The Tim Ferriss Show - #473: Naval Ravikant on Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, Crypto Stablecoins, and Crypto Strategy

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Starting point is 00:05:41 Drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash tim last time drink ag1.com slash tim check it out 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 what is the appropriate time i'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim 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

Starting point is 00:06:25 going to get into a disclaimer around that. Naval Ravikant, you can find him at 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 slash Naval. Naval, welcome back to the show.

Starting point is 00:07:11 Yeah, thanks for having me. If I recall correctly, I was crushed on podcast of the year by Jamie Foxx. That's right. I need weaker competition this time around. If you could just tone it down this year, please. I will do my best. Yeah. Jamie, basically, I could have been a completely non-responsive critical care patient as long as the equipment functioned. Jamie Foxx is the consummate performer, so 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 to provide? I don't go on other people's podcasts anymore. I had to make an exception for you

Starting point is 00:07:51 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 honor your request to have me back. I generally don't do podcasts anymore or at least other people's podcasts for a couple of reasons. First is I just don't believe in sequels. I think sequels

Starting point is 00:08:09 suck, right? You look at sequels on in movies 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 going to 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 yet here we are the thing about sequels is they make money people want them uh people crave them because there's a certain

Starting point is 00:08:48 familiarity to it but hopefully we won't embarrass ourselves too much so yes 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 at least not at least not this year 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 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. Hilarious. He's right next to you. He's back. Cannot keep this guy down. So let's talk about your account. I find your account fascinating. I find your use

Starting point is 00:09:34 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. Yeah, that's Professor Richard Feynman, who was a pioneer in the field of quantum electrodynamics. He was part of the Manhattan Project.

Starting point is 00:10:00 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 feinman path integrals he was part of the manhattan project brilliant brilliant guy and i loved him because feinman 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.

Starting point is 00:10:35 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 was kind of, to me, he was like a full stack intellectual hacker of life. And it was just very inspirational to me as a kid growing up. You know, even though I read a lot of philosophy and, you know, just kind of normal nonfiction, my hero, and even though I'm in the business world, 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 substance and survival. And so I think scientists are still the most unsung heroes of

Starting point is 00:11:20 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. Feynman is a character, certainly he is a character, was a character, and a figure who has fascinated me for decades. And actually, 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, hey, I can show you some 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 other accolades, most notably some of the prizes that he was awarded that he seemed to

Starting point is 00:12:28 have particular dislike for on some level. Yeah, he famously said that science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. 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.

Starting point is 00:12:57 Like 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 it's true up or down or left or right, it's not science. It doesn't require belief. You should be able to challenge it at all times. It should make risky predictions that are not obvious, and those predictions should then be tested. And you shouldn't be able to, after the fact, move the goalposts or change how the predictions were set up.

Starting point is 00:13:25 And so those are the hallmarks of good science, falsifiability, independent verifiability, and making risky and narrow predictions with 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. So everything has become politics now. Now science has become politics too. People politicize it and there's big science, but I think Feynman would be very unhappy with that. 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 masquerades as science. It's almost becoming social science. And, you know, going to Twitter, like Nassim Taleb is one of my favorite Twitter follows,

Starting point is 00:14:07 even though he's a bit, you know. Cantankerous. Yeah, he's cantankerous. Yeah, he annoys people for sure. But, you know, you want to hear the truth, you got to be prepared 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. And I thought that was hilarious. But, you know, it hurts because there's some truth to

Starting point is 00:14:35 it. If there was no truth 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? Because we 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 going to find truth

Starting point is 00:15:13 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. Yeah. And the science with the capital s is dangerous very dangerous no it's just as you mentioned yeah it's propaganda it's and then it becomes like macroeconomics again another teleb line he says it's easier to macro bullshit than it's a micro bullshit and so big science is the equivalent of macroeconomics whereas the equivalent of microeconomics is little science which 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

Starting point is 00:15:54 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're reduced 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. But that's very hard to do. Now, no one can agree on who the smartest scientist is. So unfortunately, I think that

Starting point is 00:16:35 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 so on, and you can apply the scientific methods to those things, then I think that's the day we start to corrupt science, or at least the word science. So real science, you know, these days is relegated to a very small corner. You know, physics, maybe like molecular biology and chemistry,

Starting point is 00:17:03 mathematics, theory of computation computation but it's a fairly limited set yeah yeah very quantitatively uh literate friend of mine said at one point most of the disciplines that have science at the end of them are not actually science all the exceptions right so computer science computer science if it's hard neuroscience right 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 carl popper right it cannot be it cannot be proven or disproven using experiment at least that's. If there isn't some experiment that could theoretically disprove it, then it's not science.

Starting point is 00:17:49 Yeah, it's like Honest Abe's law firm, right? If he needs to put honest in the title, then you have to wonder. So the same way if you have to put science in the word, other than, as you said, computer science and neuroscience, you sort of have to wonder. Let's look at a couple of quotes from Feynman.

Starting point is 00:18:04 There are a few that I think about a lot, and these are on Goodreads. But number one, and I think this is really applicable with respect to science in media, particularly a term that bothers me a lot, which is studies prove or studies show, just like capital S science shows, which isn't really a thing. 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. This is a very deep point. 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 a difference between memorization and understanding. Understanding is a 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 just memorize, 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

Starting point is 00:19:13 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, 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. 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 basics are really important. That's the steel frame, the foundation for understanding that you need to get through life. And too much of it is reduced to memorization and understanding

Starting point is 00:20:02 things as names and as definitions. i think the feynman example is you know his dad would take him for walks and they would see birds and you know 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 It likes to pick at lice and 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? The name of the

Starting point is 00:20:40 bird is irrelevant. 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 because you'll understand underneath how the pieces are actually moving on the board as opposed to what they're called. And I just want to point out, developing that

Starting point is 00:21:25 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. I just want to underscore that this is not 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. Well, just run a business. Run Unlimited Stand. It'll teach you better accounting than out of a textbook. Now, you may need to learn certain conventions because you need those to communicate

Starting point is 00:22:13 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 is going to take all the jobs. Well,

Starting point is 00:22:54 no, because 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? Or what does that mean? It would very quickly fall apart. So you always want to strive for understanding, not for memorization. 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 good news is you don't have to understand that many things. You know, while we're on the topic of Feynman, one of the quotes from him is he says, like, you know, nature uses only the longest threads to weave her tapestry. 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

Starting point is 00:23:33 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.

Starting point is 00:23:51 So 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 kind of 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 example i study and read physics and computer science just for

Starting point is 00:24:09 entertainment i don't there's no practical application for me but there's this really interesting theory i was reading about called solomonoff induction and it's basically formalizes occam's razor which is that the shortest answer is the correct one. But it's more advanced than that. But it basically says, like, if you want to 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 short they are, how likely they are. And then that gives you the probability, that kind of gives you 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 want to understand why this

Starting point is 00:24:54 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 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, which to me is fascinating. It just shows how much of what we look at as complexity actually emerges from a set of very simple rules. And it's just fascinating.

Starting point is 00:25:41 So understanding is a thing to strive for, not the words. So even though I use the fancy words like Solomon of induction and Feynman's path integral theory, whatever the heck it's called, I don't even know what the actual name is. The name is irrelevant. It's the concept that's fascinating. You spoke to learning accounting

Starting point is 00:25:59 through building a business. Let's segue to business. Your pin 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 44.8 thousand retweets, 110 plus thousand favorites. We're not going to 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

Starting point is 00:26:29 people would pay more attention to? Because there are many different pieces of advice in this thread. That tweet storm is a series of principles that I kind of wrote for myself in my head when I was 13 and I was trying to figure out how to make money. And I kind of came 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 because I think there's kind of this, 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 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

Starting point is 00:27:13 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 you have freedom. So to me, the purpose of money is freedom. And for that, you live where you want and you have freedom. So to me, the purpose of money is freedom. And 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 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. Not that I'm in their status of 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.

Starting point is 00:27:53 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 140 characters too, so it was harder. But I just woke up one night when I've 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. Obviously, that is just a very high-level, very Zen-cone-like or haiku-like or even Hallmark card-like framework. 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? And actually, Naval, let me pause to just read a few of them. This is from May 31, 2018. So a few

Starting point is 00:28:37 examples, and you don't have to comment on these specific examples, but just for people who haven't seen this, I want to 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. That one right there is the most important one, which is 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,

Starting point is 00:29:17 and specific knowledge, 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 their returns will accrue to you, especially in this highly digital world where we live in, where the cost of distributing something is very close to zero. And so what you kind of want to do is you want to productize yourself into a business and then you want to own that business. That is the way to make wealth. A clear example is the Tim Ferriss podcast and the Tim Ferriss brand, right?

Starting point is 00:29:50 It's an eponymous brand. Your name is on it. You're leveraged through this podcast and through the books that you write 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 ferris 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 ferris 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 a partner in a private business. You could be an employee of a startup where you

Starting point is 00:30:28 have stock options. But if you don't own a piece of a business, it's going to 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 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's the moment when you see things that they clearly are, and you kind of don't like what you see. Like, for example, if you and your spouse have been fighting for a long time, you know, you've kind of been sweeping under the rug and you've sort of been suffering along, but you're sweeping under the rug and then you get divorced.

Starting point is 00:31:09 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. 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,

Starting point is 00:31:38 if you went and you got a PhD in a social science, now I'm basically saying, hey, learn the code. You're going to avoid that. You're not going to want to see that because you have all this sunk cost in the degree. So I think a lot of people don't want to 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

Starting point is 00:31:57 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 want to be the old rich guy. I want to be the young rich guy. So I think these are the hard parts. The hard parts are not the learning,

Starting point is 00:32:23 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 want to acknowledge that. And I'm guilty of that too. That's just human nature. I'm not faulting anybody for it, but it's just human nature. 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% of your returns.

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Starting point is 00:33:50 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 roller coaster ride. Let the professionals do the work for you. Go to wealthfront.com slash 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 slash Tim. Wealthfront will automate your investments for the long term, and you can get started today at wealthfront.com slash Tim. And if we look at your specific case as it relates to equity, you mentioned owning part of a business. You also mentioned in this conversation,

Starting point is 00:34:36 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 most in your own life? Because you've created wealth, not just through say your equity and angel list, but also through many successful investments. And then I'm sure there are other ways that we could identify wealth as coming from your path. Yeah. What I like about my path is that I've made money doing a lot of different little things. So I've made money consistently in sort of small to medium-sized chunks.

Starting point is 00:35:29 I haven't had like one gigantic payday that set me up forever. Although it depends on your standards, right? I'm talking about my 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 there are completely different kinds of investments and endeavors, but consistent in that I get one every couple of years. I just want to interject for a second, which would seem to suggest that there are principles guiding your approaches or some systematic approaches, right? Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:36:00 Therefore, you're not relying on winning the Powerball lottery or that equivalent. No, not at all. No, there's no lottery here to win. The lottery is for losers. Lotteries are just attacks on people who can't do math. Get-rich-quick schemes are just other people getting rich off of you. There are no shortcuts. 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,

Starting point is 00:36:43 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. I've also done it by investing early on in public markets and cryptocurrencies and starting funds and all kinds of things. But I don't, it's funny, I don't really follow my own principles anymore. Like, 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

Starting point is 00:37:18 for anything because I'm not trying to make money anymore. To me, making money is like you become the kind of person that makes money. And you put yourself in long-term situations where you're always going to 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. They're very capable people.

Starting point is 00:37:39 And it just makes it easy to do things. So I've set up that infrastructure. Now the money just kind of makes itself as I go about my life. I don't want to have to work hard. I don't want to have to roll out of bed at a certain time. I don't 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. I wake up at 7, 8, 9, 10 a.m. I go to sleep at 2, 3 a.m. I don't work a lot of days.

Starting point is 00:38:13 Some days I work morning to night, but it's just based on whatever I'm curious about. I never want to have to answer to a boss. No one's ever going to tell me what to do. I don't want to order people around. I don't want to have someone reporting to me and kind of asking me all the time what to do. I want peer relationships. I want to flow. I want to be able to do business while walking in a forest, talking on a cell phone or sitting in a meeting or in front of a computer, or I want to be on a beach 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

Starting point is 00:38:53 massive force multiplier, through code, capital, community, labor, what have you. So if you're smart and you kind of 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, just sit around reading most of the time,

Starting point is 00:39:29 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.

Starting point is 00:39:53 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 practicing my craft. Well, let's talk about a few of your missives. Missives is probably not the right word. Yeah, I'm not telling you anything. I'm not trying to persuade anyone of anything. So if people don't like it, some people get triggered on Twitter and they start arguing. It's like, just leave. Just don't listen to it. The one I'm going to read would be a great one for people to get really upset about, or I would find it comical to look at the comments of people who

Starting point is 00:40:34 are upset. But 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? What was behind it? And then have you seen anxious people become largely, I guess, unanxious or non-anxious people? Most of my tweets are not very deliberate or thought through. What's happening is I've been thinking about some concept for months, years, whatever. It's been percolating. And then all of a sudden, it'll come to me in one pithy sentence where I'm like, oh,

Starting point is 00:41:15 this is how 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.

Starting point is 00:41:43 It takes care of your money problems, but it's not necessarily going to 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, you know, working is a big word. I don't, I don't even want to say I've been working on my mental state and I have, you know, working is a big word. I don't, I don't even want to 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 want to do that because it'll take away my ambition.

Starting point is 00:42:15 I want to succeed right now. And so I've thought about that a fair bit. And is that true or not? Well, it's 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, if I wasn't as anxious, because anxiety is, you know, comes from fear. And it's hard to do the counterfactual, obviously, if I wasn't as anxious because anxiety comes from fear

Starting point is 00:42:46 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.

Starting point is 00:43:01 It's a rare human being who isn't anxious. And it makes sense. We're alpha predators. We took over this earth and domesticated or killed all the time. It's a rare human being who isn't anxious. And it makes sense. We're alpha predators. 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.

Starting point is 00:43:28 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 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

Starting point is 00:43:57 warriors, right? Like 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's incredibly still, then swipes with a 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, the guy who wins the gunfight is the one who

Starting point is 00:44:31 doesn't flinch. He's just keeping his cool while he's loading his gun and shooting. He's not 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 realized this myself recently where I was in a conflict situation in business. It was a high conflict situation. It was unfortunate. I think we've solved it.

Starting point is 00:44:54 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 how kind of worked up I was the entire time, intense and didn't get much sleep. But this time I was incredibly calm

Starting point is 00:45:15 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 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 going to 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. So let's talk about attribution here. To what would you attribute the, and I know that it's difficult to isolate

Starting point is 00:46:03 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. It's like, dad, I'm suffering from a lot of anxiety. What should I do? Or you observe it and you want to help your kid out. What types of recommendations would you make or might you make? 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 of all in high conflict experience round two? 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. Like you, I've had some psychedelic

Starting point is 00:46:48 experiences, but those are very far back in the past, 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, 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 said like an unexamined life is not worth living i forget who said that quote

Starting point is 00:47:29 something like that yeah but it's a aristotle socrates 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. 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?

Starting point is 00:48:10 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, those conversations you're having in your head all the time, that is your world. That is the world you live in. That's the worldview you have. That's the lenses you see through. And that's going to determine

Starting point is 00:48:49 the quality of your life more than anything else. And if you want to 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 the sit down like 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 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, but they're provoking anxiety. And what you think of

Starting point is 00:49:30 as the anxiety that's kind of 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 a 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 It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to reestablish boundaries with family members and with colleagues.

Starting point is 00:50:10 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. Or at least parts of it, not necessarily whole cloth. So let's ask,

Starting point is 00:50:35 let's dive into meditation because 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. I don't know if that's still the case, but could you describe the practice a bit? Because it was

Starting point is 00:51:19 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 do in normal life, but it was pretty profound. So could you describe the current practice, which may be different from what I experienced? Yeah, I actually have two different things that I do. And I almost hate calling it meditation 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

Starting point is 00:52:01 routinely sort of becomes its own trap and is not going to get you anywhere. It just becomes like another spiritual high, another checkbox, right? 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 of doing it consistently? Actually, I'll say 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. Which ones? Schopenhauer,auer maxims who are we talking about 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

Starting point is 00:52:38 that makes me like him even more um krishnamurti i don't know kapil Kapil Gupta, Rupert Spira. I mean, it's all over the place. Anthony DeMello, he's fantastic, actually. I'm going to start with one book, start with Anthony DeMello's Way to Love or his book Awareness. They're both really good. But there's a ton of them. I basically read a lot of philosophers, Siddhartha, Vasistha's Yoga,

Starting point is 00:52:59 Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching. You know, I'm always going through one of these books at any given time and usually rereading for inspiration. And I'll read these at night. Usually there'll be one or two things I'll catch on to. I'll reflect on it before I go to sleep. So that is a form of self-examination. And 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 going to be aware of my thoughts kind of way. But just realizing that a lot of these thoughts that come up are unbidden.

Starting point is 00:53:38 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? Is he just being paranoid now? Is he being crazy? What are his underlying motivations? And after a while, when you see it, you start seeing through your own BS. You start seeing how you're mainly just justifying whatever the heck you want to 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 going to get you laid or any of these various things. When you're doing that reflection, is it sitting at a table, pen and paper? Is it sitting in a half lotus with your eyes closed? No, it's literally just walking around. It's just walking around.

Starting point is 00:54:30 It's just life 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 so I've just found that to be a useful 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.

Starting point is 00:55:07 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 paranoia 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,

Starting point is 00:55:42 I choose these thoughts and I want to 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 meditating. And on that one, I learned from an Indian gentleman, 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 or the so-called runner's high equivalent 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

Starting point is 00:56:23 morning 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 or 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 you want 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.

Starting point is 00:56:51 You don't resist it. You don't argue with it. You don't double down on it. You just kind of 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 epiphanies. You will make changes to your life.

Starting point is 00:57:10 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

Starting point is 00:57:23 and your mind is relatively clear. And just your anxiety level goes down. 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:57:40 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.

Starting point is 00:57:59 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.

Starting point is 00:58:14 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

Starting point is 00:58:45 way to fail at it. Literally, all you have to do is just sit down and close your eyes and just give yourself a break for an hour every day. Just take the time off from the world. Few follow-ups. Krishnamurti, do you have 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 yeah i actually don't like starting with krishnamurti he's a tough one but if you're going to start somewhere i started with this 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 is a fake guru and all that but he

Starting point is 00:59:31 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 classics, the Bhagavad Gita, get a good translation. Stephen Miller, I think, has a good translation. 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 Councils and Maxims. You know, these are smart people self-reflecting. But overall,

Starting point is 01:00:05 the point is not to read. The point is to inspire so that you yourself can reflect. Kapil Gupta is an accountant on Twitter. He has a couple of great books. Direct Truth is a fantastic book, you know, written very recently and pulls no punches. But, 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.

Starting point is 01:00:37 If they do not have utility to you, if they don't make your life better, then drop it. It's useless. I will also second the reading of philosophy, and this is not for kind of idle or abstract, like semantic tail chasing, right? It's 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 alleviates some of the manufactured emergency and urgency

Starting point is 01:01:22 of the bullshit that is foisted upon us by every possible input. Oh yeah, 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 want to pull you in where even non-participation is not allowed anymore.

Starting point is 01:01:54 Neutral bystanders are not allowed. So it's a crazy world out there. There's a circus going on with the monkeys flinging feces at each other, and they want to drag you into the fight. Really, what you want to focus on is what's timeless. Timeless is great. You know, the old questions all have old answers and they're best consumed from the old

Starting point is 01:02:12 practitioners because they were very clear minded about it. They weren't busy trying to fit into the politics of this time. They're fitting to the politics of that time, but that's lost to us now. So actually another great source is I have your Tao of Seneca series in Audible and I listen to it on repeat when I'm working out a lot. So that's a very good thing. Yeah, there's letters to Lucilius. Amazing, amazing stuff. And every time I go through it, I learn something new. Yeah, the Tao of Seneca, the moral letters to Lucilius, if people want to

Starting point is 01:02:39 look 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 I've produced. And you can find the PDFs for free online as well. Let's talk about some brass tack stuff, since I think people will be very interested. You mentioned monkeys throwing feces, tribalism. In 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 is just from the last few days. And it is crypto stable coins. Dash choose

Starting point is 01:03:35 between blow up risk, censorship risk and fraud risk. What are crypto stable coins? And what does this tweet mean? Yeah, just backing up for a second. I think cryptocurrencies are probably one of the greatest inventions 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.

Starting point is 01:04:00 But generally, the reason technology works is because it creates its own frontier. It is a digital frontier that is being created, not 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 money industrial complex that runs a lot of our economy

Starting point is 01:04:35 and runs a lot of Washington, DC, 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 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. One second, let me just pause to say that at one point, you and I did a very thorough

Starting point is 01:05:17 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 history and basics of some of the crypto. Yeah, Nick is a bona fide genius and a pioneer in the space. He also has a great blog called Unenumerated that I highly recommend. But anyway, so 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 so much 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 electronically over the internet. It's easily divisible and verifiable down to its authenticity is very verifiable, where gold is hard to do.

Starting point is 01:06:04 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 this 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, 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 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

Starting point is 01:06:43 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 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 defy 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 yeah governments

Starting point is 01:07:22 love that yeah exactly we're we're seeing a whole new casino that's better than Wall Street 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, you know, there's math and algorithms and code underneath that, not Goldman Sachs front running your trades or whatever. Not that I'm saying they do, but, you know, there's Flash Boys and kind of all that kind of craziness that goes on. And you can program it to do things and to make bets or hedges or 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 want

Starting point is 01:08:03 to take on the volatility of these cryptocurrencies. So we've created these things called stable coins, 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 is electronic and digital and controlled by computers in the cloud so these stable coins have come along that mimic the value of the u.s dollar and the best known ones are tether usdc which is coin basis coin and uh andDAI, which is an algorithmically stable coin.

Starting point is 01:08:48 But there's no free lunch in life. Hold on for one second. 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...

Starting point is 01:09:00 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 worth a dollar all the time. So if you want to hold a dollar in crypto land, the way you're actually doing underneath is you have crypto and crypto is incredibly volatile. And you're trying to convert a volatile asset into a stable asset. So there has to be a cost for that. saying is that the three main categories of stable coins 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 kind of take their word for it. Underneath, meaning they would have actual physical dollars, like you'd have physical gold. Correct. Yeah. So for every Tether they issue you, they claim to have a dollar dollars, much like you would have physical gold. Correct.

Starting point is 01:10:07 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 not saying there is. I have no evidence, but 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

Starting point is 01:10:23 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 is basically been seized. You're no longer decentralized and sovereign like you are with Bitcoin. And the last kind of risk is a blow-up 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 ethereum won't move so drastically if the peg breaks and you lose money on your so-called stable coin it's just

Starting point is 01:11:01 it's just an observation there's no free. And so if you're trying to create 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 free crypto stable dollars or they're getting the stability aspect for free, but they're not. They're either taking on fraud risk or censorship risk or blow-up risk or some combination of them. So if you're advising, and this is not financial advice, this is just two friends talking, obviously, for informational purposes only. But if you're talking to a friend who has a fair amount of savings or investable capital, and they say,

Starting point is 01:11:40 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's such a broad spectrum of options. It's still, even though it's been simplified a lot, crypto is still quite confusing. It's very complicated. To people who are very smart, I would consider, it's still quite confusing.

Starting point is 01:12:01 Incredibly confusing. Yeah, it's a domain of mathematicians, hackers, tech entrepreneurs, and a few people who really dig in but it's still too hard to handle man it's just 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 be dangerous you don't hold it because you would be i'd be a risk yeah exactly it's a bearer asset so you know you don't want to bear a bearer asset. You have to put it inside vaults, you know, the equivalent of the Goldman Sachs in this space. So like they're custodians, like Anchorage is, you know, an amazing one. There's BitGo, there's Coinbase.

Starting point is 01:12:37 So there are these large custodians or Coinlist, which is a company I helped start, 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 on your laptop, which is kind of crazy and risky and hard. You can do it through a hardware wallet, like a Ledger or Trezor, which are pretty well-known hardware wallets, where you have a small specific device that's designed just for carrying crypto. But you have to understand you're replacing the banking system. You're literally replacing the government, all the guns and the police that back up the banking system.

Starting point is 01:13:20 You're replacing all that and all the control that comes with it. So, of course 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 going to 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 going to call me every day and say should i sell should i sell you don't know that it's a really really important right so you have you have to fundamentally understand it yourself so i would say the first thing is go down the crypto rabbit

Starting point is 01:13:53 hole listen to the interview we did with nick sabo 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. Go buy it at a CoinList or a Coinbase or what have you. Figure out which custodian you want to use. Put it somewhere safe, probably in the cloud, unless you really know what you're doing.

Starting point is 01:14:19 And 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 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.

Starting point is 01:14:49 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 all the various excuses that they're going to use to print money i mean 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 currency status with the dollar, where most of our dollars, I think something like 70%, are held by foreigners because of 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 kind of the world. They use it for trading oil. They use it for settling international transfers.

Starting point is 01:15:26 They use it just to kind of 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 US government's kind of figured this out and we printed $6 trillion to fight the coronavirus.

Starting point is 01:15:45 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? And so unfortunately, that's just the situation we're in so they're going to 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 these other currencies are in worse situations but that's not necessarily

Starting point is 01:16:22 always true i think there are well-managed currencies like the Swiss franc and the Singaporean dollar. There's also hard assets like gold and crypto and real estate and even the run-up in tech stocks at some levels because equities are a tax-efficient inflation hedge or a relatively tax-efficient inflation hedge because someone like Google can just raise prices

Starting point is 01:16:43 and they don't have to hire more people because they're a monopoly. They can lay off half their engineers and the company will work just fine. So people are realizing this and there's 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 U.S. 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. Money used to be gold back, and that went away. So it's not inconceivable that'll happen. And if it were to

Starting point is 01:17:23 happen, then you would basically have the true reckoning. Then our ability to print our way out of recessions would go away. You would probably have an inflationary collapse in the US. And you would just see kind of our global economic system start breaking down. In those scenarios, crypto does really well, assuming the internet stays up, right? There are scenarios where the internet goes down too, and then all hell breaks loose and you better have golden guns, but we're not talking about that. It depends. Cigarettes and tampons to trade for your water. Yeah, that's right. Well, bullets are the ultimate one, right? As we also see in 2020, when we have 5 million

Starting point is 01:17:56 new gun owners in the US. But it just depends how much of a prepper you are, how paranoid you want to be and how many standard deviations out you want to 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. 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 guy pointing at the bird who thinks he's got it all figured out because he's able to name the yellow-throated warbler. I don't think I have it all figured out. But let's just say I managed somehow, like a thousand monkeys typing out Shakespeare on a million laptops given infinite time, I somehow managed to get a bunch of cryptocurrency onto a hardware ledger,

Starting point is 01:18:47 right? Or a hardware wallet, rather. So I have this thing, US is going to hell in a handbasket. I somehow managed to get that to fill in the blank. I'll just arbitrarily choose Spain. I 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?

Starting point is 01:19:19 Do you know what I mean? Like even smart people can't quite figure it out. But how would you you if that were two years in the future i mean i think that's unlikely but let's just say uh yeah for most of my friends this 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 bitco um then you kind of hold it there now if the shit is hitting the fan and you decide you want to get out of town, then you contact your rep there, you move it into a hardware

Starting point is 01:19:50 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. Or you can go find any of the local Bitcoin meetup people in 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 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

Starting point is 01:20:36 you can convert it. 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 5,000 or 50,000 wealthy, brilliant people. That wealthy part is really important. They will always trade it with you for hard assets.

Starting point is 01:21:04 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. He figured out what it was, and then he was just like, I want to get as much as possible. So here, take pieces of my company, but give me Bitcoin. And 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.

Starting point is 01:21:36 Because what is a currency 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 the 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 agree that clamshells were money, the world would switch to clamshells. Now, obviously, there are underlying characteristics that make euros and dollars better than clamshells. 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

Starting point is 01:22:08 belief and the beauty of bitcoin is that there are these 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 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, because if anything, more and more people are being added to that list every day. It has real value and it has redeemable value. What do you think the conceivable near term looks like with the possible entrance of more institutional investors? In other words, if we see, let me ask a better question.

Starting point is 01:23:01 It was very noteworthy and newsworthy when Paul Tudor Jones wrote his memo detailing why he was investing, I think it was something like 100 million, into Bitcoin or Bitcoin-like equivalents, some type of crypto equivalent, if not crypto itself. Do you anticipate that more institutionals are going to come in, sovereign wealth funds, things like that? And how do you think the story and the landscape could change over the next handful of years? I think it's inevitable. Look, Bitcoin and crypto still have risks, right? A lot of these algorithms and schemes are new. Even Bitcoin through its proof of work mechanism, you could argue that it tends towards centralization because it gets managed by these anonymous miners and data centers and data centers

Starting point is 01:23:48 of economies of scale. And so it will end up being more centralized than people would like. There are up-and-coming competitors like Ethereum. There's privacy issues. On the Bitcoin blockchain, you can be tracked forever. So it's not perfect. People talk about quantum computing breaking it. I don't think that's true i think you can upgrade the encryption algorithm you know just as well or better but there are always potential problems right which are not completely resolved but every time we face one of these reckonings and that problem gets resolved the value goes up the story becomes stronger and so the same way when paul tudor Jones or MicroStrategy buy Bitcoin, the story is becoming stronger. The set of believers is increasing, the validation is increasing,

Starting point is 01:24:29 and now more people can come in and hang their hat on this and say, okay, if Paul Tudor Jones agrees and Michael Saylor agrees, then I agree to be in that set of people who believe that this is going to be the new way to store value and wealth. And so now I'm joining their wealth storage scheme. And the early people then get rewarded for it. So one way to think about Bitcoin in particular is, or even actually any of the cryptocurrencies is it's a Swiss bank account. But it's a Swiss bank account with finite space. And if you want shelf space in that Swiss bank account with finite space, you have to buy out one of the existing holders in that space.

Starting point is 01:25:06 So imagine a Swiss bank account that's impregnable. It's a new one. No government can break into it. It's secured by consensus across millions of people using massive computation power around the globe. And if you want one of those safety deposit box, you got to buy it from someone who's already there. So as long as the demand for new people trying to get in the Swiss bank account is greater than the supply of people who are trying to get out of that Swiss bank account, then you're going to pay more for that box. And that's where the speculative power of it comes from. And I think it's going to take a good crisis to really see what crypto is worth.

Starting point is 01:25:39 And actually, so far, it's been weird because... Yeah, the people have said that crypto failed the crisis test with covet right i mean it did and didn't what it didn't do was it didn't skyrocket right it didn't like go you know bitcoin didn't go to 100k as everybody fled the u.s dollar but that kind of shows you how resilient the dollar is and how far we are from losing global reserve currency status but at the same time it didn't collapse either you know it didn't go down it went down briefly as people needed cash to meet various margin calls and loans, but overall stayed very stable.

Starting point is 01:26:10 And I would say the number of people who have gotten involved in crypto recently as a true wealth protection mechanism is the largest I've ever seen. So I do think that the holder base has gone up. I don't know if we're going to see real $3,000 Bitcoin ever again in my lifetime. We might see zero if something breaks completely. But I don't think we're going to see like a, you know, a bunch of people leaving and losing faith in it. And that's why it goes to 3k. Bitcoin tends to hit these highs, then crash back down to a plateau, hang out in a plateau for a while and then go back to a new high. And I kind of feel like we're, you know, around the 10k level, who knows, I don't want to make price predictions,

Starting point is 01:26:46 but, you know, I feel like there's a stronger base of holders now than there has ever been. So each one of these people comes and validates it. You know, Paul Tudor Jones validates it for other hedge fund managers. Hedge fund managers validate it for sovereign wealth funds. Sovereign wealth funds, you know, will validate it for central banks.

Starting point is 01:27:01 Eventually, some country out there is going to say, actually, we inflated our currency too much, our currency collapsed, nobody trusts us anymore. We have to adopt a new national currency instead of pegging to the dollar, let's peg to Bitcoin, or let's use Bitcoin, or let's use some other cryptocurrency. Or let's be clever and buy up a bunch of Bitcoin and then announce we're going to use Bitcoin and then Bitcoin will skyrocket, we're all rich, right? So I think there are other scenarios where it ends up being a lot more valuable, but it's going to be stumbling steps forward and backward.

Starting point is 01:27:31 It's not going to be like necessarily, you know, in one fell swoop until it is, right? That's the nature of black swans. You can't predict them. When it happens, it happens suddenly. Like I had a friend who used to tell me, he's now a hardcore Bitcoin. It's funny.

Starting point is 01:27:43 He actually helped write a book on Bitcoin now. But when I first talked to him about Bitcoin years and years ago, he said, what's the big deal? He's like, if I ever have to flee the country, I'll just buy Bitcoin then. And I said, yeah, when you have to flee the country, your entire fortune is going to buy you one Bitcoin, right? That's the problem. It's scarce.

Starting point is 01:28:00 It's supply and demand. So it's like anything else, a store of value. It's a hedge. You can't wait till the last second. And I do think more and more smart people are coming into it every single day. And I think the psychological dynamics of crypto volatility are a lot like

Starting point is 01:28:19 a casino slot machine, right? This variable reward with high variability where you just see things spiking and dropping and then they stay flat and then they spike and they drop in a way that is unlike most equities that you or i would buy on the public market even wall street at some level is this big casino with a potential positive expected value and creating some value for society in terms of hedging and liquidity for companies raising money and so on uh and crypto is doing the same thing.

Starting point is 01:28:45 It's a global 24-7, 365 casino where anybody in the world can play. But through decentralized finance underneath, you're actually making loans, you're protecting wealth, you're storing it, you're letting people buy derivatives, you're letting people hedge.

Starting point is 01:28:59 So all of these things are coming up. We now have insurance in the crypto markets. We now have lending in the crypto markets. now have lending in the crypto markets we have shorting in the crypto markets uh you know we have computation going on that requires crypto underneath look if if two computers are talking to each other if two mini ais are talking to each other and high speed uh exchanging resources to run a company how are they going to exchange money you think they're going to send us dollars through paypal or through fedwire hell no they're going to use crypto crypto they going to exchange money? You think they're going to send US dollars through PayPal or through Fedwire? Hell no, they're going to use crypto. Crypto is the native currency of the internet. Of course, the internet is going to have its own currency. Otherwise,

Starting point is 01:29:34 like saying like the internet is going to use email through the USPS, US Postal Service, it's going to have its own native on-chain, on-wire protocol for communicating data. And so what cryptocurrencies really are, Bitcoin isn't a thing. Bitcoin is not like there's a coin sitting somewhere. Bitcoin is an entry in a ledger. What? Yeah, exactly. No, I'm kidding.

Starting point is 01:29:55 I'm kidding. It's an entry in a virtual ledger. And that virtual ledger is maintained by tons of machines running across the world. And what you're doing is you're communicating value securely across the internet with no third parties in the middle validating that that is the correct communication. It's done by the entire network at once. And you're communicating and transmitting scarcity and value to the internet. And that's a new thing. What the internet gave us before was digital abundance. I can make copies of everything. And that was a very big idea.

Starting point is 01:30:27 I can make one podcast and ship it to everybody. I can make one webpage and ship it to everybody. That was a very big idea and created huge fortunes and huge revolutions. The same way digital scarcity is an equally interesting idea, which is I can only have one of this thing. If Naval has a Bitcoin, then Tim Ferriss doesn't have that Bitcoin or vice versa. That ability to create scarcity and transmit scarcity and value through the internet

Starting point is 01:30:50 is just as important as the ability to create abundance and transmit that through the internet. And so the native language of the internet in communications and protocols around valuable things and on finance is going to be in cryptocurrencies. It's not going to be any other way. So I want to bring up two more tweets, and then we can bring this to a close and put a bow on it. First, I just want to mention again, and I very rarely do this, but I'm very happy with how this discussion turned out. If people want more of the history and the design

Starting point is 01:31:25 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 going to 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. I mean, that is the entire challenge uh which is long-term thinking gets you long-term results uh and i've said this a thousand different ways in business you want to play long-term games with long-term people in your modern life and and addictions and kind of just dealing with the avalanche of all the the abundance of things that are thrown at you that are really

Starting point is 01:32:22 traps like video games are trapped there there'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 i thought you were saying walking sunlight and porn i was like we're Yeah, that sounds about the trifecta. So the 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. But in modern times, we've just hyper, hyper accelerated it.

Starting point is 01:33:01 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 a thousand times. And so literally all the 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 to 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 but anyway so 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 going to have a much easier life or as our favorite trainer jersey gregorik says hard choice is easy life easy choice is hard life that's it

Starting point is 01:33:41 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 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's probably going to be more fun than playing a video game. If you come home at night from work and your first instinct is to play a video game, you're suffering at work.

Starting point is 01:34:37 You're working just as hard in the video game. But the rewards are all fake because they're going to 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, 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 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. 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

Starting point is 01:35:19 sustains you for the long term. So for example, in foods, what you want to find is you want to 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 going to beat watching porn and having a good career or working an enjoyable job or hacking on some code that I enjoy is going to be far more productive than playing a video game.

Starting point is 01:36:00 I don't want to sound preachy, but I will just say that as 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 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

Starting point is 01:36:38 stimulating. And sure, once in a while, watch a movie with friends or with my wife, but it's a social thing. You know, I'm doing it as a way of being on the same common ground as them. I would never watch a movie on my own unless maybe I was trapped in a 15-hour airplane flight and I was really bored and I ran out of everything else to do, and I just want to zone out. Even then, I don't think I would watch a movie anymore. So I just feel like a lot of it is finding the hacks, finding the things that make the long-term feel effortless to you, and then you win. Okay. Last question. First recommendation, if you ever do decide to watch something- Sorry, before we finish that topic, very important on people. Find the people that

Starting point is 01:37:17 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 whatever. It's because your chemistry matches. Your temperament 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

Starting point is 01:37:54 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. Yeah, totally. Well, 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 right i mean something along those lines 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 and you'll get to feel that behavior. So I think the number one criteria I look for in a relationship is that person has to be kind. They just have to be a nice person. And because eventually they'll,

Starting point is 01:38:35 in a certain context, you can always be reclassified from friend to enemy. So you just want to 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, there are definitely people who engage in conflict and do it regularly, and they make it a part of their lifestyle. Just walk away.

Starting point is 01:39:07 It's not worth it. There are plenty of people who are low-conflict and easy to get along with. Yeah, low-conflict, low-maintenance, who can also be brutally candid when necessary, right, which doesn't equal high-conflict. Well, one thing I've noticed, and I haven't written a tweet on this because I've had a hard time figuring out how to say it, but the people that I want to 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.

Starting point is 01:39:45 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 want to be that person. I don't want to 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 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 number of people. And to the degree

Starting point is 01:40:26 that I've achieved any modicum of fame, and fame is a trap, and I'm going to 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. And I think that helps inspire other people to also say, okay, it's okay for me to think about myself. And I just find hanging around self-aware people is a lot easier than people who are running on autopilot,

Starting point is 01:41:05 almost like NPCs. NPCs. What does that mean? Non-player characters. It's a reference to certain kinds of video games where it's like a computer-controlled character, right? They're predictable. I got it.

Starting point is 01:41:20 All right, so speaking of games, this is the final tweet in the podcast. Here it is. The reason to win the game is so that you can be free of it. And my questions about this are, I'll read it one more time. The reason to win the game is so that you can be free of it. I would be curious to know what game you are free of or what game you're playing so that you can be free of it? I like to think I'm free of almost all the games at this point. What are the games? All of life is games, right? You start out with the family game, you do the school game, the grades game, the getting girlfriends and boyfriends game, the getting married game, the having kids game,

Starting point is 01:42:00 the making money game, the having a career game, the getting famous game, the dressing well game. You know, it's so much of a social games. There are a few that are not games like meditation. You're not doing if you're scoring points in meditation, you're doing it wrong. Yoga. These are single player games, right? So it's really the multiplayer games are the ones that suck you into society and into anxiety.

Starting point is 01:42:22 Now, you kind of have to play them. You have two choices towards peace in your life. One is you can play these games and you can win them. And when you win them, this is the hard part, realizing you've won and stop playing new ones or setting new goals for yourself that are even higher and higher. It's like my friends who have made so much money

Starting point is 01:42:39 and they continue, all they try to do is make money and they just don't seem very happy about it. It's fine if they're happy. Elon Musk seems like he's having a grand old time. That's fine, but if it's making you miserable, and you continue doing it, and you only have one life, and you kind of can't see past that, then I would argue you're playing the game too far.

Starting point is 01:42:58 So there's kind of two ways out of the trap. One is not wanting something is as good as having it. I think it was Lad shabbo said this on twitter i thought it was really good or there's a recent socrates quote that i retweeted where he was taken to uh the story is he was taken to a market back in ancient greece and it was full of luxurious and fine items and he said there are so many things that i do not want right and it was he looked at all these fineries said so many things here that i do not want, right? And it was, he looked at all these fineries and said, so many things here that I do not want. And I thought that is freedom. That is power. That

Starting point is 01:43:29 is self-contained. That is a person who has found himself and needs nothing outside of himself. That is so inspirational. So the same way I look upon the world and I say, well, I could just say that, right? You can't just say that. If I just said, there's so many things that I don't want, it's not true. I want the money. I want the girl. I wanted the fame or I wouldn't have gone on podcasts and I wouldn't be on Twitter. At some level, that is true. So obviously, there's certain things that I want. I'm not a monk. I'm not living in an ashram. But what I can do is I've gotten the things that I want and I'm careful not to want more. I don't want more fame. I don't want more money.

Starting point is 01:44:06 If I get it, it's fine. It's part of the craft, part of the bonus, you know, so I have to be careful about what I, about not unconsciously taking on new desires. If I'm taking on a new desire, I better go fulfill that. So these are all just games that I'm playing and, you know, you got to play some game. You're on this planet, you're alive. You might as well play something. Now the question is, what game do you play and how do you get out of the game so you're

Starting point is 01:44:27 not just trapped playing that game forever? And one way is you choose your games very carefully. If you're a monk, you only choose very, very few games to play or you play no games and you live content, blissful, harmonious, peaceful. Or the other is you play the game and you win it and then you say i'm now free of this so what that tweet is that tweet is the reason to play the game sorry the reason to win the game is to be free of it it's a reminder to myself that for the games that i've won it's time to let go of them and to be free of them and not to unconsciously double down by comparing myself to the Joneses

Starting point is 01:45:05 and continuing to level up and level up and level up and level up. And then one day you die. And then you're like, okay, that was pointless. Like, you know, I did all that work for what? Like for nothing. So if you're not enjoying it anymore, if you've already won the game by the definition you had when you started playing the game. And one hack is to set the definition early on so that when you go past it, you know you've won. To not get trapped into playing this game forever and just living in some anxious future as opposed to actually enjoying yourself in the present, you have to know when to stop playing the game. And so to me, the reason to play these games is to win them and then you can be free of them and to see what else then that you want to do or not do not to keep playing the same game forever because these games are

Starting point is 01:45:50 the adult games are very cleverly designed you can keep playing them infinitely and they're all ups and downs and ups and downs and i guarantee you every time you get money you'll be afraid you're going to lose it or you're going to compare it to the next person who has it or every time you get famous now that's uh let's say that's the image that you have to live up to. And now insults can hurt you. And now you don't have your privacy anymore, as you've written about. So all of these games have downsides. Or if you're good at dating, you have a lot of men or women in your life, then you're also going to have a lot of relationship trauma. And you've got a lot of tumultuousness. You've got a lot of hurt people. You've got a lot of emotional drama in your life so you just have to kind of realize when you won the game and say i'm done

Starting point is 01:46:29 with this so i would i would aspire to be like socrates and say there are so many things in this world that i do not want and i like to think that i'm kind of there for the most parts either i don't want it or i have it now of course there's a fear of losing it which is always there but i don't want to pick up new desires unconscious there but i don't want to pick up new desires unconsciously and i don't want to keep upgrading my lifestyle and my expectations to match my circumstances otherwise i'll be on this treadmill forever we are all playing games and the key is knowing which game you are playing so you can at least attempt to consciously choose the game finite and infinite games by j James Kars is an interesting read.

Starting point is 01:47:07 And I just want to close with, and then you're certainly more than welcome to add any closing comments, but a quote that really makes me think of you. It's one of my favorite quotes from Feynman. It's Richard P. Feynman, once again. Here's the quote. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Starting point is 01:47:27 I love that quote. I love that quote. I read it when I was nine or 10 years old, and I've never forgotten it. It is so important, and none of us are perfect. We all have flaws. We all have weaknesses. We all have vices, or I'll speak for myself. Certainly, that's true of me.

Starting point is 01:47:41 But you, Naval, as much as anyone else, perhaps more than anyone else I know, have gone to great lengths to become self-aware. Furthermore, and this is, I think, one of the distinguishing characteristics for me that you represent, becoming self-aware and spending time on the timeless while also reserving the right with competency to be a very high-level operator in the real world, right? Because you can be not of this world by opting out completely and go into a world of introspection, but in truth, lack the resilience and emotional awareness to interact with any type of real stressor, which doesn't appeal to me, certainly. And you can be so engulfed by being in the world

Starting point is 01:48:33 that you lose self-awareness. You stop realizing that you're playing certain games. You become addicted and self-identified with things that come from sort of consensus reality, that's also not appealing. But you have managed in a way that I find fascinating to combine the cultivation of self-awareness with operating in the world at a high level. I wouldn't say I'm necessarily there yet, but it gets a little easier every year. Like, yeah, the Feynman quote is a brilliant one. He's right. We fool ourselves all the time. And I still fool myself all the time because I still have strong beliefs and opinions. For example, even though I don't tweet a lot about politics, I do have strong political opinions. And that is a form of fooling

Starting point is 01:49:13 myself because, you know, politics is a man-made game. It doesn't really exist in the real world. There's no trees aware of politics. And I do, even though I don't like to, even some of my beliefs are filtered and line up in bundles based on my chosen media sources and whatnot. So I fool myself all the time. But just if you can fool yourself a little bit less, then you can navigate reality much better. It doesn't take a lot. Most people are just living very unconsciously, you know, unexamined life. So it just gives you kind of a leg up.

Starting point is 01:49:41 And I agree with you in that you can always check out of the game and it's easier that way, but then you're fragile, right? You kind of build resilience by working out hard. And it's hard to be calm until you've lost a lot and won a lot. Like you have to see the ups and the downs and the ups and the downs before you get tired of the dopamine chase. And you sort of realize like, okay, this is down, but eventually there'll be an up or there's an up, there'll be a down. I know how this game works. So one of the things I've been tracking recently is I've been trying to kind of make a list of

Starting point is 01:50:13 what are the activities that are sort of non-dual in nature that don't create their own opposite down the road. So chasing money does create anxiety and suffering down the road as you compare and you win and lose and so on. You know, chasing fame also has downsides where you're not open to insults and attacks and being canceled and whatnot. So what activities are intrinsically true in and of themselves and kind of are a free lunch? And so those include things like meditation, yoga, creating art, playing, reading for fun, not necessarily for knowledge or education, writing, journaling. You can even be building a business as long as you're doing it for the craft of it, for the flow of it, not necessarily for a given outcome,

Starting point is 01:50:56 although it's hard to do that. At least externally, it seems like Elon Musk is doing that. He's building rockets to get to Mars, not to make money or to be famous, although he's getting those as byproducts. So I think that kind of this whole not fooling yourself, paying attention to yourself, not taking yourself too seriously, examining your own thoughts from first principles, and kind of doing activities that are done intrinsically for you,

Starting point is 01:51:25 as opposed to for the external world. They just make your life better. I'm not doing these things to be a Stoic sage, right? Honestly, one of the downsides of the Stoics is they don't look like they were having a lot of fun. I still like that a lot, right? Now, obviously, a lot has been Latin translation. I know they had their vomitoriums and they had their orgies and whatnot. But, you know, the Stoics, just at least the way it's modern projected and this is one of the

Starting point is 01:51:50 reasons why i do like osho you know people give osho a lot of flack and and they should he he was a little crazy in some ways but he was having fun he had a good time and you, you're alive. You have one very short life. When your life ends, it goes to zero. It's to you, it's indistinguishable from your perspective. Your death is indistinguishable from the end of the world. As far as you're concerned, the world has disappeared. Because when you came into existence, the world appeared. When you go out of existence the world disappears and that is so consequential that it makes the rest of your life inconsequential and that is a form of freedom and so you should enjoy yourself you should not suffer in this life if you are just constantly suffering then figure out how to get out of that suffering if you can't get out of that suffering then figure out how to redefine your internal worldview so that you don't necessarily view it as suffering any more than the extent that you need to to get out of it. These days, we borrow a lot of suffering on behalf of other people. A lot of people want to be a little Christ carrying crosses for others. It's a miserable existence. You're actually not doing them any favors either.

Starting point is 01:52:58 You carrying their cross isn't making their life any better. The better way is for you to be happy and successful and healthy and then go save them, like literally save them physically, not necessarily just, you know, sit around suffering for them. Or at least that's the life that I choose to live. I'm going to end with one story. There was a guy that I met in Thailand, Craig, I forget his last name, but he used to work for Tony Robbins. And I met this guy and we were on vacation in Thailand. And he was just the happiest person. He was just happy all the time.

Starting point is 01:53:30 And he just seemed to be able to laugh it off. And as far as he had a good life, he had stuff going for him. But it wasn't like, you know, he had this incredibly enviable life where you would drop everything and move to Thailand, adopt his lifestyle. He had an okay life. But he was just happy and not in a forced way, but he was genuinely happy. And so I asked him, I said, like, you know, what's your secret? Why not? And he said that, you know, he used to work for Tony Robbins and he used to fly

Starting point is 01:53:55 around setting up events for Tony. And, you know, he was always sitting in the front row and taking notes and setting things up and learning and listening. And he just kind of started seeing through his own internal BS. He got to this point where, like you said, like he was fooling himself into unhappiness. And he just decided one day, he said, you know what, I have no responsibility to anybody in this world other than me.

Starting point is 01:54:18 And like, or if I do have a responsibility, there's kind of this weight of responsibility that goes on where we're like, oh, I need to live up to some imagined self. What he realized was he said, somebody in this world, somebody has to be happy all the time. That is somebody's job to be that role model for people in the world. That might as well be me. I'll be that guy. I'll take on that burden. And he decided to be the happy one. And I just thought that was simple and brilliant. And he did it. He lived it. So, you know, I want to be that guy who is successful, peaceful, happy, enjoying life,

Starting point is 01:54:53 blissful, meditative, spiritual, successful, and, you know, as healthy as I can be, and famous, and rich, and not give a damn about any of it. So if I lose it all tomorrow, I still want to be happy. That's it. That's where I want to be. And I'll just make that decision because somebody has to be that person. It might as well be me. I love it, man. Naval Ravikant, otherwise known, aka Naval Ravikant, but Naval Ravikant, at Naval on Twitter, N-A-V-A-L. And he has the podcast, of course, Naval, N-A-V-A-L. You can find that anywhere you find your podcasts, the blog, nav.al. Previous conversations we've had, and we've had quite a few, you can just search Naval on the website, tim.blog forward slash Naval. Anything else you would like to add?

Starting point is 01:55:45 Any other resources, places people can say hello on the internet, recommendations, asks of the audience, Naval? I'm mostly on Twitter. Eric Jorgensen recently put out a book which had a bunch of my sayings called The Almanac of Naval Ravikant. It was very nice of him. I don't make any money off of it. It's free on the internet. You can just download it, I think, at Navalmanac. Clever little turn of phrase. Yeah, I think that's it. We'll see you on the interwebs.

Starting point is 01:56:14 You know, I wish everybody has a wealthy, healthy, and happy life. Like, go get it. Thanks so much, Naval, for taking the time. This is awesome. And to everybody listening, thank you for tuning in. And until next time, don't fool yourself, sit down, spend some time with your mind and don't be too hard on that roommate in your head. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one,

Starting point is 01:56:46 this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

Starting point is 01:57:19 It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. 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. If you're an e-commerce seller, are you ready to meet the demands of a record-breaking online shopping season?

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Starting point is 01:59:13 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,

Starting point is 01:59:53 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, 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

Starting point is 02:00:39 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. For instance, you can do, to give a simple example, bicep curls where you are lifting, let's just say 20 pounds in each hand up, and then Toto will automatically increase the weight because you can lower more than you can lift to say 25 or 30 pounds on the way down. And I do kettlebell swings. I do all sorts of deadlifts, this, that, and other thing. And after one workout on tonal focusing on pulling, I was blasted for a full week. It's really incredible what you can do with eccentrics. They also have all sorts of other really, really cool

Starting point is 02:01:21 advantages that you can apply to any of your favorite movements. Tonal learns from your strength and provides suggested weight recommendations for every move, detailed progress reports to help you see your strengths grow. Tonal also has a growing library of expert-led workouts by motivating coaches from strength training to cardio. So you can do really just about everything. 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 check it out. Tritonal, T-O-N-A-L, the world's smartest home gym for 30 days in your home.

Starting point is 02:01:56 And if you don't love it, you can return it for a full refund. Visit www.tonal.com, T-O-N-A-L.com. And for a limited time, get $100 off of smart accessories when you use promo code TIM21. Like I'm ready for my first drink at checkout. That's www.tonal, T-O-N-A-L.com, promo code TIM21, T-I-M-21. Tonal, be your strongest.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #473: Naval Ravikant on Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, Crypto Stablecoins, and Crypto Strategy

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #473: Naval Ravikant on Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, Crypto Stablecoins, and Crypto Strategy

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.