to, you know, marry someone or move somewhere or enter a profession. It doesn't work out. And then you don't admit that you were wrong. So you get stuck in it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It depends on the person, but I think you have to try that path. If you want something, go get it. I quip that the reason to win the game is to be free of it. So you play the games, you win the games, and then hopefully you get bored of the games.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's mostly about getting trapped in local maxima as opposed to going back down and climbing up the mountain again.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, you're just stuck at a suboptimal point. It's going to cost you money. It's going to cost you success. And time. And time. The great artists always have this ability to start over, whether it's Paul Simon or Madonna or U2, and I'm dating myself a little bit. But even the great entrepreneurs, they're just always willing to start over. I'm always struck by the Elon Musk story where
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You know, he did PayPal as x.com originally, actually. It was his financial institution that got merged into PayPal. It's good that you've got the domain. You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. I'll park that. I'll hold on to it. He's consistent. He's been using it for quite a while. And he said something like along the lines of, I made $200 million from the sale of PayPal.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I put $100 million into SpaceX, $80 million into Tesla, $20 million into SolarCity, and I had to borrow money for rent, right? This guy is a perennial risk taker. He's always willing to start over. He doesn't have any pride about being seen as successful or being seen as a failure. He's willing to put it all on the line. Go back himself again each time. Go back himself again each time.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But the key thing is he's always willing to start over, right? Even now when he's sort of made his new startup as a USA, right? He's basically trying to fix it like he would fix one of his startups, right? And I think that is a willingness to look like a fool and that is a willingness to start over. And a lot of people just don't have that.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
They become successful or they become rich or they become famous and that's it. They're stuck. They don't want to go back to zero. And creating anything great requires zero to one. And that means you go back to zero. And that's really painful and hard to do.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, a lot of it is just you're memeing yourself into a bad outcome because you think that somehow suffering is glorious or that it makes you a better person. Or, you know, my old quip was, if you're so smart, why aren't you happy? Why can't you figure that one out? The reality is you can be smart and happy. There are plenty of people in human history who are smart and happy.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I think it just starts with saying, yeah, you know what, I'm going to be happy. It was a guy that I met in Thailand a long time ago. And he used to work for Tony Robbins. You know, he had a great attitude. And we were sitting around and he said, you know, He said, I realized one day that someone out there had to be the happiest person in the world. Like that person just has to exist.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You don't want to just keep looping on the same game over and over, although a lot of these games are very enticing and have many levels and are relatively open-ended. and then you become free of the game in a sense that you're no longer trying to win it. You know you can win it, and either you move to a different game or you play the game for the sheer joy of it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
He said, why not me? I'll take on that burden. I'll be that guy. And I heard that and I was like, wow, that's pretty good. That's a good frame. He knew how to reframe things. And so I think a lot of happiness is just a choice in the sense that first you just identify yourself as actually I'm going to be a person that's going to be happy. I'm going to figure it out.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And you just figure it out along the way. You're not going to lose your other predilections. You're not going to lose your ambition or desire for success. I think a lot of people have this fear that, oh, if I'm happy, then I won't want to be successful. No, you'll just want to do things that are more aligned with the happy version of you, and you'll be successful at those things.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And believe me, the happy version of you is not going to look back at the unhappy version and say, oh, man, that guy was going to be more successful. Had more success. I wish that was him. Exactly. You're actually trying to be successful so you'll be happy. That's the whole point.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Happiness, okay, so very complicated topic, but I always like the Socrates story where he goes into the marketplace and they show him all these luxuries and fineries. And he says, how many things there are in this world that I do not want, right? And that's a form of freedom. So not wanting something is as good as having it. In the old story with Alexander Dionysius, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
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Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
If you define pain as physical pain, then it's a real thing. It happens and you can't ignore it. But that's not what we mean by suffering. Suffering is mostly mental anguish and mental pain. And it just means you don't want to do the task at hand. If you were fine doing the task at hand, then you wouldn't be suffering.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And then the question is, what's more effective, to suffer along the way or just to interpret it in a way that it's not suffering? You hear from a lot of successful people, they look back and they say, oh, the journey was the fun part, right? That was actually the entertaining part and I should have enjoyed it more. It's a common regret. There's a little thought exercise I like to do, which is,
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . P a By default, you should kill everything. If you can't decide, the answer is no. And most things you should just be saying no to. Part of my keeping my calendar free is just by default saying no to everything. Do I want to create a calendar just to add your event or to add your need or your desire?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
One of the other things about early on in life, you're looking for opportunities. So you're saying yes to everything. And that is a phase that you go through. That is the exploration phase. Later, when you found the thing you want to work on, you're in the exploitation phase. You have to say no to everything by default.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And if you don't say no to everything by default, if you have to even explicitly go out of your way to say no to something, that will take up time. For example, there are a lot of people out there who are into hustle culture. And a big piece of hustle culture is like, well, you're not going to get something if you don't ask for it. So they'll hustle people.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
They'll always be sending you requests, messages. Yeah, this is a famous person problem, but I have it. And people are always asking me for things. And I kind of squirm when I get these messages. And I'm sure you get these two text messages, emails saying, hey, Chris, my friend so-and-so should really be on your podcast. Or you should come to my event. You should write a forward for my book.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You can go back into your own life and try to put yourself in the exact position you were in five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. And you try to remember, okay, who was I with? What was I doing? What was I feeling? What were my emotions? What were my objectives? And really, really try to transport yourself back.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And you kind of squirm when you get this, right? You have to figure out how to say no. And one of the things I learned along the way is that if you wouldn't ask somebody else to do it, and then you get that request yourself, you can just dismiss it. You don't have to respond. You don't even let it enter your brain.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You have to be able to delete emails and text messages without flinching if you want to scale. And scaling is very important. Scaling your time is really important. Every interruption will take you out of flow. So the only way you can remain in flow is if you get...
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
either very good at ignoring these things by default or closing yourself off like a hermit, like our mutual friend Tim Ferriss does, or you just become emotionally capable of not registering these as something that causes turbulence inside of you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Selfish is fine. I'll take selfish. Holistic. I'm a very selfish person. Don't contact me.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So I think it's really good to be able to view your own mind and your own thoughts objectively. And that is the big benefit of meditation. It creates a small gap between your conscious observation self and your mind. And that lets you then look at your thoughts and evaluate them. a little bit like you would a third party's statements.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And if you just take your mind to be you and they're integrated in one and the same at all times and you're reacting from the mind, then you're not even going to question things that come into your mind. Anything that comes in that creates a reaction will immediately create a reaction.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But if you can observe your thoughts a little bit and not in some woo-woo way, but you can even just do it through therapy, you can do it through journaling, you can do it any way you would like. You can just take long walks. You don't have to meditate and do lotus position.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
all that is unnecessary but if you can observe your own thoughts and view them a little objectively then you can start being a little more choosy a little more critical and you can realize that there are no problems in the real world other than maybe things that inflict pain on your body everything else has to become a problem in your mind first you have to view it and interpret it and create a narrative that it is a problem before it becomes a problem
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And then you realize that a lot of your emotional energy is spent on reacting to things that your mind is automatically saying are problems. And you don't need all those problems. Do you really need that many problems in your life? Again, I would say try to focus on just one overarching problem and then go solve that problem.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
and see if there's any advice you'd give yourself anything you'd do differently now you don't have new information don't pretend you could have gone back and you know bought a stock or bought bitcoin or whatever but just knowing what you know now in terms of your temperament and a little bit of age related experience how would you have done things differently and i think it's a worthwhile exercise to do so don't let me rob you of the conclusion but i'll tell you for me uh
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's like if you want to be successful, define success very concretely, focus on that and everything else. When it enters your mind, it becomes a problem, whether it's a judgment about the girl walking down the street or the car that just cut in front of you, or whether it's like, you know, this, your accountant did this stupid thing.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Like, yes, it's going to trigger you, but observe for a moment that like, it's triggering me. I've created a problem. Do I really want to have this problem right now? Do I want to spend the energy on this problem? Or do I want that going somewhere else? And it doesn't have to be that over. You don't have to, the mind mud wrestling with itself is also a problem. because I'd love to do that.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, exactly. You're going to be much happier and much more focused. Again, I think happiness and focus and success can kind of complement each other. you're going to have much more energy. Just think about it as mental energy.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You're going to have much more mental energy to focus on the actual problems you want to solve if you don't start unconsciously, subconsciously, reactively picking up problems everywhere. So before anything can be a problem that takes up your emotional energy, you have to accept it as a problem. You can be choosy about your problems.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I'm not saying I'm perfect in that regard, but I think I'm better than I used to be.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
We have that going on. And then even worse is we take on problems that we can't affect. So, you know, another one of my little quips was, you know, a rational person can sort of, a rational person should cultivate indifference to things that are out of their control, right? Or a rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things that are out of their control.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I'm as guilty as anybody of doom surfing on X or social media and getting worked up about things that I can't do anything about, right? Like, do I want to be fighting those battles in my mind when I literally cannot do anything about it?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So if you find yourself looping on a problem, like you're watching the news too much and you're getting caught up in a problem you can't do anything about, you have to step away from that. And modern media is a...
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
delivery mechanism for mimetic viruses and not what's happened now is you know 100 years ago 500 years ago if something wasn't happening in your immediate vicinity you wouldn't hear about it it wouldn't be a problem for you but now every single one of the world's problems has turned into a mimetic virus which is going into the battlefield of the news
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
and is trying to infect your mind in real time so that you become obsessed with the war in Ukraine, which is really far away, or you get obsessed with climate change, or you get obsessed with AI doom, or you get obsessed with whatever. And there's nothing as riveting as the old religion, the world is ending, the world is ending, pay attention, the world is ending.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And if you don't... It's a Cassandra complex at global scale. Cassandra complex at global scale. And I would argue that large percentages of the population are essentially just infected with these memetic viruses that have taken over their brain and are causing them to do incredible gyration about things that probably aren't even true or are greatly exaggerated.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But even to the extent they are true, there are things that that person can do nothing about. And they should put their own house in order first. So, you know, another little line I have for myself is your family is broken, but you're going to fix the world. right? People are running out there to try and fix the world when their old lives are a mess, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I think it defies credibility if you can't fix your own life first. I'm not going to take you seriously if you can't fix your own life. Like all these philosophers who, you know, seem like people you emulate and so smart or like these brilliant celebrities and they go off and commit suicide. Well, you just kind of invalidated your whole way of life.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's like that line in No Country for Old Men where the killer is waiting for the protagonist and protagonist shows up and the killer says, well, you know, if your set of rules brought you here, then what good are your rules? Didn't work. I'm holistically selfish in that I want to be objectively successful in everything I set out to want. Yeah. You have one life. Don't settle for mediocrity.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Don't settle for mediocrity. And I think the only... People debate intelligence, for example, right? We talk about IQ tests and all that. But I think... The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. And there are two parts to that. One is getting what you want, so you know how to get it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I would have done everything the same except I would have done it with less anger, less emotion, less internal suffering. Because that was optional. It wasn't necessary. And I would argue that someone who can do the job at least peacefully, but maybe happily, is going to be more effective than someone who has unnecessary emotional turmoil.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And the second is wanting the right things, knowing what to want in the first place. I could want to be a six foot eight basketball player and I'm not going to get that. So it's wanting the wrong thing. That's wanting something that you can't get. That's wanting something you can't get.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, wanting something that's a booby prize. There are plenty of booby prizes out there too, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That's if you're kind of proceeding unconsciously. And usually I think people end up there because they are going on autopilot with sort of societal expectations or other people's expectations. So, you know, or out of guilt or out of like mimetic desire. You know, Peter Thiel has this whole thing from Rene Girard about how mimetic desires or desires are picked up from other people.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And some of those are automatically baked into society, like, you know, go to law school, go to med school, go to whatever, go to business school. Um, or they might be from watching what your friends are doing and, you know, the other monkeys are doing. Um, or it might just be, you know, what your parents' expectations are.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It might be a guilt, you know, guilt is just society's voice speaking in your head, socially programmed. So you'll be a good little monkey and do things that are good for the tribe. Um, but I think the, the, the best outcomes come when you think it through for yourself and decide for yourself. And I don't think people spend enough time deciding. For example, we run on these, uh, Four-year cycles.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
In Silicon Valley, you go join a startup, you vest your stock over four years. That's the standard. In college, you go for four years. High school, you go for four years. Some things take longer. You have children, they hit puberty nine years later. That's like a nine-year cycle until that relationship changes.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But we're used to these fairly long cycles, multi-year cycles in which we are committed to things. You go to law school, you know, four or five-year cycle. You go be a lawyer, 40-year cycle. These are very long cycles. The amount of time we spend deciding what to do and who to do it with, very short, very, very short, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
We spend, you know, three months deciding, one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years or five years. And because... A lot of discovery is path dependent, where the next thing you find on the path is dependent on where you were on the previous path. You sort of start going down this vector that is a very long distance.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
People decide frivolously which city to live in, and that's going to decide who their friends are, what their jobs are, their opportunity, their weather, their food supply, their air supply, quality of life. It's such an important decision, but people spend so little time thinking it through.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I would argue that if you're making a four-year decision, spend a year thinking it through, like really thinking it through.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, exactly. There's the secretary theorem. I don't know if you know that one.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That's right. Yeah, the secretary theorem is this computer science professor is trying to figure out how much time he should spend interviewing secretaries and then how long to keep the secretary. So let's say he's going to have a secretary for 10 years. Does he keep searching for, you know, one year, two years, three years, one month, two months? What is the optimal time?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And it turns out that the optimal time is somewhere around a third. About a third of the way through, you take the best person you've worked with and try to find someone that good or better. So by the time you've gone about a third of the way through, you have seen enough that you now have a sense of what the bar is. And then anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is good enough.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And this applies to dating. This applies to jobs and careers. This applies generally. Right. But the interesting thing about the secretary theorem is that it's actually not time-based. It's not based on one third of the time. It's iteration-based. It's the number of candidates. The number of shots you took on goal. That's right. So you want to have lots and lots of iterations.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Correct. Like if you go back and you look through failed relationships, probably the biggest regret will be staying in the relationship after you knew it was over. Exactly. You should have left sooner. The moment you knew it wasn't going to work out, you should have moved on. So in that sense, I think Malcolm Gladwell
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
popularize this idea of 10,000 hours to mastery, I would say it's actually 10,000 iterations to mastery. It's not actually 10,000. It's some unknown number, but it's about the number of iterations that drives a learning curve. And iteration is not repetition. Repetition is a different thing. Repeating is doing the same thing over and over.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Iteration is modifying it with a learning and then doing another version of it. So that's error correction. So if you get 10,000 error corrections in anything, you will be an expert at it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
The journey is the only thing there is. Even success, it's human nature to... bank it very, very quickly, right? Because the normal loop that we run through is you sit around, you're bored, then you want something. Then when you want something, you decide you're not going to be happy until you get that thing. Then you start your bout of suffering or anticipation while you strive to get that thing.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, cynicism and pessimism is a tough one. We're naturally hardwired for it. Again, I go back to evolution. I'm sorry to keep harping on evolution, but within biology, there's very few good explanatory theories. And theory of evolution by natural selection is probably the best one.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So if you can't explain something about life or psychology or human nature through evolution, then you probably don't have a good theory for it. And I would say that pessimism is another one that comes out of this, which is in the natural environment, you're hardwired to be pessimistic. Because let's say that I see something rustling in the woods.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And if I move towards it and it turns out to be food and prey, then good, I get to eat one meal. But if it turns out to be a predator, I get eaten. And that's the end of that. So we are hardwired to avoid ruin and just dying. So we are naturally hardwired to be pessimists. But modern society is very different.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Despite whatever problems you may have with modern society, it is far, far safer than living in the jungle and just trying to survive. And the opportunities and the upside are nonlinear. For example, when you're investing, if you short a stock, the most money you can make is 2x. You just lose, you know, if the stock goes to zero, you double your money.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But if the stock is the next Nvidia and it goes 100x or 1000x, you make a lot of money. So upside because of leverage is nearly unlimited. Also in modern society, because there's so many different people you can interact with, if you go on a date and it fails, there are infinite more people to go on a date with.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
In a tribal system, there might've been 20 people and you can't even get through all of them. So modern society is far more forgiving of failure. And you just have to sort of neocordically realize and override that. You have to realize that you're much more running a search function to find the thing that'll work. And then that one thing, will pay off in massive compounding.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Once you find your mate for the rest of your life, you find your wife or your husband, then you can compound in that relationship. It's okay if you had 50 failed dates in between. The same way, once you find the one business you're meant to plow into and it'll compound returns, it's okay if you had 50 small failed ventures or 50 small failed job interviews. The number of failures doesn't matter.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And so there's no point in being a pessimist. You want to be an optimist, but I would say, You want to be skeptical about specific things. Every specific opportunity is probably a fail, but you want to be optimistic in the general. In the general, you want to be like, something in here is going to work out.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I mean, exactly as I said, I'm optimistic in the general that if something fails right now, then this is a little woo-woo, but it wasn't meant to be. It was a learning experience. It was an iteration. As long as I learned something from it, then it's a win. If I didn't learn from it, then it's a loss.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But as long as you're learning and you keep iterating fast and cutting your losses quickly, then when you find the right thing, you have to be optimistic and compound into it. So you don't want to jump into the first thing. You don't want to marry the first person you date necessarily unless you got very lucky. But you want to investigate and explore very, very quickly until you find the match.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And then you have to be willing to go all in. You have to be willing to move your chips to the center of the table. So both those approaches are required.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I also think like labels like pessimists, optimists, cynic, introvert, extrovert, these are very self-limiting. Humans are very dynamic. There are times when you feel like being introverted. There are times when you feel like being extroverted. There are contexts in which you'll be pessimistic. There are contexts in which you'll be optimistic.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
If you get that thing, then you get used to it. And then you get bored again. Then a few months later, you want something else. And if you don't get it, then you're unhappy for a bit and then you get over it and then you want something else, right? That's the normal cycle. So whether you're happy or unhappy at the end, it tends not to last.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
leave all those labels alone it's better just to look at the problem at hand look at reality the way it is try to take yourself out of the equation in this in a sense like obviously you're involved but motivated reasoning is the worst kind of reasoning uh you're not going to find truth through highly motivated reasoning you have to be objective and objective means trying to take yourself out of it as much as possible or at least your personality out of it as much as possible
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And so to the extent you run with this thick identity and personality, it's going to cloud your judgment. It's going to try and lock you into the past. If you say, I'm a depressed, unhappy person, yeah, I'm going to be unhappy. That's a way of locking yourself into your past. Even saying, I have trauma, I have PTSD. Yeah, you feel something.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
There are memories, there are flashes, there are occasional bad feelings, but don't define yourself by it because then you'll lock it into your identity and you're just going to loop on it. It's better to stay flexible because reality is always changing. And you have to be able to adapt to it. Adaptation is also intelligence. Adaptation is survival. Adaptation is kind of how you're here.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You're here because you're an adapter and your ancestors were adapters. So to adapt, you'll see things clearly. And if you're seeing them through your own identity, it's going to cloud your judgment.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Now, I don't want to be glib and say that, oh, there's no point in making money or being successful. There absolutely is. Money solves all your money problems. So it is good to have money. That said, there are those stories. I don't know if you've seen those studies. I don't know how real these are.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's just one of those overloaded words that means different things to different people. So I'm not even sure we're communicating the same language. But what is happiness? I think it's just basically being okay with where you are. Not wanting? Not wanting things to be different than the way they are. Not having the sense that anything is missing in this moment.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Alexander goes out and conquers the world and he meets Dionysius who's living in a barrel. And Dionysius says, get out of the way, you're blocking my son.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Ironically, I think most people, if you were to ask them when they were happiest for a sustained period of time, not for a brief moment, because pleasure can override happiness and create kind of this illusion of happiness. But if you ask people when they were happy for a sustained period of time, they were probably doing some variation of nothing.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That's right. But then you get bored. If you just sit around all the time, you get bored. So you want adventure, you want surprise. Like there's the funny thought experiment of the bliss machine, right? Which is suppose I could drill a hole in your head and put an electrode in. And they did this with monkeys.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I can put a wire in there and I can stimulate just the right part of your brain and I can put you in bliss. And you'll just be in bliss. Would you want that? Might be nice. For how long? Do it and I'll tell you. Right. So most people will say, well, I don't want that. I want meaning. I don't want just bliss. I want meaning.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And you're like, okay, well, I'll put an electrode in there and I'll give you meaning. How about that? And if you kind of run this thought experiment long enough, I think most people realize actually what I want is I want surprise. I want the world to surprise me and I want to wrestle with it in ways that are somewhat predictable but somewhat not. And you kind of end up back where you started. So
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
A lot of these psych studies don't replicate, but it's a fun little study that shows that people who break their back and people who win the lottery are back to their baseline happiness two years later. Yep. Again, I don't know if that's entirely true. I think money can buy you happiness if you earned it. Because then along the way, you have both pride and confidence in yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I don't know if necessarily for some people, pure happiness is the ultimate goal. They want to, you know, just be blissfully happy wherever they are, whenever they are. But I think other people, most people would say, well, I'm here in this world. I'm here in this life. I don't understand it or why, but I want to be, I want to be engaged. I want to be surprised. I want to do things.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I want to accomplish things. I want to want things and then get them right. That's kind of the whole game that we're all playing here.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, if nothing worked out the way you expected, if it was all serendipity and you didn't want that, you would just be a ball of anxiety. On the other hand, if everything worked out as you expected and wanted, you'd be so bored you might as well be dead. So there's some, you know, the river of life kind of flows between these two banks. And enjoy it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
What I'm specifically referring to that is if you're thinking about your personality and your ego and the character of you, and you're obsessing over that, that's where a lot of depression and unhappiness sort of lingers and gets cultivated. So thinking about woe is me, this happened to me, that happened to me, I have this personality, I have this issue, I deserve this, I didn't get that.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You're just strengthening a little beast in there that is insatiable. And that's where I think a lot of unhappiness comes from. What's the beast? It's the ego. But that word is so overused that I kind of hate to use the word. But it's a recurrent collection of thoughts that are very self-obsessed and will never be satisfied. And very concretized as well.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So they're not malleable, not particularly flexible. Well, you're just adding to them by thinking about them all the time. You're creating narratives and stories and identities. But that's different from solving personal problems. So if you encounter something, you learn from something, you're reflecting upon the learning, then you can reflect upon it, absorb it, and then just move on.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But sitting there saying, I'm Chris, I'm Naval, I deserve this, this happened to me, that person wronged me, this is who I am, this shouldn't have happened, I need to go get revenge on this, or I need to fix that or change this. I mean, that I think is where a lot of mental illness lies. is, you know, comes from.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So it depends if you are thinking about something to solve a problem and get it off your chest and get it off your mind. If it leaves your mind clearer at the end of it, then I think it was worthwhile. If it leaves your mind busier at the end of it, then you're probably going in the wrong direction.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And you have a sense of accomplishment. And you set out to do something and you were right. So I'll bet that lingers. And then, as I said, money solves your money problems. So I don't want to be too glib about it. But I would say in general, this loop that we run through of desire, dopamine, fulfillment, unfulfillment, you have to enjoy the journey. The journey is all there is, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Detachment is not a goal. Detachment is a byproduct. It's just a byproduct of just realizing what matters and what doesn't. And just for one moment on the self thing, I think Everybody craves thinking about something more than themselves. If you want to be happy, to some extent, you have to forget about your personal problems. And one way to do that is take on other problems, bigger problems.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And that could be a mission, that could be spirituality, that could be kids. It could be caring about the planet, although I think people take that a little far, and then they get kind of oppressive and tyrannical in support of abstract concepts. So these can be taken too far, just like religion, for example. Anything in excess. Anything in excess, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But generally, the less you think about yourself, the more you can think about a mission or about God or about a child or something like that.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's very liberating. Yeah, I think overthinking about yourself is probably the... It may not be the cause of depression, but it certainly doesn't help. Rumination. Yeah, I...
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Therapy is great if it lets you vent and it solves the thing and then X session later, you're done. You're clear. But if you're just looping on the same thing forever, then it's actually the opposite. You're bathing in it. You're indulging in it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, I used to have a lot of them. Now I kind of try not to have any because I think the techniques themselves are kind of a struggle. It's sort of like bidding for status implies your low status. It reveals that you're low status. So someone who's basically trying to show off comes across as low status.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
The same way someone who's trying to be happy is sort of saying I'm unhappy and creating that frame. So it's better just to not even think in terms of that.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, I don't even think in terms of happiness, unhappiness anymore.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
99% of your time is spent on the journey. So what kind of a journey is it if you're not going to enjoy it? How do you shortcut that desire contract? You could focus, you could decide that I don't want most things. I think we have a lot of unnecessary desires that we just pick up everywhere. We have opinions on everything, judgments on everything.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
that's similar to a bunch of them do you think you could have got there had you have not done the procedural systematic sort of step by step by step this is what it is and then come out the other side i don't think there are any formulas i think it's unique to each person it's like asking a successful person how did you become successful each one of them will give you a different story uh you can't follow anyone else's path and most of them are even probably telling you some narratized version of it that isn't quite true i mean that's
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And the people who are really extraordinarily successful didn't sit around watching success porn. They just went and did it. They had such an overwhelming desire to be successful at the thing that they were doing that they just went and did that thing. They didn't have time to study and learn and listen and they just did it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's the overwhelming desire that's the most important and the focus that comes from that.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, you don't need mentors. You need action. That was one of them. Another one is the people who actually know how to make money, you don't need to sell your course on it. There it is. Yeah, there's lots of variations on it. But if you don't lie awake at night thinking about it, you don't want it badly enough.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Tell me about that. Oh, I mean, my eight sleep hates me. It's always telling me. I failed at sleeping again. Brian Johnson thinks I'm going to die early. He's probably right. How much do you reckon you sleep a night? Do you have any idea? Oh, it's so random. Some nights I'll sleep eight hours. Some nights I'll sleep four hours. But it's literally just random. Are you bothered about that?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Are you trying to optimize? Are you a sleep coach teaching you how to? I don't flog myself over things. If I want to sleep, I'll sleep. If I don't want to sleep, I don't sleep. I don't think I'm doing anything right or wrong. You don't label it good night, bad night. No, I work out every day because I think it gives me more energy and I've gotten into a good habit with it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Maybe I'll do the same thing with sleep. Maybe I'll develop a good habit, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. There'll come a point where it's important to me and when it's important to me, I'll just do it. You know, most of, like, for example, you look at people with addictions, right? Overeating or smoking or whatever.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
They can kind of go through all the different methods, but it's half-hearted. And then one day they're like, oh shit, I've got lung cancer. My dad has lung cancer and they drop it immediately. Yeah. So I think a lot of change is more about desire and understanding than it is about forcing yourself or trying to domesticate yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, it's not getting caught up in a half desire or mimetic desire. It's really just being aware of what it is that you actually want at this point in time. And when you want something, then you will act on it with maximal capability. And that's the time to act on it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So I think just knowing that those are the source of unhappiness will make you be choosy about your desires. And frankly, if you want to be successful, you have to be choosy about your desires. You have to focus. You can't be great at everything. You can't be great at everything. You're just going to waste your energy and waste your time.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
and alexander says oh how i wish i you know could be like dionysius in the next life and dionysius says that's the difference i don't wish that i could sorry diogenes diogenes diogenes says i i don't wish to be alexander so two paths to happiness and uh one path is for success you get what you want you satisfy your material needs or like diogenes you just don't want it in the first place and i'm not sure which one is more valid um
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
In the meantime, just doing it because other people tell you you should do it or society tells you you should do it or you feel slightly guilty about it. These are half-hearted efforts and half-hearted efforts don't get you there.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So anxiety and stress are interesting. They're very related. Stress is when, like if you look at an iron beam, when an iron beam is under stress it's because it's being bent in two different directions at the same time. So when your mind is under stress it's because it has two conflicting desires at once.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So for example, you want to be liked, but you want to do something selfish, and you can't reconcile the two, and so you're under stress. You want to do something for somebody else, you want to do something for yourself, right? You don't want to go to work, but you want to make money, so you're under stress, right? So you have two conflicting desires.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I think one of the ways to get through stress is to acknowledge that, oh, I actually have two conflicting desires. And either I need to resolve it, I need to pick one and then be okay losing the other, or I will decide later. But at least just being aware of why your stress can help alleviate a lot of stress.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And then anxiety, I think, is sort of this pervasive, unidentifiable stress where you're just kind of stressed out all the time and you're not even sure why. And you can't even identify the underlying problem. And the reason for that is because you have so many unresolved problems, unresolved stress points that have piled up in your life that you can no longer identify what the problems are.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It gets you invited to better parties, gets you to better restaurants. Fame. So fame is this funny thing where a lot of people know you, but you don't know them. And it does get you put on a pedestal. It can get you what you want at a distance. So I wouldn't say it's worthless. Obviously, people want it for a reason. It's high status, so it attracts the opposite sex, especially for men.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And there's this mountain of garbage everywhere. In your mind, it's a little bit of it poking out the top like an iceberg. And that's anxiety. But underneath, there's a lot of unresolved things. And so you just need to kind of go through very carefully. Every time you're anxious, like, okay, why am I anxious this time? I don't know why. Oh, well, let me sit here and just think about it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Let me write down what the possible causes could be. Let me meditate on it. Let me journal. Let me talk to a therapist. Let me talk to my friends. Let me just kind of see like, when does that stress go away? If you can kind of identify and unravel and resolve these issues, then I think that helps get rid of anxiety.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
A lot of the anxiety is piled up because we move through life too quickly, not observing our own reactions to things. We don't resolve them. So this goes counter to what I was saying earlier about not reflecting too much on things. But you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them. You don't reflect on them to feel better about yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Well, if you're doing it to just feel better about yourself, that could be strengthening your personality and your ego and could be creating a more fragile personality. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It attracts women. That said, it is high cost. It means you have no privacy. You do have weirdos and lunatics. You do get hit up a lot for weird things. And you're on a stage, so you're forced to perform. So you're forced to be consistent with your past proclamations and actions, and you're going to have haters and all that nonsense.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But the fact that we do it, the fact that we all seem to want it means that it would be disingenuous to say, oh, no, no, I'm famous, but you don't want to be famous. That said, I think fame, like anything else, is best produced as a or pursued as a byproduct of something potentially more worthwhile. um, wanting to be famous and craving to be famous and being famous for being famous.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
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Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
These are sort of traps. Fame for fame's sake. Yeah, exactly. So it's better that it's earned fame. Uh, so for example, earn respect in the tribe is you do things that are good for the tribe. Uh, Who are the most famous people in human history? There are people who sort of transcended the self, the Buddhas and the Jesuses and the Mohammeds of the world. Who else is famous? The artists are famous.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
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Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
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Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
uh you know atoms bouncing is mechanics but that generates heat so thermodynamics and motion or kinetics are one combined theory that's a whole electricity and magnetism are one thing that's that's the whole creates that sense of awe uh in art it's like i feel an emotion i create a piece of art around it and then you see that painting or you see the sistine chapel or you read the poem and you feel that emotion so again it's it's creating unity it's creating connection
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I think everybody craves that. And so when you really love somebody, it's because you feel a sense of wholeness by being around them. And that sense of wholeness probably doesn't have anything to do with what school they went to or what career they're in.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Art lasts for a long time. The scientists are famous. They discover things. The conquerors are famous, presumably because they conquered for their tribe. There was someone that they were fighting for.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
My cousin said this about me. He said what I really... He says, what I've really noticed about you is your ability to walk away from situations that are just not great enough for you or not good enough for you. And I think that is a characteristic that I have. I will not accept second best outcomes in my life. Ultimately, you will end up wherever is acceptable to you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You will get out of life, whatever is acceptable to you. And there are certain things to me that are very, very important where I will not settle for second best. But then there are a lot of other things I just don't care about because if I spend all my time caring about those things, I don't have the energy for the few things that matter.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And so in decision-making, I have a few heuristics for myself. Other people can use their own, but mine are if you can't decide, the answer is no. If you're offered an opportunity, if you have a new thing that you're saying yes or no to that is a change from where you're starting, the answer is by default always no.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So, generally, the higher up you rise by doing things for greater and greater groups of people, even though it may be considered tyrannical or negative, like, you know, Genghis Khan is famous, but to the Mongols, he was doing good, to the rest of them, not so much. The higher level you're operating at, the more people you're taking care of, the more you sort of earn respect and fame.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Secondly, if you have two decisions, if you have A or B, and both seem like very equal, take the path that's more painful in the short term, the one that's going to be painful immediately, because your brain is always trying to avoid pain. So any pain that is imminent, it is going to treat as much larger than it actually is. This is kind of like a decision-making equivalent of Taleb's Surgeon.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
tell a surgeon whether you want the surgeon that doesn't look as good because he's more likely to be a good surgeon. Yeah, it's similar in that appearances are deceiving because you're avoiding conflict, you're avoiding pain.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Is success worth it then? Oof, I'm not sure that statement is true anymore. Like I made that statement a long time ago. And a lot of these things are just notes to myself and they're highly contextual. They come in the moment, they leave in the moment.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So take the path that's more painful in the short term because your brain is creating this illusion that the short-term pain is greater than the long-term pain because long-term, yeah, you'll commit your future self to all kinds of long-term pain. Manana, manana. Exactly, manana. So take the more short-term painful one.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And then finally, the last one, which I would credit Kapil Gupta with, is that you want to take the choice that will leave you more equanimous in the long term. By equanimous, he means like more at peace, more mental peace in the long term. So whatever clears your mind more and will have you having less self-talk in the future, if you can model that out, that is probably the better route to go.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And then I would focus decision-making down on the three things that really matter because everything else is downstream of these three decisions. Especially, these are early life decisions. Later in life, you have different things to optimize for. But early in life, you're trying to figure out who you're with, what you're doing, and where you live.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I think on all three of those, you want to think pretty hard about it. And people... do some of these unconsciously. You know, who you're with very often is like, well, we were in a relationship, we stumbled along, it felt okay, it had been enough time, so we got married, right? Not great reasons. Maybe not terrible reasons either.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I mean, it's people who overthink these things sometimes don't get the right answer, but maybe here, if you are the kind of person that's not going to settle for second best, you iterate, you iterate on a closed timeframe so you don't run out the clock and then you decide.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
On what you do, you try a whole bunch of different things until you find the one that feels like play to you, looks like work to others, you can't lose at it. Get some leverage, try to find some practical application of it and go into that. And then where you live, where you live is really important. I don't think people spend enough time on that one.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I think people pick cities randomly based on where I went to school or where my family happened to be or where my friend was or I visited one weekend. I really liked it. You really want to think it through because where you live really constrains and defines your opportunities. It's going to determine your friend circle. It's going to determine your dating pool.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's going to determine your job opportunities. It's going to determine the food and air and water quality that you receive. Um, it's going to determine your proximity to your family, which might be important as you get older and have kids. So very, very, very important decision, whether, you know, quality of life, how much do you stay inside or outside?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
How long are you going to live based on that? And I think people choose that one probably more poorly than they put a lot less thought into that one than the other two.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
in some ways yeah but also the you're so right how many people fall backward into a relationship and before they know it we're living together we got a dog we got a kid we were married and yeah and then when you have kids because then that's half of you and half of them running around you're never going to separate yourself from that so once you have a child with somebody then the most important thing in the world to you is half that other person whether you like them or not yeah uh
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I'm a big believer in genetics, yes. I do think a lot of behavior is downstream of genetics. And I think we underplay that. We like to overplay nurture and underplay nature for societal reasons. But nature is a big deal. The temperament of the person you marry is probably going to be reflected in your child by default. People can change.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I think those are good reasons to be famous. If fame is empty, if you're famous just because your name showed up in a lot of places or your face showed up in a lot of places, then that's a hollow fame. And I think deep down you will know that. And so it'll be fragile and you'll always be afraid of losing it. And then you'll be forced to perform.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Well, the secret to a happy relationship is two happy people, right? So I would say if you want to be happy, then be with a happy person. Don't think you're going to be with someone who's unhappy and then make them happy down the road. Or if you're okay with them being unhappy, but there are other things you like about them, that's fine. But this goes back to not trying to change someone.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And actually, we talked a little bit about how people do connect successfully on spirit and those things. But that's maybe a little too abstract. If you want to get a little more practical, it could be based on values. And values are a set of things you won't compromise on. Values are the tough decisions of, oh, my parent got sick. Do they move in with us or do we put them in a nursing home?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Do we give the children money or do we not? Do we... Do we move across the country to be closer to our family or do we stay put where we are? Do we argue about politics? Do we care or do we not? Values are way more important than checklist items. And I think if people were to align much more on their values, they would have much more successful relationships.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Evolved loss aversion. It's just painful separating yourself in front of your friends. It's embarrassing.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, it's the hardest thing in the world, starting over. It's back to the zero to one thing. It's the mountain climbing thing. You're not going to find your path to the top of the mountain in the first go around. Sometimes you go up there, you get stuck and you come back down.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And the difference between all the successful people and the ones who are not is the ones who are successful want it so badly, they're willing to go back and start over again and again, whether in their career or in their relationships or in anything else.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Well, fame doesn't help on that one because that is one of the traps of fame. People are always talking about you. They have a certain view of you and you start believing that and then you take yourself seriously and then that limits your own actions. You can't look like a fool anymore. You can't do new things anymore. You know, it's tomorrow announced I'm a breakdancer, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That's going to be met with a lot of scorn and ridicule. But what if I want to be a breakdancer?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, the truth is if I want to be a breakdancer, I'd be breakdancing. But, you know, like I'm starting a new company, zero to one again from scratch. Let's do it, you know, one more time. and not just going and raising a big VC fund or retiring or what have you. But that's because I want to build the product. I want to see it exist. So I think that you constantly just have to force yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So the kind of fame that pure actors and celebrities have, I wouldn't want. But the kind of fame that's earned because you did something useful, why dodge that? No, you can't.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You have to remind yourself. look deep down, you're still the same Chris you were when you were nine years old, deep down, you're still a kid. Uh, you know, you're still curious about the world. You still have a lot of the same predilections and desires and wants. You've got a nice veneer on it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But one of the nice things when you have kids is you realize how much closer they are to you in personality and knowledge and know-how. Like I look at my son who's, uh, you know, he's eight and, uh, I just noticed like, wow, he's probably has 60 to 80% of my knowledge and development wisdom and he has a lot more freedom and he has a lot more spontaneity.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
In some ways he's smarter and there's not a big gap here left to close. This kid's going to be, you know, done very soon and caught up to me. And so to the extent that I think I know better or that I'm somewhere or that I'm someone, it's just an illusion. It's just a belief. What's the lineage between that and taking yourself too seriously?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I shouldn't take myself too seriously because there's nothing here to take that seriously. And if I take myself too seriously, then I'm gonna get trapped. I'm gonna circumscribe myself again into a limited set of behaviors and outcomes that keep me from being free, keep me from being spontaneous, keep me from being happy. So it just goes back to the, you know, don't think about yourself too much.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Absolutely. That's why I did that exercise of thinking back, you know, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years ago, what advice would I give myself? For me, it's just be less emotional. Don't take everything so seriously. Do the same things, but do them without all the emotional turbulence. And so that's the advice I'm giving myself going forward.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, and related to this story is I think understanding is way more important than discipline. Now, Jocko would have a fit. But on physical things, discipline is important. If I want to build a good body, I got to work out on a regular basis. But on mental things, I think understanding is way more important. Once you see the truth of something, you cannot unsee it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
All of us have had experiences where we've seen a behavior in a person and then it just changes what we think about that person. We no longer want to be friends with them or we deeply respect them if it was, you know, really good behavior that maybe was observed unintentionally. So when we really do see something clearly, it changes our behavior immediately.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And that is far more efficient than trying to change your behavior through repetition. Could you give me an example? So if you were, let's say that, you know, you have a friend and then that person turns out to be a thief, you see that person stealing something, you're done with them. If you are, you know, the smoking lung cancer example is a good one, right? Someone close to you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Or anytime someone close to you dies, or you even hear about someone dying, you hear about someone dying, what's the first thing you do? The first thing, assuming that you weren't that close to them, obviously you're close to them, it's different.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But if you weren't that close to them, but you hear about someone in your extended social circle dying, you immediately start trying to distinguish yourself from them. Like, oh, well, how old was this person? Were they a smoker? Did they have an issue? Do I have that issue? You immediately start comparing. And what you're doing there is you're sort of just trying to see if there's an overlap here.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But if you see the truth in something, if you're like, oh my God, this person was the same age as me and they died. And that's starting to happen at my age where I'm starting to hear about, you know, extend circle people. Just reminds you, time is really short. There's a truth there. There's a truth there that you cannot- The reaction of distancing yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
There's a truth there that you cannot unsee. You know, or for example, I think, were you into bodybuilding or something back when? I don't know. Just like bro lifting stuff. Okay, bro lifting stuff. To be less of a skinny bitch, yeah. Right, but there probably was a point where you were being really aggro in the gym and you injured yourself. Many times. Right.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And each one of those was a deep understanding of don't go beyond this point, right? There was a truth there. So again, when you see these things in such a way that you can't unsee them, that changes your behavior instantly. And I would argue that that introspection to find those truths is actually very useful.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You're going to do what you're going to do. I mean, your level of exploration, I think, is sort of up to you. But life is always throwing truth back at you. It's about whether you choose to see it, whether you choose to acknowledge it, even if it's painful. Truth is often painful, right? If it wasn't, we'd all be seeing truth all the time. Reality is always reflecting truth. That's all it is.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Exactly. All the philosophy that's out there, for example, it's almost trite. Most people, they look at philosophy like, until they discover it for themselves. Because wisdom is the set of things that cannot be transmitted. If they could be transmitted, we'd read the same five philosophy books, we'd all be done, we'd all be wise. You have to learn it for yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It has to be rediscovered for yourself in your own context. You have to have specific experiences that then allow you to generalize and see the truth in those things in such a way that you're not going to unsee them. But each person is going to see them in a different way.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I can tell you that Socrates story and it's not going to resonate until there's something that other people desire that you realize you yourself don't want. And the moment that happens, then you'll see the truth in the general statement.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That's unteachable lessons. It's a good essay. I think one of the reasons why these lessons are unteachable is because they're too broad. They have to be applied in context. A number of the ones that you laid out contradict each other, like spend more time with your parents and don't work so hard. But at the same time, you do want to be successful, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I think a lot of these lessons come from down on high, from, as you said, like the famous movie star or the billionaire saying, oh, you don't need my to be happy. It's like, well, okay, then give it up, bitch. In reality, I think many of these contradict each other.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And it's like if you went to school and you just studied philosophy for four years, you would not know how to live life because you wouldn't know which philosophical doctrine to apply in which circumstance. You have to actually live life, go through all of the issues to figure out what it is that you want, what's the context in which some of these things apply and some of them don't.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
went like monk mode and focused on his business I asked him why and he said I started feeling like I had to live up to in private the things that I was saying in public right yeah it's a what was it who said it was a Mencken that a foolish consistency is a hobgoblin of little minds right and But essentially, look, all learning is error correction, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yes, you want to visit your parents more often, but you don't want to live with your parents and you don't want to necessarily see them every day or every weekend, depending on the parent. You might not get along with one of them. So I think it is highly contextual.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That said, I would argue that once you figure it out for yourself, you can kind of carve these variations on these maxims that apply to you. And then you'll have a specific experience that helps you remember it and actually execute on it. And you can also phrase it in a way where it's not trite anymore. It's personal.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, so a lot of my maxims and notes to self are carved in a way that they're modernized. They're saying something true, which might be trite if I didn't say it in a new way or in an interesting way that is more relevant to me today.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, it has to be said again. It has to be recontextualized for the modern age. Things do change. Technology changes things. Culture changes. People change.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, there's a lot of jargon out there. I think it's the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple thing in a complex way. And so when you see people using very complicated language to explain simple things, they're either trying to impress you and obfuscate, or they don't understand it themselves.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So you have podcast, Chris. I have podcast guest Naval.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So very often I'll think of something. I'll have some, what I think is an insight and I want to tweet it or write it down. But in my mind, I'm talking about it on a podcast. That's kind of how my mind registers it. And for a while, I thought this was a bad thing. And I tried to eradicate podcast Naval. And then I just realized that's just how it comes out. So I might as well just be okay with it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Every knowledge creation system works through correcting errors, making guesses and correcting errors. So by definition, if you're learning, you're going to be wrong most of the time and you'll be updating your priors. And so, for example, I did this Joe Rogan podcast, I don't know, it's like eight or nine years ago. And people will call out like the one thing that didn't turn out to be correct.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Now, do you know the reason I'm on this podcast? No, I haven't done a proper formal interviews straight up top, whatever, 10, 20 podcasts in a long time. Since Rogan, maybe? Probably since Rogan. Yeah, I went out at the top, right? That was the theory. Yeah, well, it's still at the top. Yeah, yeah, I know.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And then, you know, I've done some stuff with Tim, Tim Ferriss, a good friend, but that's been more co-hosting. I haven't been a guest. And then I did one or two random things where I just stumbled into a thing where, you know, there was a reason, but it wasn't like this. And I reached out to you for this one, right? I have lots of people reaching out to me for podcasts. I did not answer them.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I reached out to you. And the reason is a really funny one. It's because when I am playing podcasts in the vault in my head, for some reason, you're on the other side. And I don't know why. I literally don't know why. It's not like I've even seen many of your podcasts. I think I've seen some snippets here and there. But for some reason, you were the guy in the podcast, in Podcast Naval.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And so I was like, oh, I might as well just do it. So I reached out to you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, there are enough people that I turned down where I said, I'm just not doing podcasts. I feel bad about that. I got to go back and do those podcasts, but I probably wear out my welcome. I have nothing new to talk about. So I don't know what I'm going to say.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I don't like sequels. Yeah. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It wasn't as long ago. I have a terrible memory. Yeah. Yeah. Um, you're right. 2019 right before COVID.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I think the reason why I wanted to be on this is because... For some reason, I have the impression that you engage in conversations. And I like conversations. I don't like interviews. This is why I was doing my last startup, AirChat, which is all about conversations. And conversations to me are more genuine. They're more authentic. There's a give and take. There's a back and forth.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
There's a genuine curiosity. It's not to say the other podcasters don't do it. They absolutely do do it. But for some reason, in my mind... I had you as a guy that I would actually have a conversation with. And sure enough, you just read me your essay, which I don't think anybody else would really do, right? That implies there's a give and take. There's a genuine curiosity.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And it's just like, and they just beat on it because it helps them in their mind, raise their status a little bit. Aha, I caught him in an error. Well, I think if you catch someone in a blatant lie where there's believe one thing and they say another, that's legit. That's a character flaw. They shouldn't be lying. But on the other hand, if they just made a guess at something and they got it wrong.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I think that's useful because then certain... inexplicit knowledge that I had will be surfaced for myself. And I think that's helpful.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That's a trap. No, guru is a trap. Do not follow me. Do not bow to me.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And it also depends what you define as success. If the end goal is happiness, then why not cut to the chase and just go straight for it? Does being happy make you less successful? That is a conventional wisdom. That may even be the practical earned experience of your reality. You find that when you're happy, you don't want anything, so you don't get up and do anything.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's this sort of blending of... The reason I spend a lot of time in San Francisco is because it's a gravitational attractor for the smartest people in the world. And despite all the many problems the city had, because it's mismanaged beyond belief, it does just seem to pull in the young, smart, creative people.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
not just the ones who are building technology, but they're exploring every facet of life and they're weird and sometimes it's repulsive and it's bizarre, but you talk to these people and you just see a very intelligent person coming at life in a completely different way, putting it through the combinatorics of human DNA, which are uncountable and giving you a weird perspective that can twist your mind around.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And to do that, you always have to be learning. You can't be in a guru mentality. If I'm with somebody and they're listening to every word I say and hanging on it, that's not interesting for me. I'm not going to learn anything. I want people who are intelligent, who will say something back that is a little different and I may not agree with it, but it's going to leave a mark.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And by the way, mostly it's about the AI, AGI thing. And I think I'm still right about that. But it's a different story. People who think we have achieved AGI just fail a Turing test from their side. But it's funny how people latch on to single proclamations. But the reality is all of us are dynamical systems. We're always changing. We're always learning. We're always growing.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's going to leave an impression. Mm-hmm. And it's going to leave an impression to the extent that both that they are correct and that I choose to listen. And I'll choose to listen if I don't view myself as higher status or smarter than them. The flip side of that is I'm not really impressed by high status people. Has that always been the case? Pretty much.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
In fact, most of my friends who have gone on to become very famous or successful, the more famous or successful they've been, the less I spend time with them. partially because they get surrounded by an army of sycophants, which gets hard to break through, because I don't want anything from them. And I don't like these situations in which transactional relationships are implied.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Right, but they get surrounded by people who do want things from them and are so good at pretending they don't that it's just not worth my time to try and break out from that group. So it does get lonely at the top, so to speak, but it's also by choice because, you know, it's... Champagne problem. Yeah, you can be your own best friend too. I am my own best friend, actually.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So I really do enjoy spending time with myself. Yeah, the smartest people aren't interested in appearing smart and don't care what you think is... Yeah, I mean, a lot of life is not giving a shit, you know, a lot of the best things in life come out of that.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
A lot of my stuff is more polished. Like one of the funny things. Yeah. One of the funny things that right before this podcast was I thought, maybe I should go back and read my old tweets again.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
to sort of remember what i said and i can articulate it well but then i realized that's this performance i would just be memorizing my whole stuff to perform oh well that's an extra special level of exactly hell that you've descended exactly and i wrote memorizing me to be more me bingo and to live up to some expectations or some uh famous personality that i now have to become some straitjacket that i have to put on yeah i'm having to uh live up to in private
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So, of course, pretty quickly I saw through that, you know, it's nonsense. And it also constrains my time and it's just work.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Exactly, exactly. So it's not about changing your thoughts. It's not about fixing your thoughts. It's not about changing yourself. It's just about being observant of yourself so that you can then... It'll automatically change. Whatever change needs to happen will happen. You trying to change yourself is very circular. The mind trying to change the mind, the mind doesn't mind wrestling with itself.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I don't think it gets you anywhere.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I actually think Elon had this one figured out, which is he plowed his own money back into his own businesses to go and do bigger and better things for humanity. So what I would like to, you know, you could give it to nonprofits, but a lot of nonprofits are grifty or it's people who didn't earn it trying to spend it or they don't have tight feedback loops on having a good effect.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And hopefully we're correcting errors. What you don't want to be doing is lying in public because you're trying to look good. And I think people can smell that. Yeah. What this world really lacks right now is authenticity. And because everybody wants something, they want to be seen as something, they want to be something that they're not.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So one of the things I want to do as an aside is I want to create a little school for young physicists, but that's my non-profit.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, that's my non-profit-y thing. And I've actually underwritten media and some physics stuff. I don't like to talk about it. I don't talk about whatever so-called philanthropy because I think that makes it less real. That makes it more status-oriented. It makes it less philanthropic. Yeah, exactly.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And then people also come hunting for money. So there's all that disease. I don't believe in giving to schools. They have enough money. Ivy Leagues have enough money and they don't know how to spend it. So I think the best use of money is I think a good business creates a product for people that they voluntarily buy and they get value out of.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So in that sense, I think Steve Jobs and Elon and entrepreneurs like that have created a lot of value for the world. So one of the things I can do is I can take my own money and I can invest it in myself to go and build the next great thing that I think needs to exist. And that's basically what I'm doing right now. I'm doing a new business. I'm self-funding it.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Um, I'm applying a lot of money into it. I'm going to build something that I think is beautiful that I want to see exist. Um, I really want to see it exist. Have you spoken about this yet or is it still dark mode? It's so early. It's yeah. Maybe I'll show it to you in a few months. Uh, hopefully six months. Um, And I'm excited about it. And that's a good use of money.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
What about the worst places to spend wealth? what is the old line? If it flies, floats or fornicates.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That's the way I heard it. Okay. I'm pretty sure it's Fox, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that was, uh, maybe it was, uh, Felix Dennis. Okay. Who, who had that quote? Yeah. He said, if it flies, floats or fornicates, rent it. I think the last one was a little too, it's wrong. He didn't have a family, didn't have kids. So, you know, he missed the big one. Um, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And so you do catch a lot of people saying things that they don't really believe. And I think people are very sensitive to that.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I mean, a lot of people are wrong. Most of us are wrong most of the time, especially in any new endeavor. Difference between being wrong and disingenuous, though. Purposefully wrong. Correct. Exactly. So I think that's the big difference. If someone is wrong, no big deal, as long as they have a genuine reason for saying what they're saying or believing what they're believing.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But if they are lying to elevate their status or their appearance or to live up to some expectation, that's the mistake. And that's a mistake not just for the listener, it's a mistake for themselves, because then you're going to get trapped in a hall of mirrors. You yourself are going to be consistent with your past proclamations. So if you're lying to others, you're going to be lying to yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
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Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. ,,,,,,, , . . . . .. a, P. P. P. P. P. P. P,實,實, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a a ,,,,,,, Um, what else?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You're puppeted by a person that you are not even. That's right. Yeah. It's like, what was that line? You're basically trying to impress people who don't care about you.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Right. You only want the respect of the very, very few people that you respect. Trying to demand respect from the masses is a fool's errand.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I mean, on child raising, I've gotten a lot looser, you know, I'm still not like completely laissez-faire, but I'm much more realized like kids are going to be kids and you kind of let them do their thing.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
No, he was quoting somebody else, some brothers. I forget which ones. But he was making the point eloquently, as he often does, that at the family, local level, he's a communist. At the family level, you're a communist. At maybe the extended family level, you're a socialist. At the local level, you know, you're kind of a Democrat and so on, until at the federal level, you're a libertarian, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
No, that's a funny way of looking at it. I don't know if the scale is that simple. What else have I changed my mind on? I mean, I think the modern AI is really cool. But I think these are natural language computers. They're starting to show evidence of kind of... reasoning at some levels, but I don't think they do creativity.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, like I'm big into poetry. Every poem ever written by an LLM is garbage. I think even their fiction writing is terrible. Even the new GPT-405, with all due respect to Sam and crew, I think they're terrible writers. I find them really bad at summarizing. They're really good extrapolating, you know, paperwork.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
They're very bad at actually distilling the essence of something and what's important. They don't have an opinions or a point of view. But they're still unbelievably powerful breakthroughs. They solve search. They solve natural language computing. They make English a programming language. They solve driving. They solve simple coding and backup coding. They solve translation.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
They solve transcription. They are a fundamental breakthrough in computing. It is a different way to program a computer rather than you explicitly speak its language and write the code and then run the data through it. You just run enough data through it until it figures out how to write the program. That's huge. But are they AGI? Not yet. And I don't see a direct path from here to there.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Maybe we'll have to solve a few more problems before that happens. And I think ASI is a fantasy. I don't think there's any such thing. Artificial super intelligence, where it has some kind of intelligence that humans can't fathom.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I think that's such a flawed line of reasoning.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I think Stephen Wolfram puts it better. It's a different form of intelligence. It's like if you see a jaguar in the jungle, it has a different form of intelligence. And you're like a plant has a form of intelligence, how it can like photosynthesize and grow. It's a different form of intelligence.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's not an intelligence again, like love or like happiness is overloaded word that means many things to many people. But by my definition where, you know, the true test is you get what you want out of life. It doesn't even have a life. It doesn't even want anything. It's a different thing. Um, I do think it's unbelievably useful. I'm glad that it exists.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I think it just helps to see that status games don't matter as much as they used to. In old society, let's go back hunter-gatherer times, there was no such thing as wealth. You just had what you could carry. There was no stored wealth. So wealth games didn't really exist to wealth creation games. All that existed was status games.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You don't see it much yet in large-scale production systems replacing humans because there's a tendency to hallucinate, so you can't put it into anything mission-critical. Confidently wrong one time out of ten. Correct. And it doesn't even know when it's wrong.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And maybe they'll get that one out of ten down to one out of a hundred, but you kind of always want human oversight for critical, critical things. I... I always feel so bitter.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It doesn't have a point of view. And they are going to get a lot better. And they might get to the point where the error rates are so low that you can put them into certain bounded problems. Like self-driving, I think, will be solved completely.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
because it's a bounded problem cars don't you know go like off-road and drive through houses and stuff like that right so because and and same way like certain kinds of coding the creative side of coding i think doesn't go away i think if anything programmers get even more leverage and more powerful and rather than computing replacing programmers programmers use ai to replace everybody else on tesla versus waymo would you bet on software or hardware for self-driving
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, so I think Tesla's in the stronger, longer-term position, but it's hard to argue with what's working right now. And Waymo is working right now, so I would not underestimate them because there's a learning curve that you go through when you actually deploy something. And Waymo is way ahead in that regard. But Tesla's camera-only approach, if it works, is superior. It's much more scalable.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And Tesla knows how to print cars, right? They can just mass-manufacture cars. But I think they'll both be around. They'll both be fine. It's everybody else who doesn't have a self-driving vehicle that's screwed.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Well, I mean, think back. What was it, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, everybody was saying overpopulation of the earth is going to be a problem, Malthusian ending, we're going to have too many people, and now all of a sudden we're going to have too few people. So part of it is just the Doomerism meme is always alive and well, right? It just gets repackaged. Yeah, we're running out of oil.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
We have too much oil, right? It's like the world is cooling, the world is warming. There's always something to scream about the world is ending. There's no progress in technology. AI is going to blow up the world. Right. So people tend to overdo in both directions. Now, what is the actual fertility problem? Right. Well, people are having less kids.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Are they having less kids because there's a disease? Was there a virus? Did they lose their fertility? The microplastics in the testicles? Right. No, it's people are having less kids because they're choosing to have less kids. Right. Women have gotten emancipation, independence in the workforce and they're making more money. People don't need kids as insurance policies. They have less kids.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Maybe they're living hedonistic lives. God bless them, right? They want to have more fun. They want to have less kids. I don't see the act of choosing to have less kids as a problem. Okay, so let's move one level up. It's because of the retirees. It's because a large percentage of the population is essentially retiring at the guaranteed age of 65 or 70, thanks to Social Security.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
If you were high status, then you got what little was available first. But even back then, you had to earn your status by taking care of the tribe. Uh, now we have wealth creation where you can actually create a product or a service. You can scale that product or service and can provide abundance for a lot of people. Uh, and that's not zero sum. That's a positive sum game. I can be wealthy.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And so they need other people to pay for it. They need more workers in the workforce. And if the workforce is shrinking, then you have a small number of people, exactly, who are supporting a large number of retirees. And in democracies, you can't take pensions away. The voters vote you out. So this slowly strangled the economy. So what do you do? Then you have a bunch of immigration.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And then the whole culture changes. You end up in a low-trust society. And people start fighting over limited resources. And how do you control which immigrants come in? How do you make sure that they're good taxpayers after they're in and so on? So you end up in kind of this trap where the low fertility rate is upstream of the downstream problems that are cultural and societal.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But I'm not sure that you're going to solve that by making people have more kids. How are you going to meme them into having more kids? And I'm not even sure it's necessarily a problem because keep in mind, you have more resources now. You have less of a burden. Now there's a flip side where every kid is a lottery ticket and an invention.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So there's some benefit to having more kids, but you can't force it. I think it'll work itself out, right? The Scott Adams has this great law, which calls the Adams law of slow moving disasters. When disasters are very slow moving, like peak oil or global warming or population collapse, and everyone can kind of see them coming.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Economics and society is a force to solve them because enough individual people has incentives to go solve them. So I don't know exactly how it gets solved, but I think it could get solved in various ways. One example could be maybe people retire later. Maybe AI and automation and robots take care of the older people.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Maybe we figure out how to have immigrants while still keeping a high-trust society. We kind of put more rules around immigration that protect some of the high-trust benefits. Maybe we outsource more things. Maybe we just have more land and housing to go around. Believe me, if we were having too many kids, everybody would be complaining about how there's no housing and there's no land.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So they'll always find something to care about. So I just don't view this as a thing that any individual or government action is going to solve. I think economics and incentives over time will solve it. And I'm not even convinced it's that big of a problem. Is there anything that you do think is sufficient?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It may be self-correcting too, which is that if there are too few kids in society and the returns to having kids literally might just go up. It might just be easier to have kids.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
They're going to get the best job. They're going to have the best jobs and the best resources. Everyone's happy to see kids.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
um pensions completely drop off and the only way that old people are able to survive is if their children pay them some sort of stipend like reverse you know send money back up to generations you go okay well that's a pretty fucking good incentive that's a good incentive i also think that people have been memed into thinking that uh kids make your life worse and that's a that's a pretty pretty bad what's your experience been kids make your life better in every possible way if you want to if you want an automatic built-in meeting to life have kids
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
On the other hand, you still got to do something. You're an animal. You're here. You're here to survive. You're here to replicate. You're driven. You're motivated. You're going to do something. You're not just going to sit there all day. Unlikely. Some people do. Maybe it's in their nature. But I think most people still want to act. They want to live in the arena.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And I think there are these bad psych studies, like most psych studies, unfortunately, that say that people are unhappy when they have kids. Yeah, it's because you're catching in the middle of changing a diaper and you're saying like, are you glad you had kids or not? They don't even say that. They say, are you happy or not? And they say, no, I'm not happy right now.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But what they don't realize is that person has found something more important than being happy in the moment. They found meaning and the meaning comes from kids. And if you ask parents, do you regret having kids? I think it would be 99 to one against, you know, it would be, No, I don't regret having kids. I love having kids. I'm so glad I had kids.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
You can be wealthy. We can create things together. And clearly, since we are all collectively far, far wealthier than we were in hunter gatherer times, uh, Uh, wealth creation is positive, but status is limited. There's limited status to go around. It's a ranking ladder. It's a hierarchy. And so to rise in status, somebody else has a lower in status.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's incredibly rare to meet a parent that regretted having children. It's pretty good odds. It's extremely good odds. And I think a lot of people get late into life and then they can't admit that they should have had kids. It's kind of late in the game. But a lot of times you see everybody who has a pet, right? And they're pushing them around in a stroller, right? What is that?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
That's a sublimated desire for children.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's definitely in that direction. I like pets, I like animals, but I don't like the idea of neutering or spaying something and then keeping it as a prisoner in the house and having to train it. I don't want to be responsible for that.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
They should just be happy and do what they want. I don't, I don't, I don't have particular goals in mind for them. I think that's a, that's another route to unhappiness. That's different though, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I want my kids to feel unconditionally loved and I want them to have high self-esteem. as a consequence of that. But I don't get to choose any. All I get to choose is my output. I can output love. I can't choose what they feel. I can't choose how they behave. I can't choose what they want. I can't choose what they turn out to be.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Yeah, they should make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons and have their own desires and fulfill them as is appropriate. Like any parent, I wouldn't want them to be hurt. I wouldn't want them to be unhappy, but I cannot control these things.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
IYI is Nassim Taleb. It's about intellectual yet idiot. These are people who are overeducated and they deny basic common sense. So there's a lot of that that goes on in child rearing, thanks to really bad studies and bad public medical directives. So for example, a few parents, maybe they're drunk or they're high or there are just other issues. And
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
you know they roll over their kid when they're sleeping the kid suffocates or they neglect their kid and then is that what co-sleep co-sleeping having them in the bed yeah exactly or they're you know the the modern proclamation and so because of that they say well don't co-sleep with your kids well the kids in every society through all of human history co-slept with their parents where else do you think they were sleeping they weren't housed in multiple rooms yeah exactly we'll put them in the other tent we'll put it it's just nonsense but
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Now you can have multiple kinds of status, so you can expand some kinds of status, but it's not like wealth creation where it can go infinitely, where we can all be. living in the stars and moon bases or Mars colonies or what have you. So just realize the status games are inherently limited. They're always combative.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Co-sleeping has been around since the dawn of time. So has feeding kids cow milk or goat milk when breast milk runs out or is not available. Yet we're told formula made with soy and corn syrup, which was invented recently, is somehow better than cow milk. And cow milk can be dangerous for your kids. And co-sleeping is dangerous for your kids. And cry it out is the right answer.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
All of that is nonsense. I mean, it's very clear that we raise children throughout human history without these interventions. And to me, the idea that you're going to let your kid cry it out, I get why that's done for practical reasons so that you can get some sleep and you can go to work in the morning. But the reality is when you let the kid cry it out,
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
you're letting the kid ball until it finally gives up. I mean, a kid left by itself to cry it out in the wild, it's going to get, it's going to get eaten, right? It's going to get eaten by a tiger. Um, so this kid is starting off on the wrong foundation. The, the, the one I mentioned earlier about the idea that babies don't feel pain, like that's ludicrous, right? Um,
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I've never heard that before.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But there are definitely some people who believe that. There are enough that it was a thing in certain circles for a while. But I think we just go through these, you know, these IYI beliefs, these intellectuality beliefs come from people who take a little bit of knowledge and extrapolate it too far. They think we know more than we know. due to recent scientific studies.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And these are junk science. These are low-power studies on very certain contexts that then get over-applied. Behavioral psych is very guilty of this, but it's true across a lot of science. So even with science, you have to be skeptical. You have to look very carefully at, you know, does it apply in the right context or not? Does it come from good sources?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Did they run enough high-powered studies that are widely accepted? And there are a whole bunch of things you're just not supposed to talk about. You're not supposed to say, like you don't say, like you can't say anything negative about a vaccine because God forbid, what if they don't get the polio vaccine, right?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And that's part of the reason why the recent vaccine debate, because we've taken our worship for vaccines too far because we don't want people to not take non-essential vaccines. So it gets overdone. So the same way there's this whole SIDS thing, sudden infant death syndrome, right? And it's like, no, there's, kids don't suddenly mysteriously die.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Like more likely there was neglect or there was a problem. And then whoever was the caretaker doesn't want to admit to the problem or didn't recognize the problem. But kids don't just spontaneously die in the crib, right? So they talk about swaddling babies. You swaddle babies, you know, basically tie them up, mummify them.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So you constrict them so they don't die of SIDS where they roll over and they can't get back. I mean, it's just all this craziness around child raising.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
They always require direct combat, whereas wealth creation games can be just you're creating products. You don't have to fight anybody else. Yes, in the marketplace, your product has to succeed, but that's not quite the same as invective against other people or being angry with other people or feeling pushed down or pushed up or having a beef with somebody.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's a minefield. And you have these scared parents, they're having a kid for the first time and they open a book and they start reading how to raise children. I would argue that your natural instincts on what to do with your child are actually pretty good. It's funny, when my wife and I had our first baby, I remember at the hospital, sorry, the first one was a natural birth.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
At the birthing center, we went home and it was like, there you go, that's it. And we're like, What do we do? Where's the instruction manual? You take them home. And then you relax and you realize, actually, instincts are pretty good. You know, if the kid cries, check to see the clean, feed them, all that. It's like your basic instincts are actually very, very good.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And kids' instincts are actually very, very good. They know what they want and they want things for a reason. And they can encourage you to give it to them. Yes, it's usually children are not deficient adults who can't reason. And to some extent that's true, but mostly it's not true. Mostly they have very good reasons for what they want.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And you as a parent mostly have communication problems with them. They can't yet communicate to you. You can't communicate to them. They can't communicate to you. So early on with my kids, I tried to focus on teaching them, you know, basic explanatory theories and having them memorize things.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
I'll give you a very simple example. Right. Okay.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Well, a simple one is, you know, how does knowledge get created? If you follow the critical rationalism, David Deutsch philosophy, then it's by guessing and then by testing your guesses. So whenever they ask me something like, well, why do you think that is? Well, how would we figure out if that's true, right? So that's a basic game you can play. Involving them.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
But another one is that a lot of the rules that you teach kids have to do with hygiene. You must brush your teeth, cover your mouth when you cough, clean up after yourself, don't touch that, wash your hands after you do this, don't eat food off the floor. But all of these are subsumed under the germ theory of disease.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So if you instead go on YouTube and show them videos of germs, or if you have them look under a microscope at anything, they're like, ah, there's creepy crawlies everywhere and I got to watch out for them. And then you can talk about how, if you look at humans, like our real enemy are pathogens. I think a lot of aging and disease are actually downstream of our competition with pathogens over time.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
to a point that people still don't fully appreciate. There's a Red Queen hypothesis, which is that we undergo sexual selection to mix up our genes. And so every 20 years, every generation mix up your genes. But if you look at how bacteria and viruses mutate through just random mutations, their mix up rate on their genes and evolution rate is roughly the same as ours.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Even though they go through thousands of generations, those 20 years, because they're not doing sexual selection, they're doing asexual replication mutation. Their evolutionary rate is roughly equivalent to ours. So we're in a red queen race where we're both running at roughly the same speed using very different strategies. But a lot of how we're involved is around pathogens.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
so i would argue that wealth creation games are both more pleasant uh they're positive some and they actually have uh concrete material returns if you have more money you can buy more show me where you can exchange your status at the bank exactly yeah it's it's it's vague and it's fuzzy now you see people get rich they have money what do they want they want status so they go to hollywood start starring in movies they donate to non-profits they go to cans or davos or what have you
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
Like our immune system is one of the most expensive things to run in the body. So much is about immune system optimization. That's about pathogens. Junk DNA and bacteria and CRISPR was discovered because in bacteria... Their DNA is evolved to fight viruses.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And the way it does that is by taking viral DNA and snipping it up every time there's a viral attack and storing it in their own DNA so they have a copy so they can recognize it next time it attacks and so on. A lot of the population structure of species determines how long their lifespans are.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
So if in a given species there's a very high rate of infection, then you'll have these older members of the population are carrying diseases that will then infect the young. So it's important for that species to get rid of the old faster. So the higher the disease rate in a given population, the less long live the entire population. So the older ones don't infect the younger ones.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's an interesting hypothesis.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
homeostasis within the human body how we're always returning to a given level of things like that's a that's a fundamental part of our makeup our temperature ph blood pressure and so on under homeostasis but if you if you engage in any kind of signaling like you take a peptide for example that's a signaling molecule you take a hormone externally the body will counteract it you take testosterone the body will counteract it will down regulate its own production very fast and
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And the body releases its own hormones and pulses rather than steady state. Why is that? Well, that's because bacteria and viruses can infect your body and trick your body. They can take it over. Like toxoplasmosis does this, rabies does this, they take over macroscopic structural bodies.
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
And small bacteria and viruses would hack our bodies and literally take them over if we didn't have defense mechanisms. And one of those defense mechanisms is homeostasis. Anytime you see something getting out of whack, you immediately push back really hard on it because like, did I just get infected? Is something trying to take me over?
Modern Wisdom
#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature
It's also why hormones get released in pulses at night rather than in steady state low levels because enemy bacteria can release toxins or the same signaling molecules in small quantities, but they can't pulse. They can't coordinate to pulse. So your body can coordinate to pulse as a macroscopic object, but microscopic objects can't coordinate to create the same pulses.