EVERY SPOKEN WORD
125 min read · 25,183 words- 0:00 – 5:07
Intro
- TFTim Ferriss
This episode is brought to you by Tonal, T-O-N-A-L. I'm super excited about this one, and I was skeptical of it in the beginning. Tonal, quote, "Tonal is the world's most intelligent home gym and personal trainer," end quote. That's the tagline from their website, folks, to give you the one-sentence summary. And this device, it's really a system, is perfect for anyone looking to take their home workouts to the next level or someone who just wants to get maximum bang for the buck in a tiny, tiny footprint of space. Tonal is precision engineered to be the world's most advanced strength studio and personal trainer. It uses breakthrough technology of all different types to help get you stronger faster. I was introduced to Tonal by three different friends. All of them are tech savvy. One of them is a former competitive skier who's doubled his strength in a number of movements using Tonal, even though he has a long athletic background. And I'll paint a picture for you. By eliminating traditional metal weights, dumbbells, and barbells, Tonal can deliver 200 pounds of resistance, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's actually [laughs] it feels like a lot more at the high end, in a device smaller than a flat screen TV. And you can perform at least 150 different exercises. And these different technologies are exclusive to Tonal, and you can dial weights up and down with the touch of a button in one pound increments using magnets and electricity. So the movement is extremely smooth. And even though I have a home gym already in my garage, I'm still getting a Tonal installed. I've used Tonal for multiple workouts now to do things I just cannot do in my home gym, such as the chop and lift exercises from The 4-Hour Body, all sorts of cable exercises that would usually involve much, much bigger piece of equipment. Eccentric training. 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Every program is personalized to your body using artificial intelligence and other aspects of the engineering. And smart features check your form in real time just like a personal trainer. So try it out. Try Tonal. At least check it out. Watch the, uh, videos on YouTube and see if you can pick out a familiar voice. It's not me, I'll say that. But try Tonal, the world's smartest home gym, for 30 days in your home. And if you don't love it, you can return it for a full refund. So visit www.tonal.com for $100 off of smart accessories when you use promo code Tim, T-I-M, at checkout. That's www.T-O-N-A-L.com, promo code Tim. Tonal, be your strongest. [upbeat music] This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. The holiday season is fast approaching, and we know that people will be buying more stuff online than ever before. All of these trends to e-commerce have been accelerated due to COVID and much more. 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And right now, my listeners, that's you guys, can try ShipStation free for 60 days when you use offer code Tim. Just go to the homepage, ShipStation.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in Tim, T-I-M. That's it. Go to ShipStation.com, then enter offer code Tim. ShipStation.com, make ship happen. [upbeat music] Optimal, minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat-out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would this be an appropriate time? What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss
- 5:07 – 8:27
Naval’s no-sequels disclaimer and why he made an exception
- TFTim Ferriss
Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is always my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers from all different fields. My guest today is a dear friend. He does very few podcasts. We're gonna get into a disclaimer around that. Naval Ravikant. You can find him @Naval, N-A-V-A-L, on Twitter. He is the co-founder and chairman of AngelList. He's an angel investor and has invested in more than 100 companies, including many mega successes such as Twitter, Uber, Notion, Opendoor, Postmates, and Wish. It is a long, long list. You can subscribe to Naval, his podcast on wealth and happiness on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find his blog at nav.al. For even more Naval, plus Tim, that's me, check out my wildly popular interview with him from 2015, which was nominated for Podcast of the Year. You can find that and resources and much more at tim.blog/naval. Naval, welcome back to the show.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, thanks for having me. If I recall correctly, I was, I was crushed in Podcast of the Year by Jamie Foxx, so [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] That's right. So Jamie Foxx-
- NRNaval Ravikant
I need, I need weaker competition this time around. If you could just tone it down this year, please.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] I will do my best. Yeah. Jamie, Jamie basically I could have been a completely non-responsive, uh, critical care patient as long as the equipment functioned. Jamie Foxx is the, the consummate performer. So he is, he is formidable competition in podcasts. But you are a different breed. And I understand that you get asked to do podcasts a lot. So what type of disclaimer would you like [laughs] to put on?
- NRNaval Ravikant
Oh yeah, I don't, I don't go on other people's podcasts anymore. I had to make an exception for you because you're the OG. You put me on the map. You're a good friend, and frankly, I wouldn't even be known if it weren't for you. So I definitely have to thank you and, uh, honor your request to have me back. I generally don't do, uh, podcasts anymore, or at least other people's podcasts for a couple of reasons. Uh, first is I, I just don't believe in sequels. I think sequels suck, right? You look at sequels on, uh, in movies and, and whatnot, and they're usually pretty bad. They cost three times as much, you know, they're long-winded. The person now has an ego and a reputation to defend. They've already said what they were gonna say, so they're just repeating themselves to some level. And, you know, maybe the first run they took an idea they've had for a decade or three decades and they expounded on it and it sounded great. And then in the sequel, whether it's a book or a movie, they have to come up with something equally good, but they only have two years to do it. And it's just really difficult to do. So I think sequels just make everybody look bad, and I'm not a fan of sequels. Yet, here we are. The thing about sequels is they make, they make money. People want them. Uh, people crave them because there's a certain familiarity to it, but hopefully we won't embarrass ourselves too much.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
So yes, I don't, I don't do sequels. We'll make an exception here and kind of see how it goes. Just don't have Jamie Foxx back on.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
At least not, at least not this year.
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, I am looking right now as a framework for starting this conversation at your Twitter account, and that might seem like an odd place for me to start. People who listen to this show a lot will know that I don't often [laughs] do that. But I want to note two things. You follow zero people on Twitter, yet you have almost a million followers. And also trending right now in the United States is Jamie Foxx. [laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
I just find that hilarious.
- NRNaval Ravikant
He's back.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right next to you.
- NRNaval Ravikant
He's back.
- 8:27 – 11:32
Why Feynman is Naval’s Twitter header: the appeal of a joyful scientist
- TFTim Ferriss
You cannot keep this guy down. So let's talk about your account. I find your account fascinating. I find your use of Twitter fascinating. And I'd like to begin with a photograph of a professor at a blackboard that you have as your profile, I suppose, header. Who is the person in the photograph? I think I recognize this person, but I want to hear you describe why you chose this photograph and who it is.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah. There, that's, uh, Professor Richard Feynman, um, who was a, a pioneer in the field of quantum electrodynamics. He was part of the Manhattan Project. He's known colloquially for his book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, and a couple of related ones like, So What Do You Care What Other People Think? But he's also very well-regarded in the field of physics. Obviously, he passed away a while back, but he invented a lot of quantum electrodynamics, uh, Feynman path integrals. Um, he was part of the Manhattan Project. Uh, brilliant, brilliant guy. And I loved him because Feynman was one of the first characters that I encountered that did science and serious work and was accomplished in so-called real life, but was also like a-- He was a character. He was a happy person. He was deeply philosophical. He didn't take himself nor life too seriously. He appreciated the mysteries of life. He appreciated living life, and he had a lot of fun along the way. So it, it was kind of a, to me, he was like a full stack intellectual hacker of life, and was just very inspirational to me as a kid growing up. You know, even though I, I read a lot of philosophy and, you know, just kind of normal nonfiction, my hero, a-and even though I'm in the business world and the tech world, my heroes are scientists because I think applied science is the engine that pulls humanity forward. It eventually becomes technology. That technology allows us to engage in all kinds of pursuits around civilization rather than be scrapping for just basic sustenance and survival. And so I think scientists are still the most unsung heroes of human history, and Feynman was one of the greats. And he was admirable in many regards as to how he lived his life. Although I think recently they tried to cancel him, but, you know, they try to cancel everybody.
- TFTim Ferriss
Feynman is a character, certainly he is a character or was a character, and a figure who has fascinated me for decades. And actually, I, I collect very few things, but managed to buy some of his papers and drawings at auction a handful of years ago because it was the first time that they had been made available. So, uh, I can show you some of his equations from the Manhattan Project [laughs] which is wild-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Wow
- TFTim Ferriss
... to think about. And my fascination, though, is in many respects uninformed because I don't have the scientific literacy to fully appreciate the genius that he brought to bear on physics, for instance. But I could appreciate his cleverness and his questioning of assumptions, and also his distaste for uniforms and [laughs] other accolades. Uh, most notably some of the prizes [laughs] that he was awarded that he seemed to have particular dislike for on some level.
- 11:32 – 17:03
“Science” vs. science: falsifiability, doubt, and the danger of consensus-by-vote
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah. He, he famously said that science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
And it's so funny because these days, you know, so many people are on Twitter saying, "Believe in science," or "According to science." And you have to realize there's no such thing as science with a capital S. Science, the foundation of science is doubt. It is all about falsifiability. David Deutsch, who's kind of one of my current modern living physicist heroes, is a Popperian. Like, he, he subscribes to Karl Popper's philosophy. And he basically says that, you know, if it's not falsifiable, it's not scientific. If you can't prove it false, if there's n- if, if, if you, if it's true up or down or left or right, it's not science. Um, it doesn't require belief. You should be able to challenge it at all times. It should make, uh, risky predictions that are not obvious, and those predictions should then be tested. And you shouldn't be able to, after the fact, change the goal-- move the goalposts or change how the, you know, how the predictions were set up. And so those are the hallmarks of good science. Falsifiability, independent verifiability, and making risky and narrow predictions with, uh, details that are hard to vary both before and after the fact. And that's how you end up with good science and good explanations, not by people on Twitter voting. That's politics.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- NRNaval Ravikant
So like everything has become politics now. Science has become politics too. People have politicized it. There's big science, but I think Feynman would be very unhappy with that. Although he was just a generally happy character and non-political, intended not to get involved in these things. But I think he would realize that that is not actually science, but it's, it's masquerades as science. It's, it's almost becoming social science. And, you know, going to Twitter, like Nassim Taleb is one of my favorite Twitter follows even though he's a, he's a bit, you know, uh-
- TFTim Ferriss
Can- cantankerous
- NRNaval Ravikant
... perfect. Yeah, he's cantankerous. Yeah. He's, he, he, he annoys people for sure. But, you know, you wanna hear the truth, you gotta, you gotta be prepared to, to be hurt a little bit. But he had a great tweet recently that I retweeted, which I'm sure made a lot of people mad, where he said, "The opposite of education is not ignorance. The opposite of education is an education in social science." [laughs] And, uh, I thought that was hilarious.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
Uh, but you know, it, it hurts because there's some truth to it. I- if there was no truths to it, it wouldn't hurt at all. You know, if I said Tim Ferriss is fat, that would just bounce right off of you. But if I said, you know, Tim Ferriss and Naval are fake gurus, that might hit us, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
Because we kind of suspect at some deep level there's a part of that that's true. So I think the same way like with, you know, social science does kind of lead you down the road to ignorance because it's about social. And anything social is about group think and group behavior. And, you know, individuals can search for truth, but groups search for consensus. Because if a group doesn't have consensus, it can't get along. If it can't get along, it falls apart and there's conflict. And so the last place you're gonna find truth is in large groups. And the moment you make science about large groups and about voting and about consensus, you're not really practicing science anymore.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. And the science with a capital S is dangerous also.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Very dangerous. No, it's, it's just propaganda.
- TFTim Ferriss
As, as you mentioned.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, it's propaganda. It's... And, and it, then it becomes like macroeconomics. Again, another Na- Taleb line. He says, "It's easier to macro bullshit than it is to micro bullshit." And so y- big science is the equivalent of macroeconomics, whereas the equivalent of microeconomics is little science, which is, you know, me in a lab or me with my computer and trying out various things. And so you can, just like with macroeconomics, you can pick and choose whatever data you want to prove whatever point you want. With big science, you can pick or choose whatever papers you want. So look at the fights right now on the internet about what COVID means. You can go down that hall of mirrors and find scientific, quote unquote, substantiation for many points of view depending on which papers you choose to cherry pick. And so then we reduce back to consensus. But again, science isn't done by consensus. It should be done by experimentation, verifiability, falsifiability, rigorous testing. And, you know, in an ideal science world, you don't go and survey 10,000 scientists. You actually pick the one smartest scientist [laughs] . Uh, but that's very hard to do. Now no one can agree on who the smartest scientist is. So unfortunately, I think that the nature of what science is is being corrupted. And that started the day we let the so-called social sciences masquerade as sciences. You know, the day we said psychology is a science and politics can be a science and, and so on, and you can apply the scientific methods to those things, then I think that's the day we started to corrupt science, or, or at least the word science. So real science, you know, the- these days is relegated to a very small corner. You know, physics, maybe like molecular biology and chemistry, mathematics, theory of computation, but it's a fairly limited set.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, yeah. Very quantitatively, uh [laughs] literate friend of mine said at one point, most of the disciplines that have science at the end of them are not actually science.
- NRNaval Ravikant
That's right.
- TFTim Ferriss
Although there are some exceptions, right?
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
So computer science and-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Computer science. Computer science
- TFTim Ferriss
... neuroscience.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
If it's hard neuroscience-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Right
- TFTim Ferriss
... it would be an exception. But very often if there's science appended to it, it is not in fact something that is falsifiable according to someone like Karl Popper, right? It cannot be, it cannot be proven or disproven using experiment, at least not-
- NRNaval Ravikant
That's right
- TFTim Ferriss
... in any meaningful way.
- NRNaval Ravikant
If there isn't some experiment could, that could theoretically disprove it, then it's not science. Um, yeah, it's like Honest Abe's law firm, right? He, if he needs to put honest in the title, then you have to wonder.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- 17:03 – 22:06
Knowing names vs. knowing reality: fundamentals, jargon, and the value of understanding
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, let's look at a couple quotes from Feynman. Uh, there, there are a few that I think about a lot, and these, these are on Goodreads. But number one, and I think this is really applicable with respect to science in media, particularly a, a term that bothers me a lot, which is studies prove or studies show. Just like capital S science shows, uh, which isn't really a thing. Uh, the, the facts can get contorted quite a lot. The quote from Feynman is, "I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something." Right? In other words-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah. This is a, this is a very deep point.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yep.
- NRNaval Ravikant
And I think that a lot of times that we just define something with another definition or we just throw out a piece of jargon as if that means we know something. And, you know, it's the difference between memorization and understanding. Understanding is the thing that you want. You want to be able to describe it in 10 different ways in simple sentences from the ground up and rederive whatever you need. If you've just memorized, you're lost. So I think this is one of the things that I get stuck on a lot, which is like just keep going back and reading the basics over and over, trying to understand them. So don't necessarily have that tall edifice of knowledge that is very seductive in academia. But as anyone who's operated much in the real world knows, in the real world, you get paid for making good judgments and decisions based on the basics. For example, if you know arithmetic, statistics, probability at a high level, uh, and you understand some basic math, you have all the math that you need to succeed in life. You don't need calculus or even trigonometry or number theory or set theory or any of these kinds of things unless you're going into a deeply technical field or mathematics. Um, yet we spend so much of our time in school Covering pre-calc and calculus when the kids who are taking those courses aren't even that good at basic math. So the, the basics are really important. That's the steel frame, the foundation for understanding that you need to get through life. And, uh, too much of it is reduced to memorization and understanding things as names and as definitions. F- And I think the Feynman example is, is, you know, his dad would take him for walks, and they would see birds. And, you know, f- uh, his dad would say, "This bird is a such and such warbler." But that doesn't tell you anything about the bird. That tells you about humans, and humans gave that bird that name. Really, the bird, you know, it likes to stand on one leg at this point. It likes to pick at, uh, lice in its feathers doing this, and it likes to eat these kinds of things. And it flies, you know, this way for that reason, and these are its predators, and these are its prey. So I mean, those are the kinds of things that really give you understanding. Who cares what the bird is called? Uh, the name of the bird is irrelevant. Uh, and, and you see a lot of professions in professional life this happens a lot, which is jargon. People try to protect their knowledge by basically saying, "Well, I understand this term and that term and what this term means." But the reality is most people don't actually know what these things mean underneath. I find this very common in accounting. A lot of business people don't know accounting. And even a lot of accountants will have fancy words for things. But when you dig underneath, they don't really understand the principle of what's going on below it. And if you just understand the principles and even if you don't understand the words, you will have an advantage in, for example, negotiating deals, uh, because you'll understand underneath how the pieces are actually moving on the board as opposed to what they're called.
- TFTim Ferriss
And I just wanna point out, developing that foundational knowledge is akin to learning the basics of shooting foul throws in basketball. It is not becoming Michael Jordan, right? With a very limited set of colors with which to paint, if you spend a few weeks, maybe not even a few weeks, a few days with a decent YouTube tutorial or book gathering the basics of accounting, you will be able to make significantly better decisions, right? I mean, it's, it's... I just wanna underscore that this is not an, an, a master's degree or a PhD or any type of commitment like that that can separate you from the pack in terms of advantage.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Well, just, just run a business. Uh, running a lemonade stand will teach you better accounting than out of a textbook. Now, you may need to learn certain conventions because you need those to communicate with other humans so that there's efficient communication. When you say one thing, they understand that thing. And that's where jargon can be useful because it can be a compressed way of communicating knowledge rather than having to, you know, try and explain it from first principles every time. But when it's not useful is when it becomes a substitute for understanding. Understanding is a thing. You know, that's what separates humans from the other animals. That's what separates us from the robots, that we actually understand what's going on underneath. Like for example, in the artificial intelligence world, there's a new algorithm, GPT-3, which is the rage, which is text completion. So people are saying, "Hey, I can make up like really plausible sounding writing. And so the AI is here and it's gonna take all the jobs." Well, no, 'cause the AI doesn't actually know what's going on underneath. If I were to ask it a question of, "Well, why did you write that?" Uh, or, "What does that mean?" it would, it would very quickly fall apart. So you always wanna strive for understanding, not
- 22:06 – 24:58
From physics to decision-making: simple underlying rules and compressed explanations
- NRNaval Ravikant
for memorization. Uh, you should be able to re-articulate it five different ways in every language that you know. Otherwise, you don't really understand it. And the, the good news is you don't have to understand that many things. You know, while we're on the topic of Feyn- uh, of Feynman, one of the phrase, the quotes from him is he says like, you know, "Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her tapestry." Uh, and so what he means by that is that there's only a few basic principles that you have to understand to kind of understand the sum total of our knowledge in physics. There's not a lot. And as physics becomes more and more advanced, we're actually unifying theories. We're collapsing them into one thing like we do with electricity and magnetism or statistical mechanics and heat and thermodynamics. You know, those turn out to be one thing. So we're... or we're trying to do currently with gravity and quantum mechanics. We're trying to reconcile them in quantum loop gravity or in string theory or what have you. So you just kinda have to understand a few of the basic things, and then you'll see them recurring over and over and over again. Like for example, I study and read physics and computer science just for entertainment. I don't-- Uh, there's no practical application for me. But there's this really interesting theory I was reading about called Solomonoff induction. And it, it's basically formalizes Occam's razor, which is that the shortest answer is the correct one. Um, but it's, it's more advanced than that. But it basically says like if you wanna figure out why something happened, you take all the different reasons why it could have happened, all the different theories why it could have happened, and then you sort of weigh each of them based on how compressed they are, how, how short they are, how likely they are, and then that gives you the probability. That kinda gives you the, the explanation for why that theory happened. Now, Feynman has a very similar and elegant thing in a completely different field, where he basically says if you wanna understand why this particle took that path, why did this photon take that path, what you do is you look at all the possible paths that photon could have taken, and you sort of weigh them. You, you sum them probabilistically based on how likely that path was. It's actually the same observation, except one is about photons traveling through space-time, and the other is about the causality and why an event may have happened and what the theory is behind that. And these are two completely different fields and two completely different characters thinking about two completely different things, and these are very, very fundamental theories in their fields. But deep down, they're actually the same, uh, which to me is fascinating. It's, it just shows how much of what we look at as, as complexity actually emerges from a set of very simple rules. Uh, and it's just fascinating. So understanding is the thing to strive for, not the words. So even though I use the fancy words like Solomonoff induction and, and Feynman's path integral theory, whatever the heck it's called. I don't even, I don't even know what the a- actual name is. The name is irrelevant. It's the concept that's f- that's fascinating.
- 24:58 – 33:29
Deconstructing “How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky)”: equity, leverage, and the hard part—unlearning
- TFTim Ferriss
You spoke to learning accounting through building a business. Let's segue to business. Your pinned tweet Is a tweet storm, so it's a series of tweets, the headline of which is How to Get Rich, and then in parentheses, Without Getting Lucky. It has, as we record this, forty-four point eight thousand retweets, a hundred and ten-plus thousand favorites. We're not gonna go through this whole thing. It's quite long. But I'm curious to know what parts of it you think people are paying too much attention to or overemphasize, and what parts of it do you wish people would pay more attention to? Because there are many different pieces of advice in this thread.
- NRNaval Ravikant
That tweet storm is a series of principles that I kind of wrote for myself in my head when I was thirteen and I was trying to figure out how to make money. And it kinda came with, with a framework of how to be rich, but not by accident. To do it in a way that I could repeat it over and over, and I would leave very little up to chance. Um, because I think there's kind of this-- n- it's not completely mythology, but there's this belief that, you know, to make money, you either have to be born rich, or you have to be privileged, or you have to be in the right circles, or you have to get lucky. And I think that there are still ways to accomplish the original American dream, which is, you know, make money, but do it in a deliberate, systematic way. And when I say money, I mean wealth. I don't mean like a law firm where you make, you know, a couple hundred bucks an hour, but you're still tied to the clock. I mean like when you wake up when you want, you go to sleep when you want, you know, you live where you want, and, uh, you have freedom. So to me, the purpose of money is freedom. And, uh, for that, you need to create wealth. And can you do it ethically? Can you do it sustainably? Can you do it reliably? Can you do it with people that you like? Can you do it doing things that you enjoy? And I think it's absolutely possible, and I, I like to think that I'm at least one of many living proof points for that. You know, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are examples of others. Uh, not that I'm in their status or their league, but you know, other people have done it. So that was the whole point of that framework. And the tweet storm, I just wrote it down one day. And it's funny because obviously I have some experience at Twitter, so I know how to craft things. But I think that was written back in the day when the tweet limit was a hundred and forty characters too, so it was harder. But, uh, I just woke up one night when I'd been thinking about it, and I wrote out the whole tweet storm almost exactly like you see it. And there are lots and lots of missing pieces. Like obviously that is just like a very high level, very Zen koan-like or, or haiku-like or even Hallmark card-like framework. Uh, it's missing a ton of details, which I then tried to extrapolate on in my podcast series on the same topic. What do people overemphasize and what are people missing?
- TFTim Ferriss
And actually, Naval, let me pause and just read a few of them. This is from-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Sure
- TFTim Ferriss
... May, May thirty-one, two thousand and eighteen. So a few examples. And you don't have to comment on these specific examples, but just for people who haven't seen this, I wanna give them an idea. So the second of these various tweets in this sequence is, "Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you." End of that particular tweet. And then there's another one: "You're not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity, a piece of a business to gain your financial freedom." And-
- NRNaval Ravikant
That one right there is the most important one, which is y- you basically-- in modern life, what happens is like the person who is the best at doing something in the world will get to do it for the entire world through a combination of leverage and distribution, accountability, and specific knowledge, w- all of which I talk about in the tweet storm. If you're the best in the world at doing something, like if you're the best teacher in the world at math, you should be teaching the entire world math. If you're the best podcast interviewer, you should be doing all the top interviews. And the returns will accrue to you, especially in this highly digital world that-- where we live in, where the cost of distributing something is very close to zero. And so what you kinda wanna do is you wanna productize yourself into a business, and then you wanna own that business. That is the way to make wealth. Um, a clear example is the Tim Ferriss podcast and the Tim Ferriss brand, right? You're-- It's an eponymous brand. Your name is on it. You're leveraged through this podcast and through the books that you write, uh, and through the army of followers that you have on the various media platforms. And you're taking on big accountability, and there's specific knowledge. Only you know how to be Tim Ferriss, the learning machine, who can then connect to other learners and extract value out of them and share that with the audience. So that's an example of you having productized yourself. But ultimately, you own the Tim Ferriss business. Now, you can go lower levels down from that. You don't have to own the entire business. You could be an investor in public equities or private stocks. You could be, uh, a partner in a private business. Uh, you could be an employee of a startup where you have stock options. But if you don't own a piece of a business, you're gonna-- it's gonna be extremely hard to get wealthy. It'll be nearly impossible, almost not worth that route. So I think that is the most important foundational tweet. I think where people kind of all-- kind of miss the plot the most though is we have pain avoidance in life. We don't want to face things where it's clear we've made bad decisions because one good definition of suffering is that that's the moment when you see things as they clearly are, and you kinda don't like what you see. Like for example, if you, if you and your spouse have been fighting for a long time, you know, you've kinda been sweeping it under the rug and you've sort of been suffering along, but you're sweeping it under the rug, and then you get divorced. At that moment, you can no longer unsee all the damage that was in the relationship and what all the consequences are. They're real. Uh, the same way if you haven't been taking care of your health, but then suddenly you find out that you've just fallen off a cliff and something irreversibly bad has happened. The moment of suffering arrives and you're in pain because you can no longer unsee this thing. You can no longer avoid it. So I think the same way, the unfortunate part is that a lot of these principles are written for young people because you can set yourself on a certain trajectory in life earlier. And so for example, if you went and you got a, you know, a PhD in a social science, and now I'm basically saying, "Hey, learn to code," you're gonna avoid that. You're not gonna wanna see that because you have all this sunk cost in the degree. So I think a lot of people don't wanna pick up the new skills that are necessary, or they don't want to, for example, physically move, or they don't want to disappoint the people in the relationships that they already have to make room for new relationships. So everybody wants to start where they are. Nobody wants to go back down the mountain to find the path going to the top. Everybody wants to stay on the path they're on, maybe make a few tweaks and get to the top. Or like Charlie Munger jokes, you know, people always ask me like, "How do I get to be rich like you except quicker? I don't wanna be the old rich guy. I wanna be the young rich guy." So I think these are the hard parts. The, the, the, the hard parts are not the learning, it's the unlearning. It's not the climbing up the mountain, it's the going back down to the bottom of the mountain and starting over. It's the beginner's mind that every great artist or every great business person has, which is you have to be willing to start from scratch. You have to be willing to hit reset and go back to zero because you have to realize that what you already know and what you're already doing is actually an impediment to your full potential. And most people just don't wanna acknowledge that. And I'm guilty of that too. That's just human nature. I'm not, I'm not faulting anybody for it. But it's just human nature.
- TFTim Ferriss
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. Did you know if you missed 10 of the best performing days after the 2008 crisis, you would have missed out on 50%, 5-0 percent, of your returns? Don't miss out on the best days in the market. Stay invested in a long-term automated investment portfolio. Wealthfront pioneered the automated investing movement, sometimes referred to as robo-advising, and they currently oversee $20 billion of assets for their clients. Wealthfront can help you diversify your portfolio, minimize fees, and lower your taxes. Takes about three minutes to sign up, and then Wealthfront will build you a globally diversified portfolio of ETFs based on your risk appetite and manage it for you at an incredibly low cost. Wealthfront's software constantly monitors your portfolio day in and day out so you don't have to. They look for opportunities to rebalance and tax loss harvest to lower the amount of taxes you pay on your investment gains. Their newest service is called Autopilot, and it can monitor any checking account for excess cash to move into savings or an investment account. They've really thought of a ton. They've checked a lot of boxes. Smart investing should not feel like a rollercoaster ride. Let the professionals do the work for you. Go to wealthfront.com/tim and open a Wealthfront investment account today, and you'll get your first $5,000 managed for free for life. That's wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront will automate your investments for the long term, and you can get started today at wealthfront.com/tim. And if we look at your
- 33:29 – 39:26
Naval’s own path: specific knowledge, consistent wins, and optimizing for independence
- TFTim Ferriss
specific case as it relates to equity, you mentioned owning part of a business. You also mentioned in this conversation productizing yourself. So would you view your success in following that principle predominantly in, for instance, the equity that you own in a company like AngelList? Or is it the identity and the brand, meaning associations that you've built as Naval the human, or is it slash investor, therefore being sought after as an investor, or is it something else? How would you think of that principle as applying, yeah, most in your own life? Because you've created wealth not just through, say, your equity in AngelList, but also through many successful investments. And then, uh, I'm sure there are other ways that we could identify wealth as, as coming from your path that you follow.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah. What, what I, what I like about my path is that I've made money doing a lot of different little things. So I've made, you know, money consistently in sort of small to medium-sized chunks. I haven't had like one gigantic payday that set me up forever. Although it depends on your standards, right? I'm talking about by Silicon Valley standards. Obviously, for most parts of the world, I've had many of those gigantic paydays. But they've been consistent and they've been varied. Varied in the sense of that they're completely different kinds of investments and endeavors, but consistent in that I get one every couple of years. Um-
- TFTim Ferriss
Which would-- I just wanna interject for a second, which would seem to suggest that there is a-- there are principles guiding your approaches or-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Absolutely. Ab- ab- absolutely
- TFTim Ferriss
... some systematic approach. Right? Therefore-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... you're not relying on winning the Powerball lottery or that equivalent.
- NRNaval Ravikant
No, not at all. No, there's no lottery here to win. The lottery is for losers. Lotteries are just a tax on people who can't do math. Uh-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
... get rich quick, get rich quick schemes are just other people getting rich off of you. There are no shortcuts. Uh, so what I'm doing is I am taking my specific knowledge, which is my ability to understand deeply technical concepts and communicate them to the rest of the world to be an interface between great programmers and developers and designers and the capital markets and consumers, and using that to put myself in a position where then I can identify great trends as they're emerging, invest in those companies or help start those companies, own equity in those things, help bring them to market, help do the strategy on how to navigate the worlds of fundraising and exiting and recruiting and company building and cultures and technology development and all that, and have a brand around it. And I use that to kind of make money. And that is just one of several ways. You know, I've also done it by investing early on in public markets and cryptocurrencies and starting funds and all kinds of things. But I, I don't-- It's funny, I don't really follow my own principles anymore. Like the, for example, the whole podcast thing and the whole Twitter thing. Even though I've got reasonably good brands and followers in those, I'm not monetizing them at all. I'm not charging anybody for anything because I'm not trying to make money anymore. To me, like money is like you become the kind of person that makes money, and you put yourself in long-term situations where you're always gonna make money. So I have the brand and I have deep relationships with a dozen people who I know and I trust that I can do business with for the rest of my life. And they're very high integrity people, and they're very capable people, and it just makes it easy to do things. So I've set up that infrastructure. Now the money just kinda makes itself as I go about my life. I don't wanna have to work hard. I don't wanna have to roll out of bed at a certain time. I don't wanna have to answer to somebody. So I optimize for independence and freedom. I could have made a lot more money by raising a huge fund or joining a big VC firm early on or being an exec at one of the massive companies in Silicon Valley early on, but I always optimize for independence. I'm lazy, you know? I wake up at Seven, eight, nine, 10:00 AM. I go to sleep at 2:00, 3:00, uh, AM, you know? I don't work a lot of days. Uh, some days I work morning to night, but it's just based on whatever I'm curious about. I never wanna have to answer to a boss. No one's ever gonna tell me what to do. Uh, I don't wanna order people around. I don't, I don't wanna have someone reporting to me and kinda asking me all the time what to do. Uh, I want peer relationships. I wanna flow. I wanna be able to do business while walking, you know, in a forest talking on a cell phone or sitting in a meeting or in front of a computer, or I wanna be on a beach if I don't feel like it. The ideal would be to make money with your mind, not with your time. So if I can just make one good decision a year and that makes me all the money that I need for that year, then that's perfect. And that's the way it should be because we're living in an age of infinite leverage, and your judgment just gets multiplied through this massive force multiplier through code, capital, community, labor, what have you. So if you're smart and you kinda know what you're doing, you don't need to work hard. Working hard is the last least important thing. You have to pay your dues. You have to put in all the iterations, 10,000 iterations, not 10,000 hours, to figure out what to do and how to do it well. But once you know, you don't have to put in the time anymore. It's your judgment. And the judgment comes from clear thinking. The clear thinking comes from having time to reflect and to pursue your genuine intellectual curiosity. And you'll see that a lot of the great investors, for example, s- just sit around reading most of the time. Or Warren Buffett famously plays a lot of bridge. Obviously, not everyone can be just an investor, although that is becoming more and more democratized. And I've picked something that suits my temperament and particular capabilities. But there's lots and lots of ways to make money if you apply your mind to it. So I don't work to make money. I mean, if I make so much money that I'm donating hospital wings and universities and all that stuff, I overshot. You know, I'm not trying to have some influence on the world through money. And ironically, I have more influence of the world through podcasts like this. And so, you know, making more money doesn't change my life. It doesn't change the world as much as I could by doing other things. So there's not much incentive for me to make money anymore other than just it's practicing my craft.
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, let's, let's talk about a few of your, your missives. Missives is probably not the right word.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, I'm not telling anybody of anything. I, uh, I'm not trying to persuade anyone of anything. So [chuckles] if people don't like it, you know, some people get triggered on Twitter and they start arguing. It's like, "Just leave. Just don't listen to it." [chuckles]
- 39:26 – 44:57
Anxiety as wasted energy: why calm can be a performance advantage
- TFTim Ferriss
The one I'm gonna read would be a great one for people to get really upset about. [laughs] Uh, or I would find it comical to, to look at, uh, the comments of people who are upset. But the, the line is this: "Imagine how effective you would be if you weren't anxious all the time." Why did you put this out? And have you seen highly anxious people become people who experience very little anxiety? Is that something you've seen? But first, why did you put this up?
- NRNaval Ravikant
[chuckles]
- TFTim Ferriss
What was behind it? And then have you seen anxious people become largely, I guess, unanxious or non-anxious people?
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, most of my tweets are not very deliberate or thought through. W- what's happening is I've been thinking about some concept for, m- you know, months, years, whatever. It's been percolating. And then all of a sudden it'll come to me in sort of in like one s- pithy sentence where I'm like, "Oh, this is how I'll, I will remember this thing. This is how I can distill this down into a pointer for myself so that when I need to make decisions, I can retrieve that whole line of reasoning." And so where this comes from is basically, like everybody after a certain age, I am taking responsibility for my own happiness and peace and quality of life. And one of the things you learn after you make money is that money doesn't make you happier. It takes care of your money problems, but it's nece- not necessarily gonna put you in a place where you're in some kind of bliss all the time. In fact, there's nothing out there that will make you happy forever. So you sort of have to take responsibility for guiding yourself in such a way that your mental state ends up where you want it. And so I've been working on my mental state, and I have r- you know, working is a big word. I don't, I don't even wanna say I've been working on it. But I would say my mental state has gotten to a place which is much better than it used to be. And people will often say, "Well, I don't wanna do that because it'll take away my ambition. I want to succeed right now." And so I've thought about that a fair bit, and is that true or not? Well, certainly for me in the last few years since I've become calmer, my effectiveness has gone through the roof and I've been more successful. But it's hard to disambiguate that from, well, also maybe you're just later in your career, you're in a better position for it, and that's a valid criticism. So one of the things I've been trying to figure out is like, would I have been as successful, and it's hard to do the counterfactual obviously, uh, if I wasn't as anxious? Because anxiety is, you know, comes from fear and it's also a motivator. It makes you get off your butt. And one of the ways to make the anxiety go away, at least until the next piece of anxiety comes along, is to go do something about it. So what is the role of anxiety? Well, firstly, I noted that pretty much everybody's anxious all the time. It's a rare human being who isn't anxious. And it makes sense. We're alpha predators. You know, we took over this earth and domesticated or killed all the other animals, and we did that by being the most paranoid, the most fearful, the most angry predators this world has ever seen. So anxiety is built into the core of who we are. In fact, you could argue that all the mind does all day long is fear-based scenario planning for survival and then maybe a little bit of greed for replication. So anxiety is at the core level of who we are. But certainly some people are more anxious than others. There's no question. And some people seem to be much calmer about it. So which is more useful for effectiveness? So assuming that your goal is-- your, your motivation is intrinsic, you're doing the thing because you love it or because you really want it, and you can separate that motivation from anxiety Then I think you can take on certain superpowers. And we kind of all intrinsically know this. Like if you look at, you know, samurai warriors, right? Like, uh, Miyamoto Musashi is in a duel with somebody else. You know that the person who is calmer is going to win. In all those movies, it's the one who can like-- who's like incredibly still, then swipes with his sword incredibly quickly, and is then still again. That's the winner, the one who has a zen state of mind. Similarly, in the Terminator movies, part of the reason you fear the Terminator is because he's a robot. He's unstoppable, he's implacable. You can't argue with him, you can't communicate with him, you can't make him slow down, and he has no remorse. He just keeps coming. Or in that old Clint Eastwood movie, Unforgiven, you know, the guy who wins the gunfight is the one who doesn't flinch. He's just keeping his cool while he's loading his gun and shooting. He's not like all over the place running around. So I just think we waste so much energy through anxiety that if you can be calm and still go about your business, it's a superpower. And I, I realized this myself recently where I was in a conflict situation in business. It was a high conflict situation. It was unfortunate. We-- I think we've solved it. But as I went through this high conflict situation, I'd been through one like it years before where I was much more anxious. And I remember that time period, and I remember how much I was sweating it and how nervous I was and how I went through bouts of fear and anger and, and h-how kind of worked up I was the entire time, intense, and didn't get much sleep. But this time I was incredibly calm, and I was almost enjoying it because it was like practicing my craft. Now, of course, it's easier to do now because I have more money, but at the same time, it w- it just didn't bother me. It was just very mechanical. And because of that, I could be very effective about it, and I could be effective about it while doing lots and lots of other things. My mind wasn't constantly spinning in a whirlpool, taking on 10 different problems and just fear-based scenario planning all the time. Most of these things were never gonna happen. So I do believe that being calm and still going about your business is the superpower. Now, yes, if anxiety is your only motivator, then you have a problem. But I would argue the pure motivations don't come out of anxiety.
- 44:57 – 51:19
Self-examination as the core practice: meditation, changing your life, and “inbox zero”
- TFTim Ferriss
So let's talk about attribution here. To what would you attribute the... And I, I know this-- that it's difficult to isolate variables, et cetera. But if, let's just say, like you have a family. So let's just say one of your kids comes to you and is like, "Dad, I'm suffering from a lot of anxiety. What should I do?" Or you observe it and you wanna help your kid out. What types of recommendations would you make or might you make? Uh, another question, if you prefer it, is what has helped you to go from the whirlpool experience of anxiety in high conflict experience round one versus calm Naval in high conflict experience round two?
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, it's really hard to separate all the pieces out. I mean, it comes from a combination of philosophy, yoga, meditation, getting older, having kids. You know, like you, I've, I've had some psychedelic experiences, uh, but those are very far back in the past. Um, just a distant memory at this point. But I would say the number one thing that has been very, very important for me is meditation. And it's a stupid thing to say because it's so trite. Everybody just says it now. But when I say meditation, I don't mean sitting there and watching your breath or chanting a mantra. I mean self-examination. And meditation is a great way to do that. It's self-therapy. It's sitting there with your thoughts. So anxiety, the, the-- anxie-anxiety, this, this pervasive, non-specific anxiety where you're just constantly on edge about everything, that comes from an unexamined life. You know, I think was it Socrates who said like, "An unexamined life is not worth living"? I forget who said that quote but-
- TFTim Ferriss
Something like that.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah. But it's a, it's a great-
- TFTim Ferriss
Aristotle, Socrates, one of those
- NRNaval Ravikant
... one of those. Yeah, one of those smart philosopher types. But it's correct. It's your unexamined life that is causing the problems, and you can examine it in multiple ways. You can examine it through-- You can have some crazy mushroom trip where it all comes out one night. You could do a lot of meditation sitting there with yourself and letting your mind run crazy and then seeing what's actually in your mind that your mind wants to tell you and have you listen to and have you resolve that is unresolved. It could be through therapy. Um, it could be through reading lots of philosophy and reflection and long walks. So there's many, many ways to tackle it. But it's that spending that time with yourself to examine why are you having these thoughts. Think about it this way. We spend so much time in our relationships, our relationship with our wives, our relationship with our colleagues, our relationship with our business partners, our relationship with our friends. The most important relationship you have is with yourself. It's with this voice in your head that is constantly rattling every waking hour. It's this crazy roommate living inside your mind who's always chattering, always chattering, never shuts up. And you can't control these thoughts. They just come up out of you don't even know where. That quality of-- those quality of your thoughts, that conver- those conversations you're having in your head all the time, that is your world. That is the world you live in. Those-- That's the worldview you have, that's the lenses you see through, and that's gonna determine the quality of your life more than anything else. And if you wanna see what the quality of your life actually is, put down the drink, put down the computer, put down the smartphone, put down the book, put down the headphones. Just sit by yourself doing nothing, and then you will know what the quality of your life actually is because that's what you're always running away from. That's why people, when they try to meditate, they sit down, they're like, "I, I hate it. I can't sit still." Why? Because your mind is eating you alive. Your life is unexamined. Your mind is running in loops over things that it has not resolved. And because they're not resolved, when you run around in your normal life, it's not those problems have gone away. It's that they're just there. They're there and-- but they're provoking anxiety. And what you think of as the anxiety that's, that's kinda consuming you and you can't identify the source, that's just the tip of an iceberg poking out from underneath the water. And underneath is this giant pile of garbage of decisions that were made without too much thought, of situations that you're in that you haven't resolved, that you need to resolve, of problems that you have or desires that you have that have gone unmet or unmanifested or contradictions that you're living in or ways that you-- which you feel trapped. So proper meditation, proper examination should ruin the life that you're currently living. It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to reestablish boundaries with family members and with colleagues. It should cause you to quit your job. It should cause you to change your eating patterns. It should cause you to spend more time with yourself. It should cause you to change what books you read. It should cause you to change who your friends are. If it doesn't do that, it's not real examination. If it doesn't come attached with destruction of your current life, then you can't create the new life in which you will not have the anxiety.
- TFTim Ferriss
Or at least parts of it, not necessarily whole cloth. So let's ask, let's, let's dive into meditation because, uh, as you mentioned, it's a term that is used a lot, and in the minds of most, it is represented by things that you just said you do not do, like the mantra-based meditation or following the breath. And you and I have meditated before. I don't know if your approach is still similar, but it is quite a, I'd hate to talk about trite, paradigm shift in a sense, at least in the way that I experienced it alongside you at one point, which was literally doing nothing for extended periods of time.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Mm-hmm.
- TFTim Ferriss
I don't know if that's still the case, but could you describe the practice a bit? Because it's, it was such a burden lifted, in a sense, when the pass-fail is removed, and the experience that I had after, say, a week of doing this twice a day, which is not necessarily what people would do in normal life, but was pretty profound. So could you describe the current practice, which may be different from what I experienced?
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, I actually have two different things that I do, and I almost hate calling it meditation because everyone has in their mind a preconceived notion of what meditation is. Let's not even call it that. I would say that there are two self-examination practices that I do. And I don't even call them practices anymore because sometimes I do them because I feel like them and I enjoy them or because it feels right, and sometimes I don't. Because anything done routinely sort of becomes its own trap and is not gonna get you anywhere. It just becomes like another spiritual high, another checkbox, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Now, is it fair though to say that you're able to opt in and out now because you had a certain front loading period-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Correct
- TFTim Ferriss
... of doing it consistently?
- 51:19 – 1:02:08
Tools for a calmer mind: philosophy reading, thought-awareness in daily life, and resisting the news cycle
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah. Actually, I'll say there, there are three different things that I do, and I'll go through them. The first is I just read a lot of philosophy, especially at nighttime before I go to bed. Uh-
- TFTim Ferriss
Which ones? Schopenhauer, Maxims? Who are we talking about?
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, Schopenhauer, Western philosophy is my current favorite, uh, although I've definitely moved around in that one. Eastern philosophy, I'll read everything from Osho. I know he's discredited and been canceled, but fantastic. That makes me like him even more. Um-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
... Krishnamurti, I don't know, Kapil Gupta, uh, uh, Rupert Spira. I mean, it's all over the place. Uh, Anthony De Mello, he's fantastic actually. If you wanna start with one book, start with Anthony De Mello's Way to Love, um, or his book Awareness. They're both really good. Um, but there's a ton of them. I basically read a lot of philosophers. Siddhartha, Vasistha's Yoga, Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching. You know, I'm always going through one of these books at any given time, and usually rereading, uh, for inspiration. And I'll read these at night. Uh, usually there'll be one or two things I'll catch on to. It'll-- I'll reflect on it before I go to sleep. So that is a form of self-examination. And it's, it's not done because it's a formula. It's done because I'm genuinely interested in these things, so it's not work to me. It's fun. The second thing that I do is, which I've been doing for a long time now, is just trying to be aware of my thoughts, and not in a, you know, sit there and be like, "Oh, I'm gonna be aware of my thoughts," kind of way, but just realizing that a lot of these thoughts that come up are unbidden. I don't control them. It's not like I decided to have this thought. I don't even know what I'm saying to you right now. It's coming out of my mouth at the same time as I'm thinking it. So where is this coming from? Who is this person? What is this person saying? Is this true? Is it correct? Has it been correct in the past? Uh, is he just being paranoid now? Is he being crazy? What are his underlying motivations? And I'm not even questioning it so much, but more just kind of seeing it. And after a while, when you see it, you start seeing through your own BS. You start seeing how you're m- mainly just justifying whatever the heck you wanna believe because it's good for your survival, or it's good for your replication, or it's good for your money, or it's gonna get you laid, or any of these various things. And you sort of-
- TFTim Ferriss
When you're doing that reflection-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... is it sitting at a table, pen and paper? Is it sitting in a half, half lotus with your eyes closed? What is that? What does it look like?
- NRNaval Ravikant
No, it's literally just walking around. It's just walking around. It's just life.
- TFTim Ferriss
I- I got it.
- NRNaval Ravikant
It's just life.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Just, just... If you say something to me, I'm always going to listen to it with a slightly critical filter because you're external to me. Applying that same filter to my own thoughts gives me a level of peace and distance from them and the ability to see through my own BS, which I think makes my life better.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right. Mm-hmm.
- NRNaval Ravikant
So I've just found that to be a useful th- way of life. But there are lots of times where I forget to do it. I get caught up in some emotions, some runaway train of thought. But usually these days I can catch myself and be like, "Oh, okay, I'm in that mindset again. I'm having that mode of reactions again." And when the mind sort of sees me chattering, it quiets down a bit, right? And like I said, it's that, back to that crazy roommate analogy, which I originally picked up from Michael Singer, by the way. He has a good book called The Untethered Soul. But, you know, the room- the crazy roommate analogy, like you would eventually tell your roommate to shut up, or you would tell them to start justifying their claims. Or you would at least at some level you start dismissing them for just kind of rambling all the time in this fear, paranoiac mode. So I think just kind of viewing your thoughts as sort of these unbidden things that arise from within you but aren't really necessarily the whole story and should be viewed with the same level of skepticism that you would apply to an outside observer. I think that framework is helpful. And if you find it to be true, then you'll find yourself doing it more often. If you find it not to be true, if you're like, "No, actually, I choose these thoughts and I wanna have them and that's who I am and this all makes sense to me," then you can stop viewing it with a critical eye. That's up to you. But the last one is the one that I think people think of as more traditionally meditation, which is sitting down and, and meditating. And on that one I learned from an Indian gentleman, same, same character you learned from, who had a very simple system and I just found it the most compelling form of meditation I've ever tried, which is you sit there for 60 minutes. So unfortunately not less than an hour at a time because it takes 30 to 40 minutes to sink in past the initial chattering so you get to the good part there or the so-called runner's high equivalent. Um, and you sit for 60 minutes every day and you do it for at least 60 days and you do it first thing in the mornings when your mind is clear and you're alert and you've had a good night's sleep. And you sit up with your back straight and you can use cushions or you can use a chair, whatever. There's no magic position. And just whatever happens, happens. Whatever your mind wants to do, you just let it do. If it wants to talk, you let it talk. If it wants to fight, you let it fight. If it wants to be quiet, you let it be quiet. If it wants to chant a mantra or pay attention to breathing, you can do that, but you don't force anything. You just kind of let it happen. And so you don't fight it, you don't resist it, you don't argue with it, you don't double down on it. You just kinda let things happen. And when you do that for at least 60 days, my experience has been that you kind of clear out your mental inbox and all the craziness that was going on, all the chattering will come out. Some problems will get resolved. You will have some ephi- epiphanies. You will make changes to your life. Some will be self-examination. Some of it you just get tired of. Some of it just needs to be heard once and then it goes away. And eventually you'll get to a mental state of inbox zero, where now you're just thinking about what happened yesterday. You're kind of caught up and your mind is relatively clear. And just your anxiety level goes down. You're living more peacefully. And I've been doing this for about two and a half years now, and I've probably missed about a dozen days total. And but there are some days where I've done two hours a day or more. And I will tell you that is the single most important thing that I do. It is a sheer joy. Much of it is highly entertaining, pleasurable. Sometimes it's just flat. It's nothingness. I can't even tell you why I do it. I can't even tell you what's going on in that state. But I will tell you that that time spent by myself is the most important time that I have. And thanks to that, I am now much more self-contained. I don't feel like I need other people. I don't need external sources of pleasure or happiness all the time. I drink less. I'm not attracted to trying any drugs whatsoever. It's just life is easier. It's more pleasant. I don't take things as seriously. I'm not afraid of my mortality as much anymore. I don't fear aging. I don't, I don't lust after things. I don't have this constant pervasive need to find something outside of me to make my life better. When the best hour of my day is spent by myself, then the world has very little to offer me. And I can still participate in it, but it doesn't have that grip on me that it used to. I don't fear solitary confinement. And I think that is a superpower, and I think everyone should have it. Everyone does have it. It's easy. It requires doing nothing. It's your birthright. You can't fail at it. There's no, there's no way to fail at it. Literally, all you have to do is just sit down and close your eyes and just, just be by... Give yourself a break for an hour every day. Just take the time off from the world.
- TFTim Ferriss
Few follow-ups. Krishnamurti, do you have any f- any favorites of his or anything that you would suggest someone start with if they have no familiarity with Krishnamurti? And I'll second Anthony de Mello also.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, I actually don't recommend-
- TFTim Ferriss
But Krishnamurti
- NRNaval Ravikant
... starting with Krishnamurti. He's a tough one. But if you're gonna start somewhere, I started with his book called Think On These Things. Uh, there's also The Book of Life. Um, he's very cerebral, very intellectual, and a little confusing. Um, but he definitely speaks truth and he walks the walk. Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love. Uh, Osho's book, The Great Challenge. Uh, and I know people think Osho's a fake guru and all that, but he had some real stuff too. He's very articulate. He, uh, he understood a lot. Um, there's a great clip from him on SoundCloud, uh, that says, it's called Life Has No Goals, No Purpose. Uh, I listen to that, that one a lot. There's a lot of them out there. Once you start going down this rabbit hole, you'll find them. The, the classics, the Bhagavad Gita, get a good translation. Stephen Miller, I think, has a good translation. Uh, he also has a good translation of the Tao Te Ching. Those are both really interesting. Again, only if it appeals to you. I mean, there's ancient wisdom in Schopenhauer. Read Counsels and Maxims. You know, these are smart people self-reflecting. But overall, the point is not to read. The point is to inspire so that you yourself can reflect. And Kapil Gupta is an account on Twitter. He has a couple of great books. Direct Truth is a fantastic book, um, you know, written very recently and pulls no punches. Um, but all, you know, all of these are basically there to inspire you to self-reflect. And if you're not interested in self-reflection, if you're not at that stage in life, then don't do it. It's a waste of time. In fact, I would say the reason to do these things is just because they make your life better, because they make you more effective, because they have some utility to you. If they do not have utility to you, if they don't make your life better, then drop it. It's useless.
- TFTim Ferriss
I will also second the reading of philosophy, and this is not for kinda idle or abstract like semantic tail chasing, right? It's, it's for, for whatever reason on a very pragmatic level, deeply soothing to read the insights and observations of those who are considering things that are not of today, they're not of this week, they're not of this month. They are for much broader periods of time or timeless in some capacity, right? It, it alleviates some of the manufactured emergency and urgency of the bullshit that is foisted upon us by every possible input. And-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Oh, yeah. The, the, the news and Twitter are so toxic. The human brain is not designed to manage every emergency in the world in real time. We're not designed to process all the breaking news on the planet in our heads. And this is one of my recent tweets, but the goal of the media these days is to make every problem your problem. That's how they get attention. That's how they get clicks. You know, you have tribal wars going on, zombies battling each other, and they wanna pull you in, where even non-participation is not allowed anymore. Neutral bystanders are not allowed. So it's, it's a crazy world out there. There's a circus going on with the monkeys flinging feces at each other, and they wanna drag you into the fight.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
Really what you wanna focus on is what's timeless. Timeless is great. You know, the, the old questions all have old answers, and they're best consumed from the old practitioners because they were very clear-minded about it. They weren't busy trying to fit into the politics of this time. They were fitting to the politics of that time, but that's lost to us now. So actually another great source is I have your Dao Seneca series on Audible. Uh, and I listen to it on repeat when I'm working out a lot. So that's a very fun-
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, no kidding.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Awesome.
- NRNaval Ravikant
There's Letters to Lucilius. Uh, amazing.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Amazing stuff. And every time I go through it, I learn something new.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, The Tao of Seneca, The, The Moral Letters to Lucilius. If people wanna look on public domain from, on public domain sources, you can find these letters. The Moral Letters to Lucilius, also spelled as you might read Lucilius by Seneca. And so that's an audiobook series that, that I produced, and you can find the PDFs for free online as well. Let's talk about some brass tacks stuff since I think people will be very interested. You mentioned monkeys throwing feces, tribalism. In
- 1:02:08 – 1:10:28
Crypto as an unregulated frontier: stablecoins, hidden tradeoffs, and what “risk” really means
- TFTim Ferriss
times like this, this is being recorded in 2020, and first day of October, a lot of folks are interested in stores of value. They are fearful of what could happen and considering investments like gold or cryptocurrency. And I wanted you to explain one of your recent tweets. This is just from the last few days. And it is, "Crypto stablecoins- dash, choose between blowup risk, censorship risk, and fraud risk." What are crypto stablecoins and what does this tweet mean?
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, just backing up for a second. Like, I, I think cryptocurrencies are probably one of the greatest inventions, uh, in human history. And the reason why they're interesting is because if you look at the technology industry, technology plays in unregulated spaces. It's very hard for technology to change regulated spaces as Uber and Postmates and companies like that find out. Um, but generally the reason technology works is because it creates its own frontier. It is a digital frontier that is being created now that the physical frontiers are all closed and the new world has been colonized and the Wild West has been tamed. Where do you go to create new things free of interference and regulation and kind of exercise maximum creativity? And so that's been done mostly in the technology space. And one of the areas that has been protected by technological innovation from technological innovation is Wall Street because they're, it's, you know, they have regulatory capture, very bureaucratic, you know, the, the money industrial complex that runs a lot of our economy and runs a lot of Washington, D.C., where 20% of our GDP goes into financial engineering and into the Wall Street casino. And so cryptocurrencies are kind of how we get around that. And so they're sovereign resistant. They're designed to be completely decentralized. You don't need the violent power of the state to enforce the value of a cryptocurrency, and it allows for truly trustless transactions between humans without some king or authority or government, uh, or corporation having to be in the middle. And so it's very liberating to disconnect wealth creation, wealth storage, and wealth protection from the state, and that's what cryptocurrencies really enable.
- TFTim Ferriss
One second. Let me just pause to say that at, at one point you and I did a very thorough cryptocurrency 101 conversation with a domain super expert named Nick Szabo, S-Z-A-B-O, which people can also find for more on kind of the, the, the history and basics of, of some of the crypto.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah. Nick is a bonafide genius and a pioneer in the space. He also has a great blog called Unenumerated that I highly recommend. But anyway, so the, the best known cryptocurrency is Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is trying to be the new gold or the new Swiss bank account kind of all rolled into one. And it has some advantages, you know, as a store of value. It can be stored digitally, so it's hard to seize. It's very easy to verify technologically speaking. Unlike gold, it's easy to send across national boundaries and, and electronically over the internet. It's easily divisible and verifiable down to... Its authenticity is very verifiable where gold is hard to do. It can be divided down to millions and trillions of a Bitcoin very, very easily. It is somewhat programmable, so you can put it inside smart contracts and you can do some intelligent things with it. So it has a lot going for it as a store of value. What's difficult about it is it's not really private. It doesn't-- Although there are parts of it that are private, it's not completely private. And it's untrusted. It's brand new as far as stores of value go. It's only from 2009. And so people don't know if it'll be around forever and how dependent it is on the internet and people aren't really certain about some, like the proof of work mining algorithm that makes it possible and can it be hijacked, can it be centralized, can it have a bug, can it break? And every year that Bitcoin survives and goes through one of the various challenges facing it, it gets more valuable as people entrust it a little bit more and more. But it is extremely volatile. You buy Bitcoin, you're buying a very speculative asset at the moment. And you're speculating that it will become digital gold or possibly even, you know, all store of value and so be incredibly valuable. But along the way, there's lots of hiccups. And at any point it could break, it could go to zero. And so a lot of people who are now participating in the crypto world, they're building a decentralized Wall Street. They call it DeFi, D-E-F-I for decentralized finance. But I actually think it's more like defy as in just defy the government, D-E-F-Y. And so I think we're seeing [laughs] yeah-
- TFTim Ferriss
Governments love that. [laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, exactly. We're s- we're seeing a whole new casino that's better than Wall Street sping- spring up in decentralized finance. Unlike Wall Street, this one is 24/7 open. It's 365 days a year. It's available around the world to everybody. It's trustless in that it's, you know, there's math and algorithms and code underneath that. Not Goldman Sachs front running your trades or whatever. Um, not that I'm saying they do, but you know, there's flash boys and kind of all that kind of, uh, craziness that goes on. And you can program it to do things and to make bets or hedges or, uh, calls that you just can't even do on Wall Street. So I think we're building a better Wall Street using cryptocurrencies. But everyone who participates in that doesn't necessarily wanna take on the volatility of these cryptocurrencies. So we've created these things called stablecoins, which track the value of the US dollar, so that when you're trading, for example, you can still do it in dollar denominated terms. And this is a tricky thing because the moment you're now trying to track some asset in the real world like dollars, then you have to basically peg the value somehow to something that exists in the real world. And cryptocurrencies do best when everything is on the blockchain, when everything's electronic and digital and controlled by computers in the cloud. So these stablecoins have come along that mimic the value of the US dollar, and the best known ones are Tether, um, USDC, which is Coinbase's coin, and uh, uh, and uh, uh, Make or Die, which is an algorithmically stablecoin. But there's no free lunch in life.
- TFTim Ferriss
Now, pause for one second.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, is this-- Should people think of... What would be a comparable that people might be more familiar with? It's not an index. It's like an ETF or how would you think about Is there another, uh-
- NRNaval Ravikant
These are digital dollars. These are designed so that you can live in crypto land. This is living on a blockchain. It's math-based code, but really your value is pegged to dollars. So it's not going up or down with Bitcoin. It's just, it's just worth a dollar all the time. So if you wanna hold a dollar in crypto land, the way you do it is by buying one of these so-called stablecoins. But all my tweet was observing is that there's no free lunch. The, th- what you're actually doing underneath is you have crypto, and crypto's incredibly volatile, and you're trying to convert a volatile asset into a stable asset. So there has to be a cost for that. What is that cost?
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, it's like the subprime [laughs] mortgage crisis, right?
- NRNaval Ravikant
Exactly. Exactly. There's no free lunch. So what does that cost? And all I was saying is that the three main categories of stablecoins today, they each impose one or more of these costs. And so one cause is fraud risk, where people suspect this of Tether, where, like, actually this thing says it's backed by dollars, but it's not actually backed by dollars. I don't know if this company has dollars underneath. So you have to kinda take their word for it. So now you're trusting-
- TFTim Ferriss
Underneath meaning they would have actual physical dollars-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Correct
- TFTim Ferriss
... much like you would have physical gold.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Correct. Yeah. So for every Tether they issue you, they claim to have a dollar somewhere, but what if they don't? And you just don't know, so you're trusting them, and there could be fraud underneath. I'm, I'm not saying there is. I have no evidence, but that you're basically now back to the trusted third party model that exists in just putting your money in the bank. The second kind is where you're dealing with someone like Coinbase or some company that is well-known and trusted and is regulated, but then it's no different than holding normal dollars. There's censorship risk, where if the government says, "Hey, we don't like this character," seize their bank account, Coinbase can turn off your USDC account and your stablecoin has basically been seized. You're no longer decentralized and sovereign like you are with Bitcoin. And the last kind of risk is, uh, a blowup risk. So something like a Maker, you know, it's collateralized, but it's collateralized with Bitcoin and Ethereum. And so what they're hoping is that the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum won't move so drastically that the peg breaks and you lose money on your so-called stablecoin. It's just, it's just an observation there's no free lunch, and so if you're trying to create this m- this mythical stable currency out of thin air in what is inherently a very volatile space, you have to pay for it. And people think today they're not paying for it, they're just getting these, uh, free crypto stable dollars or they're getting s- the stability aspect for free, but they're not. They're either taking on fraud risk or censorship risk or blowup risk or some combination of them.
- 1:10:28 – 1:30:06
Getting started with crypto and where adoption could go: custody, believers, institutions, and internet money
- TFTim Ferriss
So if you're advising, and this is not financial advice, this is just two friends talking obviously for informational purposes only. But if, if you're talking to a f- a friend who has a fair amount of savings or investible capital and they say, "Naval, I want to do something with crypto. How can I get started or how should I get started?" What do you say to them? Because there, there's such a broad spectrum of options. It's still, even though it's been simplified a lot, crypto is still quite confusing to-
- NRNaval Ravikant
It's very complicated. Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... pe- to people who are, who are, who are very smart, I would consider, it's still quite confusing.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Incredibly confusing. Yeah. It's, it's a domain of mathematicians, hackers, you know, tech entrepreneurs, and, and, um, a few people who really dig in, but it's still too hard to handle, manage. It's dangerous. Like, I can't hold my own crypto. I have to stick it inside funds and custodians because I'm a known public figure, and it's a bearer asset. So ironically, I can't actually bear-
- TFTim Ferriss
And when you say it's dangerous, you don't hold it because you would be-
- NRNaval Ravikant
I'd be robbed
- TFTim Ferriss
... a kidnap risk.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, exactly.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- NRNaval Ravikant
It's a bearer asset, so you know, you don't wanna bear a bearer asset. You have to put it inside vaults, you know, the equivalent of the Goldman Sachs of this space. So, like, there are custodians, like Anchorage is, you know, an amazing one. There's BitGo. There's Coinbase. So there are these large custodians, or CoinList, which is a company I helped start, um, who can hold onto your crypto assets for you. But that's not really the point of crypto. The point of crypto is to be your own bank. So if the government is coming to seize money or if they're printing lots of it, you can always withdraw your crypto assets from these organizations, and you can carry it yourself. You can put it on your laptop, which is kinda crazy and risky and hard. You can do it through a hardware wallet like a Ledger or a Trezor, which are pretty well-known hardware wallets, where you have a s- a, a small specific device that's designed just for carrying crypto. Um, but you have to understand, you're replacing the banking system. You're literally replacing the government. All the guns and, and the police that back up the banking system, you're replacing all that and all the control that comes with it. So of course it's going to require some level of sophistication. You're literally building your own Swiss bank. So it is, it is quite complicated. Where to start? Well, I don't, I don't like giving people buy signals because if you're gonna be a good investor, you also have to have your own conviction because then you'll know when to sell. If you call me and ask me when to buy, are you gonna call me every day and say, "Should I sell? Should I sell? Should I sell?"
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
Right? You don't know that.
- TFTim Ferriss
It's a really, really important observation.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Right. So you have, you have to fundamentally understand it yourself. So I would say the first thing is go down the crypto rabbit hole. Listen to the interview we did with Nick Szabo. Go online and start reading up on Bitcoin, read up on Ethereum, read up on the privacy coins like Zcash and Monero. Learn about the different high-level stuff in the crypto space. Decide how much exposure that you want. Um, go buy it at a CoinList or a Coinbase or, or what have you. Figure out which custodian you wanna use. Um, you know, put it somewhere safe, probably in the cloud unless you really know what you're doing. And if you, if you really know what you're doing, then you can use one of the hardware wallets or one of the offline schemes. Make sure that it is protected in case that you're attacked or kidnapped or someone comes to your house or steals your computer. You know, you have to cover all those base cases, so it's not easy. But you're literally creating ev- extra sovereign money. You're creating money where, you know, if you ever have to flee the country, you know, like the Jews had to leave Vienna back in the 1930s, you're not, like, scrambling for gold. You're, you're using crypto. You're not-- If you're living in some country where they tend to seize all the money in your bank account, then you have unseizable money. If you're worried about hyperinflation as we print too many dollars, then you have a hedge against the MMT and, uh, all the various excuses that they're gonna use to print money. I mean, what, probably the scariest thing that happened in 2020 from a financial perspective is both the Republican and the Democratic Party figured out that, "Oh, actually we can just print lots and lots of money." And the US has this reserve dollar, this reserve currency status with the dollar where most of our dollars, I think something like 70%, are held by foreigners because it's the trusted reserve currency of the world. They use it for trading oil. They use it for settling international transfers. They use it just to kinda hide money. They use it to protect money. From their local inflationary authorities. So because of that, when we print a dollar, 70% of that inflationary effect is cost is borne by the rest of the world, not borne by us. And so the, the US government's kinda figured this out, and we printed $6 trillion to fight the coronavirus. And so now both parties can agree that they can just print money to get out of any problem that they're in. A great tweet that I saw was somebody wrote that now we know what would happen if aliens were to invade the Earth. The Fed would just lower interest rates. The Fed would cut interest rates, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
Um, and so unfortunately, that's just the situation we're in. So they're gonna keep doing that until at some point the, you know, the rest of the world throws in the towel and says, "You know, this dollar thing is not working for us." And what we rely upon is that the European euro or the Chinese renminbi and, and these other currencies are in worse situations, but that's not necessarily always true. I think there are well-managed currencies like the Swiss franc and the Singaporean dollar. There's also, uh, hard assets like gold and crypto and real estate and, and even the run-up in tech stocks at some level is because equities are a tax efficient inflation hedge or a relatively tax efficient inflation hedge because someone like Google can just raise prices, and they don't have to hire more people because they're a monopoly. You know, they can lay off half their engineers and the company will work just fine. So people are realizing this, and there is a flight into hard assets to get away from inflation, and crypto is one of the few places where you can really put your money in and defend against something like the dollar reserving its reserve currency status. And these are black swans. It's very hard to talk about black swans because obviously since the dollar became the US reserve currency, it hasn't lost the status even when we went off the gold standard. But at the same time, the pound sterling used to be the reserve currency of the world, and it lost its status at one point. Uh, money used to be gold backed, and that went away, so it's not inconceivable that'll happen. And if it were to happen, then you would basically have the true reckoning. Then our ability to print our way out of recessions would go away. Uh, you would probably have an inflationary collapse in the US, and you would just see kind of our, our global economic system start breaking down. In those scenarios, crypto does really well, assuming the internet stays up, [chuckles] right? There are scenarios-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- NRNaval Ravikant
... where the internet goes down too, and then all hell breaks loose, and you better have gold and guns, but we're not talking about that. Um, it depends-
- TFTim Ferriss
Cigarettes and tampons to trade for your water.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, that's right. Well, bullets are the ultimate one, right? As we, as we also see in 2020. What, do we have five million new gun owners in the US? But it, it just depends how much of a prepper you are, how paranoid you wanna be, and how many standard deviations out you wanna, you wanna handle risk. But I think this is the year where a lot of people feel like risks that were inconceivable have suddenly gotten pulled in.
- TFTim Ferriss
Let me ask a dumb newbie question. As a hypothetical, so speaking as someone who-- I'm a great example of someone who can use words associated with crypto who really has no fundamental understanding. I'm the, I'm the guy pointing at the bird who thinks he's got it all figured out because he's able to name the yellow-throated warbler. Uh, I don't think I have it all figured out. But let's just say I managed somehow, like a, you know, a thousand monkeys typing out Shakespeare on a million laptops given infinite time, I somehow manage to get a bunch of cryptocurrency onto a hardware ledger, right? Or a, uh, a hardware wallet rather. So I have this thing. US is going to hell in a handbasket. I somehow manage to get that to fill in the blank. Um, I'll just arbitrarily choose Spain. I got land in Spain. I'm like, "Oh my God, that was so close. Thank God I got out in time. I managed to make it over." How the hell do you buy an apartment or pay your rent or anything like that with crypto when it still feels like the crypto landscape and the tools are kind of computers pre-graphic user interface. Do you know what I mean? Like s-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah. Well-
- TFTim Ferriss
Even smart people can't quite figure it out. But what would y- how would you, if that were two years in the future, I mean, I think that's unlikely, but let's just say, uh-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, for most of my friends, the scenario I recommend is, like, you go buy it on something like, you know, Coinbase, CoinList, whatever. Uh, you move it into a dedicated custodian like an Anchorage, uh, or a BitGo. Um, then you kinda hold it there. Now if the shit is hitting the fan and you decide you wanna get out of town, then you contact your rep there, you move it into a hardware wallet, and then you flee the country, right? Or go wherever you're going. And when you land on the other side, now you have this crypto in your hardware wallet. In theory, you can log into a local crypto exchange, you know, go through their verification processes and upload it. Now you've got Bitcoin that can be traded for cash. Um, or you can go find any of the local Bitcoin meetup people and groups, the enthusiasts, the so-called maximalists, the diehard believers and the holders, and you can trade any of them Bitcoin for cash. Now, in the distant future, it's possible that people will just take Bitcoin directly because it is a, you know, fungible, high quality, hard asset that can be transported and held like cash. But if you can't do that, you can always find either a local believer or you can find a crypto exchange where you can convert it. The, the thing that makes Bitcoin so interesting is not that it's necessarily the best technology. It is definitely robust, and it's the OG. What makes it really interesting is it has the most diehard believers. And because it has the most diehard believers, as long as there's five thousand or fifty thousand wealthy, brilliant people who just believe in-
- TFTim Ferriss
That wealthy part is really important.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
That wealthy part's important.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Right. They will always trade it for you for, or trade it with you for hard assets. Uh, you know, I think recently MicroStrategy started, it's a company, it started moving half of its treasury into Bitcoin, and the CEO, Michael Saylor, was quoted as saying something along the lines of, "I can't believe people are willing to sell me Bitcoin." [chuckles] Right? He figured out what it was, and then he was just like, "I wanna get as much as possible, so, you know, here, take pieces of my company, but give me Bitcoin." Uh, and there are, there are lots of people like him. There are lots and lots of people like him, and they exist in every major country in the world. And as long as there are believers, because it's as much a movement or a religion as it is a currency. And because what, what is a currency at the, at the end of the day? Money is just the bubble that never pops, right? It's just if we all agree tomorrow that if we all manage to come upon a story tomorrow that it's not the US dollar, it's actually the euro that is really money, then the world will switch to the euro. Heck, if we agreed that clam shells were money, the u- the world would switch to clam shells. Now, obviously, there are underlying characteristics that make euros and dollars better than clam shells, and so therefore we converge upon those. But if the world were to decide that Bitcoin is better money than US dollars, the world would switch to Bitcoin. It's a story. It's a consensus belief And the beauty of Bitcoin is that there are these ha- diehard maximalists, and I fight with them on the internet all the time. They don't like me, by the way. So I've had Twitter battles with them running.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
But I still really appreciate that they exist because they are actually the core of what makes Bitcoin always tradable, always valuable. There's always some guy in some location somewhere in the world who will give you his house for Bitcoin. And as long as that is true, and I don't see why it would stop being true, 'cause if anything, more and more people are being added to that list every day, it has real value, and it has redeemable value.
- 1:30:06 – 2:01:35
Choosing long-term over short-term: cheap dopamine, relationships that don’t feel like work, and winning to be free
- TFTim Ferriss
So I want to bring up two more tweets, and then we can bring this, this to a, to a close and put a bow on it. First, I just wanna mention again, and I very rarely do this, but I, I'm very happy with how this discussion turned out. If people want more of the history and the design of cryptocurrency, which is endlessly fascinating, just Google Nick Szabo, S-Z-A-B-O, and then if you're interested in diving into audio, Naval and I spoke with him. Two tweets. These are both from September. One I'm gonna read just because I agree with it super strongly, and I also have observed you following this advice very well, which is, "All self-help boils down to choose long term over short term." I would modify the tweet to say, though, all truly effective self-help boils down to choose long term over short term. Uh, and, uh-
- NRNaval Ravikant
I mean, that is the-
- TFTim Ferriss
I wanna-
- NRNaval Ravikant
That is the entire challenge, uh, which is long-term thinking gets you long-term results. Uh, and I've said this 1,000 different ways. In business, you wanna play long-term games with long-term people. In your modern life and, and addictions and kinda just dealing with the avalanche of all the, the abundance of things that are thrown at you that are really traps, like video games are a trap. They're, that's a shadow career that substitutes for your real career. Or, you know, smoking weed or drinking alcohol substitutes for like pleasure through, uh, more simple things like sunlight and walks and porn substitutes for sex, and the list just goes on and on.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] I thought you were saying walking, sunlight, and porn. I was like-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Oh, right
- TFTim Ferriss
... "Now we're talking." Yeah, that sounds-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... the trifecta. [laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
But look at the, the m- so the, another related tweet I had is the modern devil is cheap dopamine. And some interesting people on Twitter pointed out to me, actually the ancient devil is cheap dopamine as well. And but-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- NRNaval Ravikant
... in, in modern times we've just hyper, hyper, uh, accelerated it. You know, the modern mind is overstimulated. The modern body is understimulated. We've just taken all the creature comforts and we've maximized them to 1,000 times. And so literally all of success in life boils down to a variation on the marshmallow test where, you know, can the kid like hold off on eating the marshmallow for 15 minutes in exchange they get two marshmallows. And the claim is it turns out to be a big predictor for future success, although like many psych experiments, I don't think it replicates well. Um, but anyway, so it, it just boils down to long term versus short term, and if you can just adopt long-term thinking in your mindset, you're just gonna have a much easier life. Or as our favorite trainer Jerzy Gregorek says, "Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life." That's it, right? So just can you take a long-term view in anything? Compound interest applies everywhere. It applies in relationships, it applies in money, it applies in health and fitness. Can you change your habits to read the kinds of books that you think will serve you best in the long term, the foundational books? Can you change your eating habits so that you're eating healthy food as opposed to unhealthy food? Can you create an exercise routine that you can do every day or every other day so that it's a consistent part of your life? And so I think a, a lot of it boils down to just Choosing the long term or the short term. And all the hacks, the good hacks basically help make the long-term choice palatable, or they help inspire you to kind of keep your eyes focused on the long term. So an example is if you're doing something that you love, if you're running a business that you enjoy, it is probably gonna be more fun than playing a video game. If you, if you come home at night from work and your first instinct is to play a video game, you're suffering at work. You're working just as hard on the video game, but the rewards are all fake because they're gonna change the rules on you or some 13-year-old kid on the internet will destroy you because they just play that video game all day long. And I used to be a hardcore video gamer. I had a lot of fun doing it, and I did learn playing games for sure. But, you know, at this point, at this age, I pick up a video game, I'm doing it to get away from suffering, and I'm not really getting anything out of it. I could play the video game of investing, or I could play the video game of starting companies, or I could play the video game of, you know, go and play tennis and that would be good for my health. So it's good to find... Uh, so, so I think a lot of it is about finding the thing that you can do that is fun for you that looks like play-- that feels like play to you, but looks like work to others that you can do that sustains you for the long term. So for example, in foods, what you wanna find is you wanna find what is the health food out there that other people consider healthy and is nutritionally healthy profile, but that I find tasty? Because if I can create those foods, if I can become a good cook and create great foods that I enjoy eating and I like them, and I can eat them regularly, but they're actually super healthy, that's amazing. That's a hack now. Now I'm eating for the long term, but I'm not giving up too much of the short-term pleasure. The same way being in a good relationship is, you know, is gonna beat watching porn. And having a good career or working an enjoyable job or hacking on some code that I enjoy is gonna be far more productive than playing a video game. I don't wanna sound preachy, but I will just say that as I-- my love for reading came from... Another one of my tweets is, "Read what you love until you love to read." So just fall in love with the idea of reading itself. So it's okay to read the junk food stuff. Just fall in love with reading, and eventually you get bored of the simple stuff, and you'll go to the more interesting stuff. And I love to read enough that I don't like watching TV. I don't watch movies. You know, people start talking about shows that they're watching on Netflix or what have you, and I give them this empty look. I don't watch shows on Netflix. They're not interesting. It's far more interesting to me to go for a walk and be meditative, and I'll be in a very happy place or to read a book which will be intellectually stimulating. And sure, once in a while watch a movie with friends or with, with my wife, but it's a social thing. You know, I'm doing it as a way of kinda sort of being on the same common ground as them. It's... I'm not-- I, I would never watch a movie on my own unless maybe I was trapped in, like, a 15-hour airplane flight, and I was really bored, and I ran out of everything else to do, and I just wanna zone out. Even then, I don't think I would watch a movie anymore. [laughs] So I, I just feel like a lot of it is, like, finding the hacks, finding the things that make the long term feel effortless to you, and then you win.
- TFTim Ferriss
Okay. Last, last question. First, a recommendation. If you ever do decide to watch something-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Sorry, before we finish that topic.
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, yes.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Very important, people. Find the people that it doesn't take work to be around. The best relationships don't feel like work. You make the other person happy being yourself. They make you happy by being themselves. Everyone's honest. No one's putting on an act they can't carry on for the next decade. Same thing with friendships. You know, the best friendships are friendships that were formed over nothing. It's not because you went to school. It's not because you studied on the same thing. It's not because you're working together. It's not because you enjoy rugby or, or s- uh, whatever. It's because your chemistry matches, your temperament is, is similar, and so you can be friends with this person for 30 years, 50 years. So the compound interest in relationships part ironically means that the best relationships, whether friendships or family or love, are the ones where you don't have to work too hard at them. So you don't have to sustain that workload for the rest of your life, and you can do it effortlessly.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, totally. Well, one of the-- one of your quotes that I think of often, and I might be paraphrasing this, is if you want to avoid conflict, rule number one is avoid people who are constantly involved with conflict, [laughs] right? I mean-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... something along those lines.
- NRNaval Ravikant
I mean, for example, when you're in a relationship, just watch how the other person treats their worst enemy because eventually they'll just redefine you as enemy [laughs] and you'll get to feel that behavior. So I think the number one criteria I look for in a, in a relationship is that person has to be kind. They just have to be a nice person. And because, uh, eventually they'll re... In a certain context, you can always be reclassified from friend to enemy. So you just wanna see the boundaries of someone's ethics. If you see someone being bad to a server or someone engaging in unethical behavior or suing other people or fighting other people all the time, it's only a matter of time before they fight you. So just stay away from these high-conflict people. Everyone has conflict. No one is clean. But that said, like, there are definitely people who engage in conflict and do it regularly, and they make it a part of their lifestyle. Just walk away. It's not worth it. There are plenty of-
- TFTim Ferriss
You've met-
- NRNaval Ravikant
... people who are low conflict and easy to get along with.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, low conflict, low maintenance, uh, who can also be brutally candid when necessary, right? Which doesn't equal high conflict.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Well, the, uh, one thing I've noticed, and I haven't written a tweet on this 'cause I've had a hard time figuring out how to say it, but the people that I wanna spend time around these days, when I look at what the common characteristic is, they're highly self-aware. They're very, very aware of themselves. They're not running on autopilot. They don't get angry easily. They don't get unhappy easily. They don't take themselves too seriously. They have a certain separation from their own thoughts and personality that prevents circumstances and their personality from overwhelming them. They don't have a victim mentality. They're not caught up in some story of what happened to them when they were younger. They've had those issues, for sure, but they've just gotten past them and been like, "I don't wanna be that person. I don't wanna be trapped in that mindset." They're not trying to signal all the time how important they are or who they know or what they've done.
- TFTim Ferriss
Or how virtuous they are.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Or how virtuous they are. They're not virtue signaling or bigoteering. They have low egos. Generally I can literally plot on a line the more self-aware somebody is, I guarantee you the more attractive that they are to a large t- number of people. And to, and to the degree that I've achieved any modicum of fame, and fame is a trap, and I'm gonna pay for this. I know I will pay for this. But any modicum of fame that I've achieved, I think is because I am one of the few people who has been successful in business that thinks out loud in public. And because I'm willing to think out loud in public, that's a risk that I take on. It improves my thinking, but other people say, "Oh yeah, he's somewhat self-aware. He's thinking about himself." Uh, and I think that helps inspire other people to also say, "Okay, it's okay for me to think about myself." And I just, I just find hanging around self-aware people is a lot easier than people who are running on autopilot, almost like NPCs.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm. NPCs. What does that mean?
- NRNaval Ravikant
Non-player characters.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- NRNaval Ravikant
It's a, it's a reference to certain kinds of video games where it's like a, a, a computer controlled character, right? They're predictable.
Episode duration: 2:01:35
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Transcript of episode HiYo14wylQw
